Bud Smith: On Chaos Love Stories, Rejection, Not Equating Self-worth to Productivity, and His New Novel, “Teenager”
Bud Smith is practically a household name in the indie lit community. Talking with other writers, either in casual conversation or while conducting interviews, his name is one I have often heard mentioned. There seems to be no end to the list of writers who refer to him as a mentor, friend, and inspiration. It’s no surprise either, because reading Bud’s work, and talking with him, it’s hard not to be charmed by his generosity and unique perspective on art and storytelling. I first encountered Bud’s stories online in indie lit journals and later was reintroduced to him by my husband after he’d read his earlier novel F 250.
I was excited when I heard Bud’s novel Teenager (Vintage, 2022) was forthcoming because I had recently read his story “Violets” in Issue 233 of The Paris Review. It was a story which I have come to define, and which I often see in Bud’s writing, as a chaos love story. I read it while drinking my morning coffee and as soon as I finished reading it, I took the issue upstairs to my husband and said something like, “Oh my god! You have to read this. It is so good.” He stopped what he was doing, read it right then, and agreed. It was great. Maybe it's weird to mention my husband (twice!) in this intro. I considered cutting it, but hey, it's part of why I was excited to talk to Bud, so I left it. On more than one occasion, Bud’s work has made me reflect on my relationship with my husband — both the chaos and overwhelm of our early love, and the growing affection and insular world created by tending to it over time. I have this creeping feeling that maybe this is the greatest metric for measuring a piece of art’s value —how much it triggers rumination on who, what, and how we love.
Like “Violets,” Teenager is a chaos love story set in an American landscape that is more myth than reality. It is about self-delusion, and dreaming, young love and heartbreak. It is a novel that bears witness to the ways in which youth ignites imaginations that far exceed our realities and prophesizes the crushing truth that “the reality was never the same as the truth.” It is illustrated by his wife Rae Buleri.
Bud was kind enough to chat with me via email during late April and early May of this year. We spoke about writing to combat existential dread, separating identity from productivity, and how to use rejection to get to the heart of the story you are trying to tell.
Shelby Hinte: Teenager felt so different from a lot of the books I've read recently and honestly, I have a hard time thinking of books it is comparable to. Of course there are some traditional Americana/road trip narrative vibes, but as a whole, it felt so original. Can you talk a little bit about how you came up with the idea for the book and how it evolved over time?
Bud Smith: I’m glad it felt fresh to you. I wrote it to surprise myself. And in a voice that kept me engaged in wanting to come back to it, work on it, edit it again and again, because that’s what it takes. The novel evolved greatly over time. I’d first written the basic plot outline of Teenager on a napkin at a poetry reading. It was a poem. I’d come to see a reading in NYC and one of the readers hadn’t shown up. The host asked me to read something and so I scribbled the poem down and read it to the crowd. A few months later I was looking out the window at Mark Brunetti’s house (publisher of my first two novels) staring at a water tower. Thought I saw a person up on the high catwalk. When I looked again, I realized it was just my eyes playing tricks. But I kept thinking of that person. I turned the poem into a short story. Not feeling like I got it all, I turned it into two novellas, one from Kody’s POV and the other from Teal’s. Eventually the whole thing came together as a novel—the one that’s published today, and finished.
You’re right, there are these road trip novels and movies, and some of them have this Romeo and Juliet/Bonnie and Clyde plot to them. There aren’t many plots to choose from. When you break a novel down, it’ll most likely fall into some mold that’s been done before. This could be discouraging to some authors I think, but even Shakespeare based his works off previous works. Romeo and Juliet comes from “The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet” written by Albert Brooke, fifty years before Shakespeare did his famous play. I think about it like this: there are only so many notes on a piano and you can only make so many chords out of those notes and you can only have so many chord progressions in your song before you lose some of your audience, before you drive them crazy and they turn your music off. Now this sounds like it would be limiting for songwriters, but really it’s quite freeing because they have no choice to find themselves in the limitations. I felt the same way, working with myths. In my case, the myth of America.
