Name John Brantingham
Age 44
Where are you from
Los Angeles, California
Fiona: A little about yourself `ie your education Family life etc
John: I’m a married community college professor from just outside of Los Angeles. My educational experience is a long strange tale. I have a B.A. in literature, and then earned an M.A., but as I was about to receive my M.A. at Cal State Long Beach, I was accepted into their M.F.A. in Fiction program, and I dropped out of that program. After I earned my M.F.A., I began working on an M.A. in History at Cal Poly, Pomona, but dropped out of that program when I was accepted into a Ph.D. in Literature program at the University of California, Riverside, where I worked for a while. I realized there that I am a writer, not a professional critic, and I dropped out of that program too. The upshot is that I have hundreds of graduate credits in history and literature with an M.F.A. to show for it, and the knowledge that even though I love reading and researching history and literature, I really don’t want to teach or write about those subjects.
Fiona: Tell us your latest news?
John: I am so glad that my book Dual Impressions: Poetic Conversations about Art that I wrote with Jeffrey Graessley just came out. It’s a poetry collection about paintings and sculptures.
Fiona: When and why did you begin writing?
John: I’m a little hard of hearing now, but when I was a child, I went through periods of near deafness. I would go so long without a conversation, that I really lost any skill in it at all. However, my house was always filled with books which I’d disappear into. If I wanted any kind of two-way communication, I had to write, and that started a profoundly rich interior life.
I think most people have two selves, the one they show to the world and the one they keep hidden. I’m very aware of this duality in myself, and I know that the true me is a completely different person than my public persona. Frankly, I like the interior me a lot more, and writing is that place I can give him expression.
Fiona: When did you first consider yourself a writer?
John: I must have been about fifteen when I had awareness that I wasn’t just doing this to pass my time but that this was the way that I understood the world.
Fiona: What inspired you to write your first book?
John: I think it was a failed fantasy novel that I wrote when I was about fifteen years old. I had a good image, but no one told me that I was going to need to have some conflict. So the character was just kind of moping around a fantasy setting wishing that he could change his world. It went on like that for a long time until I gave it up. No one else read it, but I think it was an important bit of writing for me. It helped me to process the chaos of my life at that time.
My first published book was a poetry collection called East of Los Angeles, which is about how much I love and hate living in Los Angeles and what a bizarre place it is. Truly, if you’re not from Los Angeles, there’s no way to know what this strange city is like.
Fiona: Do you have a specific writing style?
John: I come from the Stand-Up Poetry tradition of Long Beach, California. The basic idea behind that is that a poem or a story should be able to be understood on one level immediately. It should be accessible in the same way stand-up comedy is even though it isn’t usually funny. When it’s read again, it should have more profound implications. With my fiction and poetry, I try to live up to this ideal.
Fiona: How did you come up with the title?
John: Actually, that was done almost entirely by our publisher. We knocked around a lot of titles, but she unerringly had the best.
Fiona: Is there a message in your novel that you want readers to grasp?
John: Art is a conversation between you and the artist. The mission of our poetry is to respond to the artists and to understand them in richer ways, possibly expanding the ideas of their paintings. So many of the subjects of the paintings had to do with the subjugation of other people. At least, that’s what we were seeing. Art for the viewer then is the beginning of a discussion rather than a passive act.
Fiona: How much of the book is realistic?
John: There are moments of surrealism especially when our narrators disappear into the art or imagine themselves there, but in general, these are simply conversations and, therefore, totally realistic.
Fiona: Are experiences based on someone you know, or events in your own life?
John: To some degree, we go into our past, but these are really philosophical explorations about the nature of life and of history. Historians will talk about politics and battles. Artists will tell you about daily life and what we found were the commonalities of joys and horrors between our time and the times of all these artists from the twenty-first century all the way back to ancient Greece. There is a great deal of comfort knowing that I’m going through what other people have gone through as well.
Fiona: What books have most influenced your life most? a mentor?
John: These change as the conditions of my life change. I love books that I can come back to again and again and give me the message that I need. For a long time in my childhood James and the Giant Peach was important to me. I know that sounds strange, but I was the ultimate lonely child, and this was a book about gaining friends and having adventures. When I was older, I read and reread Graham Greene’s novels, especially when I was struggling with issues of identity and religion. Raymond Carver is someone I return to and Andres Dubus too. As for poets, I love E.E. Cummings, Sharon Olds, Donna Hilbert, and so many people I can’t mention them all.
Mentors have been and remain important to me. I think some of the people who were important to me don’t know that they were. My first early mentor was my older brother Mark, who has the same love and talent for writing as I do. I nearly failed out of high school because I was hard of hearing and got no help, and I was severely depressed. I came to college thinking that I would probably waste a couple of years and get some kind of job that needed little or no competence and maybe write for myself. Community college saved me, and the professors there showed me that I had value, especially Pam Arterburn and Robin Tripp. Later, my M.F.A. experience shaped me and the kind of work ethic and writer I wanted to be. Suzanne Greenberg, Ray Zepeda, and Gerald Locklin really taught me how to write.
