The 40 But 10: CJ Friedman

 

I had 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!

Today we are joined by CJ Friedman. CJ Friedman is a former food truck owner, solar salesman, and digital marketer. When he was 25, CJ lived within a Stephen King novel and was the caretaker of an off-the-grid eco-lodge in the woods of western Maine. During a two week stretch in which he saw no other people, CJ dreamt of a world that was controlled by bees and other insects. Then, while living in Philadelphia, he wrote The Bugs. CJ now lives in New Hampshire with his wife, toddler, and two senior pups.

Why do you write?

Stories are the best way to convey ideas. I want to help spread the idea that being kind is a good thing. There’s still plenty of room for drama and problems and suspense in the world full of kindness.

 

What made you start writing?

Reading Kurt Vonnegut. He showed me that it’s possible to be absurd, real, sad, funny, inventive, and what not, all at once. I like that aspect of fiction. It’s not bound by reality. But to be good, it has to be deeply rooted in real problems and emotions.

 

What do you do when you’re not writing?

When I’m not writing or working my day-job, I hang out with my wife and toddler, walk my dogs in the woods or around town, garden, play hockey, read, think about practicing the guitar again.

 

If you could have a superpower, what would it be?

The ability to know the True answer to any question I ask. Like, how can I build a room-temperature superconductor? Followed by, how can I leverage that technology to improve life on earth? Followed by, how can I ensure big oil doesn’t kill me for discovering this? Or something like: how can I prove aliens exist? Oh, they’re already here on earth? They’re just octopi and other creatures right in front of our faces! My goodness! What other animals are aliens? What are they all doing on Earth!? Is it all going to be okay in the end? Is there such thing as a soul? Does anything happen after I die? Are we living in a simulation? If yes, how do we escape the simulation? What came before the big bang? Is the big bang even real? That was the simulation starting!? Is God real? You get the idea. I’ve been wanting to write a story about this superpower for a long time, but given the capabilities and answers I’d need to come up with, I’m having some trouble. It would be awfully presumptuous.

 

Describe your book in three words.

Bugs monitor humanity.

 

Describe your book poorly.

Some bees hijack a young woman’s consciousness in order to save the Earth from humanity’s destructive tendencies.

 

If you could spend the day with another author, who would you choose and why?

Can I choose a dead author? Since the question’s open to interpretation, I’ll assume yes. So in that case, I’d love to spend a day with Aldous Huxley. It’d be fascinating to see his perspective on society and culture in 2024 and how it resembles his essays and Brave New World.

 

What is your favorite way to waste time?

Walking in the woods. Though, admittedly, it is the furthest thing from a waste of time. It does wonders for my mental health.

 

What are some of your favorite books and/or authors?

Island by Aldous Huxley; Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo; Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu; God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater by Kurt Vonnegut (or any of his books); Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler; Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami; The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip by George Saunders (I read this to my daughter all the time); and my all-time favorite kids book that I love reading to my daughter, All The World by Liz Garton Scanlon, illustrated by Marla Frazee, to name a few.

 

What songs would be on the soundtrack of your life?

Ocean by John Butler, Life Is Wonderful by Jason Mraz, Ripple by Grateful Dead

 

If there’s room for one extra question: What scares you the most?

That I’m chasing the wrong dream.

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Bees, ants, spiders, flies-all of the bugs-monitor two things: the health of planet Earth, and the planet's most influential inhabitants, the humans. Should humanity show signs of irreversibly killing Earth, the bugs will exterminate everyone. They'll then start the human experiment over with a fresh batch of people, thanks to the DNA collected by mosquitoes.

 

To learn more: 

www.cjfriedman.net

www.instagram.com/write_cj

https://www.betterworldbooks.com/product/detail/the-bugs-9781956692976?srsltid=AfmBOooJGIoZb201YVKrc06jo6KDXzjSiDDQGz4YYpgURglNwDGhf5bq

Where Writers Write: Naomi Cohn

 Welcome to another installment of TNBBC's Where Writers Write!

 

Where Writers Write is a series that features authors as they showcase their writing spaces using short form essay, photos, and/or video. As a lover of books and all of the hard work that goes into creating them, I thought it would be fun to see where the authors roll up their sleeves and make the magic happen. 

This is Naomi Cohn. 

