Kris Bertin: Short Fiction Writer

RUSTY TALK WITH KRIS BERTIN

​Kris Bertin is a writer from Halifax, NS with work featured in The Walrus, The Malahat Review, The New Quarterly, PRISM international, and many others. He is a two-time winner of the Jack Hodgins' Founders' Award for Fiction, and has had his work anthologized in The Journey Prize Anthology, Oberon's Coming Attractions, and EXILE's CVC Anthology. His first book of short stories, entitled Bad Things Happen, was published by Biblioasis in 2016.
 
Born into a military family, Kris lived in BC and Ontario as a child, then did the rest of his growing up in Lincoln, New Brunswick. He attended Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, studying English Literature and Creative Writing, but left before graduating. Since then, he has worked as a mover, a general labourer, an assistant curator in an art gallery, a call-centre cell-phone rep, a Mongolian-grill cook, a bouncer, and a writer. He currently works as a bartender at Bearly's House of Blues & Ribs. You can visit him at krisbertin.com.

The book has criminals and drug addicts and heartache and a ten-foot tall god in green robes. It has garbage collector-hillbilly feuds and little girls breaking into houses. It tracks the journey of a window-cleaner who becomes a telemarketing fraudster in Montreal, then returns home to absolve himself by becoming an exterminator in rural PEI. I can talk about that all day long. But me, and my role in it is boring. It’s like if you had a machine that could see people’s dreams, but instead you just look at the poor sap quivering on the bed in his jammies.

Chris Evans: You’ve said before that humour is an aspect of the collection that sometimes gets ignored in conversations and reviews, which rings true—it’s a very funny book, and some of the pieces, like “The Story Here,” read as straight-up dysfunctional comedy. Is there any aspect of Bad Things Happen that you think gets overplayed in those same conversations and reviews?
Kris Bertin: Thanks for saying that. I wrote the stories in this book over a long period of time, so I think of each of them as being very different, but one tack a hasty reviewer can take is to simplify and categorize everything you’ve done. No one who puts together a collection is trying to write the same thing over and over; all of us try to vary it by tone and character, conflict, themes, and a bunch of other factors. So I feel like for most short story collections—and for this one—we’re working toward different goals. I want it to be a rainbow and a capsule reviewer wants to call it orange. It’s unavoidable.
 
But, to be specific, when someone says these stories are “dark” or “gritty” or about “outsiders,” they’re wrong. Some are about those things, sure, but they’re also about middle-class moms and falling in love and small towns and ghosts. Some are difficult, some are depressing, but they’re also playful, sometimes melancholy.
 
CE: There’s an intense level of description throughout the book that runs from people (“She did have a scar on her stomach, but it was going in the wrong direction.”) to settings (“My door is too wide for the doorway, but also too short.”) to smells (“...that pulpy hamster-cage odour that develops when no air circulates.”). Does this kind of observation come naturally to you, or is it something you’ve had to cultivate? At what point in your writing process does description come in?
KB: When I describe something, it’s usually just a manifestation of what’s particularly vivid to me during the act of imagination. Some pieces pass by, unimportant, but sometimes there’s an element that, if made real by an image, will convey something to the audience that I can’t otherwise communicate. I feel like there’s no reason to slow things down unless you have something to show, so I’m content to use short sentences and ordinary description up until there’s something I want to share, something vivid or challenging, or something I’ve seen in real life that I can’t get out of my head.
 
As for its origins, I guess it’s something that comes naturally. I don’t know many writers who aren’t astute observers, so it’s probably part of the package for most of us. Paying attention counts, always, but it counts double if you’re the kind of weird person who walks around, trying to save up enough thoughts and ideas throughout the day so that they can arrange them in a little word mosaic when you finally get home.
 
CE: One review of Bad Things Happen on Goodreads states that “there was nothing to really RELATE to, as it was a level of wallowing and belly crawling reserved for thee sheer garbage of society,” which I found interesting and a bit funny, if inaccurate—the book is actually quite relatable. Does it matter to you how your work is read? Do you even care if readers find your characters relatable?
 
KB: Goodreads reviews are a laff riot, and that is definitely a good one. Goodreads was created for people to promote and share their love of books, but has instead morphed into a weird literary Youtube comments section. Me, Kevin Hardcastle, and Andrew Sullivan all got attacked by the same person (a troll who didn’t write reviews for any other books, except for ours), saying that we were “offensive.” I love that review. It’s a badge of honour to me:

Even more offensive characters. Title makes me think this is young adult literature.
Author's bio, if it's real, is hilarious. The Great Gatsby himself is now writing fiction.
 
Do I want the work to be relatable? Yes, absolutely. I want to make accessible work that doesn’t presuppose a certain level of education, or experience. I want characters who, even if you can’t imagine being them or in their situation, you can understand their motivations and actions, and how it might feel to be them. But do I worry about being misread? Not really. I can’t worry about this stuff. The vast wasteland of self-obsessed, childish and insane Goodreads contributors is a great example of why I shouldn’t.
 
