Read to Rebuild Interview: Ben Parzybok

Please join us Tuesday, March 16 at The Writers’ Dojo for Read to Rebuild: A Haiti Reading Benefit, featuring six outstanding Portland writers. This is the second in a special series of interviews with each of these readers.  Look for more Read to Rebuild interviews in the next few days.

Ben Parzybok is a novelist and web developer living with his family in Portland, OR. His first book, Couch, was released by Small Beer Press in late 2008. He also runs the startup Walker Tracker. A few of Ben’s other projects can be seen on the ideacog front page.

Q: Hi! Your book Couch is about three roommates doing their damndest to unload a couch, an effort that starts out mundane but quickly becomes a kind of surreal, Fitzcarraldo-ish adventure. Were you influenced by artists like Kafka, Beckett, or the Scottish writer Magnus Mills — folks who are interested in situations that are simultaneously mundane and completely outlandish?

A: Not really, surprisingly. I think that Couch is what happens when you take really fantastical stuff, in this case: Don Quixote, Lord of the Rings, Charles Hapgood’s Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings, a fascination with human origins and living in South America, and mix it with a mundane personality obsessed with furniture…

I think I have a quiet, subversive sense of magic. I’ve told this story enough times that I’m no longer sure it’s completely true, but: I was forbidden to read Fantasy and Sci-Fi books when I was fourteen, and pressured to read ‘real’ books. For this reason, I feel like I had to conceal my sense of magic about the world, and consequently it became embedded in mundane objects. I’m very susceptible to signs and prophecies of the most boring kind. As in: that albino crow cawed three times — Soup for dinner!

Q: Some reviewers have read Couch as a play on epic fantasy, and your three protagonists as archetypes of the genre — the warrior, the wizard, and thief. Yes? No? Do you read epic fantasy, and do you think the archetypal categories transfer fairly over to your work? If so, can you say a little more about the quest that your characters are on? If not, what do you think of readings that skew this way?

A: Yes! No. Actually I’m really enjoying local (international!) author Ken Scholes‘ work. You could consider this epic fantasy, or perhaps epic, post-apocalyptic fantasy. I can officially say I’m a fan — he and I have corresponded several times under the guise that I was going to interview him — you know, a nice, mannerly talk between two authors on the subject of genre-bending fiction, but really I just want to knock him over, steal some of his unpublished drafts and snort them up like blow. Don’t tell Ken!

With Couch, there are scenes that I consciously mapped to Lord of the Rings. The movies were out and I’d recently reread the series, and he really popularized those archetypes in literature. I remember balancing out the characters in such a way as to make a proper skill-balanced fellowship for their quest. Did I mention I played copious amounts of D&D as a kid?

But then I get mad lost in details, and before I know it Erik is more concerned with the growth of his mustache than any proper thieving, and my supposed warrior character, spends most of his time idling lazily through his own self-doubt and place in the world.

That is to say: There were parts that were conscious, and there were parts that were subconscious that were pointed out in reviews and I was all like, I did that!? I’m totally awesome! And finally, there were parts I just don’t remember. That is to say, I think the novel, like probably most novels, is a combined effort between the conscious mind and the subconscious mind, between accident and intention. Anybody who has ever sat down to write a story about one thing and written about something entirely different knows what I’m talking about, and that’s what makes our brains so fascinating.

Q: The LA Times thinks you’re a Charles Portis fan; if so, you may already know that the Coen brothers are remaking True Grit with Jeff Daniels as Rooster Cogburn. (We all wait with great anticipation!) If Couch were optioned and you could call all the shots, who would you want to make it? Who would star? What would be your dealbreaker clause–the one thing that would make you veto the whole show?

A: I love True Grit, given to me, coincidentally, by Mel Favara who is MC’ing the upcoming reading. Regarding who might direct the movie Couch: Michel Gondry? Are you out there?