Naomi is a writer and teaching artist whose work explores reclamation. Her past includes a childhood among Chicago academics; involvement in a guerrilla feminist art collective; and work as an encyclopedia copy editor, community organizer, grant writer, fundraising consultant, and therapist. A 2023 McKnight Artist Fellow in Writing, her previous publications include a chapbook, Between Nectar & Eternity (Red Dragonfly Press, 2013), and pieces in Baltimore Review, Fourth River, Hippocampus, Terrain, and Poetry, among others. Cohn has also appeared on NPR and been honored by a Best of the Net Finalist and two Pushcart nominations. Raised in Chicago, she now lives on unceded Dakota territory in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Visit her website here.

Where Naomi Cohn Writes

 

When I’m keeping my braille journal, my writing takes place in very small spaces. Specifically in the little windows on my metal braille slate. A piece of paper, firmly gripped between the two wings of the slate allows me to write in that little  space by pressing dots, in specific configurations, with a little awl-like tool that I use to press braille dots into a piece of paper clamped into the braille slate.

           

Those little openings are only a few millimeters across or down, but it took me years to find my way around in those small spaces, to poke the right configuration of dots to jot “bird” or “sky” or “train.” But all those years of learning were worth it to me, to reclaim a hand-written way of keeping a journal. While born fully sighted, I began to lose my central vision in my thirties. It was just a few millimeters of damage on my retinas. But over time, that translated to legal blindness, to not being able to read print or handwriting, among other things.  The journey of that vision loss, along with my unexpected fascination with braille, became sources of The Braille Encyclopedia: Brief Essays on Altered Sight (Rose Metal Press: October 2024)

 

But hand-punched braille, much as I love it, is not, percentage-wise, how I do most of my writing. I write most of my words elsewhere, not in laborious hand-written braille, but on the quick clack-clack of a laptop. But I love being able to carry my slate-and-stylus with me wherever I’m writing.

 

 

Whenever I get the opportunity, I love to write at an artist retreat or residency. This mossy haven was a favorite place to sit with my journal when I got to be a creative resident at Bloedel Reserve on Bainbridge Island, a short ferry ride from Seattle.

 

Or at Monson Arts, where the writers studio building had this stunning view of Lake Hebron.  I love to write wherever there’s a view. This might, at first glance seem strange, since I’m blind. But blindness is a varied thing, and most legally blind folk have at least some remaining vision. So while I can’t read street signs or make out the details of  your face, or sometimes, tell you apart from a mailbox, I still love staring out at a moody lake and sky or any other vista.

 

But residencies are relatively infrequent. Most of my writing day, day in day out, is in my writing studio, a  space I rent in an office building about a half-mile from my house.

 

This is the view from my regular writing studio.

 

The street noise—the rush of trains and traffic, the clang of the train bell, people yelling at each other on the street—all bustles up from street level. It’s funny, because, at home, where in theory, I could be writing, I am bothered by the slightest noise or interruption.

 

Add to the street noise the thrum of the coffee shop, Workhorse Coffee Bar,  I feel the vibration of each espresso shot the baristas pull.

 

But this too settles me to  my work. I consider the Workhorse folks my coffee family. Their beverages have fueled so much of my writing.  And before i had my own writing space, I often wrote there. I can picture specific entries from The Braille Encyclopedia that I wrote at their tables.

 

I can’t explain why I can write in a noisy coffee shop, but not at home. It seems the public noise is more of a lullaby. It’s not my noise, not my problem, not the suddenly, suspiciously altered hum of the refrigerator, or a subtle dripping sound that might, or might not, be a plumbing leak.

 

The magic of the studio is that all the noise and bustle has the opposite effect of noise at home—it settles me to my work.

 

I don’t have a picture of walking to my studio, but I think a studio I can walk to matters in more ways than one. Being blind and thus not licensed to drive, being able to walk there matters. Being able to walk to my studio means I get there most days. It’s not the most aesthetically glorious possible space, but the patina of use is its own kind of beauty.

 

The other aspect of walking is that walking is where I do so much of my writing. Not the words on the page part, but the noodling, the pondering, the wrestling with puzzles part. At the desk I have questions. Walking I discover answers.

 

Speaking of walking, if you walk around the side of my building, you’ll find this bright, loud fantastic mural. It’s one of dozens commissioned by a group called the Creative Enterprise Zone. It’s by a Memphis-based muralist called Birdcap  and he painted it between showers this summer. It feels like another friend to my writing, an encouragement to fill my slate with braille symbols, supported by this very different sort of art-making on a very different scale.

 

And here’s my studio, Even with all the noise, and bustle and color of the streets around me, I always find it a cozy nest.

