ArtSlag

Rusty Barnes, author of Mostly Redneck, was kind enough to put aside some time to do the following interview. Thanks Rusty. 

Q. Where are you from?

I grew up in Mosherville, Pennsylvania, a town of 300 located nearly at the top of the map of Appalachia and famous for not one thing.

Q. What do you write (prose, poetry, some amalgamation of the two? Do you write fiction, non-fiction, etc.)?

I’m a fiction writer because I was a timid fartseed of a poet when I began writing and I knew, like Johnny Cash and Shel Silverstein said, I’d have to get tough or die. I didn’t know any tough poets in those days.

If asked, I write non-fiction, but it’s not a major part of my writing life.

Q. How did you get started writing?

I wrote a whole trunkful of bad poems in high school and college, not because I knew anything about poetry, but because I had romantic notions of what a poet or writer should be. By my second year of college I was getting rejections for my poems and fiction regularly. I published one poem in 1996 or so and no fiction until the year 2000. Since then I’ve published around two hundred stories and maybe forty or fifty poems.

Q. What previous writers/artists have had an impact on your work? Who has inspired you?

Mostly just two or three writers, though there are many more I like: Andre Dubus, Larry Brown, Harry Crews, and Appalachian literature in general. I grew up in northern Appalachia, and though it wasn’t exactly like cultural Appalachia, which is the central and southern portion, I finally found people similar to the ones I grew up with in Appalachian and southern literature, and that’s where 4/5 of my reading time is focused now.

Q. Can you talk about other things that inspire you? 

Music inspires me. I put on the loudest most aggressive music I can find and that blows out all the non-writing stuff so I can get in the zone. The zone is important. It’s an inspiring element in and of itself, when I empty my mind and start typing. Anything can happen during that time. I aim for a thousand words an hour, but I’m satisfied if I get 500.

If that’s not possible—life interferes—I grab time when I can in fifteen minute intervals all day long.

Q. Can you talk about your process? How do you work, come up with ideas, how do the ideas manifest, how do you go about birthing ideas, etc.?

I write almost exclusively at night, usually from 930 or so until I get my quota or my wife slaps me upside the head because I’m not keeping her company. I have found I write best sitting on the couch in the middle of everyone’s lives, kids playing, TV on, visitors here, it doesn’t usually matter. Then when we go to bed around midnight I read for an hour or two. The ideas don’t matter. I have hundreds of ideas every day. What matters is what gets down on paper, or on the screen. I don’t believe in writer’s block anymore. Either I’m being lazy or my unconscious needs a break. I follow my gut.

Q. Can you talk about themes in your work? What images or symbols reoccur in your writing? Do you feel that you do these things purposefully or do they manifest on a more subconscious level?

I don’t think of my work in these terms at all. I think of characters and what they might do. I ask “what if?’ a lot. I think I write mostly  about relationships because the single most difficult (and rewarding) thing I’ve had to do in my life is to manage how I relate to people, both in romantic love situations and in family situations.

Q. Can you talk about your style, technique, mechanics as a writer?

I’ve been called a minimalist, which fits, I guess. Again, I don’t think much about these things. I write clean copy the first time around most of the time, so as I’ve gotten more experienced as a writer, I find I revise less and less.

Q. What are some of your goals as a writer? 

I want to write and publish books in every genre. I have a bangin’ Western I’m going to write someday, and I’m in the early stages of a mystery novel right now. I have a literary coming of age novel searching for an agent right now.

Q. What is your favorite part of being a writer? 

I get to make shit up.

Q. If you could own only three books, what would they be?

Joe, by Larry Brown, In A Father’s Place, by Christopher Tilghman, and maybe a blank book.

You can check out Rusty’s internet presence at http://www.friedchickenandcoffee.com/