By Christine Rice
Ben Tanzer, as writers like to say, gets his butt in the chair.
He is a novelist, has published collections of fiction and essays, writes a fabulous blog, and produces a podcast. A life-long reader but late bloomer to writing, his career began after he turned 30. Tanzer’s most recent collection, The New York Stories, was written over an eight-year period starting in 2006 and its 33 stories are set in the fictional New York town of Two Rivers. Tanzer’s characters are razor sharp. He lays open their emotional aches and pains, the tragedy of their misguided decisions, and their quest for redemption. From drunks to struggling parents to kids who make mistakes that ruin their lives, this collection digs deep.
A few weeks ago, Ben and I grabbed lunch to discuss all things Ben Tanzer including, but not limited to, his most recent short story collection, his rapidly expanding lifestyle empire, This Blog Will Change Your Life, parenthood, tacos, doughnuts, and the glamorous life of an indie author.
CHRISTINE RICE: We’re at Manny’s Delicatessen. It’s old school Chicago, old school deli. What are you having?
BEN TANZER: I’ve gone very old school, and quite Jewy. Is it Jewy? Anyway, I am hitting my usual – pastrami with Russian dressing, matzo ball soup and potato pancakes. Also, because we are in Manny’s – and Chicago – a Green River soda, which I quite love.
CR: You’re originally from New York. What’s your favorite deli in NYC?
BT: We haven’t lived there in so long, I feel like I barely qualify any more, but I always loved EJ’s Luncheonette, though that may not qualify as a deli, and so as cliché as this is – sorry – we used to live on 96th and West End, and in walking distance from Zabar’s, so I should probably go with that.
CR: Tell me about your first experience at Manny’s.
BT: Oh my God, so wonderful, my wife’s boss took her there for lunch, and she was so excited to take me, which she did when her dad and my brother both happened to be visiting one weekend. We practically had a minyan. It was amazing, I ate all of the things I ordered with you – I rarely deviate from that – plus the chopped liver, which I love, especially on Ritz crackers, because that’s how my grandmother always served it.
CR: Full disclosure from this Presbyterian. I had to look up minyan.
You have, what you call, a growing lifestyle empire. How do you go up against Kanye West, Martha Stewart, Oprah? What’s the plan?
BT: They are definitely among the pacesetters – I’m only half joking here – and I’m learning from them by copying what they do really well. Brand everything, cross-pollinate across all platforms, hype the things you love – and not just what you love about yourself – but all things – artists, products, ideas – and constantly try to illustrate how they all hang together. Also, figure out what you love and then act like you’re an expert regardless of how you actually feel or what you actually know.
CR: Speaking of things you love… You are a big supporter of tacos and doughnuts. I’m also very interested in tacos (as is our mutual friend Cyn Vargas) and doughnuts. What’s your favorite taco in Chicago? Favorite doughnut?
BT: I’m a lover of all things taco and doughnut for sure, but I’m no true expert in either, sadly. That would take more time. Still, in deference to my own answer above, let me pretend. So, Five Faces on Division in the Gold Coast near our apartment is a real favorite. I usually go there after a reading to get a steak taco. It’s a 1:00 a.m. stop for me. Spanglish near my office for sure, and I just discovered Irazu, which is no mystery to most people I’m sure, but new to me.
CR: That sounds like a dangerous digestive choice.
BT: The tacos or the doughnuts? They’re all good. I don’t think I’ve ever had a bad doughnut. I even love the little chocolate doughnuts you can buy at Walgreens. But that said, Stella’s and Glazed & Infused are both good, and Do Right Doughnuts, too. Regardless of location, if you put maple frosting on it, you’ve sold me, though I do not enjoy maple and bacon on a doughnut. With breakfast, eggs, tacos, absolutely, great combination, sublime, but I haven’t found the right combination on a doughnut yet. For that matter, I had a green tea doughnut in Los Angeles last summer, and it was terrible, so maybe there are some that aren’t all good.
