Matter of Craft with Brian Broome
In this edition of Matter of Craft, Brian Broome, author of Punch Me Up to the Gods, chats about writing during recovery, Gwendolyn Brooks, keeping his poetry private and what you can discover while writing on the bus.
Kailey Brennan: It was a real honor to read your memoir. It was so raw and honest and dealt with such traumatic subject matter. I’d love to know how you knew it was time to take on this memoir. Did it feel urgent for you?
Brain Broome: It didn’t feel urgent, but it felt necessary in terms of my process of recovery from drugs and alcohol. I started writing again in rehab. When I was there, I had a roommate who snored really loudly so I was up at night. I just started writing again like I did when I was a kid. What I was writing about was just why I thought I ended up in rehab. So a lot of these stories come from that. I felt like in order to be honest with myself in my recovery, I needed to sort of get these things out and stop hiding the things that I was ashamed about. And there are a lot of things that I'm ashamed about. So I figured why not write them all down and tell the stories. So that's how it came out. I mean, it was kind of a cathartic healing process - me writing the stories. I didn't know they'd ended up in a memoir. I didn't know they ended up in a book at all.
KB: Are you feeling vulnerable now that this book is out in the world?
BB: Yeah. I'm terrified. I sent a copy to my mom and she loved it. Those are her words. I'm not putting words in her mouth. She said she loved it. She had a few criticisms, but she seemed glad that I wrote it. There were a lot of things in there that she didn't know. My aunt is reading it right now and she keeps texting me saying, “I'm on an emotional roller coaster” because she didn't know a lot of those things that I write about had happened to me. But yeah, it's hard. It's kind of weird putting yourself out there like that. A lot of people think that they know you after they read it. Some people get a little too familiar. But I'm still glad that I wrote it. It's out there and it makes me feel like there's a little bit of a weight lifted off my shoulders.
KB: Yeah. I could see how that would be. You mentioned that you started writing it in rehab. I was curious how long it took you to write and - although you already touched on this- if you didn't know it was going to be a memoir, did you think it was going to be something in a different genre?
BB: I didn't think it was going to be anything. I started writing these stories in rehab and then I got out of rehab and I came home and I was afraid to pretty much leave my house at all because I was just afraid the minute I step outside, I'm going to relapse. So I was writing on social media and Facebook a lot. An old friend of mine who doesn't live in the area anymore, who was teaching at the time, reached out to me. And he said, you know, you should submit some of your writing somewhere. I think your writing on Facebook is good. Do you have anything laying around that you want to submit? And I said, sure. And he gave me a link to the Ocean State review who was taking submissions for their journal.
And I submitted and I got published there. That's when it first hit me like, Oh, well maybe people want to read my writing. Maybe I could do something with this. So I ended up going to community college and doing some more writing and getting a couple of things published here and there. Then I met a nice woman at the community college who said, you should go on to Chatham University and study writing there. And I took her advice. Then from there, I got offered a fellowship. So now it's just been writing, writing, writing. I don't want to say that I fell into it, but it kind of feels like that sometimes. (Laughs)
KB: Yeah, it’s like something kind of clicks and you are like, oh I’m good at something.
BB: That's kind of like how I felt. Like, Oh, maybe this is what I'm here for. (Laughs) Maybe this is a way that I can bring some kind of release to myself and maybe entertainment and knowledge to other people. So I just kept it up.
KB: Well I’m really glad you did. Your writing is so rich and full of detail.
BB: Thank you very much. I appreciate that.
KB: I know you are also a poet and screenwriter. And now you can add memoirists to the list.
BB: Yes. I'm just going to keep adding things.
KB: How do you think all these genres influenced one another for you? How do you feel they influenced writing your memoir?
BB: Well obviously poetry came into it because the whole book hangs off of a Gwendolyn Brooks poem. I don't think that I'm a very good poet. I write poetry, but I haven't published any of it. I keep it very private. They just sort of play off each other. If I'm writing a poem, I feel like it's this self-contained thing. And then oftentimes if I'm writing prose, I'll go back to a line that I wrote in a poem, you know? So I borrow from poetry for my prose and I borrow from my prose for screenwriting, if that makes any sense. I write small poems, so it starts off with a small idea in a poem. And then it gets more wordy in my prose. I use the prose sometimes to inform the screenwriting. So they're all connected, but I just think of them and their purpose differently. Then I started using each one of them as a grab bag for the other.
KB: I love that you still call yourself a poet even though you keep a lot of your own poetry, private. It can feel like you can't call yourself something unless it's out there. Unless it's published or recognized. So I love that you are still claiming that title because that's what you are, even if you're not putting it out into the world, you know?
