An Interview About the Craft of Writing With: Richard C. Brusca
Note: This interview was modeled after the “Writers-At-Work” series published in The Paris Review. From its inception in 1953 by a group of young Americans including George Plimpton and Peter Matthiessen, The Paris Review has been a revolutionary force in the literary world. Not only is it one of the few magazines that continues to feature original creative fiction, but it also continues to publish its highly regarded “Writers-At-Work” interviews. Originally designed to counter the prevailing custom of focusing primarily on critical academic reviews of an author’s work, this series focuses instead on the creative process and the craft of writing.
The Paris Review does not accept unsolicited interviews, so I never hoped to publish this interview there. I simply wanted to interview one of my most accomplished writer friends about the craft of writing, and to create a record of one novelist’s attempt to wrestle with the intricacies and intimacies of writing fiction.
Brusca and I are also going on a three-week, self-organized writer’s retreat in Mexico City this fall, where we will meet with other, local writers. This interview seemed like an intriguing way for both of us to start focusing on what it means to “be a writer,” since that is what we are going there to do!
-- Jeff Hartman
September 2026
Introduction
Richard (Rick) Brusca, PhD is a highly respected marine biologist, anthropologist, academic researcher, popular science writer, essayist, and most recently a novelist. He is the author of more than 230 academic papers and essays and over 15 books, including the largest-selling text on invertebrate zoology (Invertebrates 4th ed., Sinauer Associates/Oxford University Press). He is also a well-known science writer, having authored many popular field guides including Common Intertidal Invertebrates of the Gulf of California and A Natural History the Santa Catalina Mountains. Rick’s science books have won numerous awards, including Southwest Book of the Year, and his essays have appeared in many anthologies and popular magazines.
As an essayist and editorialist, Rick continues to publish in a number of magazines and newspapers in the US and Mexico. He believes scientists have an obligation to educate and inform the public at the intersection of science and policy, especially at this critical time when public perceptions of science has fallen. He believes all scientists and educators have a duty to speak truth to power in their areas of knowledge and encourages academics to make stronger connections with their communities by engaging in science communication as a regular part of their activity schedule.
Late in his career, Rick turned his creative energy toward writing fiction. He is the author of two novels: In the Land of the Feathered Serpent (2019) and The Time Travelers (2023). In the Land of the Feathered Serpent won a Best Indie Book Award (BIBA) for Best Literary Fiction (2022) and was a finalist for the 2021 Somerset Literary Fiction Award. The Time Travelers won an IPPY (Independent Press) Award for Best Hispanic-Latin Fiction (2024) and was listed as one of the top ten books of the year by the Arizona Daily Star.
This interview focuses primarily on Rick’s novels and his transition from science writing to writing fiction. As is the case with all writers, it is impossible to truly separate the writing from the person.
This interview took place on 8/28/26 at Rancho Bliss, the house Rick shares with his wife, Wendy Moore, an entomology professor at the University of Arizona. The adobe house, yard and detached casita sit in the middle of an acre of desert in the mountain foothills just outside Tucson, Arizona. They named their house Rancho Bliss when they moved in nearly 30 years ago as a reminder of what they were seeking to create: a place and a relationship centered around creating their individual and collective bliss, whatever that looked like. A boulder-sized stone carved with the words Rancho Bliss remains hidden behind overgrown plants in a corner of their yard as reminder of that goal.
The backyard is a terraced, three-level, red brick patio framed by an adobe wall that is adorned with many colorful Mexican sculptures, desert plants, and a decorative water fountain. It features a lap pool, a pergola that covers a relaxed sitting area, an outdoor grilling space, a chimenea that hasn’t been used much in recent decades, and many native plants in vibrant, multi-colored pots. Unfortunately, it was too hot outside on the day we met so the interview took place indoors.
Rick has written all of his novels at a computer that sits on a big desk in a small office. With two large windows that look out into the Sonoran Desert, there is a good deal of light in the room with a view of the Santa Catalina Mountains out the window behind his computer. Two walls are covered with overflowing bookcases while the closet behind him is filled with piles of papers and magazines and other miscellaneous stuff.
Rick is a dog person, and on this day he is still missing Marley, his most recent canine companion who passed away not long ago. Marley was a headstrong, 85-pound Goldendoodle with a lop-sided smile who one of Rick’s well-meaning friends graciously offered to send to dog obedience training when he was a young pup. But it didn’t take. I picture Marley by Rick’s feet as he worked his novels.
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Interviewer: Let’s jump right in. You’re an accomplished science writer who began writing novels later in life. What’s the main difference between science writing and writing fiction?