CR: Your blog This Blog Will Change Your Life actually changed my life. Have other people told you that? If so, how have their lives been changed? And for how long? Has it changed your life?
BT: The writer Nick Ostdick told me I should aim for changing someone’s life for at least five minutes, that seemed reasonable to him, and not nothing, and if I could accomplish that, I should feel satisfied. So that’s my goal, and I hope it’s changed people’s lives. Over the years I have heard from some people who did not feel it had changed their lives, which I feel terrible about. As for me, definitely, at a minimum, I had always wanted to meet writers, even before I ever thought of becoming one, and the blog, plus its various spin-offs, the podcast, the Zine, the clothing line, etc., has opened those doors, so yes, for me, it’s been amazing, and even life-changing as goof ball as it sounds.
CR: There seems to be a lot of anger about double spacing after periods. Has the double-spacing-down-to-one-space changed your life?
BT: The utilization of one space absolutely changed my life. My wife was in advertising when that became a thing – the double space was suddenly anathema in her office – and it really spoke to me, and my desire for things to be tight and fast. One space is like a taco or a doughnut, or even a child, just huge for me, and in retrospect even kind of moving.
CR: You started blogging way back in 2006. Why did you start blogging?
BT: I was an early adopter of a lot of these tools and platforms, because my first book was coming out and my publisher said, We have no marketing dollars, you have to be creative, maybe do a blog? I had been reading about blogging and MySpace and I thought all of those platforms would be fun, but I was self-conscious about using them. But as soon as I found a reason to talk about myself, and I had a goal, I was off and running, my narcissism now unchecked and all of it as highly self-entertaining as I expected it would be.
CR: You are an indie author to the core. Tell me about your first publishing experience. Was that in 2007 with Lucky Man? How did you become interested in indie presses? We know what indie’s don’t do, but what do you think indie presses do well or differently from big presses?
BT: The way you say that, the indie author thing almost sounds like a positive. But yes, in 2007, I hadn’t published much yet, and I didn’t know much about publishing in general, and indie presses were all I knew and all that made sense to me. Bigger presses, agents, none of that seemed real, and things like AWP or writers’ retreats, even MFA programs I’m not sure I even knew they quite existed, or that there was even a whole world of activities outside of readings and signings to begin with. So that’s where I was at, and where I remain, sort of inside for sure, but also outside, immersed in my books, the Chicago lit scene, the writers I love, and not totally tapped into what things look like on the broader level. So, what does that mean about the indie experience? That it‘s personal and intimate and the people you work with really care about your books. All of which is so important and meaningful when you’ve done so much work. But that’s not to say larger presses don’t operate this way, I just don’t really know for sure. That said, I’m willing to learn.
CR: You didn’t start writing until you were in your thirties. What sparked your interest in writing?
BT: I had wanted to write for maybe ten years – which I can now more clearly trace to a required creative writing class I took senior year in high school and the positive response I got – but I couldn’t get started, and then when I was around 30 I had been out of school for around a year and married for around a year, and happy, but I thought, something is missing, this is not enough, and then I thought writing, maybe that’s what’s missing, and then I started writing, and it was, and is, all I could think about after that.
CR: Are rejections still crushing?
BT: Yes and no. I’m mostly accustomed to it. They all suck, and some hurt worse than others, but I really seek to accept it – rejection is part of the experience if you’re going to do it at all – and move on immediately. Also, I’ve had stories get rejected and then picked up by another magazine for seemingly the same reasons it was rejected elsewhere, so, yes sometimes it’s terrible, though not knowing when, if, I’m going to hear back from someone, the anticipation, and hope, I find that much worse.
CR: Does rejection motivate you?
BT: I try to stay as neutral as possible about it, but there are differences here. Being rejected by a potential publisher, or agent, may feel like a loss, but there will be other opportunities. Being rejected, or ignored, by major publications who choose not to review a book, is much harder to deal with, because that impacts the reach of that book, and in that way the book starts its inevitable free-fall to obscurity that much more quickly after scaling more modest heights. So, is it inspiring, or motivational? Not on a case by case basis, but can the feeling of overall rejection – even understanding how privileged I’ve been – remain a motivator when I’m tired, yes, for sure, and I draw on it all of the time.
