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WORK TITLE: Trash Mountain
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 6/7/1980
WEBSITE: http://bradleybazzle.github.io/
CITY: Athens
STATE: GA
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Married; children: one daughter.
EDUCATION:Yale University, B.A.; Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, M.F.A.; University of Georgia, Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, novelist, educator, and short-story writer. University of Georgia, instructor in writing. Comedy writer and performer.
AWARDS:Red Hen Press Fiction Award, 2016, for Trash Mountain; recipient of awards from publications such as Third Coast and Iowa Review.
WRITINGS
Contributor to magazines and periodicals, including Copper Nickle, Epoch, Phoebe, Bad Penny Review, and New England Review.
SIDELIGHTS
Bradley Bazzle is a writer, novelist, and educator based in Athens, Georgia. He grew up in Dallas, Texas, and spent years as a comedy writer and performer. His short fiction has appeared in publications such as New England Review, Copper Nickel, and Bad Penny Review. He served as a writing instructor at the University of Georgia. His “fiction finds the anxieties and insecurities that are burrowed deep inside all of us.,” commented Tin House contributor Ryan Teitman in an interview with the author. Bazzle earned his undergraduate degree from Yale University, an M.F.A. in creative writing from Indiana University, and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Georgia.
Bazzle’s debut novel, Trash Mountain, started out as a short story, noted Teitman. It was also a winner of the 2016 Red Hen Press Fiction Award. The book is a “a slyly funny coming-of-age story about a boy trying to blow up an enormous pile of garbage, but it’s also a portrait of class and racial struggles in working-class America,” Teitman remarked.
Narrator Ben Shippers is a teenager struggling to come to terms with what to him (and to many others) are bleak prospects for the future in his small southern town. The most likely source of employment in the area is a waste management company in the nearby town. The company manages a vast, sprawling trash heap, a gigantic accumulation of detritus that Ben and the other locals call Trash Mountain. It is not only the symbol of the source of employment of many residents, it is also the symbol of the often wretched lifestyles, thrown-away dreams, and garbage-like opportunities that the area’s residents have to face every day.
For many years, Ben and his older sister Ruthanne have been obsessed with Trash Mountain. He believes that the mountain, or the pollution from it, led to Ruthanne’s curvature of the spine. Ben has tried many times to destroy the garbage heap, using Molotov cocktails and other means, but his efforts haven’t worked. He’s even tried various projects to raise enough money to buy a flamethrower in hops of finally setting the landfill on fire. None of his plans work, and Trash Mountain remains in place, monstrous, ugly, and unforgiving.
As the story progresses and young Ben encounters others in his community, from humble trash-pickers to the area’s prominent citizens, he begins to develop a clearer understanding of what Trash Mountain means to him, his family, and his community and its residents. He begins to understand that the economic and social inequality he sees around him would not disappear if the mountain was destroyed. Nor would the inevitable changes to those around him stop, or even slow down, with the removal of Trash Mountain.
In the interview with Teitman, Bazzle stated, “the question, to me, is what weaponizes Ben’s obsession: what makes him want to destroy Trash Mountain as opposed to staring at it, chart its height, etc.? It’s tempting to call the mountain a symbol of the crappiness of his surroundings and home-life, but that crappiness is fundamental to Ben’s frame of reference; it isn’t something he questions until later. The thing that’s changing for Ben, when the novel opens, is that Ruthanne is outgrowing him.” Whether he likes it or not, “She’s growing up, and Ben is left more alone than ever,” Bazzle continued.
Bazzle’s “sharply observant literary novel” will be of interest to readers who “who enjoy quirky narrators and fans of socially conscious fiction,” observed Laurie Cavanaugh, writing in Xpress Reviews. A Kirkus Reviews writer concluded, “Bazzle’s novel explores the compromises one makes in life even as it blends the gritty and the extravagant along the way.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, March 1, 2018, review of Trash Mountain.
Xpress Reviews, May 25, 2018, Laurie Cavanaugh, review of Trash Mountain.
ONLINE
Bradley Bazzle website, http://bradleybazzle.github.io (July 9, 2018).
Tin House online, http://www.tinhouse.com/ (May 23, 2018), Ryan Teitman, “Novel Improv: A Conversation with Bradley Bazzle.”
Bradley Bazzle’s first novel, Trash Mountain, won the Red Hen Press Fiction Contest, judged by Steve Almond. His short stories appear in Copper Nickel, Web Conjunctions, Epoch, Phoebe, New England Review, Bad Penny Review, and elsewhere, and have won awards from Third Coast and The Iowa Review.