Brusca: Well, science writing is very formulaic, at least for academic journals, which is what I mostly did early in my career. Ultimately, all you're doing is compiling data, analyzing the data, and then objectively writing up the results to present to another group of scientists. There's nothing interesting about the writing itself, and there’s little room for imagination. With fiction you’re telling a human story, and when you do that you have to make a lot of stuff up, even if it’s a memoir, to keep things interesting and colorful. Fiction is way more creative and certainly way more fun than nonfiction writing. Fiction, good fiction, allows the writer to draw the readers into whatever new world is being created by the story, provide readers with new ideas, new insights, new ways of looking at life.
Interviewer: So, did the scientist in you find it hard to make stuff up?
Brusca (laughing): No. I’ve made up stuff my whole life. I've always had a vivid imagination.
Interviewer: You’re also a successful popular science writer. You’ve written several field guides, contributed general science articles to a variety of anthologies, and written many essays for popular magazines. When did you start doing more science writing for a general audience?
Brusca: Now that I think about it, I didn’t really have a heartfelt desire to write popular science until I began working at the Desert Museum. They used to publish a really nice quarterly newsletter and an annual magazine called Sonorensis. Remember those?
Interviewer: I do! It was a fabulous member benefit. The articles and the pictures were top-notch.
Brusca: So, I started helping fill those pages with my own writing, and I discovered that I really enjoyed it. And because these magazines went out to all the museum members, thousands of people read what I was writing and I got this positive feedback, way more than from any science paper. The only feedback you get on science papers is statistics from some company on how many times your article is cited—nothing about the quality or originality or creativity. Anyway, writing for Sonorensis became fun, and I was at the Desert Museum for 13 years so that’s when I really started honing my skills as a creative writer. That’s when I developed confidence in my abilities as a literary writer instead of just a science factual writer. Even though . . . [at this point Brusca stops and laughs, lost in momentary reverie] . . . even though I’d been dreaming about writing a novel for many years and carrying around two file boxes full of old newspaper clippings and notes because I knew I wanted to write a novel someday. But I had no idea how to start or if I could even do it until I started writing regularly for the Desert Museum. And also during that time I ran the Desert Museum Press, publishing three or four books a year—recruiting, editing, and helping other writers—that whole process helped develop my confidence as well.
Interviewer: How do you define literary nonfiction?
Brusca: I think literary nonfiction is written with creativity and feeling and heart. It draws emotions out of the reader. It’s not just presenting information and facts; it’s writing that makes the reader relate to it in a personal way, that draws them into a very human story. Literary nonfiction can be a beautiful marriage between science and the humanities.
Interviewer: What is the best literary nonfiction you’ve written?
Brusca: Some of those Sonorensis articles. I put a lot into them.
Interviewer: I loved your Sonorensis articles, as well as the essays Rick Boyer used to write in the CEDO Newsletter. I used them in my high school science class because they were interesting and informative and easy enough to read, and fun to read. The stories made the students feel something and oh, by the way, they also learned about field biology.
Brusca: Yes, and when you read good literary nonfiction you realize this is not just some travelogue or intellectual description, but this is somebody writing very personally about their experiences in ways that readers can relate to and understand. And it grabs them at a deeper, much more emotional level. That’s also what literary fiction does, and I think the steps from nonfiction to literary nonfiction to pure fiction are natural ones to make for some writers. Or at least it was that way for me. I came out of those years writing for the Desert Museum feeling confident that I could write a novel.
Interviewer: Sometimes when I’m reading your books, I get the distinct feeling that you were having a lot of fun when you wrote certain passages. And I’m wondering, how much of that feeling is because I know you and how much of that is truly embedded in the writing itself?
Brusca: When someone reads a really well written novel, they should come out with a sense of what kind of person the writer was who wrote that novel. For example, I recently read a couple of Barbara Kingsolver’s novels for the first time. She started out writing literary nonfiction that was good, but that I didn't care for it. I thought it was too shmaltzy. But her novels have given me a new window into this woman's mind, and now I think I really like her not only as a novelist but as a highly creative person, an artist. I like the way she thinks. I particularly like that she takes on these monumental themes, and weaves in history and biology and human situations and feelings all together, and I’m intrigued by how she came up with the ideas for her novels.
Interviewer: Do you think people know you better because they've read your books?
Brusca: Oh, I'm sure they probably do, although nobody ever talks to me about it, so I really don't know what they think. Other than some of the comments regarding the sex scenes in the original version of Feathered Serpent. I mean, some of them did talk to me about that.
Interviewer: Nobody asked you about what you did for the CIA after reading Feathered Serpent?
Brusca: Almost nobody. Well, one guy. An old high school buddy I hadn’t talked to in 50 years called me out of the blue, and he now runs a book club in L.A. and I did a Zoom thing with his club and they asked me about it. But that was the only time I was seriously put on the spot about that.
Interviewer: What did you want to be when you were growing up? Did you want to be a scientist? Or a writer?
Brusca: My first aspiration as a child was to be a trash man.
Interviewer: Really? Why?
