Dale Bridges writes wildly inventive fiction. I’m not just tossing that phrase around either. His new short story collection, Justice Inc, reads like Phillip K Dick on crack.
The stories are iconoclastic and charming, peppered with diabolical uses of modern technology and characters poised on a knife’s edge between humanity and monstrosity.
Bridges takes the reader through a series of mind-bending realities where people are adopted by corporations, text their way through an apocalypse, build themselves robot girlfriends and warp patriotism into a barbaric ritual of unsurpassed cruelty.
The prose is well-crafted and the stories explore themes of gender, ageism, the commodification of life and even death with wry humor and an empathic understanding of human frailty. The protagonist is often an everyman who reveals the mechanics of the world, but each character is deeply flawed, often taking a surprising turn into damnation or redemption. Some worlds are topsy-turvy and others so close to our reality that Dale’s finely-tuned observations have a tendency to sting.
And though the prose is inventive and modern, there is a craftsmanship that reveals a more conservative approach to the writing itself. Living in Austin, Texas, Dale has worked as an essayist and freelance journalist. His writing has been featured in more than thirty publications, including The Rumpus, The Masters Review, and Barrelhouse Magazine. He also did a stint as the arts-and-entertainment editor at the alternative newspaper Boulder Weekly, where he wrote an award-winning humor column titled That’s Irrelevant.
With those intriguing contradictions in mind, I asked Dale about his process.
Dale Bridges Short Story Collection, Justice, Inc.
DB~ The fiction definitely came first. I never had any intention of becoming a journalist. But it’s hard as hell to make money as a fiction writer, so you do what you can.
Here’s what happened. When I was 27, I moved to Prague to write the Great American Novel (oh, the irony!). It was going to be one of those macho, Hemingway-esque stories about drinking too much and getting laid. Everything was going fine for the first hundred pages or so, and then suddenly the plot just fell apart, primarily because the book didn’t really have a plot. After that, I became depressed and drank the rest of my money away (sort of living out the plot of my plotless novel). When I moved back to Colorado, I had no idea what I wanted to do. I slept on a friend’s couch for several months until I wore out my welcome. I had to find a job.
I’d published a few magazine articles over the years, but I had never actually worked at a newspaper. However, I was a fiction writer, so I decided to do what I do best: lie. I embellished my freelance career and invented a few editorial internships, and then I delivered my bullshit resume to several local newspapers. As luck would have it, the part-time calendar editor at one of those newspapers quit the same day I turned in my resume. From there, I worked my way up to A&E editor.
It was an alternative newspaper, so they gave me a lot of creative leeway. Probably too much. I wrote articles about books and television and music and beer. It was fun. I’m not sure it helped much with my fiction writing, but I gained a lot of confidence, which was good.
But in the end, I discovered that when I was working as a journalist I had no energy left over to write fiction, which is what I really wanted to do. So I quit the job for that reason. Well, that and the fact that the publisher was an ass hat.
You seem to delight in following the most surreal thread of an idea (Corporations being people, for example) then anchoring the idea into a solid reality. Would you call yourself a world builder?
DB~ I always start with the idea. So much “serious literature” these days seems designed to keep the main idea a secret. That annoys me. I try to put the idea out there early in the story and then construct a world around that theme. I don’t consider myself a world builder yet. My style is more satirical at the moment, playing with alternate universes in order to deconstruct our current culture. However, I’d like to move more in that direction. I recently read Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake for the first time, and I was humbled by its depth. I would love to write something half that good one day.
Many of your stories feature future technology mashed up with human failings. Do you think mankind is ready for clones and robots?
DB~ I don’t think the average citizen will ever be ready for clones and robots, but they’re coming. And soon. These scientific creations make such great writing material because they ask one of our most important existential questions: what does it mean to be human? How are we different from animals and computers? Can we create that spark of humanity in a laboratory? And if we can, should we?
We will create these Frankenstein monsters, and they will be wondrous and terrifying…just like us.
You’ve worked in a bookstore in the past. How did that effect your writing?
DB~ I work at a bookstore right now! I don’t know if it affects my writing or not, but I enjoy it. Books are one of the only man-made products that I truly believe in. I am not a fan of this eBook abomination, but just like clones and robots, it’s coming.
DB—I always struggle to answer this question, because my (cringe) process is not sexy or even particularly illuminating. I don’t smoke a pipe or listen to Vivaldi or anything like that. Mostly I procrastinate. I hate writing. I’m filled with self-loathing every time I sit down at my computer. I want to write like Atwood or Vonnegut, but I can’t write like Atwood or Vonnegut because I’m Bridges. So I procrastinate. I screw around on the internet. I check Facebook, make a bitchy comment on someone’s post, edit that comment five times, go to Twitter, wonder why the hell I have a Twitter account, make some tea, chase the cat around the apartment, write a sentence, delete that sentence, make more tea…you get the idea. Finally, the guilt and anxiety overtake the procrastination, and I start to write. I write desperately, trying to ignore the little voice in my head saying, “That’s not how Truman Capote would have written that sentence.” It’s like ripping off a Band-Aid: I want to do it quickly so I don’t have to think about the pain.
I live in a small one-bedroom apartment with my wife and cat, so I write with my computer resting on a TV tray in the living room, usually in my underwear because we want to keep the heating bill down. I pace a lot. Sometimes I cry. When I finish writing, I start drinking.
What do you think writing should accomplish?
DB~ A writer’s job is to keep the reader turning pages. That’s it. Some writers accomplish this with formula, some do it with narrative voice, others with character development. The best use every trick and tool at their disposal. I get annoyed when writers start making rules. There are no rules. If the reader turns the page, you’ve done your job.
What writers influenced you and why?
DB~ Early on I was influenced by a lot of minimalistic male writers, like Hemingway, Carver, and Bukowski. I come from a small, Middle American town, and these men reminded me of my father in many ways. And isn’t that why most of us become writers, to get revenge on our parents? My short stories were angsty and gritty and not very good. I still love those writers, but eventually I realized that their experiences and psychology were very different from mine.
When I discovered Vonnegut, I was extremely excited, and I think you can see his influence in my book. Sherman Alexie also influenced my writing, as well as George Saunders, Philip K. Dick, Stacey Richter, Jincy Willett, Mark Twain, Katherine Dunn, Margaret Atwood, and George Orwell. I gravitate toward dark humor and dystopian fiction. Laughing all the way to the grave.
What made you go with a small press instead of indie?
DB~ Honestly, I didn’t think about it all that much. I’m sort of a technophobe (I know, shocking) so I have no idea how to properly format a document or download a program or create a marketing plan. When I think about doing such things on my own, blood starts to trickle from my ears. So I didn’t really consider the indie option.
George RR Martin said that when it comes to writing, there are two types of writers; architects and gardeners. The architects design with a blue print, the gardener plants a seed and sees what grows. Which one are you?
DB~ That’s a cool analogy. I respect the hell out of the architects, but that’s just not how my brain works. I have never been able to outline my writing, and I never know how a narrative is going to end when I start writing it. It’s a mess. In fact, “gardener” feels too bucolic to describe how I work. It’s more of a Little Shop of Horrors situation, and the story is Audrey II. “Feed me, Seymour!”
If you would like to see Dale Bridges feed Seymour, he lives on the web at this Blog: http://dalebridges.org/
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