Interview with Mark SaFranko

In 2025, I’ve had a chance to read Mark SaFranko’s Nowhere Near Hollywood and reread The Suicide. At the same time, a series of author interviews I placed at When Falls the Coliseum are no longer visible online, so I thought I’d share this one and others here. This interview was originally published in October 2010. Enjoy.

Interview with Mark Safranko

Mark Safranko has led a writer’s life. This fall, his Hating Olivia, will be his first novel published by a major American imprint, but the book was out fifteen years ago in England.

My understanding is that you have fought wars as a writer as far as getting into and then staying in print. Discounting the HarperCollins deal for Hating Olivia, could you describe what you feel are some of your greatest successes and failures as a writer so far?

A really good question, Alex, and one nobody has asked me before. Yes, “a war” best describes it. Hating Olivia is 15 years old and just now finding an outlet in the US, so it has been a protracted battle. I would call my greatest successes the publication of three Max Zajack novels and a story collection in England and three of the Zajack books in French my greatest successes since they were the books that got me an audience and attention, at least in Europe, after many, many years. What that says about the Europeans I’ll leave to you. My greatest failure? Well, there’ve been many, but maybe the most egregious was my failure to get a play about the life of Henry Miller produced. It went through years of readings and revisions -- the typical nightmare theater process -- and sits in a drawer of my desk. I’ve given up hope it will ever see the light of day. There are others, too, but I don’t have enough time. Life is mostly a matter of failure. Every once in a very great while something works out.

Your writing is often connected to that of Charles Bukowski, so I’d like to know how you feel about that, and also, what you feel are the strengths and weaknesses of Buk’s work?

Well, it’s misleading since I count so many other writers as influences: Henry Miller, Georges Simenon, Knut Hamsun, Pat Highsmith, Mohammed Mrabet, to name just a very few. There are really lots more. Bukowski, too, and I’m flattered that anyone would make that connection, but I think we come from a somewhat different place. That said, of course I love Bukowski’s work. To me his strengths are his humor and the fact that he’s really a philosopher. I don’t see him so much as a poet as I do a philosopher. And of course he’s completely addictive. For me a weakness is his more “literary” poetry, the pieces that always show up here and there. I have no idea what the hell he’s talking about in those poems—and I’ve read Proust.

In an online interview, you described the “monthly nut” as a huge obstacle to writing. Maybe to life itself. I’m pretty sure that implied a mortgage and most likely a wife and kids. And worse yet, I’m pretty sure this scene is being played out in New Jersey. So basically, what we need to know is how in hell did you ever write anything at all?

Yes, these days that scene is indeed being played out in Jersey. But I have an understanding wife, and she tends to leave me alone as long as I hold up my end of things. Same goes for my son. But to answer your question about how I did any writing, it’s really a matter of minutes, and I’m not being facetious. I recognized a long time ago that most of our time is wasted. If you want to write and you only have a matter of minutes every day, you have to use what you’ve got. The minutes add up and so does the work. You end up doing the best you can. It’s all you can do most of the time.

And also, how do you feel about some of the great writers who just walked off the job when it came to raising families? I’m thinking of Sherwood Anderson and then more recent writers like Saul Bellow, Richard Yates, and Fred Exley who were sort of in and out, but often out of their children’s lives. Is it possible to be a good writer and a good father?

That’s another damned good question and one I’ve pondered from time to time. I’ve done it—walked off the job—a couple of times. In the long run the dramatic gesture doesn’t add up to much, really. If you’re not “covered”—meaning you’re not flush with money—you’ll end up back on some kind of job sooner than later if you’re on the right side of the law. Anyway, to create anything at all you need food and a place to sleep and so forth. Otherwise, you’ll feel like shit and not be able to do anything.

As far as kids go, why have them if you don’t want to deal with them? Of course, lots of so-called artists don’t. Maybe they’re better off. Maybe they don’t suffer from a guilty conscience. I think lots of damage is left in the wake of the absent artist-parent. Again, you try to do the best you can. It’s my experience that kids actually need their parents to be around. Whether or not we’re good at it, who knows? There are probably one or two around.

Are you concerned that the physical book is going to become the latest casualty of electronic progress? I just heard that e-book sales jumped 118 percent from last year, and I’m wondering when the bookstores disappear en masse. Tell me I’m wrong. Please.

It’s interesting. I think that it’s the corporate monster forcing the e-book down our throats, like they forced the eight-track tape and CDs down our throats. And the reason is simple. They want to make money. Those reading devices cost lots of money. You can’t share the books, so that’s more profit. Books won’t have to be stored anymore, which will save the corporate monster even more. Not a single person I know wants to read off those damned devices, yet they’re being pushed at us relentlessly. People want to hold an old-fashioned book in their hands when they’re lying in bed or sitting on the throne. They want to mark up the pages. They want to smell paper and admire artwork. But in the long run the monster wins. He always wins. Books and bookstores will go. It’s just a matter of time.

What do we need to know before we read Hating Olivia?

Well, like I said, that it’s 15 years old. That the material is from an earlier period in my life. That it took 10 years after the writing to get published by a small press in England and then went on to get published in France. I’m really coming to the U.S. by way of Europe. I’m taking the long way around. Also, that I’d been writing for a long time by the time the book was published. And that the vast majority of my work hasn’t been seen.

Mark Safranko’s Hating Olivia arrives in November.