Welcome to the Real Photo Show. My guest today is author, editor and photo collaborator Brad Zeller, who joined me at the 2025 Chica Review to talk about his life as a writer, including the work he did with Alex Soth and Little Brown Mushroom. And we also talk about his novel Till the Wheels Fall off, published by Coffee House Press. We'll discuss Brad's love of photography and how Chico and Montana have become a second home for him. Brad will also share how his early struggles with addiction and an unintentional photography grant helped him to refocus on his writing and clarify his relationship to photography. But before we get to that, this podcast is sponsored by the Charcoal Book Club. Begin building your dream photo book library today@charchbookclub.com April's Book of the Month is Vanishing by Anna Arendt. Engraved in ghostly black and white, Anna Arendt's debut monograph, Vanishing, conjures a world of dreamlike dread and beauty. Photographed between Germany Poland Poland over 15 years. The the work slides back and forth through time like a bloody memory walking naked through the dark forest, wolves circling, howling, a daughter becoming a mother becoming a grandmother becoming a child, haunted villages and souls in jeopardy. The harsh reality of the past merges seamlessly with moments of rapture that feel plucked from a grim fairy tale. And as soon as I get that book, I will post a reel on Instagram and also on bluesky. So check that out on blueskyealphotoshow. And of course the Charcoal Book Club and the Chico Review also all come from the mind of Jesse Lenz. So thank you Jesse and the entire fantastic team at the Chico Review, Katie Moore, Reid, Class Marshall to Jake Knapp and Michael Raines, who are all accomplished, creative people in their own right. And I do have plans for Katie and Marshall to be on the show very soon. And then I'll try to figure out how to have everyone else on the show as well. I will also be bringing back the attendee shows, so look forward to that. And I'll have just a bunch of other exciting shows from Chico, but also from my regular lineup as well. Now, just one last announcement. I am in a show. It's called Primary Exposure. It is based upon the idea of fathers who photograph their families. It will include works by Harry Callahan, me, Yoav Haresh, Claudio Nalasko, Jesse Lenz, Dennis Santella, and Mark Steinmetz. The show was organized by Yoav Haresh, Denis Santella, and myself. The opening will be April 26 from 2 to 6pm at Affirmation Arts on 13th street in New York City. So just look up Affirmat Arts. And yes, we did align that with APED in the hopes that some of you listening will be in Manhattan that day. Oh, and I almost forgot, the exhibition essay was written by none other than Eleanor Carrucci. So please do stop by, come say hello. I hope to see you all there. And also please enjoy this show with Brad Zeller. I really love talking to a writer who is so closely connected to photography. And I really love Till the Wheels Fall off, which is a fantastic novel. So thank you for listening and we will talk soon. Brad Zeller, thanks for joining me here at Chico.
You bet. Thank you, Michael. Yeah, happy to finally be here.
So I, of course, have wanted to record you there for a while, but because you're a writer, it's not the typical research that I do where it's just looking at a lot of pictures and reading a biography. It's really like. So I actually read House of Coates that you did with Alex Soth, and I want to talk about that. But also Till the Wheels Fall Off. I have to admit, though, because I am a commuter to work and I spend a good two hours and a half to three hours every day in the car. I listened to it as an audiobook. I hope that's okay.
No, no. You know, that's where the money is, Michael.
And you have. You. The person who read it has not a similar voice to you, but I feel like maybe you did. You pick the person who read the book.
They send you, like, you know, a half dozen, like, people reading a chapter, and then you get to say, like, which one you like best. But then so does my age and so does the editor. So I gave my wife the vote and my step kids, and basically everybody was pretty much in agreement that the. I've never, you know, honest, this is the absolute truth. I've never listened to it, but everybody picked the same guy. So I was like, well, that must mean that's the right guy.
Yeah, I feel like there was some of your voice in that voice. I think maybe that's why everybody, one.
Of these days I'm gonna pull. I have a box of the things. I'm gonna pull it out and listen to it.
So let's talk a little bit about your past, your history and where you come from. And I know it's a bit of a long, winding road that you've had to where you are here.
I don't know very many people whose lives have had so many doglegs in different chapter. It Is a long road. It's all a mystery to me.
Yeah. So tell us a little bit about that.
Well, I mean, I grew up in a blue collar family in a blue collar town in southern Minnesota down near the Iowa border. My father had a tire shop and automotive garage, gas station in this little town called Hollandale. It was a slaughterhouse town. And the place really shaped me in a lot of ways. But also I felt like I was a kid who couldn't wait to get out of there because I just hadn't instinctively had this was drawn to things like reading and art and music as a kid. Those were not things that were, you know, had any primacy around my home. It's, again, it's a mystery how I became who I am, but I did. I wanted to get out, but I also knew how much I was shaped by that town. And there was not. I'm not knocking the town, but the culture as I understand it, with a capital C was not a real priority in my schools or my education and in the community at large, or at least as a punk teenager, I felt like it was missing. So I had to go somewhere looking for it. And probably the regret I have is coming from my background. And we had a lot of challenges as a family with my father's health. And I did not go to college. So basically when I left town, it was because I read a lot of, like, Jack Kerouac and stuff. So I spent. Instead of going to college, I went to Maine, worked at the national park on a trail crew. I went to Florida. I worked at a minor league baseball stadium during spring training. I went to Colorado. I drifted around and I did a lot of interesting things. And I played music. I was in a band early on, I was just drifting around, trying to figure out what I was going to do. I always knew I wanted to be a writer. I always loved photographs. And I went and lived in Europe for a year in Paris. But about the age of 28, 29, I'd worked a series of warehouse and factory and group home and parking lot jobs. And at that point, everybody, all my old friends that I'd grown up with were, you know, graduated from college and had good jobs and families and houses. And I was like. I was drinking. I was. I had a chemical dependency problem that was finally addressed, conscripted into treatment when I was like 27. And that sort of is where the next chapter came. So I realized, like, just to circle.