He would be my first choice. I mean, look.  The guy understands magic. He knows how to create a sense of wonder.

Starring? I don’t know. Gael García Bernal would play Erik. I have a terrible time with names and that trouble becomes particularly acute when it comes to actors/actresses. I rely heavily on on Laura for this sort of data (faces, names, songs), who remembers the words & tunes to pop songs and the names of obscure actors like some kind of secret language built into her DNA.

Q: You’re a web developer and a parent as well as a writer, so you wear a lot of hats. How do you manage your time and pick your priorities? Do you see your work as a writer feeding into your role as a parent, and vice versa?

A: I wrote Couch in a marathon stint in Ecuador, over five months in 2002, and then I had children. I’ve written a handful of short stories since then and done a few other things — we did Project Hamad (David Naimon, Laura Moulton), I started Walker Tracker and we did a couple of Peachblows (Dave Cain, Prashant Gandhi, Thane Stumbaugh) but a real novel takes lots of time and lots of thought.

I previously believed writing a novel took exclusive time, but this year I have been on a very rigid writing schedule where I write from 5:30am to 7am and bang out around a thousand words a day, and then I pretend for the rest of the day that the colossus I’m creating isn’t banging around at the top of my head like a cement sack hat, tilting me around my day-to-day obligations.

I know exactly how many words I write a day on average as I get statistics crazy about that kind of stuff. It’s an otherworldly, dream-like hour. The house is quiet and I’m only half awake. Some of the passages I’ve written feel more like dreams I’ve had. But yes. Time has been a troublesome subject — I have too many interests — and I finally realized time would always be troublesome, so I’ve moved writing to the forefront of my life (and my day, literally).

It’s really interesting talking stories with the kids. We’re reading some big works and my six year old is very aware of Couch (I’ve overheard him telling the plot line to a friend) and our current book projects, and he’s banged out a couple of books himself. I used to think that I wrote a decade into the past. That is, what I wrote about now borrowed heavily from life experiences and relationships ten years before — that was the way with Couch and a book (permanently closeted) before that. I have either matured as a person or a writer though, and find that I’m getting better at borrowing from current relationships now — especially with children.

Q: You’ve mentioned in interviews that your characters in Couch are depressed by the state of the world, and that you yourself have found a fight-the-man attitude pretty empowering at times. What have you read lately that’s made you feel better about the world? What advice do you have for writers (and readers) who want to make the world a better place? And…any hints about what you’ll read at the benefit on March 16?

A: When Michael Chabon read in Portland last he talked about the sense of impending doom that we all share as a nation. He mentioned that his son didn’t fantasize about an optimistic future of flying cars and space travel and what have you, like he had as a kid. There seems to be this universal assumption that at some time in our life — all our lives — the world will end. Ice age, nuclear holocaust, Y2K, global warming, bird flu pandemic, the year 2012, whatever.

I think that the rapture and the impending apocalypse are bullshit, and I’d like to get on a soap box about it. I’d like to walk through the streets carrying my sign: “THE END IS WAY THE HELL OFF! (Have a nice evening!)”, and, admittedly, that sign would be partly to remind myself. That said, the ‘end of the world as we know it’ is pretty much happening every ten years. But humans adapt. We’re pretty awesome that way.So I think in that regard, it’s extremely important to closely guard your hope. To be vigilant about it.

Secondly, now that we’ve gotten the why-don’t-we-give-up-now-because-the-end-of-the-world-is-here out of the way, your particular vision of the future is absolutely worth fighting for. While I think the number one object in a book should be story, I will definitely continue to wrap the future-I-think-is-worth-fighting-for into my books because you know what? I want my kids to get old on a really incredible planet. And more than anything I would really like to ride in a space elevator.

I have no idea what I’ll read but since I’m fighting this book every morning, chances are good that it will be some small chunk of it that I’ve wrestled down, pinning its ogre-arms to the floor, the both of us bloodied and bruised.