CR: You mentioned how hard it was when Lost in Space came out and didn’t get the reviews you’d thought it might. And how your writing momentum seemed to stall. You said that you might have horizontal momentum. Can you talk a little bit about that?
BT: Might might even be strong, but I was hoping for something, and maybe even desperate for a certain kind of response, because my prior book Orphans, had received reviews in Publishers Weekly and Booklist, but what’s important there – and something I needed to pay closer attention to later – is that I thought if I garnered those kinds of reviews, other things might happen – agents might call, or books festivals – which on paper is embarrassing to even say, but I thought those things could happen, and they didn’t, and so I thought, maybe the next one, I’ll get those kinds of reviews again, and it will compound in some fashion, but then Lost in Space while well received, was ignored by the trade publications, which was really hard, and left me wondering where that left the act of creating books for me? The act of writing, the ideas, the compulsion and desire to write, never stalls, but building some kind of presence, or at least the act of getting there, can feel like it has. I thought I was building towards something slowly, book by book, but I may not be, and so I’m working on being more Zen about all of it regardless.
CR: You’ve pretty much published a book every year since 2007 – short stories, on fatherhood, collections on running, flash fiction, novels. You are an indie hero. You must have a very disciplined work ethic. Can you tell me a little bit about your day?
BT: Can we just stop there, at the whole indie hero thing, because it’s all down hill from there. And that’s with fully recognizing that there can’t possibly be any truth to that anyway. Having done the embarrassment thing, however, let me say that my normal day is so boring that whatever shreds of the hero thing do exist will dissipate quickly. I more or less work 9-5, Monday-Friday – writing, editing, Tweeting, planning, facilitating all-day long; I wake-up my kids for school, watch Heroes with them, read with them, fight about homework and showers, peeing on the floor, and then finally sit down with my wife to talk bills, appointments, and love stuff around 10, before starting again the next day, rinse, repeat. That said, my day job is mostly interesting and at times really cool, the kids are beautiful, and I would like to eat them whole and my wife is lovely. I also mix all of that with various efforts at teaching a college seminar on professional development for Lake Forest College’s Loop Program, directing Acquisitions as part of the kick-ass team at Curbside Splendor and overseeing content strategy for The Montana Institute. When all of that is mostly in balance, or at least sort of completed, I write, aiming for 30 minutes a day, every day, and fail at that, a lot, but I’m constantly, and compulsively, trying to slot it in, and even when failing, I still get to write at some point most of the time, no word count, just hunkered-down, and focused on whatever project I’m in the middle of.
CR: I’m serious about the indie hero thing. Serious as a heart attack.
You love running, right? How does running work into your overall writing process?
BT: It is love, though it’s more like compulsion, so like reading was for me before I found running, and writing is now. Once I started running, I really wanted to run all the time, that flip was switched, and now I don’t think of it as a choice as much as a necessity, and like writing, I am constantly trying to figure out how and when I will run next. As far as the writing process, I am already thinking about writing all day long, but it is during the run, that so many of my other distractions float away, and what’s left is thought, and what am I writing about, or could be, where am I stuck, and what’s next, always next.
CR: A number of themes run through your writing: being a grownup, dating, drinking, relationships, parenthood. You mine a lot of material from your life. How was the writing process of Orphans (a dystopian look at Chicago) different from essays and short stories that are more reality based?
BT: This is about to be the worst answer ever, but to some extent, it was the same. I knew I wanted to write a domestic piece about how the need to work, and our ego around work – not to mention the desperation so many have felt recently with the economy – can come in conflict with and twist our relationship to family and those we love, and from that perspective, I asked the questions I would ask no matter what – what does that look like, how will the characters struggle against these conflicts and fail to communicate because of pain and pride. But then I thought, I don’t want to repeat myself, and I was out for a run, at night, and the sky was huge and forever, and I though let’s have the protagonist sell real estate on Mars, let’s look at what our world could evolve into, so what does that look like – space shuttles, robots and clones. And how do they all fit together? It’s about layering and adding detail and nuance, and so again, in that way, it isn’t different, beyond trying to embrace what I couldn’t quite see in terms of a future, but know I’ve read about.