Bradley grew up in Dallas, Texas, and has an MFA from Indiana University. More recently, he completed a PhD in English at the University of Georgia, where he taught writing. He lives in Athens, Georgia, with his wife and daughter.
bradleybazzle@gmail.com
interviews | May 23, 2018
Novel Improv: A Conversation with Bradley Bazzle
RYAN TEITMAN
An editor once called one of Bradley Bazzle’s short stories “a delightful, alchemical mixture of realism and complete bullshit,” which is probably the highest compliment I can think of for a piece of fiction. No matter how absurd the premise—the tyrannical behavior of Magellan on his voyage around the world, or a mysterious Christmas company called Santa Direct—Bazzle’s fiction finds the anxieties and insecurities that are burrowed deep inside all of us.
His first novel, Trash Mountain, was published by Red Hen Press on May 1. It’s a slyly funny coming-of-age story about a boy trying to blow up an enormous pile of garbage, but it’s also a portrait of class and racial struggles in working-class America. The two towns under the shadow of Trash Mountain could easily be plopped down in Texas, Pennsylvania, Florida, Ohio, or anywhere that people are struggling.
Before shifting his focus to fiction, Bradley spent many years writing and performing comedy. He currently lives in Athens, Georgia, with his wife and daughter. We spoke by email about the origins of his novel, the creeping specter of authoritarianism, and his thoughts on humor and contemporary fiction.
Ryan Teitman: Ben Shippers, the narrator of your novel, spends his teenage years trying to infiltrate and destroy Trash Mountain, the gargantuan pile of garbage that looms over his town. The book opens with his bumbling effort to set it ablaze with Molotov cocktails. Why is Ben so invested in destroying Trash Mountain?
Bradley Bazzle: The occasion of the novel is Ben’s decision to destroy Trash Mountain, but I hoped to give the impression that he and his big sister, Ruthanne, have long been fixated on Trash Mountain. That type of youthful fixation really interests me. Because kids aren’t as self-conscious as we are, their obsessions can be more outlandish and intense.
A story I always come back to is Dan Chaon’s “Big Me,” in which the child narrator becomes fixated on the new teacher who moves in down the block. The kid starts spying on the teacher and decides the guy might be an adult version of himself sent from the future to warn him not to become a lonely, hairy alcoholic. A more recent example is the preteen girl in J. Robert Lennon’s Broken River, who spends her time sleuthing online about the couple who were killed in their house in upstate New York. The girl’s mother is just as obsessed, but as an adult, she takes less action. The girl really goes for it.
So the question, to me, is what weaponizes Ben’s obsession: what makes him want to destroy Trash Mountain as opposed to staring at it, chart its height, etc.? It’s tempting to call the mountain a symbol of the crappiness of his surroundings and home-life, but that crappiness is fundamental to Ben’s frame of reference; it isn’t something he questions until later. The thing that’s changing for Ben, when the novel opens, is that Ruthanne is outgrowing him. They used to obsess about Trash Mountain together, but now she spends all her time reading sleazy romance novels, and, worse, trying to do well at school. She’s growing up, and Ben is left more alone than ever. This estrangement from Ruthanne is also, in part, what leads him to the delinquent boys at school and the homeless trash pickers at the landfill, and then, finally, to Whitey Connors.
RT: Speaking of Ben’s “crappy frame of reference,” can you talk about setting of the novel, the two towns that surround Trash Mountain? They’re racially segregated—the residents of Komer are mostly white, and the residents of Haislip are mostly black—but they’re both working-class towns without much opportunity. Why set the novel in these two towns rather than making Trash Mountain the defining feature of a single place?
BB: I grew up in a segregated city, Dallas, and live in one now, Athens, that’s less overtly segregated but offers a very different experience to its natives (many of whom are black) than it does to its students and young professionals (most of whom are white). For years I lived in a part of town that’s still mostly black, patches of which didn’t have electricity until the seventies. Whenever it rained, the area behind my and my neighbor’s houses would flood, floating trash into our backyards. The scummy forest behind our houses had been a dumping ground for many years, I learned. My neighbor, a black woman about my mom’s age, told me not to bother complaining to the city. I never complained, so I can’t say for sure that my neighbor’s attitude wasn’t outdated and that the city wouldn’t have done anything, but at the very least she grew up in a place that didn’t care about her complaints.