Back on that a little bit, you. You literally woke up in a jail cell right at some Point.
Yeah. Detox center.
Yeah.
And that was an experience that was. I don't. I like control. I didn't realize how much I like control. And I. And I didn't realize how important some notion of dignity was to me. But when I woke up there, I realized it was sort of like, wow, how did I get here? And what, what, what happened and what am I doing with my life? And then I went through treatment and it was like, you know, six weeks. It was tough. I was in a very tough kind of blue collar treatment facility with pretty much everybody in there was court ordered and it was like, it was just a huge wake up call. I think from the minute I got checked out of the detox into the treatment center, I was like, that part of my life is over. I'm not going to end up back in a place like this. It was the worst experience to me is to be confined in someplace where I have no freedom and I'm forced to sit there and go through someone else's agenda all day, every day. And I hated every minute of it. The stories were harrowing, but they gave me a lot of perspective. I realized I was, I was much better off than most of these people. And when I got out of there.
You had friends who had died and. Yeah, make it out, basically.
Yeah, yeah. And to this day, still a lot of my friends from that part of my life are, are dead and dying right as I speak. And it's like I just realized I have to do. What am I going to do? I guess I want to be a writer. How do I do that? I didn't go to school for it. I didn't know any writers. So I realized that when I was working, I was always reading. And I realized like at one point that like the last, like six contemporary novels I read, they essentially no one really had a job. You would be told they were a lawyer or a professor or some. Their job would be described. But mostly what they did is sit around and talk, like on television shows like Friends or Seinfeld. And it was all about like neuroses or marital dysfunction. But you never actually saw people at work, and you certainly didn't see anybody ever who was working in a blue collar, working class environment and actually doing work. The kind of world I grew up in wasn't represented. So I started doing this zine that I just typed on a typewriter and I'd printed at Kinko's with some friends. But the real preoccupation for me was why was so much about blue collar Life missing from our capital C, Culture and art and literature. And then when it appeared in music, it was like sort of cosplay version from Bruce Springsteen, someone like that, who never really did work those kinds of jobs. And so that's what I was writing about in this zine. And because of that, I got approached by the local weekly in Minneapolis to do some freelance writing for them. And somehow that turned into an actual job. And then I went to work in their office and became eventually an editor. And then I worked for several other publications and magazines and I sort of stumbled into this accidental career as a journalist, which I never intended. And it made me think of when I was in high school and you go see the guidance counselor and from the time I was in grade school and people said, what do you want to do? I say, I want to be a writer. And he said, oh, so a journalist? And I'm like, no, not really. But I ended up being a journalist. And it was great. It was great. I mean, I felt lucky to have this job that had benefits. But then that world all fell apart in my 40s. Like three publications in a row, all of them sort of legacy publications that had pretty, you know, just very distinguished histories, started to fold or be sold to venture capitalists. And there were layoffs, and the whole industry changed with the arrival of the Internet. You know, I think I was 46. I was working for this magazine called the Utne Reader. That ship went down and it was like, suddenly I was like, my dad died, my dog died, my marriage fell apart, and I was like, found myself for the first time in 15 years with no benefits. And I was like, what am I now? I'm gonna. I was back to where I was when I came out of treatment. And I basically got this free money for photography, which felt like a sham, but I took that money.
It was based on a grant with work that you had made.
So I had made. Been taking pictures for a long time. Long story short, as someone in my life who was trying to help me, very well intentioned, even though I did not identify as a photographer. And I had like so many, you know, a backpack full of undeveloped rolls of film. And I did. It just was like. It was just something I did as a compulsion and as a notebook. And I loved photography, but I never would presume to think I'm a photographer. I didn't really have much to compare it with. I just like to take pictures and I would use them for, like I said, as a visual notebook. So somebody in my life who had Been pushing me to like, you know, do something with the pictures. Took some of my pictures, filled out a grant application under my name and submitted it. And then I got a call, unbeknownst to ever having applied for this grant, that I had received this money. And it was a very strange experience because I knew people, talented photographers who had also applied for the grant, who were photographers. And somehow I got the money and I felt very embarrassed about it. I still do. Like, I took money from people, this is their career choice. But I took that money and everything had fallen apart. And I got a new dog and I got in the car and I didn't know what I was doing, but I just took off on the road. I didn't have an agenda. I wasn't thinking about making work. And I ended up just having kind of a two year walkabout. I didn't have a cell phone or computer. And I went all over the place. I was just exploring, trying to see if I could find someplace that felt like home. And I spent time out here. I went to the Northeast, upstate New York, and then I ended up in Vermont in a cabin, one room cabin in the woods for quite a long period with no plumbing or heat. And then in the winters, I would go down into the Mississippi Delta, which was sort of accidental because at a certain point in the winter when the first snows came, I would look for where's the closest place I can get 60 degrees? It would usually happen in some point in January. So the first year I just looked at the map, saw that it was the closest. 60 degrees was in, like Oxford, Mississippi. I drove down the river, I fell in love with the Mississippi Delta. I'm infatuated with the history of the musical history and the cultural history of the South. I hadn't spent a lot of time down there, so I ended up spending time poking around there, meeting a lot of people. And then the next year, when it came time to go south and I looked at the maps, the closest 60 was in a place called Apalachicola, Florida. Didn't know anything about it. On the Florida panhand. I drove down there, Ended up spending a couple stretches down there the next couple winters and meeting all these interesting people and being exposed to this totally different culture. And then was back in the cabin. And then the first snow came and I had to make a decision. I'd been out a long time. People were worried about me. I wasn't in touch on a computer, I didn't have a phone. And it was like, if I stay here through the winter, this is gonna be my. I loved all of it. I loved being the solitude. I love working around the cabin and building a garden and put. Building stone walls, and I had a stream on the property. But I thought, if I stay through this winter, I'm gonna become essentially like Ted Kaczynski. You know, I'm gonna be like, here. This is gonna be my life. And I recognized that I was becoming feral, and I recognized that I was a little bit crazy, and I wasn't really doing any work. And I also recognized that I sort of abdicated my role in any kind of a human community. And I'm comfortable by myself, but there is a point where I need people. So I decided when the first big snow came, to go home to Minnesota. And I happened to come home not having any idea what I was going to do. I was like, 46, 47 years old.
