AUTHOR ' S corner
Jordan Rosenfeld
Jordan is the author of four writing guides and three novels. Her articles
have been published in such places as: Alternet, The Atlantic, Marin
Magazine, the New York Times, the Petaluma Magazine, Salon, the
San Francisco Chronicle, the Washington Post and many more.
Matt Brandt…
Fiction is Fact Rearranged
F
or Gilroy author Matt Brandt,
reading the work of the great literary
writer Thomas Wolfe served as a
pivotal moment of inspiration for his own
novel to come, The Boy From the Forge,
which he published in July 2018.
“Before I’d even finished reading
Wolfe’s Look Homeward Angel, I thought
‘Ah, I know how to write my first book,’”
he said.
He was particularly drawn to a Wolfe
quote that helped him find his way into
his own novel, “[Wolfe] said ‘fiction is fact
rearranged and charged with purpose.’ I
drew upon a lot of experiences from my
own past, wove, rearranged, elaborated,
fictionalized and created a story with…
characters hopefully learning lessons
along the way.”
Similar to Wolfe’s work, Brandt’s novel
is also a coming-of-age story about a
young boy grappling with what he calls
“the usual stressors” such as parents, first
loves, and best friends. “Sometimes those
things work to help us, and sometimes
they present challenges,” he said.
Like himself, his main character,
Max, grew up in a blue-collar family in
Milwaukee. His title encapsulates the
complexities of the place. “The word forge
is meant to describe in one word all of
what Milwaukee is to my mind. When I
grew up, it was still manufacturing based:
smelly, dirty, about labor and work,
foundry businesses and all that stuff.”
Brandt has plenty of real-life fodder
from childhood to feed into the fictional
mix. He grew up in trying childhood
circumstances, under a tumultuous
relationship with the father who was
abusive to his mother and five older sib-
lings. Other than a brief lull, which he
94
refers to as “the golden years” after his
father left, things were challenging.
Though he does consider being
the youngest of six “lucky” in that he
received the least of his father’s rages,
the repercussions of his father’s abuses
lingered, and their mother’s subsequent
marriage to an alcoholic did not bring
idyllic circumstances. “[Our stepfather]
was a real party guy, but party people
usually don’t make good parents or part-
ners, so it only lasted about three years.”
“My siblings, because they’re all older,
they endured a lot more challenges and
pain than I ever did. That kind of pain
can really cloud people, prevent them
from growing.”
Despite getting off “lucky,” Brandt left
home when he was just 16, joined the
military when he was 18 and spent some
time in the Air Force.
He eventually moved to Colorado,
where he obtained a Master’s Degree.
He remembered the first time he visited
California, which he immediately loved.
“I landed in SFO, got out of a snowstorm
in winter clothes and stepped off the
plane where it was 70 degrees and green.
I thought, ‘I’ll live here someday.’” He
moved to San Jose in 1999 and to Gilroy
in 2006, where he lives with his sixteen-
year-old son and his sister. “California is
a utopia,” he said.
Thanks to a lucrative career in hi-tech
telecommunications working for Cisco
and Sprint, and “aggressive financial
investments,” Brandt recently has been
on sabbatical from work. This was not
only to allow him the time to write but to
attend to his health. In 2013, after several
years of being consistently under the
weather, he was diagnosed with hairy cell
GILROY • MORGAN HILL • SAN MARTIN
april/may 2019
leukemia, a slow-growing and chronic but
“highly survivable” variation of this blood
cancer. While chemotherapy put him into
remission, the chemo causes side effects
where his body creates too many red
blood cells, and every three months he
must have excess blood drained. Despite
all of this, he takes a positive outlook.
“It’s definitely an opportunity to reflect on
priorities and make decisions and try to
live life a little differently,” he said.
Leukemia of this kind often recurs, but
cancer treatments continue to innovate,
too. “My greatest hope is if I need to be
treated again, chemo will not be the go-to
therapy.”
In his downtime, he’s already working
on the sequel to his novel. He’s learned
a few things since writing the first. Plans
for the next book include “not as many
words,” he said with a chuckle. He had
to cut Boy from the Forge back from a
mammoth 150,000 words to the 80,000
it published at.
He hopes that his readers will have the
same feeling reading his work as he does
reading his own literary heroes. “When
you read a good story, you’re taken away
from your current predicament.”
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