Bud Smith Interview
[GS-INT-010]
What do you think working "for Satan", as you put it, does to your specific perspective as a writer? And for clarification, by "Satan" you mean you help build nuclear power plants, is that right?
I work heavy construction, and get dispatched out of a union hall—I get sent to all kinds of places—the week I told you I work for Satan might have been when I was dispatched down to Hell and was welding an expansion on one of those infernal Circles.
I do work in Heaven too.
But most of my hours come from power plants of some kind on the east coast of America on the regular planet earth, on this mortal coil.
I do a fair amount of my creative writing on coffee break and lunch breaks, wherever I am, and I’m not sure what would be different if anything if I had a different kind of job—a desk job, per say. That said it might have been better for me maybe to have a cubicle right from the jump.
On construction sites I used to always have to scout out a quiet place to do my writing. I used to search around the plant for wherever the nearest machine shop was and then on break I’d find a corner and pull up a chair on some fab table and get to work. I liked the machine shops because they were usually the cleanest and quietest place in whatever plant I was in that day.
It’s impossible to get any writing done in a union-trade break trailer unless you wear noise canceling headphones and that’s just insanely rude. If I’m in the break trailer I’d rather talk to my coworkers who I love dearly.
Things got easier when I made a portable desk. I’d noticed there were empty pickup trucks sitting around at break time/lunchtime, usually always Ford F-150s. So I built the temporary desk to fit into the bottom of the steering wheel and I just carried it over to an empty truck, plopped it in and got to work. I built the desk out of junk scrap lumber laying around and then I had a better time of it all. The desk fits into the bottom of the steering wheel and the one side of it sits on the arm rest and it works just as good as any other desk I’ve ever used. I wrote most of my new novel in various trucks, on break, some of the novel typed on a Bluetooth keyboard right into my email, some of it handwritten in little notebooks, and lately I’ve come to trust the TruckDesk™️ desk so much I’m even bringing my laptop to work and doing line edits.
How much does having a sense of humor matter in writing?
To me? I don’t know. If I try hard enough I can laugh at just about anything.
To the reader? I can’t even begin to guess where they’re at.
To the writer? I used to be surprised when I met a writer who wrote ‘serious stories’ and it turned out they were extremely funny in real life, as if they had to work hardest of all at suppressing the humor in their writing for some reason. Now I’m not surprised at all when that happens.
Some artists don’t lean into humor/levity (it’d seem on the surface—but also some artists are incredibly funny without even telling a single joke) they’re in pursuit of something else, and yes, the suppression of the laugh is one of many finely-considered points.
And of course, some artists don’t fully reflect their personality in their work, and by reflect, I don’t mean—the author-as-character in self-referential fiction. They show you some of their faces but not all. And the face they show you changes all the time. If you consumed a huge swath of their work eventually you’d get a conception of the many sides to that artist.
I believe humor is one of many ways an artist can express themselves. Who doesn’t like to laugh?
But the art I like best, it can be funny, or it can be stone serious, I don’t care. I don’t rate one kind of art above the other. There’s no hierarchy. But the art I like best, I come to think about it as ‘in balance.’ Something I can picture in my mind, in its final form, as a long beam resting on a fulcrum, and the many elements the artist choose to put into their work makes one side of the beam dip, or rise, depending—so if you have a little bit of misery on the right side and a little bit of joy on the left side, the work reaches a pleasing balance that seems to support itself in my mind—seems to and actually does float.
What does this have to do with humor and why it’s important?
Well, if you have a bunch of jokes in something, by themselves, that doesn’t have as much oomph to me as a work of art that has all the jokes and then has the pain behind the joke expressed with some kind of sincerity, even just for a quick glimpse.
It’s often a case of “I’ll know it when I see it” and no balancing act alone makes a masterpiece. Whatever works, works. I’m looking to be surprised and I’m trying to surprise. The work I like best does something sophisticated which I don’t quite understand but which I’m often thinking about for years and years, trying to figure out why I was so moved towards equal tears of sorrow and tears of laughter.
Of course, an artist is free to label their work anything they want (or not label it at all). This has always created conflict for me internally. When I would recount a story from my life, swap the names out for fictional ones, and call it fiction, always made me feel...gross. And this can get so granular. What if you use one scene or conversation from your real life, and then in the next chapter your characters are walking into a spaceship, does that make it fiction? I'm going to show my ignorance here, and I know you can only offer your opinion, but when you say "self-referential fiction" where is the line when that crosses into non-fiction you think? And do you ever see something labeled as fiction lacking an aura of authenticity?