You're photographing this whole time?
No, no. So once I got the grant, I took no pictures.
Oh, so that's right. You mentioned that earlier. That's when you stopped taking pictures.
That's kind of the story of my life. Somebody validates me. And then I just.
What were you writing about it?
I'm done that area. I was doing this. I was doing this thing which. This black. I write in these black books every night. The 30th anniversary of the continuous streak was March 6th.
Congrats.
So 30 years, I've managed to keep this streak alive. I started it at one point when it was, you know, a tough point in my life. And I started it to be like. My goal was 1001 nights like Scheherazade and the Persian Nights, where she was writing these stories, telling these stories every night to keep herself from being killed, having her head cut off. So I thought, I'm gonna write 1000 one night just to stay alive. And I went beyond a thousand. I think now it's like 14,000 some nights. So I was writing, but I was not thinking, I'm writing something that I'm going to ever try to get published. And most of the experiences I was having, which is really the way my life works, I never, ever have experiences. Like, probably if I listed the 20 most extraordinary encounters and experiences in my life, I never made work out of them. I never thought I was making work. I thought I was having an interesting life, which is really important to me. So I got back, and Alex south, who at that same time was doing his broken manual project, driving around in the middle of nowhere, visiting hermits, and looking to Buy a cave. And sort of going through a very similar process of becoming feral and thinking, I've reached the point of no return. He had come home, had wrapped up his Broken manual project and he reached out to me and we commiserated and we're like, we were in a similar position, similar midlife crises and he had a family and he was trying to find a way to make work and stay home. And we ended up having this extraordinary, very multifaceted collaboration where we did all these different projects trying to tell stories with images and text, which culminated with us going on the road and doing the seven part LBM Dispatch series that sort of brought me here.
Yeah, yeah. Little Brown Mushroom became your imprint. Right.
That was Alex baby. But I mean, but he and I, you know, we did nine Little Brown Mushroom projects together. I did one by myself and we were really, you know, we were doing that sort of self publishing. We were doing them all entirely ourselves. And that was kind of, you know, I like to think we were quite far ahead of the curve because when you would go to the art book fairs back then, like we would have our table of all these little things we literally printed and published ourselves and made some we made by hand. And then we'd be in the same room with Aperture and Steidel and all these big established presses. There weren't a lot of photographer owned imprints like there are now where there's just so many and they're doing so many extraordinary things. We were just sort of doing something to keep ourselves amused.
Yeah. And Rebecca Bengal in Strange Hours writes about the LVM Dispatch and makes the comparison and highlights the similarities to Roy Stryker sending out Walker Evans and Evans and A G working on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and sort of this idea of what feels like journalism but really is about an experience, an experiential process. Right. And when I looked through House of Coates, that's what I got. Between the text and the images, they're sort of on parity with each other about this experience.
So that really. Yeah, I mean it's really hard for me to keep the chronology straight. So this was in the midst of a time when we were both like still sort of in this weird, stunned, post traumatic shock decompression stage from being sort of on the road and feral and driftless for a while. We decided to do this, he decided, because Lester B. Morrison was this character that was central to his Little Brown Mushroom is the initials of Lester B. Morrison. And Lester was the guiding force behind Broken Manual. And he realized that Lester was like. Had become an albatross and that he was. Lester was this character on his shoulder that was encouraging him to go buy a cave. And so he came to me, and it was a very, you know, it's sort of a classic. Nature of my relationship with Alec is he would come to me with these requests, which are strange, but to me it was like, okay. He's like, I want to basically get rid of Lester. Can you write kind of like, write him out of my life? And I want to do a book where we basically put Lesser to bed.
Oh, wow.
And I. You know, it's like, you want me to kill him off, right?
How is this. How do you want me to take him?
And we didn't really have. We never. We seldom really. Like, when we worked together, it was this pure collaboration and that, like, we decided that there's this stretch south of the Twin Cities that's just like this toxic waste area where the giant Koch Brothers refinery is. It's just a stretch of abject landscapes and desolation and pollution. And there are these little communities out there. Not really communities, but little crossroads things. So it was. Happened to be the worst winter, I believe, like, at that point in Minnesota history. Like, it snowed every day. It was freezing cold. And in the winter, that landscape was just, you know, what's the place where they send people in Russia?
