Rusty Barnes is the author of Breaking it Down, a collection of flash fiction published in 2007 by Sunnyoutside Press, and the co-founder and publisher of the online literary journal Night Train. His fiction and poetry has been published in many journals, including Post Road, Salt Flats Annual, Staccato, Opium, Thieves Jargon, Temenos, Barn Owl Review, elimae, Smokelong Quarterly, and elsewhere. Rusty lives in Massachusetts. For more information visit his website.

Talk to me about the photo you chose to accompany this interview.

I’m going to give you a long-winded and probably boring answer. It was taken in Burlington, PA, in the kitchen of my Uncle Bill’s house. No doubt we’d just been fishing. There was a lot of that in those years. As the story goes—I don’t actually recall it—it was around this time that the families were fishing on a local lake, and nothing was biting, dead still water all around. I remember lots of gnats on those trips. My Aunt Ruby finally landed a nice bass toward the end of the day, and the fish flopped and bucked in the bottom of the boat, which apparently touched my tender little heart. I picked it up and threw it back in before anyone could stop me. I must have been terribly upset, because I hate wet slimy things to this day.

It’s a family story everyone loves to hear over and over again, and I don’t mind. Though, if I think about it, that, um, might have been the event that might have begun the process of separating me from the remainder of my very large family.

If you took the men of my family, for example, and asked them what they did for a living, you’d find farmers, mechanics, construction workers, truck drivers, typewriter repairmen. Men with practical skills, who can do whatever needs to be done. It was common for all of them to get together to replace the engine in someone’s car, or rebuild a transmission on a weekend, work until four, scrub the grease off, and grab some tin cans and shoot at them in the gullies out back before dinner. Around the time of this picture, too, my father and eleven-year-old brother put an engine in a car. My brother tightened the bolts while my father held the engine in place by himself. I watched my father pick up carpentry when he needed to, I watched him, when the period of unemployment came, work in gas stations, pick apples a bushel at a time with my mother, and even do the odd jobs for neighbors that my brother and I once did for pocket cash.

It’s a bit unnerving to sit down among men like this even now at 38, when my only practical skills, really, are teaching and reading and writing. That’s something, yes, but how I still wish I was like my uncles and cousins and nephews who can gut deer, butcher cattle, run a spreader, bale hay, wire a house for electricity, put up drywall, hand load ammunition, pick up a CDL license just in case you might need it. I never had much in common with them other than blood, and to make it worse, I’ve doubly abandoned them in my adulthood: I live 300 miles away (the rest of my family, with a couple notable exceptions, have all lived within a three-county radius for 200 years); and I’m a city boy now. God help me, a flatlander. For the first 21 years of my life I sneered at people like me. I know now from experience that Thomas Wolfe was painfully, awfully, right. You can’t go home again. You can never go home again, no matter how hard you try.

Yeah. Back to the point. I threw the fish back, and you don’t toss fish back, in other words. Or you didn’t then. So goes my life.

And that’s what I think of when I see this photo.

You’re the only literary mind in your family? How did it ever occur to you to write, read, and teach, when you grew up with a bunch of “tough” guys?

I don’t necessarily think of them as tough guys, just. . .guys. Men who could do whatever needed to be done. I didn’t know any other kind, except for some of my teachers, until college. I certainly had no models for the type of man I became, though, you’re right. However, nearly everyone in my immediate family read, often a lot. My father read some poetry—even wrote it occasionally—as well as philosophy, theology, ecology. My brother and sister read a great deal, and like any writer, books were, and remain, my best friends. I intended to become first a minister (my uncle was a Methodist minister), then figured I would become a teacher of history. I didn’t know what else to do. Teachers made good money and didn’t have to work hard. That’s what I knew, so that’s what I figured I’d do.

Honestly, I might have been happier as one of those polymath-via-night-reading day laborers you hear about (and I can hear my family laughing in my mind, audibly—for them, I’ve never been cut out for hard physical labor). It’s not as if I’ve ever had to work as hard as my father did, but I’m not unfamiliar with hard physical work. There’s a certain rhythm and satisfaction to physical tasks done as well as can be done, of seeing progress in ways that are generally impossible for an artist to see. My father could say he’d loaded so many tons of gravel during the day, my Uncle John how much blacktop he’d poured, my Uncle Mort how many miles he’d driven. Hell, I don’t even know for sure how good I am as a writer, and I sent my first story out for publication in 1987.

