Thaddeus Rutkowski grew up in central Pennsylvania and is a graduate of Cornell University and The Johns Hopkins University. His first novel, Roughhouse (Kaya Press), was a finalist for an Asian American Literary Award. His second novel, Tetched (Behler Publications) will be released in October 2005. He has received two Pushcart Prize nominations. He has taught fiction writing at Pace University, the Writer's Voice of the West Side YMCA, the Hudson Valley Writers Center, and the Asian American Writers Workshop. He has been a resident at Yaddo, MacDowell and other colonies and has written book reviews for The New York Times and other newspapers. He won the Friday slam one time at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe and was selected to read in the former home of East German President Erich Honecker in Berlin. He lives in Manhattan with his wife and daughter.

Your latest novel, Tetched, is subtitled “A Novel in Fractals,” and your first book, Roughhouse, published by Kaya Press in 1999, was subtitled “A Novel in Snapshots.” Do you find it easier to tell stories in these smaller bits?

The form came out of the subject. I first write about images or scenes or incidents that seem important to me, and then I arrange them in a certain order that I hope has a beginning and end. Some kind of coherence. And as it turns out, my structure is these bits, these snapshots, whatever you want to call them, paragraphs, because that is the way that it comes out. The way that I think, the way that I remember things. It’s not a form that I had in mind to begin with. I didn’t tell myself that I was going to write a book in this form. It was what the subject matter seemed to fall into, discreet bits that I hope add up to first a chapter, then a book.

“Fractals” is not a word that I came up with. A professor whose class I visited at U. Penn came up with the word “fractals” for the bits in these stories. It means a small thing that has the same shape as the whole. The professor said that every sentence was like a story, every paragraph was like a story. Each story has the same shape as the sentence or the paragraph. That’s why we called it fractals.

So it was someone else’s idea, but I thought it was a good idea.

The main character in Tetched is never referred to by name. Actually, none of the characters, except for a teenage drifter named Reese, have names. Was that a stylistic choice?

I use the first person, so the narrator is always the “I” in the book. The narrator is surrounded by family members, at least in the first half of the book. I didn’t name the family members, either, because I figured just by describing child, parents, mother, father, brother, sister, you don’t need names. Their description tells where they stand in the family. Later on in the book there are friends and girlfriends. Sometimes I just use “I” and “she.” You can tell how the people stand in relationship with one another.

As for the character of Reese I wanted to use the joke that he uses, saying that his name is “like the Reese’s peanut butter cup.” I thought that was too good a joke to let go. Maybe I should have just called him “the drifter.” He was also the one friend that the narrator had, and perhaps their relationship was a bit more personal, so he needed more of an identity. People definitely have identities in this book, even though they don’t have names.

In the novel, the word “tetched” is used to describe one of the neighbors, and in the beginning of the book, you give a definition of “tetched” as “somewhat unbalanced mentally, touched.” Is “tetched” an actual word, or did you make it up? I couldn’t find it in the dictionary.

Tetched is in a couple of dictionaries. I found it in Webster’s Dictionary, and the definition I used actually came from the Microsoft Word dictionary. There was some discussion about the title. I thought it might be too obscure, because a number of people asked me what it meant. And I thought, why confuse people with a word that might not be familiar to them and I did talk about it with the editor and the publisher, and they convinced me to go with it. Although now I think maybe it should have been Unhinged or Crazy. I didn’t want the book to be called Touched because that could also mean that you were moved emotionally. I didn’t want a word that would have two meanings. And Tetched just means crazy.

Everyone in the book is tetched. Maybe if it gets reprinted, it should be Unhinged.

The father in Tetched is a frustrated artist who blames his lack of fame on the fact that he has to raise a family. He is portrayed at moments as both terrifying and endearing. Is he based on your father? In general, your novels seem to somewhat blur the lines between memoir and fiction. How much of Tetched is based on your actual life experiences?