CR: How old are your children now? In Lost in Space, you seem to have had a rocky road with parenthood. How’s that going now?
BT: They are 13 and 9, soon to be 10, and they‘re really quite beautiful. With Lost in Space I thought I should lay it all out on paper – at least the parts that I am most self-conscious about – and so while I had a rule to not tell any of the kids’ secrets, I didn’t mind sharing mine or how bad I look most of the time. And it has been a rocky road, some of which is normal, or borderline normal – colic, challenges with hearing, speech delays, spinal stuff, sleep chaos – but when it is all crashing together and building onto itself, it feels anything but normal. So much of the writing though is about my inability to manage all of this, and not be as cool, or collected, as I thought I could be. And that in some way is the rockiest part, just sucking so badly and feeling so emotional about all of it. Now, why I thought I would be any better at parenting than anything else I’ve ever been interested in trying without have any true exposure to the situation is beyond me, but that has been a blind spot of mine from the jump. Meanwhile, in answer to the end of your question, how’s it going now, as great and terrible as always, endless love mixed with anger and fear and fatigue and sadness, punctuated by such profound moments of joy and delight it’s paralyzing.
CR: That is so true about parenthood, when you say, “…but when it is all crashing together and building onto itself, it feels anything but normal.”
Your essays on fatherhood in Lost in Space are so in the moment. What an amazing gift for your kids. I was so overwhelmed as a new mother that I wasn’t able to write. How did you manage it?
BT: I tried to write, and edit, the pieces as if in real time, something I always attempt whatever I’m working on, all electric bursts and alive, like punk songs and homages to energy, which was my experience of reading The Basketball Diaries for the first time. How did I manage it? The same way as everything else, by constantly asking myself, when can this happen, and how, and what will I do to be sure it’s so? Which is also an obnoxious, though hopefully not super-judging way of saying, it doesn’t, and didn’t matter, what was happening. When it was quiet for even a moment, I had, and still have, to write. If I have a fever, or I’m hungry, or tired, my flight was delayed, if I drank too much, there’s an Orphan Black marathon on, too bad, now, it’s now do it, every day, anywhere, no special desk, or light, or music. Nothing precious, and as I said, obnoxious, which I am truly sorry about.
CR: Like a lot of writers, you have a day job. Tell me about it.
BT: I oversee messaging, traditional media and social media, and content strategy for the national office of Prevent Child Abuse America. The other day, my son said, They pay you to be on Facebook? with a mixture of disdain and awe, and I said yes they do, not well mind you, but yes, only in America brother.
Shifting to The New York Stories…
CR: This is touted as The Publishing Event Nine Years in the Making. Tell me about how The New York Stories collection evolved.
BT: It’s like a new iPhone or heavyweight fight, hence ridiculous, and over hyped to the say the least. Still, if it moves copies, awesome, hype away. And the evolution, that’s possibly interesting? Anyway, I was writing all of the time, mostly short stories, some personal essays, and just getting almost nothing, almost literally nothing, published for years, certainly the first several years, so like 1998-2001, just nothing, and then the two to three years after that, some, not much, but I was reading all of the time, as I have always done, and going to the readings for the first time, and during that window I read When The Messenger is Hot by Elizabeth Crane and Drown by Junot Diaz and What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver and I saw Crane and Diaz read, and I thought about how all of these works felt like they all came from a certain time and place and hung together, and maybe that was the key. And so I plotted out a group of pieces that would hang together in terms of time and place – at least in my head – existing at a minimum in the same small town and these stories became Repetition Patterns. Which no one cared about. But then Lucky Man happened and CCLaP was really into it, and they did a review and a podcast, and they weren’t publishing anything yet, but months later they wanted to launch their imprint and asked me if I had anything. Knowing their love for Lucky Man I sent them Repetition Patterns and it began. Maybe a year later they asked me to do a blog tour for the collection and as I answered questions about the stories I started to see some larger themes emerge. If Repetition Patterns was loosely revolving around the sins of the father, maybe there were some additional stories about those children having grown-up, or growing-up, and the chickens coming home to roost. When I finished those, and they became So Different Now, I joked to CCLaP that if Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy and Richard Linklater did a third movie in the Before Sunrise/Sunset series, which I love, and which they did, I should do a third collection. But then I saw the illustrations for So Different Now and I started to get nostalgic, and then my hometown flooded, and I started thinking of wrapping up the stories during a flood. Then CCLaP said, if we have one more group of stories we could have a proper collection, and with that After the Flood was born.
