Ernest Brawley's Blog

Roots Digital Ebooks
JULY 14, 2014 / ROZ FOSTER / 0 COMMENTS

Ernest Brawley
Roots Digital Media not only produces films like Tarpit — #‎tarpitthemovie‬ — it’s also an ebook publisher. Our vision with the ebook imprint in terms of its literary fiction offerings is to digitally publish, sell and champion works of American literature that demonstrate a mastery of quintessentially American English. We’re looking for novels that take pleasure and pride in our cultural story, our history. We’re hoping to ignite in our readers a love for American writing that revels in the pleasures of language, its sound and rhythm, language that takes pride in the idiomatic meaning of American speech.
We’re beginning with Ernest Brawley’s The Rap, a prison novel, inspired by the gritty, action-packed reality of San Quentin in the 60s and by the revolutionary Black Panther, George Jackson. The Rap is a page-turning, character-driven, language-rich novel that raps lyrically about political imprisonment and rails powerfully against governmental corruption, against authoritarian statism—against The Man. If you like Ken Kesey, Hunter Thompson, Charles Bukowski, Larry McMurtry, Edward Abbey, Jim Harrison, Cormac McCarthy—authors who write linguistically rich, aggressive, viscerally incendiary and deeply American books, you’ll love Ernest Brawley and The Rap.
Little Arv Weed, a prison guard who hides his mixed race origins, is terrified to live out the drudgery of his American working-class future. He teams up with the political prisoner William Galliot, the dignified, well-educated black revolutionary, to stage an unlikely escape. Meanwhile, Arv’s cousin Wasco Weed, another inmate, the magnificently intimidating leader of the Motopsychos, a drug-running motorcycle gang, has been tasked by no less than the Governor, through the prison’s warden, to assassinate the radical black leader. Galliot’s only real crimes are political. And his most feared weapons are the ability to write and to inspire revolution. Although violently clear lines are drawn between guards and inmates, the narrative describes the terrible reality that, no matter which side of the bars these characters are on, they’re all in prison. And the desperately beautiful horrors at the heart of each are revealed in their lyrical raps, teeming with American idiom, in this brilliant piece of quintessentially American literature.

Fiona McVie in the UK just interviewed me about my novel THE RAP, now available at Amazon/Kindle. Read it below:

Name
Ernest Brawley

Age: 67

Where are you from?
My dad was a prison guard, so I was raised on the grounds of prisons all over the state of California, including Chino, Tracy and San Quentin Prisons.

A little about yourself, i.e. your education Family life, etc.
I went to college at San Francisco State University, where I received a BA in English Literature and an MA in Creative Writing. Afterwards, I spent my life writing, teaching, and traveling the world. I lived and worked in Buenos Aires, Paris, London, Rome, Granada, Bombay, Bangkok, and Tokyo. I taught at the University of Hawaii, Hunter College, New York University, and the Sorbonne. I am a recipient of the Joseph Henry Jackson Award in Literature, and served for several years on the Fiction Award Committee of the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington. I have published three novels and am about to publish another. One of my novels was made into a feature film titled FASTWALKING, starring James Woods. I am married to Kanchana Namjaiyen, from Thailand, and my daughter, Lucia Brawley, is an actress.

Fiona: Tell us your latest news?
My gritty San Quentin novel THE RAP is being republished by Little Machines Press/Roots Digital Media on April 30, 2015, and is up for pre-order at Amazon/Kindle. Roots Digital Media will then republish my novel SELENA, about the California farmworkers’ battles of the Seventies, and bring out my new novel BLOOD MOON, concerning a land war in 19th Century Arizona, shortly thereafter.

Fiona: When and why did you begin writing?
As a high school student I was intent on becoming an auto mechanic, but my English teacher liked the essays I wrote for his class, encouraged me to pursue a college track, and gave me my own gossip column, modeled on Herb Caen’s, in the school newspaper. I called it “Ernie’s Brawlesque,” and I had so much fun writing it, and found that it made me so popular with the girls, that I decided to become a professional author. When I met my teacher later in life, I jokingly told him that I would never forgive him for encouraging me to be a writer and not an auto mechanic. When he asked me why, I replied, “Because the average mechanic makes a helluva lot more than your typical writer!”

