Ben Greenman Talks About Being a Brooklyn Writer Who Lives and Writes in Brooklyn
Do you think there is such a thing as a Brooklyn writer?
That’s a good question that doesn’t have a good answer, at least from me. Many people here (most?) arrived from elsewhere, and not because something specific about the place drew them. It’s a more general appeal: nice neighborhoods, (for a time) affordable housing, good bars and coffee shops and restaurants and parks and then, a little later in life, good schools. The greatest appeal of Brooklyn, or at least the neighborhood I know, is probably its like-mindedness. People have relevantly similar values (you don’t see lots of picketing against gay marriage) and, generally, a respect for culture, whether it’s music or art or film or literature. Of course, I have also just described a potentially suffocating prison of sameness and secular sanctimony, and there’s some of that, too. Maybe it relates to what I said above: because I didn’t grow up here, and because I know the neighborhood mainly as a place that values and encourages creativity, I like it because it lets me write about other places.
Do you think geography is less and less important because of technology?
It’s more and more different. I talk to people every day via email, or see people’s ideas via Twitter, and most of the time they’re not geographically nearby. In that sense, it has to be less binding, though not less important.
So what is the role of Brooklyn, then, in your writing experience?
The other day I was bike riding with my older son, and rode down Third Avenue, underneath the Gowanus Expressway. At one point, we stopped on a nondescript industrial corner. Some of the signs were in Spanish. Some were in Chinese. There were young couples of almost every racial background crossing the street, or coming out of stores, and at least four languages within earshot. I can’t say that I felt located in Brooklyn, exactly, but I felt located at some crossroads, some place where many, many lives were taking place simultaneously. It’s impossible not to pick up a little bit of energy from every person passing by. That energy coalesces into questions. What’s that young Russian mom saying to her daughter? Why does that Jamaican guy seem so exercised, and is that a living crab strapped to his bike? Did that older African-American woman who is laughing on the telephone just say that R. Kelly is “the Billy Wilder of soul music”? And questions—or at least questions like that—are the beginning of fiction.