SH: I love how much Teenager seems to have come from a place of wonderment. It's been said, and I think the quote is attributed to Toni Morrison, that "a novel is an inquiry." I often think about this and how inquiry keeps us interested in the work, like if a writer had all the answers about a book before setting out to write a book would they even be interested enough to maintain the momentum it takes to write draft after draft? I'm curious, for you, what keeps you interested in working on a novel and how do you maintain the momentum it takes to see a project through its many phases, especially considering you have a demanding job and could likely be spending your free time all sorts of other ways?
BS: I keep returning to my writing projects because it's the thing that brings me the most joy. It's fun. It's not draining. I keep coming back because I still have things to say, to explore, to learn. Because I feel I have not become fully expressed yet. Maybe I got some stuff right, but I didn't do my due diligence to get everything else in it wrong yet. If the subject is large, the things to say about the subject are right there and you can kind of pick them up and look at every side and pit your life and experience against it. If the subject is very small, there may not be a whole lot that can be said about it, by me, but I'll try to unravel it a bit. Being an artist, and maybe, particularly a writer, suits me, because everything else I do or learn in my leisure time, I can put those experiences and learnings to use in some little make believe story. The days get more exciting because I'm paying attention, and doing my best to figure myself and my world out, so I can write about it. I like having my head in the clouds because then I forget I've got to die.
SH: After I sent you my first two questions, I actually spent the weekend thinking about it and came up with two other titles that Teenager is similar to. One is your short story "Violets" (which you know I have gushed over) and the other is the film True Romance with Christian Slater and Patricia Arquette. The connective theme I see between all these works or art is that they are all what I'd call chaos love stories —the kind where you end up sort of rooting for the lovers even though their relationship feels full of what contemporary viewers might call red flags. It is like you know it is going to end badly, but you just can't help rooting for them in all their fucked-up-ness to have their love story (at least I can't stop rooting for them). What is it that draws you to writing about this type of romance?
BS: I'm usually writing about a person who is actively breaking away from the structure and trappings of "their world." My love stories are usually about two people who are against their whole world, together. Chaos love story, that's right, that's what it is. But it's just because the whole world does not make total sense to these people who are in my stories. They have to retreat from it and see if they can find a place that is just for them. An impossible place beyond chaos, that does not exist. I think it's true too, even if you read one of my stories that's about someone who is content, happy, with themselves, alone, they are still breaking away, still retreating, though it doesn't seem like it. They've created their own little pretend world to live in, where the chaos of the world still exists for them but they've almost totally tuned it out, not grown numb to it, just hum and try and laugh while a storm rips apart everything and everything around them.
SH: I like what you said about how chaos love stories are in part a product of two characters coming together in their own pretend worlds. In Teenager, Kody and Tella are living in this reality-adjacent world, and much of their constructs of reality feel like a form of self-delusion that is based off of media they've consumed. For me, a main point of tension and anxiety I felt while reading the book was witnessing where their delusions and naivete got them. I keep circling around this idea of myth and pretend and fantasy and I guess I wonder what it is that you think makes us so drawn to myth in our culture?
BS: Being delusional is being alive. Everyone in Teenager has their delusions, their rationalizations. I notice it in people I meet, in myself. So I gave it to the people in the novel. As far as myth goes, much of this country's myth about itself, is a hopeful delusion reframing what actually happened, into a faux happiness. Maybe it has something to do with the American Dream, and the ego of the average American. Things don’t work out the way they do in the movies, but a lot of people feel they aren’t necessarily living, but rather starring in the movie of their own life. This can lead to great disappointment when the movie goes nowhere.
SH: Speaking of romance, it is so cool that the illustrations in the book are done by Rae Buleri (your wife). They really add to the vibe of youthfulness and fantasy that exists in this story and it is hard to imagine the book without them. I know the two of you have worked on another book together before and I am wondering if you'd share a little bit about how having a creative partner has impacted your own creative life.
