I met Charlie when I was a doctoral student at the University of Arizona. He taught one of my favorite classes ever (not just in graduate school), which focused on the philosophy of language. I came across the field of philosophy too late as an undergraduate to make it my major (I took my first philosophy class as a junior), but if I had found it sooner, I think I might have become a philosopher instead of an English major who ended up focusing on the study of writing.
The class Charlie taught introduced me to language theorists I ended up citing in chapter four of my dissertation: Ludwig Wittgenstein, Paul Ricoeur, Judith Butler, J. L. Austin, and Jürgen Habermas. I drew connections between their theories and theories of written composition and rhetoric to propose a new way of teaching academic writing that emphasizes building mutual understanding between people rather than focusing only on persuasion. I was honored to have Charlie serve on my dissertation committee and also to serve as a model for me of one of the strongest interdisciplinary thinkers out there.
Charlie is perhaps best known professionally as a co-founder of the e-zine Bad Subjects: Political Education for Everyday Life. One collection of articles from its 25-year run was published by NYU Press and another by Pluto Press. He also co-founded the e-zine Souciant which was published from 2011–2020. He’s currently affiliated with The Battleground, another e-zine, based in Brussels, where he serves as Music & Film Editor. He’s published two book-length collections of his articles from The Battleground. The first, published in 2021, is titled Listening for the Future: Popular Music for Europe, while the second, newly published this month, is called End of Story: European Cinema in a Post-Narrative Age.
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| Author and editor Charlie Bertsch. (Instagram/Charlie
Bertsch) |
I’m so pleased to introduce you to Charlie’s writing life. Following is an interview that we edited collaboratively. If you’d like to connect with Charlie, he’s available on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram.
When did you first know you might become a writer?
In retrospect, I should have had inklings in second grade when I won a competition in my school district for a short book I’d written and illustrated and got to participate in a county-wide program. But the event was held at a school in a very wealthy school district in Philadephia’s northern suburbs, and I found the experience alienating. I mean, the school had an indoor swimming pool!
I started to get a clear sense of being a writer in high school. During the fall semester of our junior year, I was taking a course with a beloved teacher. He distributed a photocopied handbook covering various topics, including complex ethical quandaries. The English teacher who supervised the humanities became angry at him for not getting permission to distribute this handbook before giving it to us and initiated a disciplinary action that eventually led to him being dismissed, though he was allowed to continue teaching for the remainder of the semester.
Because this man also ran the theater program at our school, he had a lot of support from current and former students. A movement sprang up to protest his dismissal, in the hope of getting it overturned. Even though our school was small and out of the way, this movement was eventually reported in local newspapers, as I recall.
Up until that point, I had been a marginal figure in school. After ending up in the outcast role in seventh and eighth grade, I tried to keep a low profile in high school. But something about this protest movement inspired me to become more visible. My general misery and lack of motivation made me more fearless than the students who had initiated the protest, the sort who are always striving to please and worried about getting into a good college.
After the beloved teacher left, I began to write pieces for our school magazine, which he had founded. I discovered that I had a gift for satire and could critique the administration while still maintaining plausible deniability. Knowing that my pieces were making an impact, even though everything in them was coded, and that they were understood both by my fellow students and by our antagonists in the administration transformed me into a more confident person and someone who was willing and able to take risks in my writing.
What or who motivates you to write?
First and foremost, I am motivated by my passionate belief in the power of the written word to promote change. I know that it is extremely unlikely that anything I write will achieve mainstream success. But more than three decades in the alternative media have taught me that it’s still possible to have a meaningful impact on society without that mainstream success, provided you reach enough people who will, in turn, pass your ideas onto others.
I am especially proud of those pieces I’ve written that have moved readers outside of my usual orbit, such as one I wrote in 2012 about my neighbor across the street, a Promise Keeper whose political views were radically different from my own. Although I agreed with very little this man said, he was still a great neighbor who worked hard to make life better for the people around him. This piece made some of my conservative acquaintances on social media—mostly from my high school—feel seen and also helped like-minded progressives to remember that we shouldn’t reduce individuals to the positions they occupy in the political landscape.
Although I have rarely had a large audience for my work, the readers I do have inspire me. It means a lot to know that I’m reaching the people I want to reach and that they are responding to my writing in ways that please me.
At this point, another motivation to write regularly is my own mental health. During the comparatively rare periods in which I haven’t had regular writing assignments, I’ve drifted in and out of a paralytic state that I now recognize as depression.
What is your favorite part of your writing process and what do you most like about it?