When did you first consider yourself a writer?
With the publication of my first short story, “Lucerne in the Snow,” in Evan. S. Connell’s San Francisco magazine Contact.

Fiona: What inspired you to write your first book?
I had grown up on the grounds of prisons, my father and two of my uncles were prison guards. I worked my way through college working nights as a correctional officer at San Quentin Prison, in Death Row, the Big Yard, and as a rifleman in the guard towers. My first novel, THE RAP, now being republished, was based upon my horrifying experiences there.

Fiona: Do you have a specific writing style?
Yes, I have a kind of rhythmic, rapping style which I acquired from listening to the cell-to-cell conversations of the inmates under my supervision at San Quentin, and from the streetwise “pocho caló” of the Chicano side of my family.

Fiona: How did you come up with the title?
The title of my first book, THE RAP, has two meanings. One has to do with the slangy, rhythmic way the prisoners in San Quentin talk, and the other refers to a “prison rap,” or sentence.

Fiona: Is there a message in your novel that you want readers to grasp?
The message I tried to convey to my readers in THE RAP was that the inmates, the guards, and the state government that ruled them were equal in their corruption, their criminality, and their evil intentions.

Fiona: How much of the book is realistic?
The book is mostly very gritty and realistic in its violence, but there are instances of magical realism as well, especially in regard to the wild little Hawaiian water nymph named Moke.

Fiona: Are experiences based on someone you know, or events in your own life?
Absolutely. I lived through many of the events in the lives of my characters. My protagonist, Arvin Weed, is very like me. Even his name has the same history as mine. Both “Arvin” and “Weed” are the names of funky little California farm towns. My father was born Ernesto Robles, but changed his name to Ernest Brawley when he passed through the border farm town of Brawley, California. A light-colored Mexican, he figured he’d do better in California with a gringo name. All the characters in THE RAP are based on my own family members, or guards and prisoners that I knew personally. Even the black prison writer in my novel is based upon the writer James Baldwin, whom I knew later in Paris.

Fiona: What books have most influenced your life most? a mentor?
The classical novel that has influenced me most is Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s CRIME AND PUNISHMENT. The contemporary novel that’s had the greatest influence on me is Cormac McCarthy’s BLOOD MERIDIAN.

My mentors and teachers were the San Francisco writers Leo Litwak, Herb Gold, and Herbert Wilner.

Fiona: What book are you reading now?
SOUL CATCHER, a novel by Michael White.

Fiona: Are there any new authors that have grasped your interest?
Yes. Michael White, Paul Watkins, John Shors, and Steff Penny.

Fiona: What are your current projects?
I am writing a novel called THE GOLDEN TRIANGLE. It takes place during the CIA’s secret war in Laos in the early Seventies. It concerns a CIA military operative named Zack who falls in love with a beautiful Laotian doctor who turns out to be a Communist spy. At one point in the novel Zack is wounded, wakes up in a medical clinic, looks up at the beautiful smiling Asian face of his doctor, and thinks he has died and gone to heaven. This too is based on my own personal experience. I was injured in a motorcycle accident in Thailand, woke up in a hospital, looked up at the beautiful smiling Asian face of my nurse, and thought I’d died and gone to heaven. A year later, I married that nurse, Kanchana Namjaiyen.

I am also writing a screenplay called STREETLIGHT about an ex-journalist who leaves her husband to restart her life and confront her past in the form of a celebrated drug rehab guru whose dark secrets she feels compelled to expose.

Fiona: Name one entity that you feel supported you outside of family members.
The Joseph Henry Jackson Award for Literature.

Fiona: Do you see writing as a career?

I no longer teach, so writing is my sole profession.

Fiona: If you had to do it all over again, would you change anything in your latest book?
Not a word!