My truest happy work memories are of building the most symmetrical and packed club sandwich I could at the Dixie BBQ, and pushing out a couple hundred fish fries on a Friday night. I felt good about that in a way I can never feel good about my writing.

Anyway, as you can see, I sometimes have difficulty coming to the point. I read, write, and teach because although I’m good at many things, I’m only excellent at writing, and those things exist in a symbiotic relationship. I write because I can, I read because it feeds the writing, I teach, because I had a few teachers who meant a great deal to me, and teaching is a way to pay them back. And I know my particular experience can teach. It’s incredibly gratifying to have students from fifteen years ago or last week send me notes about where they’re publishing, and to see them enter the same worlds I operate in, and to deal with them as peers while knowing I had some little part in making them who they are. In this way, I feel as if bits of my aesthetic and ways of seeing a work are out there making a difference, even if it’s only in convincing people that em dashes ought to be used in pairs.

How did your collection, Breaking it Down, come about?

I met David McNamara from Sunnyoutside Press while listening to a poetry reading at Club Passim. We corresponded a bit, I saw him at another litmag/publisher event in Boston, we talked some more, and when I began to consider the possibility of self-publishing a chapbook, I went to him for advice. I know a lot about perfect-bound printing, but not so much about chapbook and letterpress printing, so we met for a drink, and I brought him samples of what I wanted the thing to look like, and we talked some more. He pulled out magnifying glasses and started identifying and talking font and design right at the bar, a Smithwick’s in front of him, and his eyes lit up like a kid’s, and I thought, damn. He offered later in the evening to do the chapbook through his press, which would be only their second venture into fiction (it’s mostly a poetry press). Later, as our enthusiasm grew, he decided to do the book as a tiny pocket-sized perfect-bound book. He did great, great work. I had input at every step of the way, but he didn’t really need it from me. He knows his shit.

I was impressed with the pocket-sized book, as well. What makes it perfect-bound instead of chapbook or letterpress? What is the difference, and where would one go to get schooled in printing?

Three entirely different things. Perfect binding is a method that’s used to attach the book’s pages to the cover with a really strong glue. Most paperback books are bound this way. Chapbooks are a style of book often associated with the small press, and in particular poetry, with the halved 8.5 by 11 paper and a cardstock cover. These publications traditionally are stapled or sewn, but that’s a vast generalization, depending on the press and their professionalism and interest. Some publishers and writers simply want the work out there in consumable form, and others take their time and learn the business and design their books. And finally, letterpress refers to a book printed using movable type. It’s old-fashioned printing, but printing with great aesthetic value. Most printers and their websites have explanations of the various types of binding and printing on their websites, and Wikipedia explains things relatively well, too.

How would you describe the style of stories in Breaking it Down?

Largely rural, largely depressing stories about men who don’t communicate well. If I had had my way, the book would have been such a downer no one would have bought it. With David’s choice of material (I sent him maybe 50 published and unpublished stories), the collection shows more range than I imagined I had. I can indeed do something outside the area in which I grew up, and sometimes those are even—gasp—somewhat funny.

Did you, or will you, give any readings for Breaking it Down? Do you find readings a successful way to sell books?

I’ve given a ton of readings. You can search under my name on YouTube if you’re so inclined. I had plans for more readings, actually, but my wife’s recent pregnancy and illness made me feel a bit uneasy about it, so I cancelled quite a few so I could be around to help out, as I should be. I did a reading at Sherrie Flick’s Gist Street Series recently which drew well over a hundred people, and I sold or traded eight books while there, and it was a top of the line great experience.

I’ve found that I sell books best at readings. You’ve got a captive audience predisposed to like you, as opposed to cold-accosting people via social networking sites, though to be honest, I’ve done a great deal of that as well, somewhat less successfully. People like to connect a voice with a story or poem, too. Holding the book up and pimping it face-to-face works.

Do you get nervous, standing up there in front of an audience, reading your own heart and soul?

