A conversation with Chris Benjamin about his new book, Boy With a Problem
Readers often come to short fiction with a grocery list of demands. The genre, after all, is best-suited to writers with lion hearts and exceptional crafting skills. Fans of the form, therefore, want boldness, energy, surprises, sophisticated emotional content—and stories, please, really fresh and original stories—all within the smallest of gift boxes.
Boy With a Problem, by Halifax-based author, editor, and freelance journalist Chris Benjamin, delivers all of the above. As well, some of the 12 stories in the collection, nine of which were previously published in literary anthologies and magazines, will make you blink with surprise, or laugh out loud at an unexpected turn of phrase. Others will make you sit quietly, wondering what a life of certain parameters and events would feel like, under your very own skin.
Asked about the title of the book, also the lead story in the collection, Benjamin says, “We needed a catchy, unique title, and I found the phrase in that first story. I thought it nicely summarized the basis for a short fiction—what is the problem at the heart of each story.”
The variety of the themes in the collection is notable.
“All our problems are a mosaic of the world’s problems,” says Benjamin. “Environmental issues, addictions, how we treat each other, ourselves, and animals. Sometimes it’s right, sometimes it’s not.” He believes the answers come from within the individual. “Respect starts at home.”
Benjamin never met a point of view he didn’t want to take on and explore. He writes of boys and girls, adult men and women—all living lives variously affected by loss, conflicted or obsessive sexuality, worries about the future and our abuse of the natural world and its creatures, and the search for love, kindness, and healing.
Other characters want to live their politics—in the most defiant and painful of ways. Mulch glue and skin, as it turns out, are not ever meant to go together.
“Ideas just come to me,” say Benjamin, who has authored two works of non-fiction, Indian School Road, and Eco-Innovators, and a novel, Drive-by Saviours. “I need to get those ideas out of my head. It’s satisfying to tell their stories.”
Photo by Niki Davison
Some of his stories take a day to create—and a year to finish. “Every word counts,” he says, which is true for all good writing, but is an imperative for short fiction, because there’s no room for flab or to falter; and the writer still has to go deep.
“I want to create an immersive experience for the reader,” says Benjamin. Then he laughs. “Most of my ideas come from a ‘Wouldn’t it be weird if…?’”
Benjamin himself has always read short fiction and loved it.
“Done well,” he says, “it has all the power of a novel, and its impact lingers. It can be so potent.”
Benjamin has developed an interesting psychic process to write short fiction.
“When I go there, I am the character—then I eliminate myself. So, there’s some ‘me’ in every character.”
Perhaps more than anything, he continues, “It’s a psychological transformation, informed by knowledge that is not necessarily first-hand knowledge. It’s a balancing act.”
The stories also contain atmosphere in generous quantity.
“I love writing the senses,” says Benjamin. “Short fiction gives you the space to describe these things to the reader. It also affords more room for the sensual than the novel does.”
When asked, Benjamin admits to a favourite story, with the elegiac title of, “How Far Away From Me She’s Gone,” which features two points of view: a father, and his young daughter, who has been raped by her ex-boyfriend.
“It was hard to get it right,” says Benjamin, the married father of a daughter and son. “I guess the biggest revelation as I wrote the story was when I realized it wasn’t about rape; it was about the father and daughter’s relationship.”
This story is suffused with love and complex emotional landscapes. As Benjamin says, “When one person in a family is hurt, it affects everyone in that family, and connected groups.”
For this reader, “A Spot of Red,” the last story in the collection, was a favourite. In it, a young man experiences his first Christmas after the loss of his father. The tale is nuanced, deftly offering up humour and tenderness, swirled together with the daftness and longing that that holiday can often encompass.
Benjamin hopes the readers of his stories are “immersed, entertained, moved, and identify with the characters.”
As for him, he says, “the writing is an act of imaginative empathy. In the process, I build up my empathy muscle. I hope the reader will, too.”