"Art in one form or another, whether it is in poetry or painting or dance or music or sculpture or whatever you can name, is the only antidote for what is happening to us. The world is too much with us. Technology and the mechanics of making a living are shredding whatever dignity and worth we might have. Art reminds you that you have a soul. It reminds you that above all else, human beings are special mostly because they create.”

—Duff Brenna, October 2003

     Just over two years have past since Duff Brenna’s fourth novel, The Altar of the Body, was released into a world content (for the most part) to ignore its brilliance. Sure, Altar made it out of its first year as a hardcover and has since picked up some paperback readership, but in a piece he titled “On the Road to Rejection: A Tale of a California Book Tour,” Brenna vents some frustration: “I’ve written four novels, but so far I haven't made anyone any money except a publisher in Germany, where my books sell better than they do here. I'm told my work is odd, quirky, character-driven and sometimes too literary, all attributes that German readers seem to love and most American readers seem to hate.”      Brenna has also piqued the interest of an Irish publishing house (Wynken de Worde) that wants to reprint all of Brenna’s novels in the UK, Ireland, and Denmark—and is anxious to see his forthcoming novel, The Willow Man, which is slated for publication by Picador USA in early 2004. Between the release of Altar and this, his final year as a professor at California State University San Marcos (CSUSM), Duff Brenna has experienced enough to frame some future novels.
     Brenna spent his 2002-2003 academic year on a sabbatical in the Yukon Territory, where he worked, in near isolation and bone-thinning cold, on his fifth novel, The Willow Man—the sequel to his third novel, Too Cool. Brenna divulged that The Willow Man will also connect to his first, picaresque novel titled The Book of Mamie, which won the 1988 Associated Writing Programs Novel Award.
     Before heading to Canada, Brenna plodded through a disappointing and aggravating book tour. He said that nothing good happened on that tour and that the day after his last stop on the tour he “boarded the ferry for Alaska and indulged in what Thomas E. Kennedy calls ‘The Sacrament of Vodka.’ I stood on the stern of the ship that night and watched the phosphorescent water boil and saw in those bursting bubbles the narcissism and vanity of what I had been doing, and I was ashamed of myself.” What’s a shame is that so many people missed out on hearing Brenna read from his work.
     All of Brenna’s novels include either autobiographical elements or pieces of other people’s lives. In my recent interview with him, Brenna offered some insight about why he incorporates real life into his fiction: “I need someplace to start. I am always attuned to what other people are saying, whether they are talking about their own lives or the lives of others. I love to listen to people, and invariably I find something useful to write down."
     Given some of his characters' actions, many of Brenna’s readers may be frightened or turned off by his novels, but Brenna trusts his audience to approach his works of fiction as just that—fiction. Discerning readers understand that fiction can and will involve some truths—just as nonfiction works invariably possesses some manipulations of fact. “I fictionalize it,” Brenna explained to me, “but most of it happened.” Some people and events, for example, in The Book of Mamie are true: Mamie Beaver really exists (that is her real name), and Jasper John experienced much of what occurs in the novel. Triple E (Too Cool) really went into the mountains—in the form of Brenna himself— with his girlfriend in a stolen car and nearly froze to death.
      From Altar, “Buck Root was actually a man named Chris Carr and a mighty bodybuilder with great ambitions. Joy was his girlfriend. I met them when I was fifteen and loved them madly.” After all, has there ever been a consensus on whether art imitates life or life imitates art?
     Fictionalizing people’s realities may be one reason some critics call Brenna’s work too character-driven. But, then again, some of the most studied writers, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Twain, were masters of centering works around characters—true-to-life characters. “Where life and literature meet there is first and foremost character,” Brenna offered. “We are all heroes and villains, courageous and cowardly, noble and ignoble, loving and hateful. On good days, we are smart and people admire us. On bad days, we are stupid and people roll their eyes at us.”
     Aspiring writers pay attention, please: “Show me a hero basking in glory, and I’ll show you a tragedy in the making. Point is that no one is one thing. No one is pure evil. No one is pure goodness. Everyone has his or her reasons for the behavior that we observe. It’s the myriad complications of the human psyche that both baffle and intrigue us, especially if we are writers. I’ve never met a flat character in real life, but you find them often in plot-driven fiction. They are mere tools for the author and easily forgotten.”