My favorite part of the writing process is the initial stage when I’m doing research and formulating ideas. If I’m in a groove, that work fills me with positive energy and generates enough hope to get me through the most difficult part of the process, which is when I sit down at my laptop and try to come up with a way into my piece.
Where do you do most of your writing and why is that your chosen place?
I do most of my writing at home, in the wee hours of the morning. The official reason for this is that I work for a magazine based in Belgium and need to communicate with my editor when it’s morning in Europe. But I also find it difficult to work when I might be interrupted by my family. Although my kind of ADHD makes it possible for me to focus intently when the setting is right, it also leads me to be easily distracted. Interestingly, during daytime hours I typically find it easier to write in a crowded café, where the ambient noise helps to offset the tendencies of my own brain.
Whose books do you most like to read and why?
These days, I am more likely to listen to a well-narrated audiobook than to read a physical one. I suffer from a kind of dyslexia that makes it difficult for me to match up the end of lines, which often causes me to get stuck in a loop, staring at the same page for minutes on end. Although this dyslexia has always been a problem, it became much worse after I endured a serious health crisis and long hospitalization in 2021.
That is why, when I returned to Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain during my long recovery process, I abandoned my paperback for the excellent Audible version. I typically listen while on the go, which helps me to remember text better than when I am sitting in my chair at home. In the case of The Magic Mountain, I experienced the second half of the book while learning to hike again on my favorite trail in the Catalina Mountains north of Tucson. I wrote a long piece about the novel, broken into three parts, for The Battleground, incorporating photos I had taken during my hikes. Although most pieces of mine attract more readers, that one is dear to my heart.
My type of dyslexia makes it much easier for me to read from flat surfaces than curved ones. As a consequence, I read much faster on screens or photocopies that lie flat. That’s fine for research but feels strange to me when I want to immerse myself in a fictional world. So I generally read non-fiction on my laptop these days and listen to novels.
In terms of what I like to read, detective and espionage fiction are my go-to genres for pleasure reading, which in 2024 usually means pleasure listening. John Le Carré’s Cold War narratives have been a favorite of mine since I was a teenager, and I enjoy revisiting them periodically. One of the reasons why Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Sympathizer, recently adapted into an HBO mini-series, places high on my list of recent novels is that it takes me back to that mode of storytelling but approaches it from a different angle. Another reason is that he is the only recipient of a Macarthur Genius Grant that I once defeated at Scrabble!
Over the past decade, I have been trying to read classics of world literature in translation, since my professional training left me little time for literature that wasn’t in my fields, nineteenth and twentieth-century American literature. Some, like Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, I read in book form. But I found it much easier to listen to Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust than to tackle it in print and not only because of my dyslexia.
I also read cultural theory because I enjoy it, perverse as that may sound, because I appreciate getting a lot out of a little. The same applies to poetry, though I haven’t engaged with it as much lately as I would like.
What advice do you have for aspiring authors?
The standard advice always seems to be to read widely and as much as you can. I think that’s definitely the case for children and teenagers. But once you are in your twenties, I would argue that it becomes just as important to read well instead of just reading for the sake of reading. That means SLOWING DOWN and reflecting on what you read, rather than rushing to the next book.
One exercise I’ve found valuable is copying down a paragraph that I particularly like by hand, in a notebook, and then writing notes about it. Something about the particular hand-and-brain connection there seems to make the words on the page or screen sink in differently and opens my eyes to details I might otherwise overlook.
Anything else you'd like to share?
For a number of years, I taught a class for first-year students in the honors college of a major university. The idea behind this course was to get these students, who were almost always the hard-working and motivated sort, to make their writing less impersonal, since these students often had difficulty later in their undergraduate years writing the kind of self-descriptions required for applications to graduate and professional school.
I came up with a variety of exercises designed to bypass the habits these students had learned in high school, when they were trying to please their teachers instead of themselves, and to help them mobilize personal experiences in their writing. My favorite one of these involved giving them twenty minutes to respond to a prompt in class. I would ask them to leave their name off of these in-class writing assignments. Once they were done, I would distribute them in such a way that each student ended up with someone else’s in-class writing and could not tell who had written it. Then I would ask students to read the in-class writing carefully several times in preparation for presenting it to the class. I told them to imagine that they had experienced what the other student had and would then take volunteers, asking them to read the in-class writing aloud in such a way that it seemed like their own work.
This seemingly simple exercise led to some very powerful moments in my classes. Afterwards, students often reported that it was their favorite thing about the course. Somehow, the work of impersonating someone else would unlock a capacity to write more convincingly about their own experiences going forward.
I mention this because I think that doing a modified version of this kind of exercise can be very helpful for writers. You can read published work, of course. Or you can get in a writer’s group where you do something along these lines