At Catalog Coffee in Hampden, Sam Farhi is sipping a cup of cold brew and paging through Eileen Myles’s Not Me. The Baltimore-based debut novelist is sporting a ball cap, a blue linen shirt, and a trim red beard, but the most noticeable thing about him is how happy he seems. He’s just launched his new book, The Sapsuckers.
Described by early readers as intense, raw, and haunting, The Sapsuckers takes on a young man’s obsessive search for the truth about his brother’s mysterious death. We dig through a family’s buried secrets in this gripping and beautifully written narrative set in the author’s hometown of Ithaca, New York.
We spoke with Farhi about his work, his process, and his influences.
Walk us through your writing day.
My kids wake up around 6:30. We have to get them to school by 7:30. So my entire writing day is 5 to 6.
I’ll keep a cold brew next to my bed, a store-bought bottle that’ll last me a week ’cause I’ll just take a gulp. It’s dark. I grab my computer, I know where it is. I stumble from my bed to the closet, and set up in the closet. I keep the lights off. I turn my keyboard brightness up one click, right? So you can see the keys, and the screen’s not that bright.
Every single morning, not checking emails or responding to things, but actual work, actual writing. It can be editing, it can be generating more, but it has to be that. My writing is very voice-based. I have to speak aloud while I write. I probably end up with maybe 200 words. Sometimes less, sometimes more. And then at around 5:45, I go back to bed for, like, 30 minutes, maybe. That’s really what it is. I do that every day, and then it builds up. And then before you know it, you have a draft.
Tell me how you pick it up and put it back down again. That’s a real challenge, I think, for a lot of writers. If you’re in a groove, stopping, and then getting yourself back into that groove.
It’s exhausting. You pull up the document and you just start. You just kind of have to throw yourself at it. I’m not someone who can go for hours, because for me it’s physically exhausting. I couldn’t do it for more than that.
When I was in my twenties, before having a career or kids, I was wasting a lot of time. I’d tell myself I’ll write all day, but, if you actually break it down, there would be 45 minutes where I’m actually writing. This is just forcing that time. Start, take a breath and don’t stop.
When you have kids, your time becomes scarce, and when you have a scarce amount of a resource it rises in cost. That’s what I tell writers who are thinking of having a kid. What will happen is all of a sudden you’ll get mad at people who waste your time.
You seem like someone who’s concerned about good sentences.
Well, me and Malik Crumpler, who’s a poet friend of mine, and he’s in Paris now, we started to really look at our sentences. We’re both big rap fans. He was a rapper in the ’90s. He’s one of the best freestylers I ever met. We started looking at sentences at the end of them before a comma or a period, there’s a punch that happens. And we wanted to arrange our sentences so they hit.
Then we saw The Elements of Style, Strunk and White, and it turns out it’s a frickin’ rule, you want the most important part of a sentence towards the end because that’s the last thing you see.
So, if you look at someone like Ta-Nehisi Coates, when you look right before all the periods you get the “punch” of the sentence. And it’s effective.
I don’t necessarily do that anymore. Now it’s the voice that matters. If the sentence gets to where it’s supposed to be, and if it sounds like the person, it’s working.
Part of learning your own voice, in my mind, involves building your own personal canon. Who do you think of as your forebears? Henry Miller was really influential for me in my 20s.
Why?
Because he’s not concerned with plot. He’s concerned with revelation. He’s concerned with having an idea and letting it go and go and go. It doesn’t have to be about a story, it doesn’t have to try to be a character.
But Henry Miller’s big thing is also that he’s crass, right? He lets the mind loose and sees where it goes, without the bounds other writers might impose. It can be about an intense philosophical idea; it can also be about pubic hair.
Back in the day all the dirtiest stuff was in the novels. Novels could depict the things that you couldn’t photograph. It’s the most private medium. The most important thing about reading is that it’s yours. It can go into these dark recesses of your mind, and no one can stop that. Pubic hair is already in your brain somewhere. Henry Miller arrives there and doesn’t shy away from it.
So we’ve got Henry Miller. Give me a few more.
Toni Morrison. I think she’s the greatest American writer, with Mark Twain. I love Sula. But I also love The Bluest Eye. I love Song of Solomon, and I love Beloved. That probably is one of the greatest. She’s everything I’ve been talking about, poetic, deep in the dark recesses of your mind.
You know, she also had kids. She wrote between 4 and 6 in the morning. Every morning.
Do you think you’re a forever Ithaca kind of guy? Is Ithaca your Dublin?
That’s a good way of putting it. Yeah. Maybe eventually we get to Baltimore, but I’d probably have to move away, which I don’t see happening in the near future. For Ithaca, I had to move away to write about it, because I didn’t realize what I was growing up in was special. Once you’re away from it, you can look at it.
Baltimore launch
September 10th, Greedy Reads Remington, in conversation with Sylvia Jones. More info here.
