In 2023, I decided to retire the literary Would You Rather series, but didn't want to stop interviews on the site all together. Instead, I've pulled together 40ish questions - some bookish, some silly - and have asked authors to limit themselves to answering only 10 of them. That way, it keeps the interviews fresh and connectable for all of us!
Sheldon Birnie is a writer, dad, and
beer league hockey player from Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, and the author of Where the Pavement Turns to Sand
(Malarkey Books, 2023). He can be found online @badguybirnie
What do you do when you’re not writing?
I’m a reporter by trade, so my weekdays are spent
interviewing, researching, and writing stories about the community I call home.
I have two small children, who keep the rest of my time pretty busy with
various activities and day-to-day stuff. I play hockey an evening or two a
week, occasionally get the old band back together to play some music, and
generally just hang around home or the vicinity of my neighbourhood, reading
and writing for fun when possible.
What’s the best money you’ve ever spent as a writer?
I bought an office chair from Costco a couple months
back. $90 I think. Beats the hell outta the kitchen chairs I’d been sitting on
to work/write for the past few years.
How do you celebrate when you finish writing a new book?
A
nice size glass of the good bourbon.
Describe your book in three words.
Gritty, grimy, weird.
What is your favorite way to waste time?
If
you can spend 20 minutes just laying around, doing absolutely nothing, just
watching the leaves blow in the wind, that’s time well spent if you ask me.
What are some of your favorite books and/or authors?
Impossible to single out even just a few, but I’ll giver
a go here… I was a big Ray Bradbury and Stephen King fan as a kid, and still
enjoy their stuff today, and can see how early exposure to their work,
particularly short-stories, informed my own writing even today. In my late
teens, Philip K Dick was a big influence, then in my early 20s, I became
obsessed with the work of Raymond Carver, Charles Bukowski, Hunter S. Thompson,
and Cormac McCarthy. Over the past 10 years, I’ve tried not to let any writers in
particular exude such a smothering effect on my own work. I’ve come to really
appreciate the work of Margaret Laurence and Alice Munro, while trying to read
as widely as I can, both contemporary and older writers I’ve somehow missed.
Paul Quarrinton’s a beauty, both Whale Music and King Leary are top notch. Over
the last couple years, I’ve been digging on Shirley Jackson, William Gibson,
Kazuo Ishiguro, Denis Johnson, Charles Portis and Raymond Carver, among many
others lately, and am excited everytime I see something new from Willy Vlautin,
Bud Smith, Claire Hoppel, Andrew F. Sullivan, Jon Berger, Kyle Seibel. The list
goes on and on forever, really, and the party never ends.
What is your favorite book from childhood?
Was a big Lord of the Rings fan too back in Grade 6/7,
but have found it impossible to get back into it since then, even just in
reading The Hobbit to my son, who is 8 (we both agreed to put it aside, try
again later) and I’ve never even made it through those three films. I’ve found
that The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy holds up as an entertaining read, and
I’d have to say that reading Trainspotting in junior high blew my young mind,
back then, and I’ve enjoyed re-reading it a few times since.
What are you currently reading?
Right
now, I’ve got Saga of the Swamp Thing Book 5 by Alan Moore on the go, loving
it. I’ve also been working my way through The Milagro Beanfield War by John
Nichols and Liberation Day by George Saunders, enjoying both on the whole. I
also just started in on The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker, after seeing some
chatter about it online, and though it’s early going still, I’m digging it.
What genres won’t you read?
Self-help, though I could probably use some.
What songs would be on the soundtrack of your life?
Hard to say, but I hope my buddies will play Todd
Snider’s “Play a Train Song” at my funeral when I die, if I haven’t outlived
them all.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Ride along on a journey with these 20 stories by Sheldon
Birnie through the wild and wondrous backwoods of the Canadian prairies, out to
where the pavement turns to sand and the possibilities are as endless as the
horizon…
From close or would-be encounters with extraterrestrials,
lycanthropes, bigfoot and the Ogopogo, haunted hockey skates and more, Sheldon
Birnie’s new collection of short-fiction Where
the Pavement Turns to Sand takes readers on a midnight cruise through the
Canadian prairies before dumping you back on your doorstep, unsure as to what
exactly just transpired.
A golf pro claims he was abducted by aliens before the
big local tournament, though townspeople figure he finally fell off the wagon.
A line cook comes face-to-face with something from his worst nightmare only to
be mocked mercilessly by his peers. A beer league hockey player worries he
didn’t do enough to help a former teammate, with tragic consequences. In these
20 stories, the mundane and the menacing meet over a pint at the local rink on
the darkest night of the year, or around a midsummer bonfire beneath the stars
on the shores of a deep forbidden lake.
Where the Pavement
Turns to Sand is a collection of working class, everyday heartbreaks and bad
decisions. In a refreshing rural Canadian setting, the characters in these
slice of life tales stumble through divorce, debt, bad sex, and boring jobs,
but also curling robots, aliens, jackalopes, wendigo, lots of legs wet with
urine, and (maybe) sasquatches with an unexpected whimsy. What makes it work is
Birnie’s signature dark humor and conversational style that makes every story
feel like it was your neighbor telling it to you over a beer around a campfire,
or at the rink. Surprising, entertaining, grimy and weird.
– Meagan Lucas, author of Songbirds and Stray Dogs and
Here in the Dark, Editor in Chief of Reckon Review.
Buy it here:
No comments:
Post a Comment