Fiona: What book are you reading now?
John: I always read three books at a time. I’m rereading Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie right now because I want to write the story of Pomona, California, and I wanted to review how he structured his story of India. Besides, who doesn’t adore Rushdie. I’m also reading Ellen Bass’s new poetry collection and a Bill Dix novel by Chris Swinney. Chris is a good friend and a great writer. I love his work.
Fiona: Are there any new authors that have grasped your interest?
John: Paul Tayyar and Grant Hier are brilliant poets that everyone should be reading. There are a lot of great ones out there. If you love genre fiction as I do, you have to read Christopher Allen Poe and Bonnie Hearn Hill too. They’re good friends, but I found my friendship with them through their writing.
Fiona: What are your current projects?
John: I am working on two collections simultaneously. The first is poetry about the history of California through the history of our water. The history of humanity is the history of water, and our water is in crisis now. Rivers have stopped flowing. California’s glaciers have disappeared.
The second project that I’m writing is a history of California told through flash fiction and very short stories. I go back to the time of mammoths, all the way until now, trying to capture moments of humanity. I have about 100 stories, and I want about 50 or 60 more.
Fiona: Name one entity that you feel supported you outside of family members.
John: The dA Center of the Arts in Pomona, California has been a gift to me. I am the writer-in-residence there, and as a very social person, the dA has given me a place to work and a way to project my voice. I love everyone there, Margaret, Jason, Scott, Uncle Bacon, Elder, Mary, Catherine, Ryan, Ron, Ro, and all of the artists there. All of them along with my wife have given me a new perspective to my own work.
Fiona: Do you see writing as a career?
John: Absolutely. I think if you are serious about being a writer you must think of it as a career. If it is a hobby, you will begin to prioritize other things in front of it. Writing however is part of who I am and I want to do it all the time. I work the rest of my schedule around it.
Fiona: If you had to do it all over again, would you change anything in your latest book?
John: No, absolutely not.
Fiona: Do you recall how your interest in writing originated?
John: Communication is always tricky and usually wrong. For example, I almost never say anything important on Facebook because people are simply waiting to pounce and to miss your message. What I have to say to this world though is important to me, and I saw from an early age that I could form that message most carefully in writing. Everything else seems inexact to me.
Fiona: Can you share a little of your current work with us?
John: Here are three of my water poems:
Your Story of Water
You move east of Los Angeles
when you’re four years old,
and even then something feels off.
Where you came from,
you stomped on the edges of rivers and rain puddles
and watched bugs walk across the skin of water.
The desert was a far-off dream.
When you move in,
you stand in your parents’ backyard,
tilt your head back,
and watch the wind blow dust
across your new sky.
Your mother comes up behind you,
jokes that it looks just like the end times.
When you’re eight,
your first drought starts,
and the governor tells restaurants
to stop serving water.
Your father takes you up
to the reservoir
to point out the bathtub rings climbing the valley wall.
That night, your mother reads Revelation
out loud after dinner.
She raises her eyebrows specifically at you.
El Niño years come and go.
When the torrents start,
you ride your bike in the rain
and imagine your body is a dirty flatland,
your pores sucking up moisture.
You stand on the bridge
over the concrete river
and watch the thirty-foot trench fill
and drain off into the Pacific.
In these years, when you dream of Revelation,
Death rides a white skiff.
When you move to London
at the age of twenty,
the river becomes your fetish.
You come from a city of salt water,
and everything is fresh here.
It flows through the downtown,
and the misting rain is a constant.
You stare at swirling eddies
until your professors
ask if everything is all right.
When you finally have to move back home,
a tiny masochist part of you finds
a relief you don’t discuss.
You spend your adulthood trying to move away,
but at cocktail parties and coffee houses
in distant cities,
no one understands you, not really.
They like you
but can tell you’re off
even though you don’t talk about water.
The drought has moved inside of you
as it has with everyone else in the city.
You carry its lack with you,
the way you carry
your mother’s dreams of the end of the world.
Here’s another:
After Backpacking over Mt. Whitney
My back’s propped
against the rock wall
so I can stare
into the Milky Way’s middle distance
or watch that creek flowing
down into Owen’s Valley,
and I think maybe
I’ll just stay up tonight,
let the stream and the sky
do their thing to my head
and have the ancient thoughts
of water and stars.
Of course, that’s when I fall
asleep and dream totems
that are either personal or Jungian,
and who cares
as long as they’re drawn
from the springs
of the High Sierras,
the waters older
than these mountains,
the waters that incite bears
to dance their joy in the meadows
downstream,
the waters that will eventually split
these mountains in half.
They are in me.
Here’s a third:
Burn Your Maps
One million years of evolution
and your blood is still brine.
Your blood, which is the true you,
will know its way home.
In that final journey, you will seep out
of your body seeking the earth,
working your way downstream.
The sun will burn the rest of you into the air,
and your liquid self will rejoin the earth
until you become
the blue of the sky,
the green of the sea.
Fiona: Is there anything you find particularly challenging in your writing?
