Scott Bradfield is the author of The History of Luminous Motion, which was recently reissued by Derek White at Calamari Press. It was originally published by Bloomsbury in 1989. His other novels include What’s Wrong with America, Animal Planet, Good Girl Wants it Bad, and The People Who Watched Her Pass By. He has written four short story collections: The Secret Life of Houses, Dream of the Wolf, Greetings from Earth,and Hot Animal Love. And two books of criticism: Dreaming Revolution, and Why I Hate Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Bradfield lives in London, England. I conducted this interview via email.
—Brandon Hobson
BRANDON HOBSON: Can you talk a little about how Derek at Calamari came to rerelease The History of Luminous Motion? Was it his idea or something you’ve been wanting to do?
SCOTT BRADFIELD: It was one of the few instances of serendipity I’ve enjoyed in the world of so-called Literature. For years (decades even), I genuinely believed that world would beat a path to my books and stories, but eventually, as everything I wrote went rapidly out of print and stayed there, I wised up and started assembling them in e-format editions, with my son doing the jacket designs, and composing these new afterwords, if only to remind myself where I was when I originally wrote them, and what in the world I was thinking about. Since I have no clue how to work scanning software, I ended up retyping the entire published edition of History into my computer, and endlessly copy-editing it against the Vintage paperback edition, which is the sort of mindless, dull, unimaginative work I’m pretty good at. Writing brief afterwords, on the other hand, has turned out to be much harder.
About the same time that I was posting the first e-versions of History at the various available venues (Amazon, Kindle, Kobo), a young guy asked me to answer the proverbial question, “Why do you write?” and while I normally avoid such questions, I perversely wrote him something incredibly brief along the lines of “I have no idea why I write,” which is true, and when my answer was posted on his website, I suddenly heard from Derek at Calamari, who not only followed the site, but who remembered History as a book he had discussed with his brother in another life. Within weeks of my gratefully agreeing to have Calamari republish History, Derek had formatted, designed and illustrated the new edition, and it arrived on my doorstep in hard copies. (I usually wait...
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