CR: Two Rivers is a fictional upstate New York town. Any similarities to where you grew up? Or did you grow up in NYC?
BT: Any similarities, maybe one or two. No, really, while the stories themselves, and the characters, are warped versions of people I know, and me, and our stories, Two Rivers itself as a living, breathing character is very much modeled on my home town, from the elementary school built on a swamp to Thirsty’s, a Southside bar near the house where I grew up. I drew on the streets, homes, the rivers and even the air I was immersed in the first 18 years of my life. That I haven’t lived there for almost 30 years only means I have no idea what it truly looks or feels like now.
CR: There are a lot of messed up dads in The New York Stories. “No Nothing” is one of my favorite stories. And those characters reappear in “After the Flood,” too. What draws you to flawed fathers? Why is that a recurring theme?
BT: Well, it all goes back to the father. Or so my therapist tells me. But I had a great dad, who was more complex than any one label, much less calling himself complex, but he was a tortured artist and always searching for community, a tough guy, an advocate, and so it starts with him, but I am drawn to damaged characters, men especially, who can’t quite figure out how to communicate, and when I started working on these pieces, the first of the men – and at times women – I was friends with cheating on their spouses and getting divorced, and there were the kids I had worked with in New York City and all of their distant, damaged, deadbeat dads – one of whom is at least in part the model for father and son in “No Nothing” – so it all started to blend together and I in turn tried to make sense of these story slivers in my head and make them into something.
CR: In “God’s Work,” there’s this line:
This is a trap. You don’t talk age, asses, or sisters with your wife, not if you’re smart. Which maybe I’m not, having already discussed two of those things, still I haven’t touched age yet, and I don’t plan to, I’ve been married long enough to know better than that.
In the margin, I wrote, “This is what men should live by.” I might add a few other caveats but this advice would help out a lot of guys. How do you get that message out to the greater male population?
BT: You’re very generous, though I’m glad you dig that line. I remember when I first read High Fidelity, and then About a Boy, by Nick Hornby, I kept thinking the same kind of thing, though I also felt like he was sharing state secrets and it wasn’t clear to me that he had clearance from his fellow males to do so. Still, when my lifestyle empire truly blows up, we’ll get the message out there, I promise.
CR: Good to know. I love that story. I love the first line of that story. And the end. And everything in between.
BT: I’m not sure that’s a question, but I like it, and I love you for loving it, so there’s that. Meanwhile, I have a story, but when I wrote this for a reading I was invited to, it didn’t hit me as especially sad, or somber, it seemed funny and maybe touching, with an ending maybe more sad than the rest, but still kind of hopeful. But then I read it, and people were drinking a lot, and it took the air out of the room like almost nothing I had ever experienced at a reading, at least me reading, and when I looked up, everybody’s jaws were sort of hanging there, and I felt bad and entertained all at once.
CR: There are many references to the Genesis Flood and Noah’s Ark narratives. Flooding is a recurring theme in the The New York Stories. Flood myths date back to ancient cultures. What draws you to that narrative?