I do beforehand, yes, but generally not while I’m in the moment. I don’t want to fuck up and look dumb. I’ve learned to practice, even my in-between patter, such as it is, long beforehand, and to go in with twice as much material as my time allows. I judge the crowd, if I’m not reading first, and change my ’set,’ as it were, to reflect the vibe. If I see kids in the audience—you never know who’ll show up—that limits some of my material. But then other times I see a 12 or 13-year-old in the audience and figure they’ve heard worse in school, and go ahead and read my raw material anyway. I’m a nervous person, always red-faced and finger-trembling at the slightest hint of social interaction, so unless my voice shakes, it’s difficult to tell I’m nervous. I also separate myself, more or less. I put on my editor/professional/teacher hat, and that helps. The person who screams at the baseball game on the tube and sings to himself and rattles his foul language off the porcelain ears of the young disappears, and my Rico Suave persona comes out.

I want to read the novel you’re working on. Now! Can you share the synopsis you showed me? How far along in the novel are you?

Sure. I’m happy to share it. Right now the novel’s called “Youth and Young Manhood,” ripped from the title of the wonderful Kings of Leon CD. I will find its real title sometime soon, I hope. I’ve got roughly 280 pages finished right now, and probably another 40-50 pages that have been axed from various places, and I have the last two pages. I need to connect them all now, and it’s proved daunting lately to even get writing time, with various life complications taking nearly all my energy. But I’ll get there. I keep telling myself people are waiting for me to finish.

I’m at that point in the novel where the main action has played out, and I have a very difficult dénouement that I need to muster psychic energy to write. Then I have three-four subplots to resolve and/or iron the kinks from, and I’ll be “done.” This first draft came pretty quickly, I have to say, having never completed a novel before, taking about three months to get to 75000 words. It seems odd to be at the end, though.

Thirteen-year-old Richard Sizemore and his friends Katie and Dex stumble onto a passed-out naked woman in the woods near their homes, and in the process of helping her, begin to untangle a web of deceit that begins within each of their own families and expands to include an entire community. With a mysterious locked door, and a menacing farm owner who, the kids eventually find, is trafficking in pornography, the quiet county they live in becomes something else again: a setting where families are tested and broken, and ultimately, made stronger at the broken places. Richard is forced to make a choice between what’s right and what needs to be done, and his life changes forever.

Set in rural Northern Appalachian Bradford County, PA, meth capital of Pennsylvania, against a somberly beautiful countryside, a backdrop of few jobs and little opportunity, this book explores what it means to grow up with limited options, and how something as simple as following your conscience can often lead through disaster to an awakening that for all its hard-won knowledge, may come at too high a price.

You’re also a poet, and are currently working on two poetry manuscripts. Tell us about those.

I have one chapbook manuscript making competition rounds right now, called “Dear So-and-So.” It’s a collection of near-sonnets and off-sonnets, influenced by Ted Berrigan and Galway Kinnell and Kim Addonizio and John Wieners, if you can imagine such a fucked-up beast. I quite like the collection, though contests and journals have not been terribly kind to them yet.

The other manuscript’s provisional title is “The Girlfriend Narrates a Three-Way Before the Ball Drops on New Year’s Eve.” It’s mostly, um, let’s call it an exploration of rural kink and sexual mores. It’s dark and ugly and nearly violent in some poems, and gently lyrical in others, and sort of well-manneredly dumb in others. None of the poems are high on anyone’s priority list for publication, but they’re important to me. I sense if I publish a chapbook from these two, it’ll probably be a suite of the Dear So-and-So’s sandwiched within the other poems, and whatever else I write. As soon as this novel’s edited and at an agent, I’m going back to my old habits of writing a poem or a flash story daily. I need a half-year or so to generate new material and find whatever’s going to come next while I continue research for the next novel.

Let’s switch to Rusty the editor for a minute and talk about editing for Zoetrope and the journal now known as Redivider. Which gig came first? How did you get these opportunities?

