Tim Brown: Walking Man
Book Club Chat

February 17, 2009. Queenie D and Tim Brown discuss his satirical novel,
Walking Man.

Book Club Chat: Interview with Tim Brown

How did you come up with Brian Walker's story?

I wish I could tell you that I experienced some divinely inspired episode that caused the story to enter my head fully formed. But the reality is much more prosaic.

Back in the late 1990s after my first novel, Deconstruction Acres, was published, I was on the lookout for subject matter for my next novel. Following that old adage that you should write about what you know, I determined that the two things I knew about most and liked to do best were recreational walking and zine publishing. So I decided to write a novel that combined these two things. What resulted was a character, Brian Walker, whose appreciation of walking eventually causes him to publish a zine focused on the pedestrian life titled "Walking Man." In his zine he recounts his adventures walking through the mean streets of Chicago circa 1989-92. Readers naturally focus on the zine-related content in my novel, but I'd say there's an equal amount of pro-pedestrian rhetoric contained in there, too, along with meditations on the spiritual aspects to walking. Brian shares with me the opinion that walking is one of the single best imagination-enhancing activities available to writers and artists. And it's free, too.

Book Club Chat: Interview with Tim Brown

Tell us about your involvement with the zine world.

My initial experience with zines began in 1982 when I started publishing Tomorrow Magazine, which was a low-budget poetry journal that lasted until 1999. Tomorrow proclaimed to "publish tomorrow's poetry today" and initially focused on Chicago-area poets. Later, it went national, attracting some reasonably well-known contributors of a decidedly un-academic bent.

Up until the early 1990s I wasn't even aware that I was publishing a "zine." But I gradually recognized that the production methods I was using were similar to how zines were produced and distributed – layout was done on a computer, editions of two or three hundred were photocopied at the local copy shop, binding was done by hand using mailing tape, and the finished product was distributed to a few bookstores, cafés and record shops around town.

When I met some people in Chicago plugged into the national zine scene around 1993, I discovered that I was the publisher of a "poetry zine," just one type of the myriad varieties of zines available, including music zines, UFO zines, tattoo zines, riot grrrl zines, you name it. Eventually, I joined these people in planning a national zine convention, the Underground Press Conference, held at De Paul University from 1994-96. At this point I became immersed in the zine scene – I wrote articles for other zines, reviewed zines and collected zines. Alas, with the advent of the web, especially blogs, the energy behind zines largely moved online. But there are still a handful of diehard zinesters out there who publish their artistic output in print format.

Book Club Chat: Interview with Tim Brown

It's hard to imagine that life in Chicago is as you describe it in the late 90s. It seems so depressing. I can't imagine people taking old furniture out of the streets to use and then "returning it to the alleys from whence it came." You lived there during that time, was it really like this?

Well, like any big city, Chicago had (and has) its rich neighborhoods and poor neighborhoods. When I first moved to the city in 1985, I lived in a loft on the Near West Side that was in the middle of the meat-packing district. My roommate and I were the only permanent indoor residents of the neighborhood for many square blocks. He played in a band, and our home (I use that term loosely) doubled as a rehearsal space. A number of people lived outside our building, homeless people and other scavenging types attracted to meat scraps and other meat byproducts readily available in dumpsters situated in back alleys and on street corners.

Later, I moved to a neighborhood called Ukrainian Village that was largely made up of the working poor and their gang-member children. It was Latin Kings territory, and I constantly witnessed drug dealing on my street and heard stray gunshots at night. One time I was home watching TV and heard a scratching noise coming from my back door. When I opened the door, a young teenager ran away and I saw he had carved the Latin Kings logo into it with a knife.

A lot of my peers – meaning artists, writers and musicians, people like Brian Walker – had similar experiences during this time living in marginal neighborhoods. We worked at low-paying jobs while we pursued our art, and it was where we could afford to live. We turned out to be the advance guard towards gentrification until we ourselves were displaced by other, richer residents buying up and rehabbing cheap housing in the hope it would appreciate in value. My old loft is now fully renovated and located in a chic neighborhood about two blocks from Oprah Winfrey's television studio, and Ukrainian Village is filled with homes and condos that these days cost a half-million dollars or more.

