Richard Scarsbrook Interviews

Interview By: On: November 27th, 2005

These interview questions were discussed in November 2005 between Carrie W. (Age 17) and Richard Scarsbrook.

CW: How did you come up with such a colourful personality for Dak?

RS: I think the experiences of average people like Dak Sifter are just as interesting as the extreme personality types we often encounter in fiction, and the details of so-called ordinary lives are often very funny and touching. In creating Dak, I wanted to place him in situations that would be unique and entertaining to readers, while at the same time still resembling the formative experiences that are common to us all (such as dealing with difficult people, falling in love, maturing and growing into ourselves). If Dak Sifter is an appealing character, it is ultimately because there is a bit of Dak in all of us.

CW: Are any of the things in your book based upon your life? If so, could you give an example?

RS: Just about all of the chapters in Cheeseburger Subversive have a connection to my own life as a teenager in one way or another. I had troubles with a lawn tractor like Dak does in “Lawn Boy”, I had a strange experience while riding the school bus like in “Hell on Wheels”, I worked in a pickle factory like the one in “Pushin’ Pickle”, and so on, but Dak’s versions of the experiences are much funnier and/or more extreme than my own. I amplified, distorted, rearranged and added to the “truth” to make the experiences more entertaining or meaningful, to make each chapter a true story rather than a mere anecdote. I find real experiences are good seeds from which to begin growing a story, but imagination is the soil the story grows in, and re-writing, proofreading and editing are the water, nutrients and sunlight.

CW: What date was the story line set in? 1980s?

RS:I tried to keep the story as free from specific time references as possible, so that it would have a certain “timeless” quality, but I suppose since I was a teenager in the ‘80s, certain details from that period leaked into the story whether I really wanted them to or not.

CW: How long did it take for you to write this book?

RS: Overall, the book took a little over a year to write, but I didn’t just pick away at it a little bit at a time. I was working full-time when I wrote Cheeseburger Subversive, but I treated writing the book like a second job – three to five hours a day after work, every day, writing or editing the whole time. When you focus on writing a book that way, the pages add up quickly.

CW: How did you come up with the story line?

RS: Originally, I wrote three individual short stories, “Hell on Wheels”, “Cheeseburger Subversive” and “Tristan’s Quarter”, that were each published in literary magazines. It occurred to me that all three stories had similar themes beneath the surface, and that the main character in each story could have been the same guy with just a bit of re-writing. So I re-wrote the stories, making them into Dak Sifter stories. Then it was just a matter of imagining what other things might happen to a guy like Dak in the years in-between.

I don’t think we become who we are in one continuous, smooth growth, but that we are molded and defined by certain critical incidents in our lives, and that our characters are formed by how we ultimately respond to these defining moments. As such, I thought that having each chapter in the book tell the story of one particular defining event in Dak’s life would reflect this, and then the chapter would add up to tell the bigger story of Dak’s evolution from boy to man.

CW: The incident at the McDonald’s was insanely funny, was this based upon a true event?

RS: One summer at the end of high school, I worked for a small construction company that traveled around the countryside building pole barns. The trucks and equipment the contractor owned were all worn-out junk, and the trucks were constantly breaking down, usually in the middle of nowhere. I should probably write a story about those adventures some day. . .

Anyway, one of the trucks overheated on Highway 401, Canada’s busiest highways, and the owner made me go lift the hood and check the radiator while he and the rest of the crew smoked cigarettes. What happened to Dak happened to me – the radiator exploded all over me, burning my skin and soaking my shirt with stinky radiator fluid. Naturally, I had to take the shirt off. The owner just laughed at me, then sent me running across Highway 401 to get lunch for the rest of the crew at a service station McDonald’s while we waited for a tow truck to arrive. Of course, after standing in line for half an hour, they refused to serve me because I wasn’t wearing a shirt!

The rest of the story about the McDonaldland Mutiny is made up. Whereas I simply sulked back to the truck, frustrated, humiliated, and without any food, I thought it would be funny if Dak lost his temper and went a little crazy – which is what I WANTED to do at the time!

CW: What character did you like writing about the most?

RS: Other than writing about Dak himself, I think I most enjoyed creating his love interest, Zoe Perry, who is a sort of composite portrait of many of the girls I liked when I was in high school, girls who were intelligent and self-confident and usually one step ahead of me. The power of our attraction to members of the opposite sex (or sometimes the same sex) is a strong motivating force in humans, and I got a kick out of exploring in the book just how far Dak’s wild attraction to Zoe would take him.

CW: If you could (or would) change anything about the book, what would you change?

RS: When I originally wrote Cheeseburger Subversive, I had no intention of writing a sequel, but since many people who have read the book have asked me “What happens between Zoe and Dak?”, I became very curious to find out myself. I eventually wrote a sequel called Featherless Bipeds, which will be published in early 2006. There are a couple of tiny details in Cheeseburger Subversive that I would change to make the events that occur between the two books more consistent, but, other than that, I like Cheeseburger Subversive the way it is.

CW: I feel as if Benjamin’s suicide was an important part of the book, but I’m not sure how it changes Dak. Was this a character development incident or something else?

RS: There are several reasons for the chapter about Benjamin. In most of the situations Dak gets into in Cheeseburger Subversive, he is capable of influencing the outcome, but in this case, he is powerless. A story like “Benjamin’s Aliens” shows that terrible things sometimes happen anyway, in spite of best intentions, and that life is not always fair or kind. Approaching things in an optimistic manner will often help tilt the odds in your favour, but you are still going to lose sometimes. Also, by contrast, the chapter demonstrates that some of the problems Dak has been dealing with throughout the book are rather minimal compared to the Benjamin’s issues.

CW: Will there ever be a sequel to this book? (The ending does leave some room for continuation.)

RS: Dak Sifter’s adventures will definitely continue in Featherless Bipeds, which will be published in early 2006. And, yes, readers will get to find out if Dak ultimately catches up with Zoe in the end!