In all of my fiction, I use my experience as a starting point and I reshape it and distill it and restructure my experience to make it more dramatic. In my books, my characters have a heightened state of being alive. I don’t know how to put it. They’re almost hyper-real because the narrative is so condensed and terse and there are a lot of incidents in the book. In real life, things don’t happen in that pattern or at that pace. I start with people I know and I use experiences I’ve had or that people tell me about. It could be a total stranger telling me an experience. I use whatever seems to fit into the tone of the story. I try to keep a consistent voice or tone, and once I find the tone, everything has to fit into that tone--that’s how I organize the work.

My father was a teacher. That wasn’t his career, but he had a master’s in teaching from Columbia Teacher’s College. He always tried to instruct me and the people around me on various things that he thought were important. He spent a lot of time with me. I almost came to know him better than my mother, because she worked outside the house and I didn’t see her as much. My father always had activities that he thought would be educational. I definitely think he had some issues, but I think that I magnify them in my fiction because I want the story to be dramatic.

What is your writing process like? Do you have any special rituals you go through before/as you write?

I do most of my writing at art colonies, and I try to go to a colony at least once a year during my vacation from work. That’s not a lot of time. It’s only a couple weeks a year, but I’ve been going to them for about 17 years now. So I’ve put together a few months of time where I have nothing else to do but my writing. I also belong to an urban colony, The Writers’ Room here in the East Village. I could go there every day, but I probably go there every week. I was there this morning for a few hours before I met with you. I don’t write all the time while I’m sitting there. I don’t know if anyone does that. But it's good to have time when no one's talking to you. I find that it takes me a couple of days to get to where I feel like I have something that I want to think about or that I’m engaged with. That’s my pattern. The first day I’m searching for something to think about. Time is a luxury. Also, I write on the bus and I carry a notebook, a small notebook.

Is it a small spiral notebook?

Well, it’s a small notebook, but it doesn’t have a spiral binder! (laughs) And I think that every writer should have one on them at all times.

As someone who often performs your work in public, are you concerned while you’re writing with how your work will sound? Or do you just get the words out there?

When I’m writing, I’m not writing to perform, but when I read aloud I try to choose things that will sound good when read aloud. But I usually don’t specifically write for performance. I’m usually writing for the page. My background is in traditional literature, not in theater. But when I give a reading, I want to be entertaining. I want people to feel like they've gotten something from me that they can enjoy. I'm really conscious of that, because I think that most readings are not much fun. Most readings last too long. So I want to make readings a different experience. But I'm not primarily a performer.

Do you feel like your MA helped you at all?

This is a question writers get asked a lot. One of the best answers came from Junot Diaz when I heard him speak at NYU. He said you can find a lot of writers who don’t have a graduate degree who are good writers, but they are the exception to the rule. There are many of them. Most writers do have a graduate degree. It doesn’t guarantee that you’re going to succeed, but most people who do succeed do the graduate school thing. Yeah, it’s helped me, but there’s so much more to being a writer than having a degree in writing. Seems like one small factor in the whole life. But I think it’s an important element.

Any advice for writers just starting out?

Well, I would say that the person who has to motivate you is yourself. No one can force you to be a writer if you don’t want to do it already. If you don’t have a strong desire, a strong drive on your own, no one’s going to be able to make you write. But, if you do write and you do have a strong desire to do it, you can get good advice from other people by taking workshops, going to readings, presenting your work aloud, listening to what people say. And you’re going to get some encouragement. You’re going to find some people who are similar to you and who like your work, and I think that’s important--to get some pats on the back as you go along. And you have to decide: do you want to go to graduate school? Do you want to be a publishing writer? Do you want to be a performer? Do you want to make CD’s or write books? But whatever you decide, you'll find places to do it in New York. You’ll find more people doing those things here than anywhere else.

What are you working on now?

I’m working on the same sorts of things. I write these short stories and then I collect them into a book and I hope the book has a beginning, a middle and an end. But I don’t know what it will be at this point. I don’t start with a framework and try to fill it in. I start with the message and I see what form it takes.

For more information, please visit Thad’s Web site: www.thaddeusrutkowski.com