The Gulag?
Yeah.
Or Siberia.
Siberia.
Oh, yeah, sorry.
So it was like a really dirty Siberia. And so there was this little town called Hampton, and there was a bar, and above there, there were, like, rooms for rent for, like, workers in the refinery or something. So we rented this room up there. He did it for two weeks. I did it for two weeks. He was still, you know, operating fully as Lester B. Morrison. He'd adopted that Persona. I actually adopted a Persona for that project. It was a commission for this Krakow photo festival originally. So he spent two weeks in the middle of this really incredibly grim, desolate place in this incredibly grim, desolate rooming house. And then I went out there for a couple weeks, and then we basically just came back together. And he just. We didn't communicate about this. He had taken these photos, which he decided the right fix was at the truck stop near there. He had found a whole bunch of disposable cameras, like, discounted or something. And I had written this text in the same place, and we just took those two things together, and it became House of Coates.
So I apologize. I conflated the 2. The LVM dispatch and house of Coates I sort of transitioned very quickly in the same sentence. Is one born of the other.
So there were three. There was a book called Conductors of the Moving World, which I did, and I think that may have been the first. I'm not sure. That was working with an archive from this Japanese travel inspector who'd come to the US to study traffic patterns. Alec essentially dumped the archive on me and said, you want to figure out how to make a book out of these? We made every one of those by hand. Every one of the edition was a different book. It was extremely crazy, but really an adventurous and challenging thing. Literally every single one of those books that anyone has is different from all the others. Different sequencing, different collection of photos, even. I played games with hiding texts in there. Most of the stuff we did was really just to keep ourselves occupied and amused. And then I think after that was House of Coates before the Dispatch. And then after a brief interlude, he called me on his birthday, and he said, hey, I want a birthday. I want you to give me a present for my birthday. Can I come by and pick you up? I was like, this will be interesting. Sure. So he comes by my house. It's late December. Yeah. Lester's now out of the picture, and he says, I want us to go around. I want to find a way to stay home and make work, and I want to be able to go out and do work in the day and be home with my family like a normal person. So we decided we would. We created business cards. We created this thing called the Winter Garden Dispatch. It was a fake newspaper. It had our names and numbers on it. I was listed as the bureau chief. And we drove around in exurban Twin Cities to these places where, even though I'm from, live there. We both lived there much of our lives. I'd never. Neither of us had ever been. And we just would present ourselves at these community events, St. Patrick's Day, dances, all sorts of things. We'd find people. Like, I would ask, I have this habit of traveling to places. And I would say to someone in the town, like, who's the most interesting person in this town? So we found out there's somebody who's the last snow globe repairman in the world. And we would go find them, and we'd do these little. I'd be the reporter. He'd be the community newspaper photographer. And we did this for a couple, several months, and it was super fun. And we found all sorts of great stuff. An abandoned ghost town that had been settled by, like, survivors of the Donner party. And we were, we were having just like a super, just incredible fun with this thing. And then because Alec is like one of the most, you know, he can't do anything without just going whole hog. And he's got the most, the fiercest work ethic and he gets super excited about something and then, you know, like, you're in for an adventure. So he Magnum, through Magnum, his agency, they were starting a program called Postcards from America. So he decided, pitched to them that we would take this idea on the road. So much for the idea of staying home and working close to home. So we ended that turned into this long, long seven part multi state travels all over the U.S. i think a total of like four or five months. And then we never did anything with the Minnesota work. We went from that right to Ohio and started doing the papers. So there's a vast archive of that material, both from the early Minnesota stuff and then from all the outtakes from our trips which amount to like hundreds and hundreds and hundreds texts and images that we would have to cut them down to 40 for the edition. So I have the archive and I don't. The agreement is always that I would figure out how to make something out of it. And I would love to do that, but I've never found anybody that wants to pay me to do it. And it would be like, you know, two years of digging through, you know, half dozen boxes of notes and work prints and itineraries and maps. So I still. It hangs over me. I want to do it. It was such an extraordinary experience.
Yeah. I'm always thinking about how you're either a photographer with a writer's mind or a writer with a photographer's mind. And I know you've only recently, I think, sort of come back to the idea of opening up to photography as in making photographs.
Well, it's very dangerous because I'm extremely ocd. So when I was making music, one of the problems is I've got like, you know, ADD. I was medicated for that for 40 years, OCD sleep issues. And so like if I, when I had instruments, I would sit up all night, just tranced out, noodling on a guitar or a piano. And it was not healthy. The reason I stopped taking pictures is because I liked monkeying around with sort of cheap cameras. But I had one decent camera and I liked film. But then it became expensive to process the kind of color film I had and I was always broke. I went to Europe and I lived there and when I came back I had all These rolls of films that 25 years later, when I was cleaning out a storage space, I realized it had never developed and they'd been water damaged. So when I got this grant, I invested in a digital camera that was supposedly quite good at the time. And then I went out on the road and I realized what digital meant, that you needed a computer and you had to work with the computer, which I don't do. And it's too late for me to ever learn any of those things, like Photoshop. But I didn't even have a computer I could plug it into. I could not get the pictures of it. So I just put it in the bag and I basically virtually never used it. And that was it for my days as a photographer. So when I wrote the novel that's with a traditional commercial literary publisher, they of course want to talk about social media strategy and things like that until.
The wheels fell off.
Yeah, to promote your book.
Yeah.