Brusca: I always wanted to be a trash man because it seemed like fun. I mean, you get to drive around the neighborhood looking for exciting things to find. This was in grade school. But, honestly, I don’t think I decided I wanted to be a scientist until I was well into my college years. When I graduated from high school, I had no idea what I wanted to be. I just went to college because that's what my big brother did. So I went to college, went to the same college he went to, and that's where I fell in love with science. But I never wanted to be a writer growing up, although, looking back on it now, I certainly always enjoyed reading. I began reading cartoon books at four, and then comics and stuff. Then I graduated to the Hardy brothers. Those were probably the first real books I read. And then after that, it's hard to remember, but the next thing I can recall reading are the classics like Moby Dick and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.
Interviewer: So, was that in high school?
Brusca: No, no, that’s junior high, maybe even grade school. I enjoyed reading because I had a lot of time alone. I only had one brother and my parents’ world wasn't of much interest to me, so I spent a lot of time reading. I have always been able to lose myself in good fiction; all it takes is one page and I’m in that other world.
Interviewer: Were you a reluctant science writer? What I mean by that is, did you develop your basic writing skills because it was something you had to do to further your academic career or did you always like to write?
Brusca: Writing always came easy to me and I rather enjoyed it, so it was never a burden at all. Most scientists consider writing one of the more challenging aspects of their career for some reason. I guess they're not natural writers. But for me, I always was. I started writing at an early age. I mean, I'd write letters to my mother and father just for fun.
Interviewer: Did you ever take a creative writing class in college?
Brusca: I did take one course in creative writing in college, but that was before I settled on my major. I enjoyed that class. We wrote several short-stories over the course of the semester. What was my first major? [He laughs]. I think philosophy. Yes, it was philosophy. And then I switched to social sciences, and then I switched to botany, and then I switched to zoology before I finally settled on marine biology. I took one marine biology course and that’s what hooked me on science.
Interviewer: Do you think it was the subject itself that hooked you, or was it something else like the professor or the coeds in class or simply that it was time to choose a major?
Brusca: Well, I have always been curious about many things, so I enjoyed taking different kinds of courses, but nothing really fired me up until I took that marine biology course. So I guess it was the subject.
Interviewer: So when did you first think about writing novels?
Brusca: It never occurred to me that I might want to write a novel until I was well into my career— in the late 1980s and when I was in my mid-forties. I'd just gone through a period of time in the 80s where I was spending a good deal of my time in Latin America doing marine biology research. I was also changing life partners and going through a midlife crisis of sorts and one thing after another. And at one point it just dawned on me that all of that stuff that had happened to me over the last 10 or 15 years was pretty interesting and I should write it down. At first, I thought I would write a memoir for my own sake, for my kids’ sake or whatever. But then the more I thought about it, the more I realized, well, that would be really boring for anybody other than me and maybe my kids. So, it occurred to me that I could make it a lot more interesting if I wrote it as a novel. I thought it could be somewhat of a fictionalized memoir or something like that. And about that time, I hooked up with Wendy Moore, who became my third wife and now my partner of 30 years. She’s the one who really encouraged me to think about it as a novel.
Interviewer: So, until you met Wendy, you were just dreaming about someday writing a memoir?
Brusca: Yes, she was the one who really encouraged me to think of it as a novel. And, as you know, I had this big box of files and old newspaper clippings, a couple of boxes actually, even maps and things, that I’d been carrying around since the 80s, thinking I’d need them some day to write my memoir. And turned out that I didn't use any of that material because whatever what you need for a novel is already all in your head. If you don’t remember something in history, you can always google it.
Interviewer: So, what do you need to write a novel?
Brusca: What do you need for a novel? What you need is a story. My story for my first novel was my memoir, my life in the 80s. So I already had the story. That was easy, right? But you also need to be able to write clearly about the human experience, the human condition and the joys and disappointments we all face in life. If you have the talent, you can even write about good and evil, love, trust, and all those other important things in our lives. This is what literary fiction is, and that’s why it’s character-driven, rather than plot-driven. Some of the greatest fiction ever written is plotless; think of Cormac McCarthy’s last novel, Stella Maris. The best literary fiction pushes the reader outside their comfort zone, it’s provocative, it reveals other ways of thinking or living. It’s illuminating. It allows the reader to unself, to step outside their personal identity and into the world of others in an intimate way.
Interviewer: So, how did your memoir turn into a long novel?
