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Brian Prousky

Brian Prousky spent most of his life as two distinct people. The first held a day job and raised a family and was public and sociable. The second ruminated over sentences and wrote books in secret and dreamed of a living a literary life. They shared little in common, mostly their obsessions – with Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Mozart, Saul Bellow, Roberto Bolano, tennis and hockey.

Somehow, summoning up a kind of courage or resolve he’d assumed was absent from his DNA, the first Brian Prousky left his day job, revealed his secret and dedicated himself full-time to writing. And the two Brian Prouskys became one. Now the author of four novels, Auden Triller (Is A Killer), God Might Forgive Gershwin Burr, The Anna Geller Invention and Healing Brian Esseintes, as well as a collection of short stories, Jupiter the Stupider, and two books of poetry, Body of Winter and Meeting Poems, he lives and works in Toronto, where most of his characters, who struggle with secret and often conflicted lives of their own, and who never quite fit in, do as well.

IN THE AUTHOR’S WORDS

Author interview

Responses submitted between 18 September 2022 and 19 September 2022.

What inspired you to start writing?

I've already sent you a completed interview form (hope you like it). Thought I'd send you another picture just in case the one I already sent you is too bleak for your liking. You can choose the one you think would be best. Thanks. Brian.

Who are some of your favorite authors and books?

Every word written by Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, Saul Bellow and Roberto Bolano. I could probably find joy in reading notes they left for repairmen or their shopping lists. Besides them, I keep going back to Elias Canetti, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Don DeLillo, Joan Didion, Thomas Pynchon, Cormac McCarthy, Nicole Krauss and John Irving, to name only a handful. Most recently, I reread Elias Canetti’s Auto-Da-Fe and Thomas Pynchon’s V. They’re both sublime.

What would you like to tell readers who have just discovered your books, but haven't read one yet?

That they will be experience something exhilarating, teetering between the bizarre and deadly serious. That they will delight in the unfolding of the lives of absurdly eccentric, flawed, self-critical, heartbreaking, redemption-seeking characters shaken by past experience and its present reverberations. That they will be spellbound by odd and unexplained behaviours that are ultimately explained. By mysteries that are ultimately solved. That they will be exhilarated by stories that twist and turn and surprise and where fantastic predicaments are the norm. And that they will dance joyfully to the unique rhythm and beat of the writing.

Who is the favorite character you created, and how did they come into being?

If I had to pick one, it would be Auden Triller. He’s easily the most organic character I’ve written. One I poured my soul into. Which is just another way of saying I poured everything I love and hate about myself into him.

What are your future plans as a writer?

I’m currently writing another novel, with the working title, Uriel Through Eleanor. It’s about a man in his eighties, a veteran of WWII, now writing a memoire. And about a woman, his paid transcriber, who repeatedly exasperates him by repeatedly changing what he dictates to her, and who, unbeknownst to him, appears to have a profound connection to his past.