BS: We are always making something. I'm down in my blue room right now at my desk and she is in the pink room at her desk, painting. Rae is one of the most creative people I have ever met. And she is like me in the sense that she doesn't expect anything to happen. She'll paint a stack of watercolors and we'll be an hour or two into hanging out, afterwards, drinking beers in the living room and we still haven't talked about what she worked on that day, or what I worked on that day. We just always have something else to talk about, and we barely ever talk about making art, because we just make art. You don't have to talk about it very much with other artists if you've made some art recently. The cure for being a pretentious person, is don't pretend. She has no ego about her. We'll go over to the desk and start going through the watercolors and they are so beautiful and funny and weird. I say which ones I like best and then a few days later, I might notice she's repainted it a couple times and made a new piece of her BEST work. That's all it ever is. It's never listening to Rae explain, what I was going for was this ... she never says that. I try not to either. If I write down something in my/our life, the idea usually comes from talking to Rae about something and she'll go, "Oh my god that is so fucking funny, you should write that down." So I do.
SH: You have a pretty long track record of publishing work with indie presses, but Teenager is your first book to be published by a large press. In terms of working with publishers, how has this experience been different for you than with previous books?
BS: The experience was totally free. Be as wild as you want. I worked with Todd Portnowitz for Vintage, and he is an adventurous thinker. I turned in the draft expecting some of the brutality of the book to be honed down. But each step of the way I just felt more comfortable in the fact that content was not going to be restricted. I had some great guidance on a developmental level. I’d talk to Todd about what the characters were going through, and we’d get closer and closer to the emotional core of the book. I felt taken care of and like something exciting was happening. And of course, then the idea was out there to add illustrations, also Todd’s idea. He was the one who pulled Rae into the project. We’ve both felt extremely lucky to have been able to make this book together with Todd. As far as all the other stuff with a big publisher, I don’t know, there’s more people involved, but I’ve yet to hear someone push something on the project.
SH: I have read and listened to a lot of interviews with you and something I always wonder when I hear you speak is what you do when you feel discouraged with your writing or the publishing world or all the things that can be hard with writing. I agree with you that writing is a super special way to escape reality and that most of the time it is a gift to be able to write, but what about the times when you face rejection or self-doubt?
BS: I've been doing this work since I was a kid, and I just never have gotten discouraged. There's been so much rejection, so many people saying no, but it's just really none of my business. Neither is the world of publishing. My duty is just to make up funny little stories, but to take the making of the funny little stories be something that consumes me and aids my life day-to-day, not in a way that leads to renown or fame (if that exists for writers), but in a way that makes me think that I have done something good with my time here. I don't give up on my projects. I have some projects I have been working on for twenty years, thinking about, reworking, re-approaching, rewriting. I'm not going to let the projects die. No matter what. They might not get published, but if I live long enough they will be completed to my satisfaction.
When I get a rejection, when I get told no, this isn't happening, I take the critiques to heart. I think about them deeply. But I think there's another side to all that. When you get a rejection, or when your story/book/project gets passed on by a lot of people—maybe twenty places have said no—I never just blindly think 'Oh I know more than them.' I accept that there is something not right with the project. I'll have to fix the project in order for it to grow and be its best and become FINISHED, but the advice I am given/the reason why the place passed, it is seldom useful. If I were to just do what they half-heartedly suggest, I wouldn't make them happy and I wouldn't make myself happy. They are correct, there is something missing/wrong with the project, but the solution is always to do something wild and unpredictable, yet true to the project, that a critic could never come up with. It has to come from the artist, and it has to go farther than the artist had ever gone into the rabbit hole of the project. It usually has to do with some profound emotional truth that the artist (me) was scared of exploring earlier, and now that the doors have been closed, it's time to chase down that stuff that scared me to begin with and see if there's a bigger answer to life hidden in that pain.
SH: I am impressed with how grounded you are around writing and rejection. I often hear other writers express despair and self-doubt in the face of rejection (and I can be sensitive to it at times as well). Part of me thinks it stems from equating self-worth/identity with labor and production. How do you separate your identity from your work, whether it be your day job or your writing work?