Brusca: Well, at first I did begin writing it as a memoir, and I immediately realized I couldn't use any real names of any of the real people, of course. They're mostly all still alive and what I had to say about them, they might not want me saying in public, right? So first thing I had to do is create characters out of them. And then I just started writing, and as my memoir began to turn into a story, all these characters I knew, but now with different names, began to have their own distinct personalities. And after a while, as I imagined and reimagined what had happened back then, it became quite transformative for me personally. I reimagined the story as a kind of Homeric quest, sort of a Joseph Campbell process that one might go through to find their inner truths and so forth. A “Hero’s Journey.” Which was, of course, how I had come to view that period of my life. As I mentioned, the 80s were personally challenging years for me—I was on a quest of some kind. I was even questioning if science was the best way to understand the world. And I took great risks. So as that idea grew inside me, I decided to model the characters in my novel after people in the Odyssey. The character Penelope was the obvious one because she was the woman that I would leave at home while I'd go do my traveling and research and then come back to. I have to admit, Penelope in my novel is actually an amalgamation of two important women in my life. Anyway, once I decided to model this character Penelope after Penelope in the Odyssey, it was easy to imagine other people in my story, from my real life, as various characters in the Odyssey. It all just fell into place, and I realized all I had to do was exaggerate a few things that had happened in my life just a bit to make it an intriguing story.
Interviewer: Your first novel, In the Land of the Feathered Serpent, not only contains many parallels to the Odyssey, but it also contains lots of magical realism, which can give it a surreal feel at times. Where did that come from?
Brusca: That was effortless. I spent so many years in the late 60s and early 70s experimenting with psychedelic drugs, that it was very easy for me to just recall what that was like and write it down.
Interviewer: To a reader, or at least to this reader, the magical realism made the book seem fictional. Those parts don’t read like memoir.
Brusca: Perhaps to a reader who has not done a lot of psychedelics, some of the magical realism might make the story seem a little surreal at times, but if they’ve taken a lot psychedelics they’d probably just think I was taking LSD when I wrote it. [Chuckles.]
Interviewer: So how long did it take you to write your first novel?
Brusca: Probably a year and a half, or two years.
Interviewer: How many hours a day did you work on it? Where do you do your writing?
Brusca: When I’m on a roll, I’ll work for 3 to 4 hours per day writing, occasionally 5 hours. Usually in the morning. That’s enough. And I do all my writing on a computer in my home office. I used to write longhand but haven’t done that in years because now it seems so slow. I’m a very fast writer and even on a keyboard my fingers can’t keep up with my brain.
Interviewer: How many versions of Feathered Serpent did you go through?
Brusca: Well, the first one was fine, but then I realized I needed, and wanted, to put in more about the highlands of Guatemala, where I spent many years exploring. So, then I revised it to add that piece, which was a substantial revision. But that was about it. So just two versions. I mean, it was all just in my head. It's all just my memory of my own life in the 80s.
Interviewer: Did you think at that point that Serpent was a one off? That is, the only novel you’d write?
Brusca: Oh yeah, that was it. That was the extent of my literary ambition. But of course, then you do it and you're holding your book in your hand, and you think Gosh, that was fun! And you realize how addicting the whole process is and then start thinking maybe you’ll try it again someday.
Interviewer: What's addictive about it?
Brusca: The fun. The sheer joy of creating characters and a story. The process of thinking it all through and the challenge of putting it down on paper. Writing it well and then editing it and then sharing it with people. The whole process is fun. Very addicting. There's nothing about it I don't like. Except the marketing. Yeah, I don’t care for the marketing at all.
Interviewer: So your second book, The Time Travelers. When did you decide to write a second book and where did the inspiration for that one come from?
Brusca: Well, I don't know. I just didn't do anything for a long time after Serpent came out. The original published version, as you recall, was a bit risqué. I don't know about you, but I kind of get into a state of altered consciousness when I'm writing fiction, and it's so deep just in my own head that I forget about the fact that other people are going to read it. Right? And so the thing came out, the risqué version, and all of a sudden I started thinking, gosh, all of my wife’s colleagues at the University are going to read this and I started wondering what they might think. Pima County Libraries was planning to put copies in all their sites too and I wondered about youngsters reading it. So then I scrambled to edit the first published version to tone down some of the sex scenes, which I did before the libraries got it. And that was a little bit traumatic for me. You know, this was my first novel, and in one sense, were I a purist, which I’m not, but were I a purist about the whole thing I would have just said the heck with it, that's what I wanted to write so take it or leave it. But I didn't. I decided the whole thing made me a little nervous, so I changed it. The whole experience had me a bit skittish and so I stopped thinking about writing fiction for a while after that. Traumatic may be an overstatement, but it was concerning to me. Looking back, I probably over reacted. Plenty of female readers told me they loved the sex scenes. Really, there are tens of thousands of great and successful novels far more sexual than that first release of Serpent was. Think about James Joyce’s Ulysses, or Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. Ernest Hemingway’s novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls, was denied a Pulitzer because it was deemed too risqué.
Interviewer: Did you make the changes primarily because you were concerned about your professional reputation or did you make the changes because after you got some initial feedback you thought toning it down might increase your audience, particularly among female readers?
Brusca: I wasn't too worried about the audience, about turning off female readers, and I’m still not. I was more concerned about mine and Wendy's colleagues and how the book might change their view of me/us. Who knows? But as for general readership? What I have found is that most American women are pretty uptight about sex. And if they read my novel, it would probably be helpful for them. Most American women are quite prudish in my opinion—it’s in our national heritage. But not all of them. Many of them are just like Penelope in my story.
