SW: You seem to have your foot in the door of so many different projects and media—poetry, short stories, novels, and even a memoir, but you're also involved in a project where you review certain pieces of your life. As I read a few of these reviews, I couldn't help but be struck by how they simultaneously feel intentional and crafted yet funny and effortless. Can you talk a little bit about how you accomplish this? Also, where did the inspiration for these reviews come from?


BS: I'm just trying to have some fun even when shit is no fun. Every time I look out the window something strange is happening and it doesn't matter what window it is either. I'm trying to do what Martin Mull joked not to, I'm writing about dancing about architecture.

To make something look effortless, you do it over and over again for a million hours while no one's paying attention, and then when you finally get their attention, it looks easy. Along the way, it's a mess. Even when it's finished it's a mess. Some people just like a mess.



2.

SW: In your collection, DOUBLE BIRD, you have a short story called "Gling, Gling, Gling" which essentially follows a day in the life of a man hit by a car and of the woman who hit him. The oddest part of the story isn't that the man befriends the woman who effectively killed him or that Candy Crush is what led to his untimely demise, it is how well you weave together the utterly typical (like how the two characters go grocery shopping together, go to a job interview, etc.) and the fantastic (for example, everyone reacts to the dying, bloody man more like he has a cold than like he's a victim needing emergency assistance). Can you talk about how domesticity and surrealism mingle in this piece and what significance this holds for both you and the reader?


BS: There's nothing ordinary happening anywhere on this earth. In your body, and in your mind, right at this very moment, things are happening that we used to call miracles, and now we don't know what to call them. Science is catching up. I'm most interested in "magic" people in real life, people who for some inexplicable reason are at the center of wonders, and oddities, and joy. So it makes sense that my fiction would be about that too. I like learning about things that are perfectly balanced on the scale of chaos and order. Those things and their perfect balance make up my better stories. Sorrow offset by Glee. Domesticity and surrealism are closer modes than we usually feel comfortable admitting. Reality is fine and well, but if you look around long enough at your own life, very few of us live in anything resembling reality.



2½.    

SW: Why do you think . . . ?


BS: I went down to the corner store and bought a bag of oranges, and most of them were very good. While I was making a tuna fish sandwich today, my boss texted me and said there wasn't any work for as far as he could see out, and I could be laid off if I wanted, I said, nah, that's alright. He said I could stay home without pay, indefinitely, and I said that seems very cool, let's do that. It was raining and it's still raining. I was supposed to do laundry today but instead I did this and when my wife comes home now I'll have to blame all of you, and she is going to be very mad at all of you, and there's nothing I can do about it. Can you believe I'm on allergy medicine instead of complaining on the internet like everyone else about pollen and cats and Hell itself? Can you believe I won't make the mortgage this month? Can you believe in two weeks I'll be standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon with my little brother, William? It's been a couple quiet nights without any dreams and I hope that keeps up, I have no use for dreams anymore now that I have my sister-in-law's HBO Go password. I think I'll learn to play the piano and give all this up, all this, even this interview. In a million hours, I'll show you what I can do.



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Read Bud Smith's story.

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