Anyway, by splitting the town in two, into the imaginary towns of Komer and Haislip, I hoped to heighten the potential us-versus-them dynamic. Ben and his delinquent friends are the type of people we might imagine being susceptible to authoritarian fantasies and fearmongering, and one of the ways that works down the line, after you realize the authoritarian leader isn’t actually going to do anything to make your life better, is by convincing you that you’re part of the in-group and that the out-group has it way worse. I’m paraphrasing Timothy Snyder here. His latest, The Road to Unfreedom, is riveting and harrowing, and essential right now.
RT: Even though Ben has an ongoing obsession with destroying Trash Mountain, in the rest of his life he gets caught up in the gravity of whatever group he’s around, whether it’s the delinquent boys at his school, the trash-pickers at the dump, or Whitey Connors. Is that a function of his limited opportunities in Komer or something about Ben’s personality?
BB: Honestly, I never questioned the degree to which Ben immerses himself in the work of those around him. That may say more about me than about Ben. I used to do a lot of improv comedy, and one of the instincts you develop, doing that, is not to wring your hands over whether or not to do something. You just do it, and you go all the way with it.
When I’m writing, particularly in the first person, there’s an element of performance that seems to kindle those same instincts. I may go too far, though. One of the criticisms I got from Steve Almond, who judged the Red Hen contest, was that Ben rarely took a step back to reflect on what he was doing. I made a major revision based on that criticism and others, but Ben is still a little reckless, and recklessly trusting.
What I can’t decide is if that element of Ben’s character is simply an outgrowth of my writing process or if it’s a small part of my own character, easily exploited for artistic purposes.
RT: As I was reading, Ben’s movement from one group to another felt like a very accurate portrayal of growing up (sans Molotov cocktail attacks, at least for me): you leave some friends behind, make others, then do it all again, most of the time with no big falling out or event as a catalyst. You get older, and you just drift into new things.
BB: I suppose that’s true. Growing up (even next to a landfill), there’s always the promise of new friends and adventures. And then the brutal, Clarissa-Dalloway-style stripping away begins. Adulthood!
RT: Trash Mountain began as a short story. What was it like expanding it into a novel?
BB: I enjoyed writing the story, and found Ben’s voice came easily, so writing the novel was a matter of re-inhabiting Ben’s voice and directing it towards what I hoped would be an escalating action based on causally linked events: the firebombing fails, so he needs better equipment; to get better equipment, he needs a job that pays money; he can’t get real job, so he gets a sketchy one; and on and on. The results were pretty rambling and weird, so revision involved a lot of cutting.
For instance, there used to be a chapter where Bob Bilger, the mountain climber and Haislip native, speaks at Ben’s school, and Ben gets so pumped that he sneaks out to the VFW that night to see Bilger again and ask some hardball questions. The chapter was funny (to me, at least), but Bob Bilger didn’t tell Ben anything that he didn’t figure out on his own over the course of the novel. Something I discovered as I wrote and revised was that Ben’s voice, the impetus for the novel, was changing (maturing?) as I wrote.
RT: You use humor regularly in your fiction. When I hear humor discussed regarding fiction, it tends to be an indicator for a genre: “comic fiction.” But it seems to me that humor is more like a tool of craft–being good at jokes the way you would be good at plot or dialogue. How do you view it? Or is creating that kind of distinction missing a larger point?
BB: When I first started writing short stories, my stories tended to be very short and based on escalating jokes, not unlike the comedy sketches and one-act plays I wrote in college and the years after when I was performing. The shift away from that was gradual—and incomplete, as of this writing. I like to think that my pacing is better now, and that my characters are more sincere and believable, and not all teetering on the brink of madness. But at some point, I stopped trying to resist those instincts. So much of human interaction is joking. It’s part of how we make sense of things, and writing is nothing if not a sense-making project.
RT: Now that Trash Mountain has been published, what are you working on now?
BB: Three other novels. That may sound like a lot, but the way I’ve been working in recent years is to rotate among projects. I’ll finish a draft of one novel, then move to another for a few months. The breaks help me see the novels anew, and revise more drastically.