Interviewer: Was it hard to make those changes? Was the sex a big part of the story?
Brusca: Well, it was hard because sex was a huge part of my life at that time and therefore a huge part of my story. That’s nothing unusual; think of Anaïs Nin or Erica Jong or Anne Rice. My novel starts at the point when I’d just left my second wife and was in a very exploratory phase of my life. A big part of the reason we split was because I was spending all my time in Latin America and she was up here working and slaving away while I'm down there having a good time. I actually took her to Nicaragua with me once, which was a huge mistake because it was in the middle of the Contra War, so it was dangerous and she was scared the whole time and things didn’t go well. It was a stupid thing to do. I remember walking into this hotel I always stayed at in Managua, and when I walked in the staff recognized me and came over and started talking to me, and that totally freaked her out. I hadn’t told her about a lot of the stuff that was going on down there, although she did know I was collecting information for the CIA, and that made her very uncomfortable. Anyway, we separated, and so the story starts at a point in my life when I was newly single, and I wanted to capture that feeling.
Interviewer: Do you think you will write about sex differently in future novels?
Brusca: Well, when I started thinking about writing a second novel I realized I didn't want to be known as the novelist who writes nothing but sexy books, right? It was important to me in my memoir to be authentic, but I wanted to do something different with my second novel. So, the second novel doesn’t have any explicit sex scenes in it. But it does have a wonderful love story in it.
Interviewer: So is your second novel, The Time Travelers, complete fiction?
Brusca: Yes—completely made up.
Interviewer: And that's the book you won the 2023 Independent Press Best Hispanic Fiction Award for, correct?
Brusca: Right.
Interviewer: Where did you come up with the idea, the inspiration, for that one?
Brusca: I honestly don't remember. It's funny, you publish these things, like publishing a scientific paper, and then you put it aside on a shelf and you move on. You have all these other pressing matters to deal with. And so, you just completely put it out of your head and forget about it, and you move on to the next paper, or to the next thing you need to do. I think what happened is that I eventually started dreaming about putting one of the most interesting characters from my first novel, Odel Bernini, into some new and different settings to see how he would react, and after playing around with various scenarios for a while, I finally came up with something that stuck. I guess I just wanted Bernini to be put into some fun new situations.
Interviewer: As someone who knows you and is familiar with both your novels, I like In the Land of the Feathered Serpent more because I think there’s more of you in it, but I think The Time Travelers is a better book. It’s a good story, it’s more accessible, and it contains lots of interesting historical background about the Aztec empire and the development of modern-day Mexico City. In fact, I’d call Time Travelers historical fiction. How do you see it?
Brusca: I don't think of Time Travelers as historical fiction. I think it’s basically a science fiction fantasy novel. Feathered Serpent is the one that's really historical fiction because it's set in the 80s and all of the Contra War and the Latin American politics of the time are accurately described. I think Feathered Serpent is the better book, but Time Travelers is clearly the better commercial one. The audience for a book like Feathered Serpent is much smaller than the audience for book like Time Travelers.
Interviewer: What's the difference?
Brusca: Well, there are a lot of differences. For one, Time Travelers is an easier read. I mean, you can read it out over a weekend. But Feathered Serpent requires a real commitment. It's got a long work up—you have to be willing to put yourself through 30 or 40 pages before very much happens, just to set the scene and establish the characters. It’s the price of admission. Whereas Time Travelers just starts right out with the story immediately.
Interviewer: Many critics, as well as readers, would say that a good book should hook you almost immediately, and that the American public doesn’t want to read books that require 30 or 40 pages to set the table.
Brusca: I get that, but I just didn’t care about that at the time. I wanted my first book to be an epic Homeric fictionalized memoir of my life in the 80s. I didn't care who read it or didn't like it. I just wanted to write it. I never, for a moment, expected it to win a national book award for literary fiction.
Interviewer: So you really don't think of Time Travelers as historical fiction?
Brusca: No, not really. Well, it sort of is and it sort of isn't. I mean, it is a historically accurate story about the origin of the Aztec Empire. But, unlike Serpent, the historical aspect of the story wasn’t a central theme.
Interviewer: I feel like I learned more about Mexican history and the origin of the Aztec Empire from Time Travelers than I learned about Central America history in the 1980s from Feathered Serpent. And the characters in Feathered Serpent seemed to be a more vital part of the narrative, whereas the characters in Time Travelers were only part of what drew me in. But maybe that’s because I know you and I always thought of Feathered Serpent as a fictionalized memoir.
Brusca: I can see that. I guess it all depends on the knowledge and assumptions and perspective you, as a reader, bring to any book. But I never thought of Time Travelers as historical fiction. I just thought of it as fantasy science fiction, and kind of a romance story also. But you see, like Serpent, it cuts across a lot of genres.