BS: Well that’s just it, I don’t equate self-worth with my writing or my job. I’m used to going into this plant I’ve been working at for the last few years and having some semi-brutal task for the day dished out —climb in that hole and shovel out that muck, or climb that ladder hundreds of feet up into the sky, take apart the machine at the top. It keeps a person humble. What am I going to say? No? I'm too good for that? Not at all. I'm not too good for the job I'm given to do. I chose to drive there, I swiped in for the day, I'm going to try to do my best. I'll try to think of a smarter and better way to do it, but I know I can't get out of the work.
Illustration by Rae Buleri
If my conscious can live with why the job needs to get done ethically, I have to do it. I've chosen to come to the place, and some days the specific task is especially grueling. But a person has to do what the universe tasks them to do.
A lot of times I can't even remember why I started writing a specific piece of fiction. I just kind of wake up in the third draft of it or something hardly aware of having started. I think most artists we follow for a while, those who have a body of work, they are just on the right path, they stayed on the right path for as long as they could, they structured their life in such a way so that they could do the drug of making their art, and what we have left over from their life is the result of an addiction that pleasantly killed that particular artist.
SH: I want to return for a second to what you said earlier about writing as a form of joy and way to think of something other than death. I am pretty obsessed with this idea of the ways in which we find joy and distract from existential dread, or at least make peace with it. Why do you think that writing is the activity that facilitates this for you (as opposed to say painting or praying)?
BS: I've got my fair share of dread too. For some reason when I'm telling a story, it all fades away, I can only concentrate on the story, the telling of it. Usually when I tell a story, I find myself laughing and when I'm laughing, that dread goes poof. It's the same thing when I read, I'm so swept away in receiving the story from the teller, I can't help but think I'm being taken care of, that someone, somewhere has a plan for me. If in real life I can't say God has a plan for me, at least I can be completely honest when I say, well, this novel I'm reading, one of the best ones I've ever read, the author certainly had a plan for me, that's why they wrote it.
SH: I love the way you refer to artists/writers as structuring their lives in a way that allows for making art and I am particularly intrigued by the way you connect artmaking to a type of addiction. Is this what writing feels like for you —a sort of substance you can't give up?
BS: A habit I can’t give up. Some people can’t get over praying. I can’t get over doing this.
SH: I continue to be in awe of your positive attitude around rejection and I guess I wonder if you have any advice for writers who struggle to overcome self-doubt or feel discouraged to return to writing after rejection?
BS: If something in life has felt really lousy to me I haven’t done it for very long. My advice is don’t torture yourself. If you hate getting rejections, you don’t have to submit your work around. It doesn’t make you less of a writer, if anything it makes you a purer writer. Like others before me, I’ve been rejected endlessly and will continue to be. The honest work never ends. I have a notebook full of hundreds of submissions I sent out and hundreds of rejections. For some reason all the rejections just never seemed to bother me. I’ve had so many ‘sure things’ I thought were going to happen and it just falls apart. But that’s okay. My advice to people who hate getting rejections, is just to think of it all as a joke. At least that’s what I do. I don’t take the publication of my work very seriously, in self-defense, I’m sure. But I do take the creation of it extremely serious.
Bud Smith works heavy construction and lives in Jersey City, NJ. He is the author of Teenager (Vintage ’22), Double Bird (Maudlin House, 2018), Dust Bunny City (Disorder Press, 2017), among others. His fiction has been published in The Paris Review, The Believer, The Baffler, and The Nervous Breakdown, and many others.
Rae Buleri is an artist, and illustrator of Teenager and Dust Bunny City. She likes to walk and talk on the phone. IG @raewatch
About the Interviewer
Shelby Hinte is a bay area writer and educator. She has led writing workshops at San Francisco State University, The Writing Salon, and in the community, including teaching creative writing to incarcerated adults and youth on juvenile probation. She is a contributing writer and interviewer with Write or Die Tribe and a prose reader for No Contact. Her writing has been featured in ZYZYVA, BOMB Magazine, Hobart, SmokeLong Quarterly, and elsewhere. Follow her @shelbyhinte
