GALO: “There is much fright,” you quote from William H. Gass in a preface to a short story collection. How do you deal with fright as a writer? What are you fearful of?

MSB: Death mostly. I’m increasingly afraid of death. I’m totally afraid of death. I just wrote a blog post about it because my birthday was yesterday (Dec. 29) because generally around my birthday I tend to think more about death than probably any other day, because I use the birthday to measure how much of what I really still want to get done; have I got done. And most of my writing is kind of connected to existential issues and my current or ongoing battle with myself and [with] grief, really; I’m probably not dealing well enough with my fright. I’m still pushing away, so to speak, and I think you really have to let them in to do the best writing that is possible to do if you want to write true. If you don’t care about that, and you just want to write any old story or you just want to write for success, then obviously it doesn’t matter if you get in touch with your deepest fear and stuff like that. It’s a very good question because I think that probably how you deal with fright, your personal frights, is at least one source of true writing. I work a lot with, I mean I’m also a psychotherapist–that’s one of the things I do and I’m trained for–so I work a lot with methods trying to get the unconscious out into the conscious and working with that material. Which, of course, every writer does and in my case I’ve thought maybe a little bit more about the mechanics of the unconscious.

GALO: You often post your work on the literary sites Red Lemonade, Fictionaut, and others. It appears you obviously enjoy all this connectedness and sharing of your writing. How important are these Internet social scenes to you?

MSB: They’re vital. They’re absolutely vital, more than important. I mean, for a number of reasons–but only after having been active online for maybe two years or so– I do now have an English-speaking writers’ community in Berlin that I’m connected to. A small one, but in terms of size, it’s nowhere near the community I’m connected to online. I think, if my first steps into writing in sort of coming out with old work would have been personal which is something I experienced in London over 15 years ago with poems, I would have completely bombed.

I mean, the whole process of bringing your writing out online is much more; you have much more control over it because like most writers I take rejection really badly. And when I started writing, I didn’t know if people would absolutely hate what I did. So first I put up this pseudonym, so you couldn’t see me. That was the only way in which I could actually stand to put any work out there. And then slowly as I realized that some people at least liked this stuff, I sort of took it down, and then the very last step, I even did public readings to actual people. But for me, the online writing community is absolutely vital.

GALO: Let’s talk about the National drink of Argentina, which is ‘Mate.’ I understand it contains caffeine like coffee. Why Mate instead?

MSB: The thing with Mate tea is that you start it, [and] then you keep putting hot water on it and add a little Mate, so you can drink it for a long time. It’s a wonderful drink in [the] summer, in the hot summer; I drink it all year round because otherwise I would drink coffee, and if I would drink coffee all day, I think I would die. I drink too much coffee as it is. I’m quite high strung as it is. I can’t do that. But the reason why I drink Mate is of course [because] I followed a woman to Buenos Aires. Women have always been the pillars along which I have organized my life. I fell in love with the country [Brazil] but then returned to Germany because I hadn’t finished my diploma in physics. I realized if I stayed down there, I would really stay down there forever, and I was a young man, 25, and I wasn’t ready for that yet. But I’ve kept the Mate.

GALO: The saying in Germany, “eating and drinking keeps body and soul together,” how does this figure into your life?

MSB: The south of Germany, where I come from, their eating and drinking is really very, very important. They’re famous for their wines. It’s a great tradition. You saying that makes me think I should write a lot more about eating and drinking. My characters particularly don’t eat and drink enough. I realize that; I must make a note. It’s really important to me but it doesn’t really come through.

Only recently I’ve begun to have a little wine again. I was a teetotaler because I had too much when I was a soldier.

GALO: How long where you in the service?

MSB: Two years. I was a paratrooper.

GALO: Many jumps?

MSB: Many jumps. Yes I jumped with the Special Forces. I have the American Special Forces paratrooper sign too. It was fun actually. I couldn’t do it now. Now even the idea gets my heart palpitating.

GALO: When exactly, and why in the world, did you decide to pursue the writing life?

MSB: Good question. I think I decided to be a writer of some sort when I was seven or so, very young, and I’ve written ever since. But to really seriously pursue it, I didn’t do that until my mid-30s when I gave up my business career and moved into academia — partly because the academic schedule and academic working life is a lot more amenable to a writing existence. And sort of more and more of my non-writing activities are falling away from me, or rather I push them away, and what remains is more and more time to write, and so I would say it’s grown rather organically. I got myself some stability first and a family.

I mean, I was first shocked when you said, “The writer’s life,” because the question on my mind was, am I living the writer’s life? I thought ‘yeah, actually I am.’ A literary life in a sense that literature and writing is the absolute center of my life, apart from family and personal things you know I sleep, shit, have sex, stuff like that, but the soul center of my life is my writing. I published my first piece in the summer of 2009, so that’s not too long ago — makes me happy to say that.

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