Interviewer: So tell me about your third novel. What are you working on now?
Brusca: Have you read Cormac McCarthy's last, posthumous novel, Stella Maris? The sister of the protagonist from his preceding novel, The Passenger, who is locked up in a psychiatric ward called Stella Maris, has an obsession with cosmology and mathematics, and the whole novel is dialogue about those topics—an exploration of those deep topics through dialogue between a psychiatrist and his patient. It's one of those novels where there's not really a story arc of any kind. It’s fascinating. My new novel is a little bit like that. What I wanted to do was explore cosmology and time at a really deep level, but of course there’s also a story going on. I decided to use some of the same characters from my previous novels and they're caught up in time travel again, only this time at a more profound level. And it's a different kind of story. I confess I’ve become fascinated with the idea of time travel. I’ve been reading all these books on the subject, a lot of scientific papers and what have you, and in the cosmology and physics community it's a completely acceptable idea that time is not linear and time travel is absolutely possible. The prevailing thought in the scientific community is that time travel is definitely possible and that all time exists always, everywhere. It's just that nobody's figured out how to move about it in yet, although they can move about with particle accelerators and such instruments. They can go backward and forward in time, but only for milliseconds. So far.
Interviewer: So, when you get enthused about a subject like time travel, you obviously delve into the academic literature, as well as popular culture, to do your research. But who do you have in mind when you sit down to write your novel? Who is your audience? Do you worry about this next novel being too scientific?
Brusca: I am concerned that it's way too scientific, as I think you know. But gosh darn it, I just don't care. I simply want to do it. If the price for being true to my ideas and my craft is low readership, so be it.
Interviewer: When do you put on your audience filter? From the very beginning of the research and writing process or primarily during rewriting and editing?
Brusca: Definitely during the rewrite. I mean, I'm just now starting to edit the first draft and I’m trying to make it a bit less scientific. I know it’s way too scientifically detailed and I’m trying to tone it down, but I'm not having much luck. It also has a lot of history in it that I’m trying to tone down, primarily about Alexander Humboldt, and that’s a challenge as well. Right now it has a narrative of Humboldt’s entire time in the New World. So, the readership on this one is going to be much smaller than on Time Travelers. No question. I predict it will appeal to only 10% or 20% of people that enjoyed Time Travelers, but I’m willing to just do it anyway.
Interviewer: Do you have a working title?
Brusca: Yes. Cloud Dragons.
Interviewer: So, one of the literary examples that motivated you while writing Feathered Serpent was the Odyssey, and Stella Maris is one of the inspirations for your third novel, was there any similar literary inspiration for your second novel, Time Travelers?
Brusca: No, no, the story just appeared in my mind as I began writing. It's funny, I honestly don't remember how I started writing Time Travelers. Maybe it was the prologue, Progenitor, that came to me first and got it all started.
Interviewer: By the way, I think Progenitor is one of your best, stand-alone pieces of writing.
Brusca: Thank you, I do too. A lot of people have said that. But it's funny, I sent it to a publisher back east and they wrote back and said that the prologue, Progenitor, was so confusing that it ruined the whole book. They said nobody could figure out what the heck I was talking about. So much for that publisher. But who knows who actually reviews those book manuscripts? Probably some college intern or whatever. Editors and reviewers are a capricious lot, in any field of art. Everyone’s mind works differently.
By-the-way, there’s an interesting recent example of capriciousness around Homer’s Odyssey, one of the oldest surviving works of literature. Two new versions of the story have appeared, one being a new translation of the book by University of Pennsylvania classics scholar Emily Wilson, the other a nearly-three-hour film version by acclaimed director Christopher Nolan. Simply put, Wilson is a hard-core academic and Nolan is a gifted imaginarian. Never the twain should meet! Wilson’s new translation met with critical acclaim. However, in my opinion, Wilson’s attempt to make the story “accessible” and “modern” largely ruins it by diminishing the pathos, tragedy, and drama of the original work. And her use of the English language is at the level of a high school junior, at best. Reading it was a tiresome exercise in mundane writing. In other words, I would suggest Wilson lacks the kind of imagination and literary skills needed to be a novelist, and she certainly should not attempt to rewrite a great novel like the Odyssey. Hence her scathing criticism of Nolan’s film, a masterpiece of art and storytelling, comes across as pathetic, pompous, and self-serving.
Interviewer: So, all your science books and articles were published by established journals and publishing companies, but your two novels have all been independently published. Do you think there's a stigma associated with being a self-published writer?
Brusca: Not personally, but I think some people look at self-published authors as something lesser than the commercially-published writers. But that’s really on them, because I don't feel it personally and because the Indie market is huge. I mean, it's like when recording artists started putting all their music online themselves because they were sick of dealing with the big ripoff record labels. It's the same thing in the Indie writing world. Eighty-five percent of the books published in this country are Indie books.