The furthest along takes place in a near-future America dominated by pharmaceutical conglomerates, where some people discover, and experiment with, a drug that allows them to enter the worlds of movies and TV shows. The newest is about a race of mutant seductors in Atlanta who hibernate in shallow graves. Both of those are written in a split third POV and involve sci-fi elements. Somewhere in between is a shorter, first-person novel about a homemaker in Dallas who decides his brother-in-law is a wizard, only for the true wizard to turn out to be their neighbor: former Eagles frontman Don Henley.
Bradley Bazzle’s first novel, Trash Mountain, won the 2016 Red Hen Press Fiction Award, judged by Steve Almond. His short stories have won awards from The Iowa Review, New Ohio Review, and Third Coast. They also appear in New England Review, Epoch, Copper Nickel, Web Conjunctions, and other literary journals. Bradley grew up in Dallas, Texas, and has degrees from Yale, Indiana University, and the University of Georgia, where he taught writing. He remains in Athens, Georgia, with his wife and daughter.
Ryan Teitman is the author of the poetry collection Litany for the City (BOA Editions, 2012). His poems have appeared in Gulf Coast, New England Review, The Southern Review, The Threepenny Review, and The Yale Review, and his awards include a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. He lives in Philadelphia.
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Print Marked Items
Bazzle, Bradley. Trash Mountain
Laurie Cavanaugh
Xpress Reviews.
(May 25, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Library Journals, LLC
http://www.libraryjournal.com/lj/reviews/xpress/884170-289/xpress_reviews-first_look_at_new.html.csp
Full Text:
Bazzle, Bradley. Trash Mountain. Red Hen. May 2018. 256p. ISBN 9781597099103. pap. $16.95. F
[DEBUT] In this first novel by the winner of the Red Hen Press Fiction Award, young Ben Shippers comes
of age at a time when the best prospect for employment is the waste management company that squats over
the border, blurring the class divide between his small, economically depressed Southern city and its
racially diverse "twin." Growing up near Trash Mountain with low expectations, the independent-minded
Ben industriously sets to blow up the dump that probably caused his sister's curvature of the spine. Pursuing
this secret mission, Ben traverses his community on his bike, striving to improve his sister's lot and
encouraging her to go to college. With guilelessness to rival Forrest Gump's, Ben slips past all societal
divides.
Verdict Like Graeme Simsion's The Rosie Project without the rom-com element, this sharply observant
literary novel will appeal to readers who enjoy quirky narrators and fans of socially conscious fiction.--
Laurie Cavanaugh, Thayer P.L., Braintree, MA
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Cavanaugh, Laurie. "Bazzle, Bradley. Trash Mountain." Xpress Reviews, 25 May 2018. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A542242981/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=15f15cba.
Accessed 24 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A542242981
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Bazzle, Bradley: TRASH MOUNTAIN
Kirkus Reviews.
(Mar. 1, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Bazzle, Bradley TRASH MOUNTAIN Red Hen Press (Adult Fiction) $16.95 5, 1 ISBN: 978-1-59709-910-
3
The (metaphorically) long shadow of a massive landfill shapes the destiny of a young man in Bazzle's
bleakly comic debut.
Some people have an idea of their life's goal from a young age. That's the case here, as narrator Ben
Shippers decides early on that he must destroy the massive pile of garbage located in the landfill beside his
childhood home. After an early and failed attempt to burn the landfill down, Ben embarks on a host of
quixotic projects to raise enough money to buy a flamethrower, in hopes that his future attempts will work.
The landfill comes to stand in for many of the issues young Ben encounters, from his family's economic
problems to the decline of his parents' marriage to the tensions that exist between his hometown of Komer
and the nearby municipality of Haislip, two archetypal small American cities. Gradually, Ben's assorted odd
jobs temper his penchant for destruction--"I guess I had lost some of my terroristic spark, I'm ashamed to
admit," he observes--and his friendship with Demarcus, son of a local bar owner, gives him a greater sense
of community. The novel has an episodic feel, as Ben encounters an array of fellow students, potential
employers, and local luminaries. Throughout, Bazzle chronicles the ways in which Ben's early idealism
erodes under more complex concerns. The novel's tone is occasionally uneven: Bazzle's observations on
questions of race and class feel rooted in a social realism tradition, while other characters, like a longwinded
local businessman and his father, a contentious figure nicknamed "Donkey Dan," seem imported
from a more broadly satirical work.
Bazzle's novel explores the compromises one makes in life even as it blends the gritty and the extravagant
along the way.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Bazzle, Bradley: TRASH MOUNTAIN." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2018. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A528959987/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=6af4c6ca.
Accessed 24 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A528959987