The author of New York Waters sat down to talk with Writer to Writer about what he's seen and heard ...
JD: Could you tell us first a little about your background as a journalist and what sort of stories you covered for the New York Times?
BG: I don’t really consider myself a journalist. The term implies someone with a lot more dedication to breaking news, ferreting out the truth from reluctant witnesses and so on, than I have. I’m far more of a touchy-feely human-interest writer. I like to write about people I admire, people doing things with their lives that are brave or unusual and generally quite different from anything I could imagine myself doing—and who are happy to talk to me. I was lucky enough to break into the Times when it still published its Sunday city section, which was a haven for freelance writers drawn to stories like that. It was an entity within the larger paper that allowed for a more impressionistic or literary bent. My first story was a profile of my old mailman, who’d been walking the same route in Brooklyn for 25 years, and had seen it change beyond recognition. It sort of set the tone for the other stuff I did, which were often profiles — there’s something about reading a profile that to me is still the greatest treat: you get a person’s life compressed into a few thousand words or less, and as a writer there’s the thrill of recording the patterns of how people talk, what words they use, what they say and don’t say. I was lucky enough to get to write a number of such extended profiles.
JD: Something about the combination of text and photos in New York Waters conjured up one of my favorite books, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Could you tell us about the conception of New York Waters and what it was like collaborating with photographer Randy Duchaine?
BG: Randy and I were brought together by a book packager originally, who had long wanted to do a book on New York’s waterfront. His original idea was very high-concept — a beautiful, massive, coffee table book with end papers and so on, and that was only going to concentrate on Manhattan. In the end, he died about a year into the project and we both assumed it was doomed, but in fact it allowed us to really make the book we wanted to make, which included all five boroughs of the city, and was far more about the working waterfront and its characters than the original book would have been. We were very lucky that Globe Pequot, the publishers, let us make exactly the book we wanted to make, without any interference. It was a very good partnership between Randy and myself, because we found we were both very much drawn to the same kind of subjects. We both wanted to get as far away as possible from any sort of coffee table book, and we wanted to capture something of the almost-vanished working waterfront. What was interesting, though, was how differently we went about our aims. Writers are sneaky types, especially profilers. We like to sidle up to our suspects, pretend we’re not there, listen in like a fly on the wall. Photographers have to be the opposite — they have to jostle their subjects, manipulate them, be relentless, because that’s how they get what they need to get. It took me a while to realize that. And Randy was very open about his process. I would literally look down his camera sometimes as he set up a shot, and he would read my drafts, and we’d spend huge amounts of time talking about what we felt about our subjects ands wanted to reveal about them. It was the first time I’d ever truly worked with a photographer, rather than have them come in after the fact to take pictures for a story of mine.
JD: You are working on a few film projects now, yes? What can you tell us about the company you are working with and the projects themselves?
BG: I’m working on two film projects, though both are in the early stages. One is a documentary based on a profile I originally did a couple of years ago for the Times. It was about a group of Italian-American guys from Bensonhurst who still get together to celebrate their friendship thirty years on, even after death, divorce, kids and so on. The photographer I worked with on the original story, Neal Slavin, is also a film director and we both knew we had to try to make a film of these extraordinary people. Unfortunately, we wasted a lot of time thinking it should be a feature film, before we realized the obvious, that this incredible material was just staring us in the face and all we needed to do was get out of its way. We have a small amount of footage and about a million pages of notes, and we’re talking to a seasoned documentary producer soon who we hope will be able to help us with financing. The other project, which is a bit more advanced, is a feature comedy set in New York City during the height of the Vietnam war. Neal and a producer he works with at a production company asked me to turn a short essay published in Playboy 30 years ago that they owned the rights to into a film treatment. It’s now doing the rounds of some film financing companies in New York. I’d never done any writing like that before, and I found to my surprise I really enjoyed it. The original essay is incredibly funny and I realized my love of real-people dialogue came in very helpful. There’s less of a difference than I had first thought between the different modes of writing.
JD: What books (and films) have had the greatest influence on you as a writer?
BG: The books that mean the most to me are those written in what I suppose you’d call the “plain style.” I love Orwell, the British travel writer Norman Lewis, the novelists Richard Yates and Tobias Wolfe, and essayists like Anne Fadiman, Cynthia Ozick and Philip Lopate, and of course the usual suspects for a profiler like me, Joseph Mitchell and Studs Terkel. And the films I love tend to reflect that simplicity—John Huston’s The Dead, Glengarry Glen Ross, and more recently Frozen River and Wendy and Lucy. I have tried and failed to love the great stylists of our age, Quentin Tarantino, David Foster Wallace or Martin Amis, and I think some of my friends despair of me because of this. What’s interesting about working with Neal on these films is that he’s a far more cinematic and bolder stylist than I am, though at the same time we find ourselves absolutely in agreement about the material we’re working on and how we feel about it. We’re both documentarians at heart. It will be interesting to see where and how our styles merge if these films develop further.
JD: What's your writing practice like? When you are feeling stuck do you push through or take a break and work on another piece?
BG: With two kids and a dog its really hard to establish a regular routine. I’ve been writing long enough to know I can only write in the morning, though. After that, it’s editing or phone calls. When I’m working on a piece I become utterly obsessive and can’t break away from it to try something else until it’s complete, which is a flaw I wish I could overcome. What helps me most is my diary, which I’ve been doing for about 15 years now. Not only does it help connect the brain to the fingers, but it brings my life back to me unexpectedly. It’s amazing what we forget — about 99% of our experience — so to retrieve a little of that feels like a gift.
Thanks, Ben!
For more see Ben's website, www.bgibberd.comhttp://www.bgibberd.com and for more writerly tips see mine: http://bangthekeys.com or check out my book, Bang the Keys.