BT: The dopiest answer is that while I more or less grew up on the Susquehanna River, though not in the small town way where people work on the river, the city’s livelihood depends on the river, and everyone has a boat of some kind, it also wasn’t like the river towns out here in the Midwest where people are truly concerned about flooding, and towns are periodically overrun with flood waters. But then my hometown flooded, especially the side of town I grew up on, and my elementary school was destroyed and the books from the library I hung out in after school all floated away, and the neighborhood where Thirsty’s is located was under water and I got really upset – nothing like that had happened when I was growing up, and so more than anything biblical or literary, I started thinking about my fictional version of the town under water and what that might mean for the town and my characters, and after that I thought the final section could take place during or following a flood, even as the battle with fathers’ and their legacy and the calm that might follow and almost making peace with all that, shifting to mother nature and something we have no control over whatsoever.
CR: So you must see a lot of bad parenting – indirectly – in your day job. There are lots of bad parents in these stories. They are struggling with addiction, pain, loss of love, love. They are confused. This parenting thing is a deep well.
BT: If I can hop on my soap box for a moment – so sorry – I’m not sure I think of them as bad parents, they’re damaged and all the things you say above, but it’s always a problem when we think of parents as really sucky or really great – though I did do just that in Lost in Space, which makes me a hypocrite, and maybe an asshole – but they, we, I, all struggle, and that is what is of interest to me and why parents are so interesting. How do people cope when they’re already fucked up? How do we make sense of things, anything? How do we communicate, or not? And why does shit go so wrong? Parents are ripe subjects in these areas, and they of course have the blessing or curse of impacting their children, the next generation, the future, whatever, and I’m interested in all of that, though especially in this collection which is intentionally looking at how these things ripple across decades and generations.
CR: Themes in this book include but are not limited to water, aging, kids, fathers, drinking, bad parenting, drugs, addiction, love, pain, loyalty, confusion. Since you wrote these over 2008-2014, seeing these all together now, how do you think your writing has changed over the years?
BT: I think it’s sparser, and tighter, but more slamming too. I certainly want the reader to feel like they’ve been punched in the stomach – not too hard mind you – whether that’s with humor or pain, or ideally both. So, I think, hope, I do all of that better. More accurately though, or differently said, I’m always striving for some combination of Jim Carroll, the Ramones, Bruce Springsteen and David Cronenberg – with a dash of Junot Diaz, Elizabeth Crane and Raymond Carver – and I think I know how to do that now. In the beginning it was a deluge of words that sort of just came out that way unconsciously which I further honed, and now, even though I still furiously edit and strip away the fat, I know what I want to say and how I want to say it.
Cool?
And thank you.
Ben Tanzer is the author of the books Orphans, which won the 24th Annual Midwest Book Award in Fantasy/SciFi/Horror/Paranormal and a Bronze medal in the Science Fiction category at the 2015 IPPY Awards, Lost in Space, which received the 2015 Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award in Prose Nonfiction, The New York Stories, SEX AND DEATH and Be Cool – a memoir (sort of), among others. He has also contributed to Punk Planet, Clamor, and Men’s Health, serves as Senior Director, Acquisitions for Curbside Splendor and frequently speaks on the topics of messaging, framing, social media, blogging, fiction, essay writing and independent publishing. He can be found online at tanzerben.com the center of his vast lifestyle empire.
Christine Maul Rice’s award-winning novel, Swarm Theory, was called “a gripping work of Midwest Gothic” by Michigan Public Radio and earned an Independent Publisher Book Award, a National Indie Excellence Award, a Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year award (finalist), and was included in PANK’s Best Books of 2016 and Powell’s Books Midyear Roundup: The Best Books of 2016 So Far. In 2019, Christine was included in New City’s Lit 50: Who Really Books in Chicago and named One of 30 Writers to Watch by Chicago’s Guild Complex. Most recently, her short stories, essays, and interviews have appeared in Allium, 2020: The Year of the Asterisk*, Make Literary Magazine, The Rumpus, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Millions, Roanoke Review, The Literary Review, among others. Christine is the founder and editor of the literary nonprofit Hypertext Magazine & Studio and is an Assistant Professor of English at Valparaiso University.