     Forgotten? Yes, but are they rejected as cancerous vessels that must not be consumed, digested, and consumed again—regardless how flat, short and irrelevant their metaphoric lives truly are? Of course not. These types of characters fill some sort of twisted American void wherever we turn, and media domination seems to douse, too damn often, the embers of meaningful art in our society.
     “Trained on sitcoms, sound-bites, strobe-lights that have stunted our attention span, most of us want instant engagement of our senses. If you don’t get me with the first paragraph,” Brenna explained as a problem of audiences, “chances are you don’t get me. Down goes the book. On goes the TV or VCR.”
     Brenna suggest that in reading Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, A Winter’s Tale, War and Peace, Anna Karenina, and Crime and Punishment, “you will find brilliant depictions of the human soul divided against itself, coping at times and unable to cope at other times. In other words, you will find yourself. The closer you get to those truths, the more your characters will speak to the motivations of our own lives and the more we will trust your vision.”
     As a reader, the innate ability and inability of people to deal with situations in their world must be infused into fiction for me to give a rat’s ass about them, yet many of the novels, movies, and (gulp) television shows that become popular and make a selected few very wealthy are plot-driven fiction dominated by flat characters.
     Brenna expressed some of his beliefs about this puzzling place we find ourselves in regarding “entertainment” today: “It is an unfortunate and deeply depressing fact, but short stories and novels are not held in very high regard these days, except among those who might be called an ‘elite’ few. The media rivalries are fierce. Few, if any, novels or short stories can compete with them.” Brenna further expressed his frustration saying that there’s not much we can do about this unfortunate phenomenon. “That’s just the way it is. All you can do is learn your craft and work like a demon to make what you write as compelling as words in a row can be.”
     Fiction writers can only hope that more readers approach novels like Brenna does: “I’m in no hurry. Many of my favorite novels are from the 19th century. I love the leisurely way many of the writers from that era pull you into their stories. I want to lose myself in images. But that’s not the sort of thing ninety-nine percent of American readers want.” Maybe this realization is what led Brenna to write the screenplay for The Book of Mamie, which was optioned by a Canadian filmmaker. Brenna is presently adapting The Holy Book of the Beard, his second novel, into a screenplay. Los Angeles based writer and musician Michael Covertino wrote the screenplay for Too Cool, which has been optioned by producer Denise Shaw.
     Brenna embraces the pan-art potentiality of films and wants to see the film industry uphold the artistic integrity that created some of his favorite films: Lawrence of Arabia, A Man for All Seasons, The Lion in Winter, Dr. Zhivago, On the Waterfront, Apocalypse Now, and The Godfather.
     Whether in novels or films, Brenna demands those creating possess some sense of artistic responsibility. Not only do writers need to entertain, but they also need to remain loyal to their vision and belief in the truth of what they are saying. “If you don’t entertain your readers, you are letting them down, and they will put you down. If you don’t cultivate a depth of vision about what it means to be a human being, then you’ll never have very much to say that will connect with the deeper processes of your reader’s mind. If you compromise the truth in order to get published or be popular or make your parents proud than you write fluff, you’ll never say anything worth reading or remembering. To hell with what your relatives and other people think of you, quit bullshitting and write what you know to be truth. Your truth might be someone else’s lie, but write it anyway.”
      Art is religion to Duff Brenna, so it follows that he should urge honest and meaningful art from others. “Art speaks to the quiet, spiritual voices inside us that know there has got to be something more fulfilling than the dumbed-down diet found on most television channels and on the screens of most theaters. It is a subliminal role for many of us, until we finally realize how desiccated we’ve become.” Brenna experienced this desiccation as he balanced teaching at universities and writing novels for the past twenty-two years. When asked if universities encourage and foster creativity and original thinking, he replied, “You’re making me laugh.”
     Places, like universities, where art and creativity once found solace and space to grow are changing too quickly. Brenna enjoys teaching but acknowledges that it is difficult to do so while developing his craft of writing fiction and defending the practices and environment that allow real learning to take place. “It ain’t easy. You’re always frustrated, always being pulled one way and then another. But I really like teaching and would keep doing it if it weren’t for the increasing demands that the CSU system (not the students) makes on my time.”
