Chicago Author Spotlight: Gint Aras

By Betsy Mikel in Arts & Entertainment on Feb 27, 2011 4:00PM

When the readers of Finding the Moon in Sugar first meet their protagonist, Andy Nowak, he doesn’t have many redeeming qualities. He’s a 20-year-old petty drug dealer who has little motivation to accomplish much with his life. He lives in a cruddy apartment in Berwyn, tried community college, but flunked out. But when Andy stumbles into a relationship with the Lithuanian Internet bride of one of his clients, his character begins to show some depth. When she disappears back to Lithuania, Andy decides to follow her. Although Andy has a limited education and doesn’t always form coherent sentences or thoughts, he is an effective observer.

Author Gint Aras has given Andy the voice of someone who has never been schooled in the process of writing, so he simply writes how he speaks. At the beginning of Finding the Moon in Sugar, it seems that Andy’s limited vocabulary and constant confusion of your and you’re might soon get tired and old. But when Andy is transplanted into a completely new environment, complete with new language, new culture and new experiences, Andy uses his own simple language to describe remarkably commonplace people, places and things. His misspellings and awkward sentences matter less and less.

I know probably lots of you never heard no opera before, or maybe you seen it on Channel 11 around Christmas when it’s just a fat woman and a guy in a tux singin’ real bored. But let me explain some shit right here, cauze most opera ain’t like that. Most is totally insane and tripped out.

As Andy describes his sex, drug and booze-soaked experience in Lithuania, he is coming of age without even realizing it. He is a naïve narrator, but he is an honest one. Readers have no reason not to trust Andy’s thoughts and observations as truth. Even as Andy makes mistakes or finds himself in awkward situations in his new Lithuanian life, it’s encouraging that he has moved beyond Berwyn and now has rich and interesting experiences to write about.

Author Gint Aras will be participating in the Windy City Story Slam Third Annual All-City Championships tonight, so we chatted with him about his book, his experience in self-publishing and his thoughts on the Chicago literary scene.

Windy City Story Slam, Double Door, 1572 N. Milwaukee, 8 p.m., $7

Chicagoist: How did you decide on the voice for Andy?

Gint Aras: Andy as a character was quite a spontaneous discovery. He was a character who could sustain a novel, and working on his voice took time. He’s so very different in his logic, the way he looks at the world and the things that seem bizarre to him, and some of us take for granted. Really, he’s based on my students. I work in a community college, so his syntax and diction were different from someone who has an MFA. When I first started teaching, I realized I didn’t know Cicero as well as I thought I did. The only part of his environment, sociology and consciousness that is different than mine is his relationship to language. He’s quite haphazard with it. He doesn’t have a lot of verbs, he spells words right in some places and wrong in other places. The difference between him and other students is Andy CAN communicate with language. So finding that balance between being honest and fair to the environment I wanted to capture and also being able to create a voice that would entertain and engage people that weren’t from that environment - it took awhile.

C: A lot of the places in Finding the Moon in Sugar are places you have lived in or spent time in. How did your understanding of these locations contribute to the story?

GA: You want to be fair to the people you are trying to represent and you want to engage both sides, both the people who know these places as well as the people for which these places are utterly exotic. I realized awhile ago that these places are exotic to some people, the language, the smells and things there are times when I smell damp raincoats and old cigarettes and it reminds me of Vilnius. It’s that kind of place that has its own sensory experience. I wanted to communicate that and give that experience. But you must imagine the bridge before you build it, and the novel is the same way.

You learn to write by telling stories, and sometimes those stories are true and sometimes they’re not, but they all require an imagination. And you’re in this phase where the imagination and memories fuse and inform one another or are changed by the other. I gave myself quite a bit of liberty when I wrote about these places. I was aware they were fictitious places. I gave myself the liberty to write about them outside of my imagination.

C: Last fall you said you wrote on Chicago Artists Resource that you self-published this to begin growing an audience. Have you started to accomplish that goal?

GA: My audience is ever growing, and it continues to grow that way. As a result of polishing this book, I started receiving requests from magazines to submit things, which has never happened to me before. Before I used to submit things to the slush pile and get rejected. So I ended up in Criminal Class review, I ended up getting to participate in the Windy City Story Slam, just earlier this month, I participated in the Bleeding Heart’s Art’s Fest.
Prior to this, I would have never got invited to these things and events. So I took it upon myself to try to build one. This is just part of the effort of building an audience, I’m also reading, I’m doing interviews, I’m reviewing books, I’m doing the things that all writers do, but it’s on the other end of this industry. But I haven’t really had this much fun ever. This is much more fun than banging your head against the wall and trying to get something published.

C: You’re a teacher at Morton College, right? How does your work align with or inspire your writing?

GA: The community college is a great, great job for a writer. You come home and think “today I did what I could to help a student who needs an instructor to help him.” The students at Columbia College don’t need a teacher. They have plenty of authority figures in their lives. In many cases in a community college, you are often dealing with people who have never before been asked to read a book. And they’re perfectly capable, but no one has even made them.

I’ve taught writing classes under these posh circumstances where it is more of a pastime for the students. The discussions may be deeper and the students will have an awareness of current events, but if they didn’t have you there, they’d be fine. I’m really really proud to be at community college. And my college is very supportive of my writing, and I get three months off out of the year to focus on it.

C: Do you have any advice on writing or self-publishing that you can give other blossoming writers?

GA: The only advice I have is that before you do anything, you should have an awareness of why. Why are you writing these books and who are you trying to reach? Instead of wondering how to publish your book and what you should be doing with it, you should have a good awareness of what’s out there right now. Read literary journals. The best writers read across genres and saturate themselves with as much writing as they can get their hands on. Read a lot. Read stuff you normally wouldn’t. Read stuff your friends don’t know anything about.. I stumbled upon this book about welfare states, and it was this first book I had ever read from Finland.
Read stuff that you weren’t taught to read in school. There’s so much going on right now. Everyone thinks they’re a writer now. There’s a beauty to that and something to celebrate, so poke around. Subscribe to a literally journal. That also increases your chance of getting accepted.