Book Club Chat: Interview with Tim Brown

What made you want to write a metafictional story? Why not just write a complete fictional novel?

I take it you're referring to the format of the novel, which takes the shape of a biography of Brian Walker, complete with quotations, footnotes and a biographer/narrator. This, actually, was how I solved a difficult technical problem. Originally, I had intended to tell a straightforward story about a young man who rises from humble origins to become America's foremost zine publisher and a noted pedestrian-rights advocate – an ironic take, if you will, on the Horatio Alger storyline.

But I quickly was confronted with the fact that to tell a dedicated zine publisher's story fully, I would have to include excerpts from his zine writing, which led me next to how his writing was received, which then led me to include other characters describing his life in their own words. Envisioning his story as a biography that incorporated narration, extensive quotation from his zine, and the words of others, whether from interviews, reviews or news stories, made the most sense formally. If I ever had a "eureka moment" regarding the genesis of the book, it was then, when I resolved to make it a mock biography of a fictional character.

Book Club Chat: Interview with Tim Brown

Is Brian a hero in his own right?

Wow, that's a hard question! I guess it depends on how you define "hero." If you're referring to Homer's Odysseus or Shakespeare's Henry the Fifth, then probably not. Brian Walker doesn't engage in any heroic exploits like those characters. If anything, he's more of a modern hero in how he's really pretty ordinary like, say, Leopold Bloom. Or maybe Brian should be considered an "anti-hero" whose creation owes a lot to Holden Caulfield's existence.

Like Caulfield, he's a bit of a crank who has a bone to pick with society. Besides discussing in his zine the spiritual dimensions of walking, he just as often offers prescriptions to other pedestrians, and especially to automobile drivers, on how to behave properly when out in public. He occasionally acts heroically, for example, when opposing in deed and later in court Richard Neely, the character who almost runs him over with his car. But, at the same time, the media exploit Brian's notoriety and build him up into a more significant figure than he probably deserves.

This is definitely a theme in my book: to show the ridiculous lengths the mass media go to in order to elevate personalities out of all proportion to their levels of accomplishment. We constantly have "heroes" of dubious merit shoved down our throats by popular culture, the sports world and the news media. It cheapens the concept, really.

Book Club Chat: Interview with Tim Brown

My least favorite character is Layla and I'm sure you meant her to be! However, her rejection of Brian's proposal inevitably helped him along his path. Was this intentional?

There are a number of plot twists and turns in Walking Man that propel Brian into the paths he takes in life. Layla, his difficult law-firm boss, causes him to make a decision that ultimately turns out for the best. You could also make a case that Brian's father's death, his move to Chicago, his relationship with Tracy Minister, his girlfriend, and even bad oysters determine his fate either by themselves or in conjunction with other events. Any good novel contains friendly or malign characters, positive or negative influences, situations within or outside a character's control, happy or unhappy coincidences and so forth, which steer a character to a certain outcome. Real life is also like that.

I disagree with those authors who claim that their characters "act by themselves" or "behave independently of the author's control." They say that, I think, to make the creative process sound mysterious or something. I'm of the belief that imaginary characters may respond to imagined situations based on their (imagined) make-ups, but the characters and situations are products of the author's mind and, therefore, they are the result of the author's conscious intention.

Book Club Chat: Interview with Tim Brown

What's next on your list of things to write?

Thanks for asking. I have a novel being published in 2010 by Gival Press, a small publisher in Virginia. That seems to be my fate: to publish with small or independent presses that allow for more quirky, offbeat material than trade publishers in New York. Titled American Renaissance, the book is a comic historical novel set in 1830s America and contains a mix of fictional characters and historical personages.

My current writing project is a novel set in the Great Depression and is titled American Scene. Another comic historic novel, it's about a pair of folk-song and folk-art collectors. I've been thinking about writing a whole series of novels based on the American experience set in various historical periods. I wish this book was further along, because it's becoming extremely timely given the nation's current economic problems and comparisons of the Depression era with today.

It's been a pleasure communicating with you, Book Club Queen. I truly appreciate your interest!

Book Club Chat: Interview with Tim Brown

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