Jackie's Chat With Benjamin Busch

Last week, Ben Busch arrived very early for his signing of Dust to Dust at our Historic Lodo Store. I've been a huge fan of the book since reading the first page of the preface (you can see my review HERE), so I was extremely happy to have some time to sit chatting with the author.

He's on a bit of a "rock-band" style book tour.  His publisher, Ecco, had planned an 8 city book tour for him, including hotels and airplane travel. He asked them to just give him the money they would have spent on all of that and he would drive himself around to as many book stores as possible, and luckily they agreed. Tattered Cover was the 47th stop on that tour--he is planning on making it to 150 in total.  He explained to me, "Musicians, especially when they are starting out, tour everywhere to get themselves known.  I'm a writer, so I'm doing signings. Same thing."  He's sleeping on friends couches or in his car,taking $10 showers and doing laundry at truck stops.  He's also  exploring a whole lot of places he's never been before.

He's actually far more than a writer.  He's a veteran of two combat tours in Iraq as a U.S. Marine infantry officer (surprising the Vassar recruiter by signing up for officer training the summer after his junior year there).  He's also an acclaimed photographer, sculptor and illustrator.  After coming home from the service, he became an actor, his best known roll being Officer Anthony Colicchio on HBO's series The Wire.  He mentioned that he got a lot of that character's rage by tapping in to the many frustrations he encountered in Iraq.  He's also had roles on Homicide, The West Wing and Generation Kill.  Never idle, he would "reverse engineer" the sets to figure out how movies are made, and has now become an award-winning film director and producer as well.  Add a wife and two daughters and a farm in Michigan, and you can see Busch is a very busy fellow.

Busch admits that he is a very determined man, saying once he makes his mind up about something he will "pursue it with absolute commitment."  That has been the case for him for most of his life. "By seven, I was set.  After that I just got taller and made mistakes.  I've always been very transparent.  What I'm going after is not a secret."

Perhaps the biggest catalyst for writing his book was the combination of coming home from Iraq on his daughter's first birthday,and realizing she did not know him, in addition to losing both of his parents in a year's time. "Those we lose we carry  I'm always amazed by how much of our lives we keep....The artist will always adapt to the medium that's available," he says.  Though not much of a reader despite being the son of novelist Frederick Busch,  explaining "I can't stay still for very long,"  Busch realized that words were what he needed to use this time to express his sense of place and its importance.  He didn't want to write a memoir exactly, he wanted to show people how he sees big things like immortality, childhood, materiality, the universe, the world outside of all of us.  So while the book necessarily involves him, "I'm the one who was seeing these things," really it's more about the big realities of being human--the nuance and subtleties that his artist's eye has always helped him see, and live by.  And now, in  Dust to Dust, he's trying to share that vision with the world.

--Jackie