And I'm like, well, I'm not a social media person. And like. And the day I start talking about social media and strategy in the same sentence, you should shoot me. So I was like, well, they said, well, you should be on all these different things, like TikTok. And I don't even know them all, but the one they said one of them was Instagram. And I had known what Instagram was because we had used it on our dispatch trips to document the trips. We had an LBM dispatch account. So I decided, well, I'll look at it. And then I realized I have a Facebook account from like 18 years ago because that's where my family, my sisters, my hometown people are. I don't like it, I don't use it, but it is a way to stay in touch with my family that are far flung or not. But so when I went on Instagram and it goes into my contacts and it just finds all the people I know on there. It was all the photo people.
Oh, yeah.
And it's like, there's where my friends are. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I'm in this place where I only see them at stuff like this or the book fairs. It's like, I can keep tabs, we can keep tabs on each other. So I'm a guy who had, you know, during the dispatches, I was coerced into upgrading to an iPhone for the purposes of the work, however, I had this iPhone and I did not. You've ever think that I would use the camera of a phone? That seemed like such an alien idea. But once I got on Instagram, I'm like, well, I want the pictures to be a Trojan horse so that people will read my words. Because Instagram is not really a medium of words. I wanted to just use it to write. But in order to get people in there, I had to, like, post pictures. So I started taking pictures again with my cell phone, and then it quickly slipped really slow, became super obsessive. I'm taking pictures all the time, and, you know, very dangerously in the last couple months, I've started thinking about, man, maybe I should get an actual camera again. But I know I don't want to. I like that I can be the guy at something like this. I love what people do with photos. And I can still keep just my word mind and process the photos through my way of seeing as a writer and start trying to think. I'm trying to compare myself as a photographer with other people or play that game. So I think I'll resist the urge to go buy an actual camera.
So, you know, I wanted to move on a little bit and talk about Till the Wheels Fall off, because, you know, when we're talking about your brain as being sort of the photographer and. Or the writer and which mode you're in, I feel like Till the Wheels Fall off is obviously you as the writer, but it's very photographic in a lot of ways. And I have one question. Is the Eggleston market a little Easter egg? There was like, a country store. I think you call it Eggleston.
Yeah, there are. Actually. You're the first person to get this, but. So there's all sorts of little photo games I play in that book that no one. Of course, I mean, I just do things to amuse myself. But I was a little frustrated because I just figure my photo friends will read this book. There are many photo Easter eggs, including, like. And I will just say this now because I'm eager for someone to take the challenge because I just thought it would be noticed. But I describe in precise, what I think is precise detail, four very famous photos as parts of descriptions of a town and also different landscapes.
Well, one of the descriptions I paid very close attention to was the. I think there was the panoramic view from the apartment in the football field. Right. I think there was something going on there with the way you described that. I won't be able to name the other three now, but.
Yeah, yeah, no, they're. They're.
Yeah.
Two of them, I think are, like, absolutely obvious. Like, you go like, oh, that's a description of. I'm not going to give it away. Because until somebody finally gets it, when they do, I'll give them a prize.
Oh, man. I'm looking at my notes now to see if I noticed anything else. One of my favorite characters. So we're not. Right now, I'm just telling you how much I love this book. And I identified with this book as someone who moved around with families and had different parental figures in my life. But. But the cowboy therapist I sometimes thought. Is that you did Brad Zeller put himself in the book as the cowboy therapist.
I'm in that book. So you're really perceptive. Every character has some aspect of me and none of them are actually me.
No, I didn't think it was bipartisan.
But they're all like. They all have one quality that. I made a list of these sort of. I made a lot of lists before I wrote that book. Cause it was just coming out of working with Alec and we'd done a teaching stint at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. And then it was like, okay, dispatch is over. The residency's over. What am I going to do now? I have this free time. I'm going to sit down and write. And I just made a list of all these different things, including those photographs that I wanted to. I'm going to do, put all these. This sort of stone soup approach into this, into a book. And then I just thought, okay, these are all these qualities or not. I don't. Qualities, not the word characteristics of me. And also part of my neural makeup or my childhood. And I'm gonna put these 11 things in there and I'm going to take each of them and assign them to a different character.
Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, so I. Obviously, I don't want to give things away, but the relationships are incredibly well thought out. The arc of the relationships are amazing in the book.
Thank you.
And it takes, I think, a thoughtful reader to appreciate the thoughtful writing. Meaning this book isn't gonna take off and send you into an action packed adventure?
No, there's. No. There is. No. I mean, I'm not a plot. My life has never. I'm not a plotless person. I could never find or follow a plot in my life. And I'm not that interested in heavily plotted books or films. You know, it's very pretentious to say this, but the inspiration for this book was reading Proust's remembrance of Things Past where nothing happens. It's very interior. So. And I. And also I have a very. I have attention deficit disorder and have been on and off medications for it since I was a child. So that consciousness is like turning somebody with their thumb on the remote control. And that just keeps turning the channel. And that's what it's like for me to sit and write. So when I sat down to do this, I decided I didn't think I was going to publish anything. I was simply trying to figure out how to find my way into a new chapter. So I would sit down and I would just. I decided when I'm typing and I use a manual typewriter because I like the loud physicality. Whenever my mind goes somewhere else, that's. I'm changing the channel.
Okay.
So I'm flipping. The book is flipping all over in time, just like remembrance of Things Past does. And he spends a lot of time in interior, from interior to exterior to interior to exterior. And I knew that it was going to be like, you know, it's not a book that I deliberately chose that the publisher is a very respected literary nonprofit publisher that publishes kind of adventurous things.