Interviewer: I’m sure you’ve been deluged with offers from so-called hybrid publishers offering to “publish” your books, for a fee of course. Did you ever consider using one?
Brusca: No. In my mind, Indie publishing is the same whether you self-publish or whether you go to a hybrid publishing house for help. That just depends on your comfort level with editing, formatting, designing a cover, and marketing your books. And your budget, of course. I mean, I could have taken my novels to one of these local publishers here in Tucson—well, they’re really printers but they call themselves publishers—and then pay them to print and distribute my books and I could say I had a publisher, right? But you lose control over your work when you do that, and most of the time they don’t do much to help you market. I’d rather have complete control over my work. For example, a friend of mine just published a book and it's a very good book—a personal narrative about a cave he discovered in the Appalachia region and explored in his youth. It's now a State Park and his book is a real adventure story. Very well written and very good. I tried to convince him to publish it on Amazon via KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing), but for many reasons he said he could never figure that out. So, he just found some random printer who calls himself a publisher, right? And they publish it and now he's got a garage full of books and no way to market them or anything else. Unless there’s a big commercial publishing house willing to devote a lot of resources to my book, I’d rather have complete control over my own work than to give a publishing house control.
Interviewer: Do you think your willingness to embrace all aspects of the self-publishing experience was because of your experience leading the Desert Museum Press?
Brusca: Definitely. I was involved in all aspects of the book recruitment, editing, design, and creation process, finding good writers, good copy editors, design people, cover artists, etc. I got to know all aspects of the business well, so working on my own novel was quite easy and fun. I also got very comfortable as an editor myself, which helped a lot. Most people are either good editors or they're good writers, very few are both. And I think I I'm fortunately good at both now, because I've spent years and years doing it.
Interviewer: Speaking of cover designs, do you think you could walk through a bookstore and tell the self-published books from the commercially published books just by their cover?
Brusca: I’ll bet I could do it and be right 75% of the time. Anyone can hire a creative person to design a really nice cover, so some of the self-published covers are excellent, but sometimes the creativity backfires and the industry standard isn’t on creativity, you know. They have to fit into a certain box. Commercial books have size requirements and the kind of paper you use matters. The big publishing houses are all about marketing and their concept of a cover is what they think will best sell the book in a bookstore or an online snapshot. The cover may not look reveal anything about the content of the book, but it can still be eye-catching.
Interviewer: Did you enjoy making your covers?
Brusca: Yes. I loved it. I won an award for the cover of Time Travelers, which means the fellow who designed it won an award. I've never even met him, but I knew about him because his digital art is famous around Tucson. And so I wrote him and asked if he does book covers. And he said, “yeah, I charge thus-and-such.” I said, well, I can't afford that, but let me send you the manuscript. So I sent it to him and he read it and it turns out his wife is an Indigenous woman from Mexico. She's Aztec blood. So, he loved the story and said he’d do it for half price. I think he did a fantastic job.
Interviewer: What has the whole self-publishing experience taught you about the publishing industry in general?
Brusca: The biggest eye opener to me has to do with what I learned about the readership. I’m astonished at how few people read books these days, and how many of them don't care if they read or not. They actually don’t think they need to read books because they've got their iPhone and iPad. I mean, I've had arguments with young people about this. They say, literally, “I don’t need to read a book because everything I need is on my iPhone.” And among those who do read, very few read fiction. If they do read fiction, the majority read romance novels and mystery novels. Romance novels are the top-selling book genre in the U.S. Most men who do read prefer nonfiction, which means it’s a small group of mostly women who read fiction, for whatever reason. Maybe because they're living with boring men and they need escapist literature. So, for me, it's been a real eye opener and, what I've done is, I ask people all the time if they read books. Just the other night I had a conversation with a relative who freely admitted he doesn’t read books. He actually said, “I just don’t read books!” And when I asked him why, he said it's too much bother. It’s just too hard. And he’s a well-educated individual. Another academic friend of mine says the same thing. These are not dyslexic individuals. They simply don’t enjoy reading, especially not fiction. Perhaps it’s just that they lack imagination. Without that, I suppose it would be hard to read a novel.
Interviewer: What kind of feedback have you received from friends and relatives on your novels?
Brusca: The feedback from those who actually say anything has been very positive, but the hard thing is no feedback. I think some people don't read my books because they're afraid they won't like them and that would make them feel bad and so they won’t want to say anything to me. They just don't want to be in that position or put me in that position. I don’t know; I’m just guessing. But that's a small minority of people. Most North Americans simply don’t read! And if they do read, they don’t read books, and if they read books they don’t read fiction. I bet you could show 100 Americans a list of the last 20 Pulitzer Prize winners and very few, not even one out of that 100, would recognize a single name. America is becoming a land of non-readers.
Interviewer: Have you ever thought of translating Time Travelers to Spanish?