Fiona: Do you recall how your interest in writing originated?
From reading great books as a kid and admiring their writers.

Fiona: Can you share a little of your current work with us?
Sure. Here’s the first two pages of my new novel, BLOOD MOON, which is set in the year 1880:

The specter that sent twenty-year-old Eduardo Dawson running from the city of his birth was an enormous, pale-eyed, raven-haired Mexican woman of Welsh extraction named Maruja Rhys. A rumored diabolist, and a certain nymphomaniac, she was known as “Maruja la Bruja,” or more prosaically in English, “Maruja the Witch.”
For no apparent reason, she conceived a passion for Eduardo on his first day of work at the Mexico City Herald, the English language daily where she was a veteran copywriter and he a mere cub reporter. Much to the merriment of his colleagues, she continued to follow him about every day thereafter, gazing upon him as if moon-struck, inventing endless flimsy excuses to confer with him.
To complicate matters, Maruja la Bruja lived directly above Eduardo in a company-owned building next door to the newspaper premises, on Calle Isabél la Católica, and every night she leaned out her window to fling clanging centavos onto his laundry terrace, beckoning to him lasciviously when he stepped out to investigate.
At the risk of stoking his own vanity, but in the interests of clarity, Eduardo reminded himself in the journal and sketchbook he kept that this was not the first time a woman had trailed him about, stalking him like a hunted animal. Several times in the past, he had been hounded in a like manner -- and by far younger and more attractive huntresses than Maruja la Bruja. Some of them had even managed to fell their beleaguered prey in what he described in his daily personal record as “the tangled forest of their intentions.” For the longest time, Eduardo could not imagine why he had become such sought-after game, till one of his most fervent pursuers, a former art teacher of his from the British International School named Mrs. Candice Thatcher, bid him confront his mirror with a fresh eye, as if he had never cast a glance there before. What he saw in the glass before him then suddenly explained it all, for although he was cursed with the thin sandy hair, humdrum hazel eyes, and pasty skin of his ungainly English father, he had been blessed with the classical facial symmetry of his beautiful Latin mother. Eduardo was so taken with this new impression of himself that he whipped out his pen, ink, and sketchbook and did a quick self-portrait on the spot. When he was done, Mrs. Thatcher, an artist of some talent herself, pronounced it an amazing likeness.
Yet Maruja, as it turned out, was even more passionate and pertinacious than Eduardo’s former stalkers, and she chased him relentlessly for nearly a year. The more he ignored her advances, the more frenzied were her appeals, to the point where he feared she might tie her bed-sheets together some inky night and, “with her sooty mane flying like some Druidic handmaiden,” slither down and ravish him while he lay sleeping.
Then one evening, home from a lengthy, frustrating encounter with Encarnacíon McGinnis, a comely Catholic colleague whose misguided religious fervor rendered her impervious to the charms that others had found so irresistible, and flush with too much cheap Spanish wine, Eduardo threw himself down on his bed fully clothed. Just as he was drifting off into an alcoholic stupor, Maruja la Bruja started tip-tip-tipping her coins on the tiles of his terrace again. There was quite a substantial pile of them by then, for out of fear that she might take him wrong he had left them to rust where they lay.
“¡Ven pa’ca, Eduardo, ven p’arriba!” she coaxed, in the faux-friendly tone one uses to beckon a wayward pet, as he stepped out onto his terrace and looked up to where she stood leaning, long-haired, out over her flower planter. Yet the instant she had his attention, the veil of geniality died in her eyes, replaced by something akin to the optics of a carrion crow. An eerie blue fire blazed up in their depths, seeming to wither the flowers before her and flare through the darkness. “¡Ven p’aca, Eduardito mio, ven p’arriba!” she chanted, crooking a purple claw at him, and he felt himself “wilting,” as he would put it later, in the word-besotted alliterative style that was the bane of his editors at the Herald, “wilting to her wicked will like the pansies in her planter.”
Slipping out his door, creeping up the open stairway above the patio where the sports editor and his cronies played cards every night, fearing discovery and the ridicule it would provoke in the newsroom, Eduardo cursed the virtue of Encarnacíon McGinnis. Cursed the fever it had ignited in his loins. A fever that now – perversely – rendered him defenseless in the face of the powers of darkness.
Whereupon, Maruja la Bruja flung open her door.
Naked as the night she was born, her vast, black, feathery V flaring nearly to her navel, she clamped onto his waist with talons of steel. Swept him up like a fetish doll. Bore him into her foul-smelling nest. Fell backwards on her rancid straw pallet. Dragged him down. Then with an “antediluvian, raptor-like shriek that shook the rafter beams,” she opened her mouth, arms, legs, and nether parts to enfold him in a smothering embrace. Instantly, he found himself plucked apart, ingurgitated, churned about in some sour, fermented substance, and just as quickly spat out.
In brief, she tupped like a teenage boy.
Having had her way with him, she was no longer interested, and tossed him out on the landing like a pecked bone.
Not three minutes after Eduardo had crept up the stairs, he found himself slinking shamefully down them again, above the laughing men in the courtyard, who all seemed to be pointing up at him.