I wrote two things. I don't know if they'll make sense to you. They made sense to me while I was listening. A powerful embrace of the inevitability of who you are.
Yep.
And it's not so much the remembering. It's sort of like being reminded of things while you're remembering things.
Exactly. You really are a good. You've so far. You're like batting a thousand thanks.
Yeah. No, I mean, it's also how much I enjoyed the book and really listened, listened, listened. So the relationships, of course, they have this sort of slow build. And of course, everything is revealed in the end. I mean, enough is revealed in the end, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's actually quite a few questions still in terms of those relationships, I think, but, like the kind of questions you have as a human being where you don't always get full satisfaction.
No, I mean, I think that this thing came from my childhood where I grew up in a family. Very loving family. But, like, very much unlike the families in the book. More like the family, like the Uncle Raleigh character who's kind of the real paternal figure in the book. He's more like my family. Very loving, very supportive.
Right.
But also sort of unable to relate to me in terms of, like, my weirdness and my things that I love. So he was really the representative of my family. But, like, nothing was ever resolved in my childhood. And it was a very unsettled and somewhat like, you know, a lot of up roller coasters in terms of, like, family finances and health. And so there was it was a very unpredictability even to, like, what you could rely on. And so that my mother was nothing like the mother in that book, but there were other people in my life that were very much like the mother of my book. I'm tapping on things. Yeah. So that's definitely that nothing. I don't think anything's ever resolved.
Yeah.
I don't think you're ever guaranteed of a happy ending.
And yet it is a return to home story.
Yeah.
Which is a very much a common human experience, I think.
I think that's like, there's always this. Well, I mean, you know, the roots of the word nostalgia is pain for home. The pain of returning home.
Yeah.
And I had a real conflicted relationship with the town. The town in this book definitely resembles the place I grew up. Some of the business names are exactly the same, but it also does not. It resembles other. There's little aspects of all these other little towns around the town I grew up in. But, yeah, I had a. I couldn't wait to get out. I really, really did not like it when I lived there. But, you know, the older you get, the more. And you live in a big city and things are. You know, you deal with all the big city issues. And it was like. Well, there really was kind of a. You know, that roller rink was a real place in my childhood, and there's a lot of places in it that were real places that, as I get older, I would wish I could go back and revisit these little restaurants and this. This roller rink.
Yeah. Yeah. The roller rink played very big for me because it is very much the idea that I explore when I'm photographing. And that is home is not always home.
No.
And home is where you.
Where you make our homes. Like, you know, like, I'm. I feel like home. I mean, when I first came to Montana, that was my response. And I always say this every time I come, it's like, from the moment I came here, it's like this. I feel like I'm home. And I often did not feel that when I lived in the town I grew up in. And now there is no home there. But I still find I'm more. You know, I realize there's all these. I put a lot of them in the book. These places that, as a kid were just sort of like, I didn't have any perspective. But I look back and go, wow, that was a really, you know, unusual place to be in a small town. Like, there's a place, a thing in the book. It's a head shop called, I think, the Soviet Embassy. And this is a small, like, blue collar meatpacking town. And I thought there were many times in writing the book, I thought, did I make that up? And I would ask my brother and my friends, and they'd be like, no, that. That never happened. So I actually made a trip to my hometown. I went to the local historical society, and I found the city guides from my childhood. And sure enough, there was a head shop in my hometown for one year called the Soviet Embass.
That's wild. Now, if this gives something away, we'll cut this out.
Yep.
The woman at the end of the story.
Yep.
Is that your wife?
So I don't care about giving anything away. There's one thing I will say is that there's a moment in the book where the character Matt, the central character, encounters this woman and her dogs, and he asks her, you know, awkwardly on a date, and her response is, let's.
And that she kind of takes charge of the relationship.
Yeah. And that was basically. I wrote my wife, who I did not really know. I met her once. She came to a book release party for House of Coates. That's where I met her.
Oh, wow.
As I was coming out of the wilderness, I met my wife at the release party for the book I wrote about coming out of the wilderness. And when I didn't really know her, I met her at the event. I was intrigued by her. We had a really interesting conversation. I didn't know anything about her. And then she sent me a friend request. I didn't know who she was. She sent me. I didn't get her name. She sent me a friend request on Facebook. And I looked at the picture and I go, that's that woman who was at the House of Coats. And I looked at her, and then I looked at her page, and she had zero friends in common. And every other one of my friends on there, like, the lowest number would be like 150 common friends.
Oh, wow.
So I was like, who is this person? So I was. I kind of looked at her page and I thought, she seems kind of interesting. But how do I not know? We're in a town like the Twin Cities. So I actually wrote her back on Facebook and I said, what were you doing at that book party? And she said, look. Oh, my friend. And I went out for dinner and decided to come by. It sounded interesting. And then, you know, maybe a couple weeks later, I had to go to. I was going to something that I had to go to. And I wrote to her and said, hey, I don't know what your story is, but I'm going to this, you know, this thing. And I was wondering if you, you know, if you're around and you'd be interested in coming with me. And she wrote back, just let's. And I thought, wow, that's a rather.
That's it, that's it. Oh, that's so good.
So the short answer is yes.
Yeah. It was such a. Such a. A strong and healing character, I think.
Yeah. She's. My wife is very assertive and very. Takes charge and very much gets shit done.
Yeah.
And I'm like, I'll just sit in my. All day. I would have no social life if it were not for her.
