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Thomas E. Kennedy, Interviewee 
Duff Brenna, Interviewee
David Applefield, Interviewer
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Duff Brenna
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When Brenna was 15, he read Jack London´s biography, Sailor on Horseback, and found it a self-defining moment. "I decided I would always take chances, dare myself and do it, and get as much as I can out of whatever time allowed. Now that I´m in my fifties, I´m beginning to slow down, half surprised that I´ve lived so long and yet finally realizing that I really, really will die and my reflexes aren´t so fast anymore. I better cool it if I´m going to finish the series of books clanging around in my head." The author of three published novels The Book of Mamie, (University of Iowa Press, 1990); The Holy Book of the Beard, (Doubleday, 1996); and Too Cool, (Doubleday, 1998) as well as a collection of poetry Waking in Wisconsin, (Doubleday, 1998), Duff Brenna is a man who has paid his dues. At fifty-three Brenna has witnessed life from inside of a number of jails and foster homes, through the eyes of a truck driver, a crane operator, a steel worker, a dairy farmer who went bankrupt, an airborne soldier mobilized to "pacify" a Latin American "communist insurrection," a writer struggling to be published for twenty-five years, and as a husband and parent. As a summa cum laude college graduate, he eventually became a tenured associate professor at California State University, San Marcos, where he was named "Outstanding Professor" in the Department of Literature in 1994.
In 1988, his novel The Book of Mamie, which had been turned away by 23 agents and 23 publishers, won the AP Novel Award and, two years later, was published by the University of Iowa Press. 1990 was a good year for Brenna; it brought major reviews that hailed him as "an American treasure," and a new Twain, Steinbeck, and Flannery O´Connor. His success with The Book of Mamie also brought a movie option and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. His next novel, The Holy Book of the Beard, debuted to splendid reviews, and the third, Too Cool, even greater ones.
Brenna´s work and narrative style is unique in American fiction. His vision transcends the conventional consensus reality of the United States today. And, there is also exuberance, a rare commodity in a literary America of minimalist K-mart realism. Literary and entertaining, his characters are unlike those we have come to expect from novels published by either literary or commercial presses. The main character of The Book of Mamie is a six-foot tall Wisconsin woman of enormous physical strength but with the intellect and savant wisdom of a precocious child. The Holy Book of the Beard is peopled with a low-life San Diego diner crowd who reflect, inter alia, the figures of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Triple E, the main character of Too Cool is a juvenile delinquent called upon to deal with a situation of grave seriousness in the snowy mountains of Colorado. Brenna´s forthcoming novel, The Altar of the Body (Picador USA), excerpted here, deals with a passive Minnesota man whose life is taken over by an over-the-hill bodybuilder and his leggy, Las Vegas girlfriend and her aging mother, who, in her hallucinating mind, literally melts into the pages of a paperback western. Hilariously funny, Brenna´s novels remain rivetingly serious, and his multitude of past lives inform his prose. Brenna is currently working on Foggy Meadow Breakdown, a collection of linked stories about a family that helped settle Foggy Meadow, Minnesota, and he has notes for a novel about the Alaskan experiences of Triple E, the delinquent protagonist of Too Cool. Brenna´s work has been translated into Japanese, Finnish, and German.
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