CE: Work is a recurring theme throughout the collection, from service industry to petty criminality, with many characters barely maintaining or on the cusp of losing jobs they don’t particularly enjoy. If you weren’t, like the rest of us, financially dependent on working, would you still work anyway?
KB: Well, writing is work, and I don’t plan on ever stopping that, so yes. But if you’re asking whether I’d continue doing a different job as well, the answer is probably yes. If money was no longer a concern, I think I’d like to do community work—volunteer a men’s shelter (likely the one where a lot of my customers come from), or something like that. I would do that now, if I had more time, and routinely feel shitty about myself for not helping out in that way.
 
I will say, though, that I really do love bartending. I love when it’s dead and I get to talk with and meet different people, and when it’s not, I love the pressure of being busy and trying to do everything perfectly, trying to solve five problems at once. I love being behind the bar, making drinks, taking care of people, making sure they’re safe and no one’s bothering them. I’m not convinced it’s something I would ever be able to fully leave behind. Throughout the years my home bar has gotten bigger and bigger and now I’m at the point where I’m always ready for a spontaneous forty-person party (which has never happened).
 
CE: You’ve been posting some older stories—ones that didn’t appear in Bad Things Happen—on your website for free, with write-ups about where they came from and why they didn’t make the cut. When you look at your older work, what do you see? What has changed in your writing between then and now?
KB: I think the stories I put on the website are good ones. The truly terrible, unreadable stuff will never be shared, but the ones I put up are so old that I don’t have any bad feelings about them whatsoever. I find if you’ve put something aside, it’s easy to hate it while it’s relatively fresh, but as it ages, it solidifies. It’s no longer malleable, and your feelings about how to fix it, or what ought to have happened vanish. You’re not thinking about the same things, or in the same way anymore. So it just becomes inert. A story you couldn’t write now, because your concerns are different, your life is different. The materials are out of stock, the methodology lost. I don’t know how I would go about making another “Boardwalk at Midnight” or “Gorilla Painting.”
 
What I see in those stories is a lot of uncertainty about the future, a lot of anxiety about love and career, a preoccupation with—what I think the back of the book says—“who we are, and what we want to be.” I think that last part will always be what I’m interested in, but the big difference with what I’ve been doing lately is that I’ve moved away from smaller, more personal stories, and tried to branch out into the more complicated and even stranger world of everybody else. The story “The Narrow Passage”—about peering into the naked lives of people by what they leave behind (in the trash)—was my newest story in the Bad Things Happen, and the one that most embodies these ideas.
 
CE: You’ve been working on a couple of novels and some much longer short stories. How does the process of writing long prose differ from writing short prose?
KB: This is obvious, I’m sure, but it takes a lot longer to do a big one than a little one. The form is different but the process isn’t really. I think, in some ways, longer stories can be trickier, because they make you think you have room that you probably don’t. It’s easy to think you’re taking time to explore something when really, you’re just meandering. So in writing a 10,000–15,000 word story, there’s a lot more editing, a lot more drafts, a lot more ghost passages floating around, unsure of their place until the very end when it all comes together.
 
CE: You’ve had a successful few years, with over a dozen stories appearing in journals and anthologies, and now a well-received collection under your belt. At what point in your career, if at all, did you become comfortable describing your self as a writer?
KB: I am a writer, but it’s not something I’d ever bring up at work. Even the copies of my book I have behind the bar are for people in the know who ask about it. I’ll identify as a writer when I’m in the right place, but otherwise I think going around talking about it is weird. Why would you do that unless you want attention for it? I don’t. I think focusing on the author is a mistake, too. Who we are isn’t interesting, what we make is.
 
The book has criminals and drug addicts and heartache and a ten-foot tall god in green robes. It has garbage collector-hillbilly feuds and little girls breaking into houses. It tracks the journey of a window-cleaner who becomes a telemarketing fraudster in Montreal, then returns home to absolve himself by becoming an exterminator in rural PEI. I can talk about that all day long. But me, and my role in it is boring. It’s like if you had a machine that could see people’s dreams, but instead you just look at the poor sap quivering on the bed in his jammies.

Wow, look, he’s really sweaty. Look at his eyelids. His hands keep opening and closing.

Turn on the Dream-O-Tron, for God’s sake! Let’s have a look in there! 

KRIS BERTIN
Bad Things Happen
Biblioasis, 2016

Description from the publisher:

The characters in Bad Things Happen—professors, janitors, webcam models, small-time criminals—are between things. Between jobs and marriages, states of sobriety, joy and anguish; between who they are and who they want to be. Kris Bertin’s unforgettable debut introduces us to people at the tenuous moment before everything in their lives change, for better or worse.

Christopher Evans’ fiction, non-fiction, and poetry have appeared in Grain, Feathertale, Joyland, The Canary Press, The Moth, and others. He lives in Vancouver, BC, where he is the Prose Editor of PRISM international magazine.