Brin-Jonathan Butler

How did you become a writer?

My first memory is of the sound my father's finger tips pounding away at an old type writer before dawn up in the country. It stirred me out of a dream. I had an early romance with the mystery and dark magic of his private struggle filling blank pages yet not being able to finish the book. It was never a stain I had much interest in mopping up. The spike broke off in the vein pretty early for me with this racket and with my old man.

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.).

Italo Calvino, George Orwell, Van Gogh's letters, J.D. Salinger, Lydia Davis, Margarite Duras, Robert Hughes, Cervantes, Richard Ben Cramer, Steinbeck, Gogol, DBC Pierre, Jimmy Cannon, Mark Kram Sr., Hunter S. Thompson, Kundera, Kerouac, Michael Herr, Hemingway, Kafka, Patricia Highsmith

When and where do you write?

I write at four in the morning wherever I happen to be located, preferably in the company of my cat Raul here in Spanish Harlem. I come from generations of Dutch farmers and don't think I look at a blank page much different than they looked at untended, fertile soil.