Abby Bardi: Author Interview by Kat Magendie

Abby Bardi, born and raised in Chicago, has worked as a singing waitress in Washington, D.C., an English teacher in Japan and England, a performer on England’s country-and-western circuit, and most recently, as a professor at Prince George’s Community College. She is married with two grown children and lives in Ellicott City, Maryland.

R&T: In The Book of Fred, you’ve created a strange religious sect called The Fredians, where Mary Fred Anderson is isolated until the tragic deaths from preventable diseases of two of her brothers sends her on a journey to live with a foster family. What prompted you to create the Fredians?

BARDI: I’ve always been interested in cults. Specifically, what prompted the Fredians was that I saw a news show on TV about a religious group that refused to give their children medical care, and it stuck in my mind. I never found out who they were, so I had to invent them. It always amazes me what horrors people will perpetrate for the sake of an ideology, so I think everything about the Fredians is plausible—well, except for the thing about fish [as part of their religion, the Fredians eat mostly fish]”

R&T: Mary Fred changes the lives of her new foster family, so in an upside down ironic way, the saviors become the saved. Did you set out to do this? Or did your characters demand it be this way?

BARDI: I really didn’t know what Mary Fred would do—I just started hearing her voice in my head one day. But I was happy that she was such a good influence on everyone; I think she was even rather helpful to me.

R&T: You arranged the novel into sections from the different points of view of your characters. How difficult (or easy?) was it to tap into each character’s voice? And, whose point of view did you enjoy writing from the most?

BARDI: It was a lot easier than sustaining a narrative from one person’s point of view, actually. You can move around more, and you never get bored. I suppose I enjoyed writing Roy the most, since he is the most troubled of the characters, and in some ways, his voice is the most like mine.

R&T: It would seem fun to create this “otherworld;” the one Fred Brown founded, where all the followers wear brown, trace F B into the air when his name is spoken, and fear the coming of the “Big Cat”—a cataclysmic explosion. Did you have a delicious sense of enjoyable freedom with creating this world?

BARDI: Well, sort of. Creating an otherworld is a rather awesome responsibility, I think. I’m doing it in a novel I’m writing now, and it’s not easy. The world of the Fredians has its own internal logic, and I had to be careful to think the way they do; it’s a little confining, actually—much easier to write about a world one knows.

R&T: You also love to write music and have written over thirty songs. Does your music inspire your fiction? Or the other way around?

BARDI: I’ve written thirty or so good songs, but have written lots of other ones. My music and my fiction are completely independent of each other; I’ve never been able to get them to overlap in the slightest, though it would be fun if they did. (Did I say “my music”? Ick!)

R&T: You are an English professor—do you feel as if you are held to a “higher standard” in your writing? And if so, how does this affect your writing?

BARDI: I know lots of people who teach writing well who don’t do a lot of writing themselves, and conversely, I’ve known people who were terrific writers but didn’t teach very effectively. I think they’re different skills. I do get a little uncomfortable when my students read my writing, but mostly, they seem not to, so I don’t have to worry.

R&T: What are the steps you took to get from finished book to printed copy? And, is there anything you would do differently if you had it to do again?

BARDI: The Book of Fred was one of those miracles of publishing where everything went right. I wrote it quickly, found a great agent almost immediately, and she sold it to the second person who read it. So I wouldn’t do anything differently there. I would probably have done a million things differently after the book was published, but that’s another story. By the way, my pub date was 9/11, which made the publicity situation for it a bit weird.

R&T: Do you have favorite books or movies that inspire you?

BARDI: I’m writing a dissertation right now on nineteenth-century British literature, and that’s all I’ve read for about five years. It was all I ever read before that, come to think of it. I really love Dickens and Shakespeare, which makes me one of those classic old-school English teachers, I guess. I used to read all kinds of contemporary writers, but none of them are contemporary any more. As to movies, for the past two years I’ve been obsessed with Hindi cinema, i.e., Bollywood, and that’s all I ever watch. I don’t know if the movies inspire me in terms of writing, but I love them, and they inspire me in terms of life. There’s something colorful and joyous about them that bleeds into everyday life—sort of like Dickens on steroids.

R&T: What is the writing life to you? Or, how important is your writing to your sense of well-being?

BARDI: I have what I’ve come to refer to as a writing disorder; I have to write all the time. I think it’s a kind of mania, but it seems harmless enough.

R&T: Do you have a certain time and place you prefer to write?

BARDI: I write every morning at my computer—it’s the only time and place that works for me.

R&T: Do you ever get the old so-called “writer’s block,” and if so, what do you do to overcome it?

BARDI: I almost never get writer’s block, and I theoretically don’t believe in it; having said that, I have a bit of a case of it right now with the thing I’m working on. I think people only ever experience writer’s block if they have inadequately prepared for what they’re working on and have no idea where it’s going, and that’s definitely the case with me at the moment.

R&T: Since many of our R&T readers are also writers, what advice or insights can you give them?

BARDI: Hmmn. I guess the most useful thing I would advise anyone is to write for its own sake, i.e., for the sake of art, rather than with thoughts of publication. It’s better for the writing, and it’s better for one’s sanity.

For more on Abby Bardi visit her website at: http://www.abbybardi.com/

Read Kat Magendie’s review of The Book of Fred.

Kat Magendie is a freelance writer/editor, and Senior Editor/Newsletter Editor at The Rose & Thorn. She has written, is writing, and will ever-more be writing novels, short stories, essays, and a few sad but hopeful poems. She has been published here and there. Visit her at www.kathrynmagendie.com.

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