There’s no line when it crosses into non-fiction. If something blends ‘truth’ and ‘bullshit’ together then I just call that ‘art.’
Actually, ‘Art’ with a capital ‘A’.
Plus, memory is fallible and science these days points towards a person overwriting an old memory with a new version of that memory every time they recall that old memory. So, as long as you’re not a journalist adhering to a rigid code of ethics—meaning—oh no, they caught me bending the tale and now they must cut my hands off—I’d prefer the person making the ‘art’ to lie their hardest to me so that I can get to the heart of some emotional matter they wished to convey to me as a human. Facts can only take the reader so far.
And if you aren’t corroborating all your evidence, you’re simply writing ‘fiction’ anyway.
But authenticity doesn’t matter to me. Recently I heard about The Jefferson Bible which was Thomas Jefferson’s edit of the New Testament. You know what his great idea was? He deleted all of Jesus’ magic tricks and preserved all Jesus’ words grounded in reality. There’s no resurrection, just the philosophy.
Me?
I’d rather have the surreal and the mundane hold hands.
I’d rather Hamlet’s father shows up and speaks to him and Hamlet has an argument with his girlfriend. I’d rather have Frankenstein’s monster stalk the land eager to kill his creator but also, above all else, wish to have a woman love him.
When I think of art, and what I want from art, I don’t see a solid distinction between fiction and non-fiction, I just see methods of so-called reality (specific to the artist’s ends) referenced to various degrees, and a swirling abstraction, or an impressionistic lens the artist creates, imposed on their subject in such a way, when successful, makes me feel something unique to myself, but which is also discovered to be somehow universally felt, some shared some mass hallucination — and bonus points if we are moved, and our understanding of this strange world we are said to live in, expands.
In my view there is nothing gross about fiction.
Anything can and should work in fiction.
It’s a lawless utopia.
The person who creates the fiction may feel dirty or deceptive to have lied so thoroughly (convincingly or unconvincingly, case by case) but in the end it doesn’t matter who is telling the story and why they are telling it, and whether they strived for truth or played you a fool, what matters is the person experiencing the art falls into some dream you have made for them and when they wake up they have not even noticed they were sleeping and perhaps, in glory, something crucial has changed for them.
Or at the least they forgot their problems for a little while.
The trouble starts when something has to be authentic. When something has to be authenticated. When that happens, judges get out yard sticks and scales and all the requisite ribbons needed for the Olympic Games, and the art is downgraded from ‘art’ to ‘pop-science’ or something. Something you might reference later to win an argument or use to make an investment but not much else.
I’m always looking for the unreal in the ordinary, and how it can brush up against my hometown and transform that ordinary place into Midsummer Night’s Dream.
I have actually been using writing as a tool to connect with my hometown(s) (military kid, lost of locations at critical ages). And no surprise, I have found levels of emotion I never thought I could. But I do think that for a long streak I was writing the farthest wild, thrashing ideas I could come up with. As if trying to use chaos itself as a writing tool. And disassociate completely from any personal reference point. And after thinking about it, over the course of other writer's careers you see that sort of streak. Do you think there is something to the need to howl so that a writer can come into their own?
Who can say?
Maybe in the beginning, a new artist has enthusiasm and has velocity to get them (and us) through whatever art they are making. There’s seldom nuance. But who cares? There’s wild propulsion which is exciting to experience.
And then as the artist gets older and keeps making stuff, they lose a little of bit of that velocity in their work and in its place they slow down and spend time examining whatever ‘it all is’ and that is interesting to us in a totally different way.
Time seems to make this happen organically, and it happens to most artists one way or another. They begin with a simple statement told-as-lightning-bolt but by the end of their life’s work, they might be completing some grand statement slowly chiseled into the side of a mountain.
And minimalists do sometimes become maximalists.
Or vice versa.
People will always surprise us.
Yes, they’re always fundamentally stuck with themselves but there’s another constant, which is that they are undergoing subtle change every day, learning as they go, or sometimes unlearning most of what they spent their life gaining the ability to do. The DNA is the same, but the heart is a different shape. Or something like that.
My favorite artists kept it loose the whole way. Never stopped playing around. Never stopped finding something to laugh at, even if there was never anything funny at all. Never were too concerned with being right because they knew being right is one of the least interesting things that can happen to a person. They started out as absolute beginners and ended up my heroes.
That feels like the right place to end.
Bud Smith is the author of the novel, Teenager (Vintage, 2022), and the short story collection, Double Bird. His short fiction has been published at The Paris Review, The Believer, LARB, among others, He works with the boilermakers union and lives in Jersey City, NJ.