John: I’m someone who has a lot of ideas all at once, and I have a lot of energy. I have trouble with focusing. I’ll come up with grand ideas, and I really have to trust my wife’s instincts when she tells me that I need to finish one thing before I move onto another.
Fiona: Who is your favorite author and what is it that really strikes you about their work?
John: That changes of course, but right now it’s probably Raymond Carver. He’s absolutely brilliant. His insights on life are shaped by pain and reflection, and he sings to me. There are many writers alive today who I could cite. Living authors include Grant Hier, Donna Hilbert, Paul Tayyar, Clifton Snider and others. These are all Long Beach poets and friends of mine, and they speak to me too. Seriously. Read Paul Tayyar’s work. He will change the way you look at the world.
Fiona: Do you have to travel much concerning your book(s)?
John: Yes. I am often a poet and writer of place. I spent the last summer living in the back country of Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Park. If you read my poem above, Mt. Whitney is in these parks. I need a place to talk to me to write about it, and since I am largely a California writer, I spend a lot of time wandering around the state. One of my favorite things to do is to go to the train station and decide there at random where I’ll be later. I do that with my car too. Just let the road tell me.
Fiona: Who designed the covers?
John: This last one was done by the publisher. She did a brilliant job. Past covers were done by a variety of people, but I love those my wife has done. She is a visual artist and art historian, so she has great insights on this.
Fiona: What was the hardest part of writing your book?
John: Dealing with the constant self-doubt and the near-crippling nightmares about being a fraud. I’ve always had nightmares, and they tend to get worse the deeper I am into a project.
Fiona: Did you learn anything from writing your book and what was it?
John: Most of these lessons were artistic. In the past, I didn’t have a lot of interest in Degas. He’s one of my favorites now. His depiction of poverty and his empathy for those who were crushed by it are beautiful. I can’t look at The Little Dancer, Aged Fourteen without feeling a sense of loss of innocence and distaste for the rich people who turned all of those little dancers into objects of sexuality.
Fiona: Do you have any advice for other writers?
John: People are going to tell you in subtle and unsubtle ways that what you’re doing is not worthy and pathetic. The worst of it is that those voices get into your head and that thing that you love the most becomes a thing of shame for you. Think of yourself as a professional writer and write all that you want. Those people are monsters projecting their own pain onto you. Don’t listen to them.
If someone in your life is telling you that, and you want a pep talk, write to me at johnmbrantingham@aol.com. What you have to say matters, and I’ll tell that to you.
Fiona: Do you have anything specific that you want to say to your readers?
John: I think that self-doubt and self-loathing are the traps that we fall into most often and most easily. This is the message that most of my work has. These feelings are lies we tell each other and hope is the truth that feels like a lie. The most important shift I’ve made as a professor has been to understand why students drop out. When I first started, I imagined people dropped when they couldn’t handle the work intellectually. Not true. The smartest students will drop out of a program when they feel as though they don’t belong in it. Our self-concept is by far the most powerful aspect of our being.
Fiona: Do you remember the first book you read?
John: Curious George.
Fiona: What makes you laugh/cry?
John: My wife makes me laugh. She’s the funniest person I’ve ever met. I spend most of my time goading her into making jokes. Problems that are easily solved make me cry. 45,000 people a day die of starvation. Each of those deaths is avoidable, but we’re all focused on the wrong things. All of the pain of this earth is avoidable, but we’re focused on minutia.
Fiona: Is there one person past or present you would meet and why?
John: St. Francis of Assisi – He seems like the kind of person I should be striving to be.
Fiona: What do you want written on your head stone and why?
John: I don’t want a headstone. I’d like my ashes scattered and then have a bench looking at Moro Rock in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Park. I could also go for one in Mt. San Antonio College where I work and one of the places I love the most. On that bench I’d like written, “He has become the blue of the sky, the green of the sea.”
Fiona: Other than writing do you have any hobbies?
John: Hiking. It is the perfect meditation.
Fiona: What TV shows/films do you enjoy watching?
John: 30 Rock, Evil Dead 2, Lawrence of Arabia, Psych, Jeopardy.
Fiona: Favorite foods / Colors/ Music
John: British pub food, but I had to stop eating that for health reasons. Green. Jazz, especially latin jazz and bossa nova.
Fiona: If you were not a writer what else would you like to have done?
John: I would have been an interpretive forest ranger. That was an early dream that I let go when I realized that my passion for writing conflicted with it. I couldn’t be both writer and ranger although some people are.
Fiona: Do you have a blog/website? If so what is it?
John: Yes, it’s called 30 Days Until Done. Each day I give a new prompt. These prompts are unified so that by the end of the month, you have a complete collection. johnbrantingham.blogspot.com/
authorsinterviews 
RIGHT ON, Brother! Great to learn even more about a man I respect and learn a great deal from. Keep doing what you are doing. You are an inspiration and comrade.
This makes me want to write a story about the time I had to sit on a rock and figure out where I could find water. To find the water I had to tell myself the story of California. When I got to the end of California’s tectonic conveyor belt story, that conveyor built brought me water. It was the damnedest thing. A very serious situation. I was in a tight spot.
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