Tanzer will read from Lucky Man at the Bookery II in Dewitt Mall on Saturday, July 21 at 3:30pm. Recently, he was kind enough to speak to us about what inspires him, what drives him and what he plans for the future.
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Ben Tanzer: I spend a lot of time with my wife and my two young sons. Not incredibly rabble-rousing I know, but true. Beyond that, everything, including writing, gets squeezed in around the family and work. I also enjoy shooting pool, something my father and I did for years together.
IT: Is there an author from whom you draw special inspiration?
Ben Tanzer: I am definitely inspired by authors who wrote books that just knock me on my ass. So, while I have always been a voracious reader, Jim Carroll was the first author to do that with The Basketball Diaries. It floored me, and I tried to achieve somewhat of an homage to it when I wrote an unpublished memoir a few years back based on the journal entries I wrote while my father was sick and died from cancer.
Most recently, two local Chicago writers have had an impact on me as well. Don De Grazia has written a book called American Skin which I just loved. It was watching him read that book and then reading it myself that prompted me to believe I could start my book. Similarly, when I read Hairstyles of the Damned by Joe Meno I thought, "Man, I don't know if I can write something like this, but now I know what to aim for."
IT: A large portion of your professional life has been devoted to social work. Do you have a specialty?
Ben Tanzer: This might be a two-part answer. First, my focus for many years now has been on children and the prevention of child abuse and neglect before it occurs, and so this is the area I move in professionally. In terms of skill set though, my role in this work tends to focus on facilitation and big picture planning on the one hand and more recently, messaging and communications which is newer to me and really interesting, the first time my work and writing interests have truly intersected.
IT: Lucky Man is largely focused on the efforts made by young people to cope with an unstable and traumatic emotional environment. What brought you to this theme, and how did you get into your characters' heads?
Ben Tanzer: I had an incident in mind from when I was a kid that I wanted to write about and I was wondering whether I should do a short story or a nonfiction piece about it. I then thought it could possibly be one of a series of key scenes in a larger story and that scene became the climatic scene involving the character Gabe.
Once I had that scene, I started thinking of other scenes that I wanted to tie in, and the characters who needed to populate them. As I fleshed out who [Gabe] might be involved with, the story seemed like it needed four characters and so I drew thumbnail sketches of each one based on experiences I and many of my friends had had. With this beginning in place, I followed the characters wherever they went as long as they started with the opening scene I had in mind and the closing scene I wanted to reach.
The reason I know them so well is that they are me at that age and the people I knew thrown together and spilled out across the pages of the book.
IT: The four main characters of Lucky Man have difficulty communicating, and this seems to drive their desperate escapism. What led you to explore this conflict?
Ben Tanzer: For me, communication plays the strongest role in driving self-awareness and healthy relationships. Communication, whether internal or external, is a challenge for the young, for males, for anyone with poor role models. These are young men with limitations and challenges struggling to carve out their own identities without the tools to do so. What interests me most is the struggle to cope with tough or challenging situations and then obtaining the ability to recognize we are in fact struggling.
IT: What's your process?
Ben Tanzer: My main rule is writing 30 minutes a day, every day, at some point, somewhere, though since my second son was born I let myself miss a day during the weekend as needed. With two kids and a full-time job I have tried to not allow my writing to be too precious in terms of place, noise, tools, or anything else. I try to map the next day or days' writing in advance and then do my best to commit to the schedule I've created... If the kids ever get out of the house or I reach a point where I don't need to work so much, I plan to become very precious when writing, only the best, complete silence, top of the line coffee and office products. All of it.
IT: In Lucky Man, some places are named and some are left anonymous. What led to this choice?
Ben Tanzer: Decisions like this aren't always fully conscious, but I wanted the book to start like it could be happening anywhere, anywhere anyone reading the book grew up, because I wanted to normalize the experience. As the characters [made] choices [to move], I wanted the places where they were going to be more clear to them and the reader.
IT: How do Ithaca and the rest of Upstate New York emerge in your writing? Having been raised here, do you attach certain impressions to the region?
Ben Tanzer: With certain stories, or the opening of Lucky Man, the writing is influenced by experiences I or someone I know had growing up or coming home to Upstate New York and so the towns I know best, like Binghamton, Ithaca or Albany, become filters for how I see those stories in my head.
When I think of Binghamton, for example, I have a time and place in mind, a place where there are the kinds of neighborhood bars I love, and diners where I learned to play Pac Man. And there are forests where we threw keg parties, and it's gray much of the time, and the kids I knew when I was in elementary school were fairly rough and we all fought a lot at the church next to school. There are Hess stations and mini-marts everywhere and we went to them endlessly for frozen burritos when I was growing up.
IT: Lucky Man is a major accomplishment. What does the future hold for you?
Ben Tanzer: I'm not sure what the future holds exactly beyond more writing, trying to get better and think more outside my own head. I want to write more books and I want more opportunities like the ones that have been coming with Lucky Man - chances to do readings and interviews and getting to meet more writers. All of it has been great.
[In marketing Lucky Man]I've tried to take advantage of YouTube, MySpace and blogs, things that seemed very foreign and exotic to me a year ago. These experiences have shown me that there are other things I want to do - I would like to really try and become more of a performer or storyteller, and I would like to learn more about making films. I would also like to try and adapt one of my books as a screenplay and I would love to collaborate on a graphic novel.
I've also been thinking lately about how much fun it would be to start my own zine or journal, so we'll see lots of ideas these days, lots of excitement, anything seems possible right now.