 

 

It’s not a big space, but big enough for a comfy chair to stare out the window, and a desk, and some bulletin boards I can clutter with unfinished sketches and marker doodles on old braille journal pages (which themselves were brailled on repurposed paper) and  pebbles from places I’ve been and things people have given me that support me in my work

 

Last, but not least. Every artist and writer needs a slinky.

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https://rosemetalpress.com/books/the-braille-encyclopedia/

 

As befits this daring exploration of a life that defies clear categories and boundaries, Naomi Cohn’s revelatory memoir The Braille Encyclopedia: Brief Essays on Altered Sight shapeshifts between lyric essay and prose poetry and traverses the divides between lived experience, history, and scientific knowledge. Told in the form of imagined alphabetical encyclopedia entries, this meditation on progressive vision loss examines and illuminates Cohn’s at first halting then avid embrace of braille as part of relearning to read and write as an adult. Using etymology, historical and medical research, and personal vignettes, this abecedarian collection of linked micro-essays and prose poems is both Cohn’s singular story of grieving and refashioning a life built around words and an evocation of the larger discussion of how our society views disability. The Braille Encyclopedia is poignant, playful, and wry, providing a literary reckoning of the technical and emotional aspects of facing the loss of sight.

What I Read in September

 Not sure what got in the way, but this was a low reading month for me overall, with a total of 9 books completed and one read for publicity purposes (which I won't include here.)

Maybe it was the change in weather, maybe it was just the page counts this time around. And sadly there were no 5 star reads....

Either way, come check out which books I spent my time with September!

The Monsters are Here by Lori D'Angelo

This is a wonderful #forthcoming collection of flash and short stories about monsters of all kinds - #vampires #werewolves #witches #ghosts #ghouls #aliens and of course, the worst monster of all... humans!

Lori's debut contains some of the most human monsters and monstrous humans I've read in a while. The relatability factor is high with this one.

The Monsters Are Here is a unique mix of horror and urban fantasy with a little bit of sci-fi thrown in for fun and that makes it the perfect halloween sidekick.

And seriously, have you seen this cover?!

The Borrowed Hills by Scott Preston

I can't remember who I saw reading or recommending this one but I grabbed it when I was out book shopping last week because it sounded really good and the cover certainly doesn't hurt.

Though it's set on a sheep farm in 2001 in Northern England at the start of a foot and mouth outbreak, The Borrowed Hills reads like a western. Men lose entire flocks of sheep and are in financial ruin. Desperate times call for desperate measures and a group of men make a decision that will alter the course of their lives.

Within these pages you will encounter endless violence, both of the animal and human kind, botched robberies, thwarted love, and endless rolling green landscapes. The writing makes for a stunning debut, even if the story gets a little lopsided at times.

Those poor poor sheep...

The Graveyard Shift by ML Rio

When you work the night shift and need a smoke, you end up at the local graveyard because it's the closest place off campus to sneak a cig. You meet other nicotine addicted, sleepless, late night weirdos there too and develop a kind of unspoken insomniac club. All's cool until the night you all notice a freshly dug hole in the ground and let Occam's razor take care of the rest.

This fungal thriller is a really quick read that flows fast off the page but with all loose ends and no resolution?! Are you being serious right now? That's how this book is going to end?!

I think my digital review copy is missing a couple chapters because there is no possible way it just hangs there like that. Send it back to the author. They have more work to do. They failed to understand the assignment.

Arrrrrgh!

Creatures by Crissy Van Meter

I kept eyeing this one in the bookstore, the cover was gorgeous but the jacket copy felt eh, so I would pick it up and put it back, until I saw it in a used book store for a couple of bucks a few weeks ago, and thought, this is a sign.

The book opens with a woman waking up the day before her wedding to find a dead whale beached on the island. She can't help but believe it's an omen. Her husband to be, a fisherman, has been out at sea and there's been no sight of his boat and her estranged mother has arrived at her doorstep unannounced. From there, we're rocked back and forth in time as she recounts the lessons she learned while living with her drug dealing dad and the painful longing for a mother who was never around, while she tries to move forward in the grip of grief and uncertainty in a relationship that never quite seems to be what she needs it to be.

I loved the writing and Meter's overall approach to the storyline until the infidelity came in. I wasn't expecting it, though as I reread the jacket copy, I can see how it's kind of written between the lines there. I'm just not a fan of that as a plot device and it can be kind of triggering for me. Co-dependency and the lasting damage of bad parenting are also themes that ebb and flow throughout.