I edited for the Beacon Street Review in grad school. A few years after I left they changed the name to Redivider, which is really just a much hipper name, let’s face it. That came first, and I got the gig as I’ve gotten so many other things, by stepping up and being willing to do it when no one else wanted to take responsibility. The Zoetrope All-Story Extra gig in the late 90s came by volunteering. Once in, Mare Freed and Jim Nichols, together with Tom Edgar, had a good system for making the journal work, and I simply worked within it. Like many people, I edited journals in college and continued to do so more or less professionally—I was a poor specimen of medical copy-editor and copy-writer along the way too— when I realized that whatever literary career I had would depend not only on how hard I was willing to work, but also on the vagaries of a marketplace that had little or nothing to do with quality. I spent many years working in chain bookstores and independents while teaching a full load of composition at three different schools, so I knew how difficult it could be to make a good book fly and how much depended on co-op dollars and secret corporate machination, even in the independent stores, with sweetheart discounts and deliberately refused shipments and idiotic strict-on-sale dates. Sigh. I say that now, but I loved bookselling and would do it again. I didn’t fit well in the chain’s corporate structure, being generally too vulgar and knowledgeable for the average store—shock, I liked to talk about books I’d read other than Who Moved My Fucking Cheese— and yet when I worked for the independents, I was too corporate in my mind-set. I couldn’t win. Anyway. That’s not what you asked. Forgive me, O Kelly for my drifting off-topic. Mea maxima culpa.

I still have, shall we say, very close ties to bookselling, and I cherish the days when I visit the Brattle Bookshop in downtown Boston and some poor shriveled soul has given up and sold their entire stock of signed first edition hardcovers ranging from the late 70s to the mid-90s, and I can pick up signed hardcovers of authors like Jayne Ann Phillips and Robert Boswell and Andre Dubus. That, my friends, is a great day, and it doesn’t matter a bit to me that I already have worn paperbacks of everything they’ve ever written. Now I have—hardcovers.

And then you went on to create Night Train. How long has Night Train been in publication? How has the journal changed and redefined itself over the years?

Rod Siino and I co-founded Night Train in February 2002, we published our first issue in September 2002, and though we’ve hiccupped along the way, the journal’s been in constant publication now with new stories every week. We’ve moved from primarily print to a primarily online format, but nothing else has changed, I don’t think. We’ve certainly turned over staff in that time, as reading manuscripts in the volume we do tends to burn someone out quickly. Yeah. I don’t know that we’ve changed all that much. I feel as if we’re less constrained by our (old) stated aesthetic these days, maybe, but then Alicia (Gifford, Fiction Editor) and I have been working together for a long time, and have a good sense of what will appeal to the other. I respect Alicia’s editorial eye a great deal, and the way she helps keep me from making mistakes is nothing short of miraculous sometimes. I’ll be all, is this good, or am I insane? Or, more likely, have I missed something here? And Alicia will come in and make one quick and incisive comment, and I’ll be like, oh, yeah. That’s right.

What can a writer learn about writing from editing?

Unless you’re a complete dolt, you’re going to get a much better sense of yourself as a writer, like it or not. You’ll learn where your strengths and weaknesses are by seeing the constant and repetitive rookie mistakes in other stories, and you’ll learn to see how your own work stacks up against what comes into the journal for consideration. You can learn a great deal about revising your own work, too, by constantly paying attention to how word choice and rhythm, for example, affect the flow of the stories you consider, and how beginnings and endings ought to work together. I think the one disadvantage of editing is this: your own aesthetic development gets retarded. Since you’re editing—if you’re doing it correctly—according to what you perceive the writer is trying to do, you’re constantly trying on different hats and making choices that you might not make regarding your own work. It can become confusing if you have a finely developed sense of what you want to write. I have a straight-on, fairly conventional story-sense most days influenced by the Southern, Appalachian, dirty-realist/minimalist bordering on transgressive fiction writers I love to read, and the fiction I write. Yet, probably because I’m constantly trying on different aesthetics in my editing, my best stories are probably metafictional. I have a relatively large body of published work that speaks to that conventional story-sense, including a book, and certainly my novel falls into that range aesthetically, but I have nearly as much experimental work, most of which remains unpublished. It doesn’t feel right to me, with very few exceptions. I don’t even send it out.

My poetry aesthetic, though, is the polar opposite of my fiction. I read experimental poetry, almost exclusively. I’m not particularly interested in reading narrative in poetry. I like explosive language and transgressive subject matter, great swaths of words that may or may not make linear sense. I like off-kilter, bug-eyed, loopy poems. I haven’t been a quote unquote serious poet until the last few years though, if you don’t count the sheaves of high-school and college verse. I entered grad school as a poet, and upon meeting a real poet, Bill Knott, quickly discovered poetry was not to be my primary métier. I’ll always write poems, though, and send them out. I get probably more joy out of a published poem than I do a story, honestly, and the sad thing is, all that experimental reading has not affected my poetry a bit. What comes out of me is pretty tame language-wise. I’m probably not much of a poet, honestly. My poetry is quasi-fictional, which is to say, um, I’m not sure what.