Fiona: Is there anything you find particularly challenging in your writing?
It’s all challenging, especially coming up with new and original tales to tell. But there is nothing in the world that I would rather do.

Fiona: Who is your favorite author and what is it that really strikes you about their work?

As I said above, Cormac McCarthy is my favorite contemporary author. First, he tells deep and meaningful stories, often about characters facing the most horrid, contemptible antagonists. And he does it with magic prose, clean, naked, direct, and overpowering in its emotional impact.

Fiona: Do you have to travel much concerning your book(s)?

I have traveled all over the world. I once even hitchhiked from California to Argentina, from Paris to Singapore. Yet oddly enough all four of my completed novels are set in California and Mexico, the lands of my ancestors, the places I know best.

Fiona: Who designed the covers?

THE RAP – Lawrence Ratzikin
SELENA – Paul Bacon
THE ALAMO TREE – Wendell Minor

Fiona: What was the hardest part of writing your book?

I lived in Paris when I wrote THE RAP. Any research I had to do was at the American Library in Paris, which had very little information on the prison system of the state of California. I found I had to utilize my memory far more than library research. The story itself was easy, as were the characters, because they were already a part of my life.

Fiona: Did you learn anything from writing your book and what was it?

I learned that writing is not a hobby or a pastime. It is a full time job, and it takes all your energy and time.

Fiona: Do you have any advice for other writers?

Write something every day, even if it’s in your journal, even if you have to tear it up later. As you get in the habit of writing, it gets easier and easier.

Fiona: Do you have anything specific that you want to say to your readers?

If you like novels based on real events, real characters, real human experience, set in a real historical context, have a look at my novels.

Fiona: Do you remember the first book you read?
Mark Twain’s THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLBERRY FINN.

Fiona: What makes you laugh/cry?

Happy children make me laugh, sad ones make me cry. The same goes for my wife.

Fiona: Is there one person past or present you would meet and why?

Napoleon Bonaparte, because through his own efforts he came out of nowhere to become greater than anyone else, and because of his own mistakes he ended up worse off than when he started. I’d like to ask him whether it was worth it or not, though I have a pretty good idea what his answer would be.

Fiona: What do you want written on your head stone and why?

He lived. He loved. He wrote. He traveled. He died happy.

Fiona: Other than writing do you have any hobbies?

Reading, watching French films, surfing, traveling.

Fiona: What TV shows/films do you enjoy watching?

Don’t watch much TV, but I’m addicted to “House of Cards.”

Fiona: Favorite foods / Colors/ Music

Italian food. The color blue. Jazz and Classical music. All-time favorites: Miles Davis’ Sketches of Spain and Eric Satie’s Les Trois Gymnopedies.

Fiona: If you were not a writer what else would you like to have done?

I’d have made a pretty good defence lawyer, I think.