Looking over other reviews, I see that this book is quite polarizing. And I agree with both sides - it's kind of dreary and frustrating, but I also found the book to be quietly beautiful.

Elmet by Fiona Mozley

This book was sent to me by @sherrystaceybg5 quite a few years ago, who felt strongly that I would like it and I'm embarrassed to say that I am only just now getting to it but man was she right. This was right up my alley.

Narrated by a son named Daniel, the book starts at the end, with him searching for his sister, though we aren't yet privy to how or why they've been separated. But we soon come to understand that his father brought him and his sister out into the middle of an undeveloped forest, close to where their mother used to live, and together, they've built a home of their own. They live an isolated life and are taught to live off the land and to fend for themselves. The dad makes money bare knuckle fighting and cashing in on favors owed until the owner of the land he's living on discovers him and comes to collect his due.

It's a quietly violent and atmospheric book about family that plays around with gender biases, while also hinging heavily on themes of survival and revenge. It's definitely a must read for fans of books like Andrew Kivak's The Bear and Eden Lepucki's California.

William by Mason Coile

I listened to this on audio and quite enjoyed it in that format. The pacing and narration were spot on and made for a fun travel companion on my ride back and forth to work.

A strange haunted house novel in which AI is the ghost? Oh yes, please.

A robot who believes something dark has infiltrated his system and causes him to terrorize Henry, his pregnant wife Lily, and their two guests? Hello darkness my old friend!

Bloody and violent deaths in a state of the art house that has locked you in with no means to escape? Uhm, bring on the body count!

A twist you don't see coming that turns everything onto its back? Jaw. Say hello to the ground!

Well played Coile. Well. Played.

Last Ones Left Alive by Sarah Davis - Goff

A zombie apocalypse in Ireland. Orpen, a young girl who was raised on an isolated island, is now escorting her mother's ill girlfriend in a wheelbarrow through a barren, haunted landscape seeking the last known safe haven, a city of potential hope and home to a rumored female force called the Banshees.

More heart than horror, Last Ones Left Alive is a solid and engaging read but it isn't bringing anything new to the genre. A similar vibe to Megan Hunter's The End We Start From, the protagonist's optimism and tenacity shine brightly through the dark and sloggy terrain. Orpen's inability to give up, her maddening desire to locate the city, and the rigorous training she received back home make it impossible not to root for her.

The pacing is slow but tolerable, with alternating chapters that bounce between Orpen's current journey on the mainland and the circumstances on the island that led her to flee its relative safety.

I'm ready for a 5 star read, you guys. These 3 and 4 star books I've been reading lately are ok and all but I'm ready to be wowed. (Sigh).

The Hollow Kind by Andy Davidson

I read Davidson's In the Valley of the Sun and love love LOVED it! So I had ridiculously high hopes for this one. And it started out with so much promise, too.

It had the perfect 'wtf is going on here' energy, and took its time setting everything up, nice and slow, bouncing back and forth between two timelines, giving us the history of Redfern Hill, the property our protagonist inherits from her estranged grandfather.

And when the weirder shit started ramping up, I was still into it, and found it harder and harder to put the book down. I wanted to know what was up with the whispers and the vines and locked coal closet.

But then the book just lost its shit and went all cosmic ancient entity on me, and felt a bit Poltergeist / At World's End / Nope-ish there at the end, don't you think?

And hello... I mean damn people, never go back into the house once you leave it. Especially when the thing you're running from is hungry and angry. Don't you watch the movies? It never ends well.

Not gonna lie. There were more than a few eyerolls during the grand finale there.

The Bog Wife by Kay Chronister

I was excited to land a review copy of this one and had high hopes for it, and boy did it live up to the hype.

Oooh so many echoes of Follow Me to Ground and Eartheater in this deeply atmospheric Appalachian folk story of a secluded family who, for generations, spend their lives tending to the cranberry bog on their property. And the bog, in return, is supposed to bless the eldest son with a bog-wife, a vegetal human-like being that will assist them in carrying on the family line.

The Haddesley children maintain the ritual, but the bog fails to deliver, and everything the siblings believed to be true is coming into question, crumbling around them like the walls and ceilings of the ancestral mansion they call home.

The polar opposite of her sun-blanched western novel, Desert Creatures, but just as intense and strange, The Bog Wife swims within a variety of genres - historical, gothic, fungal/eco, body horror - while sinking its fingers and toes into odd family rituals and claustrophobic landscape and legacies.