Brusca: I’d love to do that. I think it would have a great audience in Mexico, especially Mexico City.
Interviewer: You’re going on a self-organized writing retreat to Mexico City in October of this year, ostensibly to commemorate the culminating scene in Time Travelers where Aztec warriors emerge from the depths of the subway stop in the Zócolo on the Day of the Dead. What do you hope to get out of the trip, as a writer?
Brusca: Wow. I don't know. I've never gone on a writing retreat. I've never put myself in a situation where I had three weeks in some place other than here in Tucson, to do whatever the hell I wanted and to focus solely on my writing. I have a rough draft of this third novel, and I hope to have a polished draft by the time I return from Mexico City, one that’s good enough to send to a few people to read.
Interviewer: How important is it to you that the retreat is in Mexico City?
Brusca: It's very important to me because my story is set in Mexico City. So was Time Travelers. And I love Mexico City. I mean, I could do it anywhere, I suppose, but Mexico City is just so full of visual and mental input, you know. Every brain cell in your head is on overdrive when you're in Mexico City. It should be really stimulating and hopefully stimulating for writing, but definitely going be stimulating in general.
Interviewer: Do you anticipate doing a lot of reading as part of your writing retreat?
Brusca: I'm taking several books, but I don't know if I'll read them all. Who knows, I might not read any of them!
Interviewer: Do you read as a writer these days or do you read for enjoyment? Do you make such a distinction?
Brusca: Other than research for a nonfiction book I've been writing about the state of Sonora, all my reading right now is as a writer. To try and understand other writer’s styles. You know, to try to figure out what they were thinking when they came up with their ideas to begin with. I mean, how do novelists come up with their ideas and how do they decide to write a particular kind of story? I'm fascinated by it.
Interviewer: What else do you look for when you’re reading a novel as a writer?
Brusca: Well, plot is important but there are a lot of plotless books by great writers that are worth reading. Cormac McCarthy's two post-humous novels, as I mentioned—The Passenger and Stella Maris. I couldn't figure out the ending of Passenger because it just didn't make sense. He was leading you all the way through to this big climax scene and it just never happened. There was no ending. And as a reader, you're thinking, I feel cheated! Yet, Passengers was profoundly good writing and I loved every word, every sentence in it. But then I talked to Richard Grant about it. He’s writing a biography of McCarthy, and he told me that he thinks actually McCarthy never actually finished The Passenger. He believes McCarthy never wrote the ending but that when he died the publishers just went ahead and published it anyway.
Interviewer: So when you tell people you're going to Mexico City on a writing retreat, do they understand? Or do they think you're nuts?
Brusca: People don't understand. Unless you’re a writer, or you live with a writer, I don't think you can understand the passion around this kind of activity. My writer friends are jealous of me for being able to go to Mexico City for a month just to write, while they’ve got to stay home with all these family responsibilities. I’m very lucky. But, this is my moment and I feel it’s important.
Interviewer: What does it mean to you to think like a writer?
Brusca (laughing): Well, I’ve been thinking like a writer for so many years now, I don’t really know. Part of it is being a good observer, but it goes deeper than that. A writer’s mind observes deeply, and it absorbs situations that are unique or interesting to them and it unconsciously starts processing it like a scene in a novel. Or maybe it’s just a line on a page in the newspaper or a magazine. I mean, that's what’s happened to me. I hear a phrase on the radio or a word in a conversation, and I want to write it down. I don't want to forget it because there's something about it that makes it memorable and I love figuring out what that is. I think a lot of it is just that we writers are obviously captured by the beauty and complexity of the English language.
Interviewer: Do you think other people see things they find intriguing and want to somehow commemorate by writing them down or taking a picture, but then never do it for whatever reason?
Brusca: Are you kidding? Most people live lives that are very superficial and not deeply connected to the environment that they're in at all, especially the human environment. I always thought that, but it seems even worse these days. I mean, I've always known that you have to do what you have to do to live your life and support your family, and that comes first, but man, this disconnected life that Americans, especially young Americans are living is strange and dangerous.
Interviewer: Looking to the future, do you want to write more novels or do you want to write more science books?
Brusca: Oh, I think I’m growing tired with science writing. Fiction is way more fun. What I’d really like to do is finish this Bernini Trilogy. It never occurred to me that I would end up writing three books with Odel Bernini in them! And so now as I'm finishing up this third one, I realize I've created the Bernini Trilogy, which is not something I ever set out to do. It just happened. So that means it's sort of like one big project all of a sudden, and now I need to finish it and then move into a whole, conceptually new, kind of novel. So, if I'm going to do a fourth novel, it’s going to be something completely different. Sorry Bernini, but it’s adios!
Interviewer: Maybe that’s a fitting place to end. Following the Bernini Trilogy, Rick Brusca takes on a completely different type of fiction!
Brusca: That sounds good to me. I can’t wait to read it, I mean, write it.
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