     As institutions of higher learning are morphing into product-churning business paradigms, professors passionate about their subjects and their students are marginalized. “The huge enrollments in our classes create a sense of anonymity that is hard to overcome. The pressure to ‘make the numbers’ is extremely demoralizing.”
     Brenna has taught at CSUSM since its doors opened in 1989. “Compared to every other college where I had taught, it was a paradise. It no longer is. I don’t think it will ever be again.” When asked what has changed since CSUSM’s infancy, Brenna told me that professors “are facilitators now, processing mass wannabes towards dubious accomplishments promising ambiguous results. So there isn’t very much gratification now and little sense of mission, other than that of survival. The inevitable corporate un-university is here. Darwin said it would be this way.”
     Prior to heading north for his sabbatical, Brenna’s approach to teaching was celebrated as he won CSUSM’s President’s Award for Innovative Teaching. On returning to southern California, reenergized by his productive journey to the Yukon, Brenna hoped he would be stepping back onto a campus that still acknowledges the positive and progressive pedagogy that earned him his award just one year earlier. That campus, unfortunately, was not only dried up, it was dead. “The conclusion I’ve reached since returning from the Yukon is that the system we’re working for doesn’t give more than lip service to the arts. They really don’t care about the caliber of the artist they hire, they care about a body in a slot cranking out a product.”
     Brenna could not help but refer to CSUSM’s loss of internationally acclaimed poet, Judy Jordan just two years earlier: “I mean, Judy Jordan won the Walt Whitman and The Critics Circle Award, and other universities understood what that meant and they came after her. But CSUSM didn’t seem to have any idea what Jordan had accomplished and how it reflected a kind of shining glory on them. We let go of the most brilliant poet I’ve ever personally met, a poet that would have enhanced the reputation of our college immeasurably and brought students to it just to work with Judy Jordan. What we’ve said by not offering a genius time to write is that we don’t really value that sort of thing. What we value are the work-horses who will giddy-up and plow a straight line.” (To learn more about Jordan, visit our archives.)
     The loss of such talent was a red flag for Brenna, but the final administrative act that has pushed Brenna to resign as professor after this academic year was the elimination of Shakespeare classes for the Spring Semester to make room for another Creative Writing course. “Creative writing over William Shakespeare is just plain wrong-headed, in my humble estimation. Students who are really driven to write fiction or poetry will do so in spite of all obstacles. No one really needs to take a creative writing class. Writers can pick up all they need to know simply by reading stories and novels with dedication and a critical eye and practicing what they learn. Shakespeare, on the other hand, is a foreign language to most students. They need to be led through the intricacies of the Elizabethan language and shown again and again in detail after detail the breadth and depth and beauty of Shakespeare’s infinite mind and how his themes are always relevant, timely and universal.” Interesting. A university fights to add a Creative Writing course and, in doing so, loses their best creative writer. Ironical, isn’t it.
     Brenna punctuates his opinions about CSUSM’s decision: “A university without a Shakespeare course offered every semester is no longer really universal.”
     The de-valuing of the arts and diminishing professional integrity of one university will not stop Duff Brenna though. A return to the Yukon might be in his future. “I did enjoy my stay in the Yukon. I traveled a lot and had a few adventures and learned some neat stuff that I was able to use in The Willow Man. I’m sure I’ll go back to the Yukon and Alaska in a year or two and tramp around a bit and see what I can stir up.” Brenna admits that he is solitary by nature and that he gets claustrophobic in crowded cities. “I preferred my life there to the one I have here. The noise makes it difficult to think. The freeways are shark pools. The eyes of far too many people look haunted. The terrorists are coming.”
     Although the changing climate at CSUSM has led Brenna to leave a career he truly enjoyed—and a profession that was once worthy of loving—maybe this change will prove serendipitous for him. He will continue to write, and he is looking into Writer in Residence possibilities at many universities, including Princeton. Brenna is also interested in running workshops for other colleges. “It’s all up in the air now. Mostly, I want to isolate myself long enough to finish the two novels I drafted in Canada.”
     Duff Brenna is far from leaving his position at Cal State San Marcos in some sort of snobbish, anger-filled fit. He is, however, going off defeated and demoralized. “But the upside is, I’ll have some time to write now, and who knows, maybe I’ll even be able to make a living at it.”