Frank Haberle
Frank Haberle’s debut story collection, Shufflers, about minimum wage transients during the Reagan era, is forthcoming in August from Flexible Press. His short stories have won awards from Pen Parentis (2011), Beautiful Loser Magazine (2017) and the Sustainable Arts Foundation (2013). They have appeared in magazines including Stockholm Literary Review, Necessary Fiction, the Adirondack Review, Smokelong Quarterly, Wilderness House Literary Review, and the Baltimore Review. Frank lives in Brooklyn and works at New Settlement in The Bronx.
Are there particular films that have influenced your writing?
When I was young, drunk, and out of work, I spent a lot of time chain-smoking in the balconies of the seemingly endless string of beat-up art cinemas in Cambridge and in the Village. Although I didn’t start writing until I stopped drinking many years later, I would argue that Andrei Tarkovsky’s films—the Mirror, the Sacrifice, Stalker, Solaris, Andrei Rublev, any and all of them; I saw them all a dozen times--were a greater influence on how my writing evolved than any author, teacher, or other external influence. I am not saying that I write like Tarkovsky or that my stories share the depth of his stories—they do not. I am in no way as smart as Andrei Tarkovsky. What really influenced me was the degree of abstraction he found in every day life. In a Tarkovsky film everything is blunt and simple until it isn’t—until the camera starts panning a puddle forming under a wall where water is suddenly pouring out of nowhere; or your mom floats slowly by outside the window, or an old man stumbled barefoot through a muddy field filled with coins. I think these things happen, all the time, in every day life; we are just too tuned out and preoccupied to pay them any notice. If we did we’d all walk around terrified. When I write stories, which are often based on something as mundane as a job sitting in the lift shack on a ski mountain in the fog, I find myself compelled to let something drift through the middle of the scene—only because if it occurred to me, it probably was really there. Tarkovsky’s films helped me identify these floating images and encouraged me to let them float.
Is there a particular genre of music that influences your writing?
Most of my writing takes place in the 70s and 80s, and involves hapless screw-ups and drifters stringing together minimum-wage jobs and dreaming of a life just-beyond-their-reach. I would like to think that my writing is infused with the frustration and the irony of American punk music. There’s a lot of Minutemen and a lot of Replacements sentiments running through my stories. But there’s also a lot of self-depreciation and humor and heartbreak that’s influenced by folk-country like John Prine, Steve Earle, Patti Griffin, Son Volt, and all those Dead Texans like Blaze Foley and Townes Van Vandt and Jerry Jeff. I still can’t believe Mr. Prine has left us. He got me through a lot of hard times. I write (in my head) when I walk and that’s when I listen to music; I type when I get home if I can—I have two jobs and three teenagers. When I’m free I often walk across Brooklyn and into the City. In the city, on the headphones, I’ll go deep into Metallica or Motorhead or Audioslave. During this plague year, my family and I have ended up down in the pine barrens of Central Jersey, a beautiful but haunted place, and I find myself listening to country music—Kristofferson, Willie, the aforementioned Dead Texans. I’m scared to go back and tell my cool New York friends that I’m now into country music!
Do you have a favorite graphic novel?
This is an embarrassingly easy question for me to answer, only because I live with three kids who consume graphic novels like I used to drink beer—it is Paper Girls by Brian Vaughan and illustrated by Cliff Chiang. I think there are six volumes. If you don’t know it, 4 girls delivering newspapers in suburban Cleveland in the mid 1980s get pulled into a time-travel vortex, have a sling of adventures in the past and future, build incredible resilience and reliance, and then-boom-get dropped back in Cleveland like nothing happened. It was really beautifully and creatively rendered and, as the father of three teenagers finding their way in this cruel world, it just destroyed me on every other page. I had to stop myself from sobbing on the D-Train on my way to work. It broke my heart.
Vacation Druthers-City or Rural, and Why
I’ve been back living in Brooklyn for 35 years now, and I am a fourth-generation Brooklynite—my great grandfather was a member of the Dead Rabbit Irish street gang before he escaped to Greenpoint after the Civil War, and my grandfather on the other side arrived when he was 14 and slept on the floor of the grocery store where he had his first job in Bushwick. That all said, I will take rural any time. I dream I am hiking in magical mountains. The few chances we get away from work every year, my wife and I take the kids to a cabin in Vermont we rent, 15 miles up a dirt road behind an old farm, where there is no internet , no phone, no TV. It’s a little terrifying the first few nights, but you get used to it—and boy, it’s hard to come back to Brooklyn sometimes. But I also get alot of writing done in that cabin.
Is there a work of art you love? Why? Have you ever visited it?
Monet’s water lilies saved my life, once, very literally. Once, when I was in a real bad way and strung out, and my heart was broken and I was slipping just a little bit past the self-pity-party that I soaked in through my 20’s, and into something a little more dangerous, I walked into the Museum of Modern Art and found myself standing there, for an hour, staring into the water lilies. This is in the old Moma, where the panels surrounded you on four sides in that room, and that was all there was. You can look into those water lilies and see things in the depths, and see the flutter of things reflected just above the surface. I only left when a guard shuffled me along-I think they were closing, or maybe he noticed the nut job standing there for an hour staring into the painting- but an hour was all I needed, and when I got back on the street, I was ready to give life another go.