BB: Yeah I mean, I'm friends with Yona Harvey for God's sake. (Laughs) Like, I don't know if you've read any of her poetry, but she's incredible. Partly it's just I don't know that my poetry is good enough to be published, but I also just keep it private because I feel like it's for me. Every once in a while, I'll go back and read it and think, Oh God, that's terrible. Or, you know, this isn't so bad, but it's not anything that I aim to publish.
KB: You mentioned the Gwendolyn Brooks poem, which was actually my next question for you. I loved how you organized the chapter titles [of your memoir] by stanzas from her poem, “We Real Cool.” I was curious if you could speak about how you came to that choice. I can imagine organizing something like this with your personal history could have been challenging.
BB: I can't remember when I first heard or read the Gwendolyn Brooks poem, but I know at one point after reading it, I thought to myself, this poem, to me, is like a mini treatise about black masculinity. I don't remember exactly when I had that thought, but I was writing these stories at the same time. And I thought, what if I had a story for each line of the poem. It immediately just came to me like, why shouldn't I try to structure my stories around this poem?
It's a great poem. I started looking up interviews with her. She never actually says the word masculinity in any of the interviews I saw or read. Maybe she does and I just never came across her saying that. But I just felt like this is about how black boys learn to become black men in a lot of ways. Maybe even just generally this idea of rebelliousness, this idea of being non-affected and non-emotional and hard drinking and just tough and cool. I think that the word 'cool' in that poem is translated to masculine. That's how I decided to try to incorporate it into the book because that's what I was writing about.
KB: Do you keep a writing routine or practice? If you do, can you walk us through a day in the life.
BB: Oh, I wish I kept a routine. One of my biggest goals, or the person that I want to be, is this person who can have the discipline to sit down from whatever time- 1:00 to 5:00, 8:00 AM to 2:00 PM or something - and just have a disciplined time for writing. I'm not very good at it. I have students and they asked me this question. I'm such a hypocrite. I'm like you should have a time every day that you write.
But I write whenever I just can't stand to not write anymore. I'll have all these ideas in my head and I will procrastinate and procrastinate and procrastinate until the idea is literally trying to explode its way out of my ears. And then I'll sit down and write. But when I do it, I know my surrounding environment either has to be the bus. I ride the bus all the time. Sometimes I'll get on the bus to write and I'm not even going anywhere in particular. Or it has to be in my home and the lights have to all be off except for I have one of those hula lamps. (Laughs) Or a library. So those are the only three places that I can actually write. I see people doing it in cafes and seem to be really into it. I have no idea how you can do that. For me, it's either the bus, my little space in my home or a little cubby in a library.
KB: What is it about the bus?
BB: Oh, it's amazing. I don't know if you take the bus, but when you get on it, it's like if you're a chef and you go grocery shopping. There are all these characters. There's all these different kinds of people. There's all these experiences. There's all these conversations. I eavesdrop on people's conversations all the time. For a while, when I got out of rehab and I was just writing on social media, I was doing these sort of like daily updates. I would take the same bus every day and I would write a little travel log from this bus here in Pittsburgh about what I was seeing and what I was hearing and just the different colorful types of people that were on this bus. So yeah, I ride on the bus all the time. I take a little notebook. I used to just get my laptop out and just start writing on the bus.
KB: I love that.
BB: You should try it. Take a pen and pad and just write little notes, things that you see with different people, things that you notice, or like a snippet of a sentence and then just put it away and then come back to it later and write a whole thing. I find that really, really fun.
KB: Is there a book you have read recently that you can recommend?
BB: Well, I haven't read anything recently because I've been teaching. I've been reading a lot of my students' papers and stuff like that. But I'll tell you two things. The last two things that I read that really affected me were an essay by a writer named B. Domino called The Champagne Room. She wrote this really great series of moments, about being a stripper.
I re-read The Kind of Light That Shines on Texas, which is a book of nonfiction essays by an author named Reginald McKnight. It is just really wonderfully and beautifully written. And Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies. So I just give you three things instead of the one that you asked for. (Laughs) But those three things just knocked me over in the limited amount of time that I've had to read.
BRIAN BROOME is an award-winning writer, poet, and screenwriter, and K. Leroy Irvis Fellow and instructor in the Writing Program at the University of Pittsburgh, where he is pursuing an MFA. He has been a finalist in The Moth storytelling competition and won the grand prize in Carnegie Mellon University’s Martin Luther King Writing Awards. He lives in Pittsburgh.