Does Rusty the editor ever stifle Rusty the writer?

I can’t really be stifled. There’s a great line Jack Nicholson hams up in the film The Departed, supposedly quoting John Lennon: “I’m an artist; give me a tuba (pronounced TOO-burr, according to Jack) and I’ll get you something.” All I need is a block of time and an instrument. I write on the laptop on the couch in the middle of three kids playing and arguing and doing schoolwork, a wife, a mother-in-law, TV blaring. If that doesn’t stop me, nothing will.

You belong to a couple of writing communities—Zoetrope and Scrawl. What are the benefits of such groups? The cons?

The primary benefit is the community of like-minded individuals, who’ve been invaluable to me in times I had no other writing community. I kept writing, I kept learning and reading and meeting other writers, I learned about markets, I started my journal. The cons are pretty small. I feel as if I’m always irking my friends if I don’t publish them, and I’ve lost some of them as a result, which makes me feel like crud for a while, but whatever. The world will flay them much more thoroughly than my rejection of their story or poem ever could. And then there are trolls and psychos and weirdoes, which I’m glad to know are vastly outnumbered by really cool people, many of whom I’m privileged to call friends.

You just started a new blogazine called Fried Chicken and Coffee. It comes with a Content Warning, and as payment to contributors, you offer up a book from your personal collection. It seems that everything about this e-journal is ballsy. Tell us more about it.

Not much to tell yet. It’s a few days old, and I did it because it’s something I’ve wanted to do for a while, and thought I didn’t have the time for. The busier I am the more I can do, it seems.

Anyway. I met some resistance to the way I looked and acted in graduate school, having little in common with the people around me because of 22 years spent in the bosom of the backwoods. Or maybe I didn’t meet resistance, and I just thought I did. Either way the psychic effects didn’t change: I felt I stuck out, for reasons having to do mostly with class and expectations about how one ought to operate ‘out-of-class.’ I found some scholarly work dealing with class as I worked in trade bookstores and later in college bookstores, and my reading habits became more expansive. I managed the textbook department at UMASS Boston for a few years, and I began self-educating by buying leftover textbooks, older edition sociology and American studies and media studies texts that had been marked for disposal, and woodshedding the way I had when I began to write fiction. Big influences include White Trash: Race and Class In America, by Matt Wray and Annalee Newitz, Gender, Race and Class in Media: a Text-Reader edited by Gail Dines, Screened Out by Carla Brooks Johnston, Appalachia: a History, and most of all the Redneck Manifesto, by Jim Goad. Many others too. Once I had hold of the theoretical handle, it was all go. I got an idea to do a blog and possibly a journal, associated with Night Train but not at all similar, that included the kind of rural fiction and poetry I love as well as some analysis of the material (as best I can do so), and some leavening with personal experience.

The content warning is a tease, sort of. But I will be discussing at some length the way Hollywood commodifies and reuses the rural bumpkin/white trash/redneck stereotype, which will include discussion of Hollywood and porn and where they intersect for maximum profitability. It could get ugly, and the content warning just says I’ve done my job. If people get offended they can’t blame me.

I’ll do reviews, have guest bloggers, whatever comes to mind. I may even have music.

As for the payment, blogazines are so common. I can’t afford to give someone real incentive to publish with me on a blog, so I thought I’d try to do something else interesting. I have lots of good books. I wish I’d thought of this a few months ago, though. I recently donated 23 cases of books to charity. Everything I have left is great stuff, and it’ll be terrible to divest myself of them, but fun, too.

Contact Rusty: rb AT rustybarnes DOT com

Read:

“Harry, Giselle, and Joyce”
a short story
published in In Posse Review

“If the Tree Falls”
a short story
published by Small Spiral Notebook

“No Pretty Boy”
flash fiction
published by Temenos

“At the Esso”
flash fiction
published by Ward 6 Review

“The Ex-Boyfriend Checks In on Saturday Night by Cell Phone”
poetry
published by Lit Up Magazine

Two Poems
in Thieves Jargon

Rusty Barnes readings
on YouTube