Yeah. Yeah. And there's a kind of villain in the story. The new guy, the new stand in. He's a little bit of a caricature of a high school theater teacher, but also leads me to the next point. Music is so incredibly important in this book. There's sort of these catalogs of music. I think someone who wrote about it called it the Playlist, A fantastic playlist. And it seems very relevant to sort of moods and periods and time your playlist, the way you put them together. But this villain likes the worst, blandest white jazz.
Yes.
I could see you writing that in.
Well, you can imagine as a teenager who, like, is sort of a misfit in a small town and, like, I mean, basically that character. And I do think that I feel a little bit bad about that character because I think, like, it's almost bizarre how many people I've met who think that character is based on somebody that they know because it is a universal character, especially from the 70s.
Yeah. Yeah.
And like, you know, even, like, it really is sort of based on a composite of different people. But the main qualities and actually a couple of the actual lines in the book come from a guy that I met in Minneapolis who was actually, you know, worked in theater. But the number of people that I've met who read that book who said to me, was that character based on that? I swear that character was based on this guy that I, you know, taught at my high school. Like, no, I don't. I didn't.
I don't know your high school when I know that.
Yeah.
But can you talk a little bit more about the music?
Oh, so, man, there's a lot of things in this book. Like I said, I want it to be, like, all these things that I'd never written about my hometown, my sleep Issues, my music obsession. These are private things. Like, one of the weird things about my life and my so called career is that most of the really formative experiences in my life, I've never actually made their way into my work. And that's a very Minnesota trend. Like, no one ever writes a great Minnesota novel. They live in Minnesota and they write books set in Prague or in New York. And it's like, Minnesota's not interesting enough. And I wanted to say I want to write something that's actually set in the world I grew up in. And then I was like, okay, I'm gonna make a list of all these themes and subjects from my life and my childhood. I'm gonna put them all in a blender and turn it into fiction. So music is like. The character who is. Probably most exemplifies my philosophy would be Russ, the guy who owns the roller rinks as a dj. And like, I really do feel like music is. My record collection is a chemistry set. I go into my shed and I basically can change. It's a weather station and a chemistry set. I can literally. I've never. I don't take any kind of mental health drugs. I can change the weather, emotional weather in my life. I know what records fit, what moods. And also to come back to photography briefly. But I have made. I have a soundtrack for almost every photo book I love and I work on them zealously. And I have a soundtrack for every state I've ever driven through. And I have a soundtrack for my drive from Minnesota to Montana across the badlands. And I'm really. It's like, I feel like that music, if you really love it and care about it and obsess about it to the extent I do, you can find the right music for almost any situation that can elevate you. And you know, everybody loves music. When you're in a sad mood, you play like Nick Drake or something.
Yeah, yeah.
You know, I mean, I listen at home. One of the challenges of this place, Michael, and it really is, is a. The sleep issues. But also at home, I listen to music from the time I get up until I go to bed.
Wow.
It's constant.
Yeah.
And it's like this silence was so howling in my room that 12:30 in the morning, I walked across to the office and said, can you give me a fan?
Oh, wow.
Because I don't have any source of music to hear. I'm not a streamer.
No, you're not. Right. So you're not putting Spotify on your iPhone. No. You know you mentioned Russ. Russ is such a unique character in the book. Russ is, like, sort of thrust into this situation where he has these sort of paternal instincts, but also feels like doesn't want to overstep or doesn't. Or isn't ready to be the full dad, but has this incredible love and care, but just can't fully express it.
And so.
But there's music and there's the roller rink, and there are these small actions, these small things he does to show how much he cares, even if they can't physically or verbally express what they want to say. Yeah, it's a great character.
I love that because, I mean, he is somebody. I am very capable of expressing how I feel. But at the time I wrote that, I had just married my wife. She's a single mom with two teenage children, and I'd never write, raise children. And music was, I discovered, was a really quick way to bond with them. I think they were both surprised. Like, wow, he knows the same kind of music we like. I'm one of those old, pathetic old guys who tries to keep up with everything.
Yeah.
So I knew hip hop, and I knew, like, who sampled what, you know, I don't. I didn't have the challenges of Russ, but I did. I was dealing with that at the time I was writing the book is that I'm suddenly in a house with these two kids, and my wife travels for work. So I would be. They didn't have. I would be driving them to places, and I'd be having to find things to talk about with them over dinner. And it was just this experience that sort of led to that character.
Yeah.
And also just the way that I tried to fill that house with music to sort of drown out the things that I just couldn't figure out, what we should be talking about.
Well, that also could bring us back to the teacher, the theater teacher, and show, like, where those connections failed.
Right.
Yeah. Those times when it didn't work.
Yeah. There's a moment in that book that's based on a real moment, and I feel sort of bad about it, but it was not. It had nothing to do with the teacher or that character, but it was an adult in my life trying who knew I liked music and who was trying to connect with me and who kind of tried to surprise me and came to me and, like, pulled out behind their back like, hey, look at this slow hand. And it was an Eric Clapton record. And at the time, I thought Eric Clapton was like, no.
So you really wrote about that.
Yeah. So I Used that line because the way the guy said was, hello, like, aren't I hip? And I was kind of like, oh, okay. Yeah.
So let's just say we know there's lots of great high school creative teachers out there. This is not a slam on.
No, no creative teachers. Not at all.
My high school photo teacher was my hero.
It was more of a slam. The two teachers in my high school that basically I wouldn't have survived. Like, I am who I. Largely as much because of them and their introduction to me to the humanities and art.
Yeah.
