Author Notes: Rob Benvie

Rob BenvieRecent Puritan contributor Rob Benvie discusses his short story “Glassiness” from Issue XXII: Summer 2013 of The Puritan.It’s curious how a scenario gets lost as you go along. You’ve got to have a scenario, and you’ve got to test it so that you know where the comedy comes in, splitting it up into scenes (you can make a scene of almost anything) and have as little stuff in between as possible. I like to think of some scene, it doesn’t matter how crazy, and work backward and forward from it until eventually it becomes quite plausible and fits neatly into the story.Oh, wait! My apologies—I’ve just been randomly cutting and pasting lines from P.G. Wodehouse’s 1975 interview with the Paris Review. Focus, Benvie, focus!Well, this story, “Glassiness,” found its beginnings in two realms. The first is an endlessly bountiful well of spite, bitterness and general bad vibes that is, sadly, probably one of my most defining traits. Much that motivates me to get through the day derives from spells of jealousy and ill feelings targeting others more successful and decreed by my inner adjudicator as talentless and trite: for lack of a better term, “professional envy.” I am, natch, certainly far from unique in indulging such asshole-ishness. It’s a rotten way to live and think, but it can be exploited to drive a story (According to Wodehouse, A.A. Milne was a “pretty jealous chap.” The dude who made up Tigger!).The second motor for the story came from this wacky notion of human taxidermy, and half-baked ideas of how this image of preserving a human body, plucked out of some arbitrary “exotic” locale, might obliquely poke fun at this mandate of “character development” that is supposedly every author’s solemn responsibility. I could say more about this, but I just used scare quotes twice in one sentence, which is a signal that I don’t have quite enough confidence in this idea to make a coherent or convincing point. Nonetheless, I hope the story is found by readers to be funny/peculiar/tweet-worthy.For lack of a conclusion, let’s be reminded of this great quote, also from Wodehouse: “I love writing. I never feel really comfortable unless I am either actually writing or have a story going. I could not stop writing.” Word!Rob Benvie is the author of the novels Maintenance and Safety of War (both with Coach House Books). His writing has appeared in many print and online publications, including McSweeney’s, Joyland, Matrix, and Broken Pencil. In his musical life, he has recorded and toured internationally with such endeavours as The Dears, Thrush Hermit, Camouflage Nights and Tigre Benvie. Born and raised in Halifax, Nova Scotia, he has since split his time between Toronto and Montreal.