Puff author Bob Flaherty

Oh yeah, a lot of short stories. I won several short story contests in the Northeast region. That kind of got me going

I’d been sending out a lot of stuff, a lot of short stories and generally they come back, in the same envelopes you sent them in. So I just got mad one day and I went to a friend of mine who had been in the business for awhile and I said “Give me a name!” So he gave me the David Black agency and told me he was friendly with David Black but that turned out not to be the case. But I did call the David Black agency anyway and I bluffed myself through the receptionist and talked to David Black himself. He said he never heard of my friend but he said send me some things so I sent him two chapters of Puff.

Then I didn’t hear a thing from him for eight months. I’d forgotten all about it, didn’t even realize that I’d sent it. I had completely abandoned the project and was working on other things. Eight months later George from the Black Agency telephoned and said “We loved your chapters and do you have anymore?” I said “Sure I do!” Of course I was lying and I didn’t have anymore so I spent the next 48 hours awake and just knocked out two more chapters. They loved those and we just went from there.

Yeah, I was completely done but then there is another whole editing process that happens after acceptance. Then when the book was completely done at that level we submitted it on to publishers. It was kind of unique because I don’t think it happens that way

Yeah it was kind of a funny process. We didn’t know necessarily where the story was going and when I was done writing for the night I wasn’t sure where I was going to pick it up the next day.

Probably not, I think I’ll do what they tell you to do, character development and all that before you jump in. It was a blast though.

It has two duel plots going on. I guess the main plot of the book is that these two brothers are in the middle of this gigantic blizzard that goes on for three days. They want to score an ounce of pot and to do this they have to drive through a couple of town lines which is impossible because the roads are all closed and so they disguise themselves as rescue personnel. The only vehicles allowed on the road would be police and fire and ambulance and that kind of thing. So they disguise themselves as Red Cross personnel so they can complete their mission and go through three towns and come back with an ounce of pot. That is the basic plot but it also goes back and forth between two points of time, when the narrator was 13 and when he was 23.

It is almost all autobiographical but not necessarily chronological. There are an awful lot of similarities between the narrator and myself. When I was younger, I had just tons of experiences and I would go kind of where my nose lead me. Then as another one of my friends told me, you have a cabinet just full of things you can pull out when you need them. Writing a book was that way, there are just so many things that I would get involved in. I don’t want to put a percentage on it. But my father who did have a newspaper agency and we did destroy his whole operation one night.

Yeah, I thought of myself as an innocent really but I just kind of got involved in things. It’s hard to explain it. We had a dog who lived to be 20 years old but would run away every so often because he just followed his nose and then he’d end up 20 miles away and starving at the side of the road and we’d have to go pick him up. That is kind of the way I lived. I would go where I was interested in going without any discipline. But I don’t think I was a menace to society or anything. I just went where the sun was shining.

No, I think it is kind of a fearlessness that you get when you do this sort of thing. Now this is my first time as a novelist but with the things you read over and over again about the Hemingways and the Updikes and all is that there is you see the kind of a fearlessness it takes to get to that point. You can’t be afraid to expose yourself. Most of what’s in this book comes straight from the heart. Looking back on it now I think, “Oh my god, did I actually say that?” I think it is an interesting exercise to explore like that and not be afraid to put it on paper.

Yeah, that’s kind of a nice way to put it. I think the subplot to the book is probably death. I certainly didn’t design it this way, but as you look back on it almost every chapter deals with death in some way then it snaps into a wild comedy. The narrator, of course that would be me, has an interesting take on death. Initially there is a great fear of it and there is one part where he sees his grandmother all laid out and says that her privacy is washed away like bleach. So he’s uncomfortable with death, he’s not afraid of it, but he just doesn’t quite get what is it all about. I think ultimately maybe the bigger question is that life is finding something worth dying for.

Yeah a little bit. It’s funny when you’re writing about a kid because you have to see things through his eyes and then of course as an adult we face death so differently. In this country we face it so stoically so we don’t really think about it so much. I think writing the book made me think a lot about death. It is so inevitable and at the same time you want to avoid it all costs. It is a funny little thing.

My whole life people ask me that and I just say cremation, to just get it over with. I really don’t want to be laid out in a funeral parlor. The very idea of being laid out in a funeral parlor and having people that wouldn’t even give you the time of day come and gawk at you is so absurd.

I’m 55.

Yeah, I think I’ve only been writing now for about eight or nine years. I wrote in college for my college magazine but just crazy referential stuff. Then there was this whole period in between where I didn’t write much at all and did cartoons.

Yeah I did it for a couple of regional magazines. Then my wife got me into a workshop which really opened things up for me. That was incredible. I thrived on it from the very first meeting. You free form write for a half hour about anything and the words just flew off the pen.

Yeah, my brother still lives in the area so he gets a kick out of it.

It’s an interesting little book told from the eyes of a kid whose mother is the mayor of the town. There is a very ominous bike path that runs through the town and there is a part of the bike path that you simply do not cross. You can only go to a certain point and you don’t come back. So eventually the hero is going to have to cross that path.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

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