And I didn't have any. I mean, I did not. That's not based on a real experience. It was based, though, on a very punk, dissatisfied, disaffected, bored kid in a small town, you know, where I thought all the most of the adults were lame.
And, yeah, I think the person I, in some ways felt the sorriest for or the worst for or the person who I just saw as the most tragic was the mother.
Yeah.
And just sort of the bed hand she was dealt early on. And then also that I actually didn't know or expect. It was a surprise, that moment where her life starts to turn around. Like, that was a complete surprise for me. I didn't know how fully developed her character would become until that moment where she gets the library job and other things. And then even then, Matt is such a bastard.
Yeah. I mean, it's like, you want to get out from underneath this. So, I mean, again, I've experienced this thing. Like, I have a friend. So. My town was a meatpacking town. I grew up in the 60s. I have vivid, vivid memories from my childhood of neighborhood.
Matt's the protagonist. Matt's the character we follow.
Yeah. So many people in my neighborhood being brought home, coming home from Vietnam, you know, dead hearses going up our street with cat with flags on them. And there's a big Vietnam memorial there. Like, a lot of those people were sent and served. I knew them. They were the older boys in my neighborhood. So I knew a friend who's, you know, had lost his father in Vietnam and his mom just going to his house and seeing that just unbelievable, oppressive, emotional weather there, like, moved me so much, even as a kid. And I just think, like, I tried to, you know, imagine, like, how would you survive something like that when she. She did have, like, I think she had two young children. So everything just came, like, you find these things and you go, how can I use this? Or imagine this into a piece of fiction? But I also know people who have spent their Lives trying to get out of, not just underneath this, these dynastic families that like, are sort of like, we're gonna. You're gonna work for us and you're gonna do this. And you know, you married myself, you.
Parent the business, everything else.
And I mean, how terrifying that can be. And I know friends who've been like, felt trapped in that kind of a thing. And I think that the family and the. And the book is very. Matt's family is very close knit and like, and they all work together and there's family businesses which. And there's a very nurturing aspect to it, but there's also sort of a smothering.
It's nurturing and dominating at the same time.
Yeah.
Yeah. Well, the last thing I want to say about the book, only because it was very funny. So the first car that I ever drove to high school in was my friend's car. And it was probably an 80 to Caprice Estate wagon, Woodside. You know, the fake wood on the side that we put mag wheels on.
As my first car.
And that shows up in the book as a different model. But that shows up in the book.
Same exact description though. I know that they're all, look, they all made that model with the fake wood siding.
That was great. It was a nice touch. Well, I loved it. Congrats.
Thank you so much. I'm really. I can't tell you how grateful I was that you actually reached out and read that. That book. I mean, it's like I. I have. That's a different character than the guy in the photo world. It's the guy who writes books without pictures.
But it's. I. I see it as very photographic.
I mean, there is, you know, the cowboy is basically like a shorthand version. Introduction to the history of photography.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. He's a great character. Oh my God. So what, what's next? What are you working on?
Well, it's back to like, you know, fending off photograph.
Anti photographer.
No, I love these people and I love. They're like the people who are now. Who now pay me to do work. It's hard for me to balance those two things. I'm trying to finish another book, a novel, a book without pictures, one of my books without pictures. And it's very hard because I keep getting these really great and really kind of, you know, things I'm excited about to work on these projects with photographers. But I'm not a multitasker. So last year was pretty much devoted to working on photo stuff. I kept pecking away at the novel, but it should have been done by now and then. This next year is shaping up to be pretty much a lot of photography stuff. And on top of that, I started a photo book publisher with Ethan Jones back in Minneapolis, who. Ethan is Alec's studio manager and also a great photographer. So we have our first book coming out in June.
Is this something you can announce or you want to wait on that?
No, I can announce it. We did a couple little introductory zines of Ethan and my work. Mine is four short stories about photographs. And Ethan's is a book from his residency in Iceland. There are these two companions. But our big book, which is being printed now, is by Eric Ruby, who's kind of a cult legendary photographer, Photographer's photographer guy. Extremely one of the most interesting people in the photo world that I've ever met. He worked for Alec. He worked for Jim Goldberg. He was Jim's studio manager. And he's just a spectacularly interesting photographer. So we're doing, you know, a big, very big book of his photos. It's like he's been working on for five years or something. And we're just super excited. I'm like, if I would have had a wish list of books that I would want to publish five years ago, and I never imagined I would ever do this, undertake publishing photo books, but I would have said, like, I think that would have been on my list. And I think when Ethan and I started talking, each of us made a list of who books that we would love to do. And he was the one that was on both of our lists.
No, that's amazing.
And he happens to have just moved back to Minnesota.
Well, that's great.
Called Stone Soup. You can pre order it on the. Our publisher is called Nocturna and the pre orders for that book are on the site, as are the zines.
Excellent. Well, Brad, this has been fantastic. I'm glad I waited to record with you. We did it last year because I really did want to read and do more research. And I think this. This was great.
I'm really, you know, it's just you add a whole new dimension to this thing.
Thank you.
I mean, I come from a journalism background asking questions, so it's like, I was pleased when you were here last year. I was curious what you were doing. Yeah, but it's like, it's nice to have someone here who's actually interviewing people and doing the job I used to do.
Yeah. All right, well, let's get back over there.
All right, thanks, Michael.
All right, bye, everyone. Real Photoshow is produced by me, Michael Chovendalton. Music by Matteo Chovendalton and Jim Raimundo. If you like the show, please rate and review with all the stars on your listening platform.