Who is Author B. D. Love?
Raised in and around Detroit, under a different name, and have moved all over the country, though I now recall Los Angeles as my one true home. I started off writing poems and stories, gave up after I got my MA in creative writing at Syracuse, and became a punk musician, then gave up music to write poems and stories, and now I’m back in music, working with Maura Kennedy on what I guess you’d call American Art Songs. Long road.
What’s your latest book all about?
Well, it is about being in a band, and about loving the impossible, whether it be a woman or art. So I guess it’s about how dreams die badly and their ghosts linger on a long while hoping for some sort of resolution that probably never arrive. I think I wrote about the death of rock and roll, “the dream is over” as Lennon sang, via the murder of one true believer. Maybe I am a ghost as well.
How did you get the idea of writing this book?
I was in a band with a bunch of losers, and I sought revenge. Ha. Actually, I was in a band with a bunch of losers and I wanted to redeem something out of the ordeal. I tried the story several different ways. One was a memoir and that didn’t work, because being in a band is not all that interesting, really, and I have been in a few. Then I tried it as sort of an traditional experimental piece — I know, an oxymoron– through several points of view, and that failed. And I remembered that the great Anthony Burgess wrote a book about his “99 Best” novels in English since I don’t know, the modern era, and he got flack for including Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye. I read it and decided Burgess was right: Chandler is one hell of a writer. So I spent a long summer reading all of Chandler, and the experiences that were the basis of ATP fell into a mystery pattern. I wanted it to be like punk: noisy, fast, and over with quick. None of my other work is genre fiction, either as B. D. Love or as Lan Yan.
Oh, I later got in a band with real musicians. It was called My Sin. It was really good.
Where can readers contact you?
Best via my personal email at this point: bdlove@earthlink.net My website at bdlove.org isn’t forwarding all the time.
