Meet Brian Finney | Writer and Professor Emeritus

We had the good fortune of connecting with Brian Finney and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Brian, what led you to pursuing a creative path professionally?
We all want to share our opinions and outlook with others. We are most successful at doing this when we embody our ideas in the form of a story. Writing works of fiction in particular lures the reader into this act of sharing by making our stories a source of pleasure. How? Through form; through the creation of subtle, complex or ambiguous characters; through exciting turns of plot; by keeping our readers guessing; and by innovative manipulation of language. Accepting this challenge has always given me as much pleasure as I try to give to my readers.

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
I spent much of my life teaching fiction, first at London University, then at various universities in Sothern California after immigrating here at the age of 52. When I retired from full-time teaching, I found myself for the first time writing my own fiction. I had spent all those years analyzing how notable novels were constructed and, without consciously intending to, there I was making my own attempt to create a work of fiction. What was distinctive to my work was that I could only write about individual characters’ lives if I set them against the larger political and social context of the time.

My first novel was titled Money Matters (a deliberate pun). It concerned a 27-year-old woman living in Venice, California (where I live) who had not got her life together. Asked to investigate a woman’s disappearance, she finds herself threatened by rich and powerful forces, including the Republican nominee for Governor of California during the mid-term election of 2010. Both candidates for governor made immigration their primary election issue. Immigration becomes the principal theme of my novel when the disappeared woman turns out to be a threat to an elite implicated in illegal immigration.

Dangerous Conjectures (a quote from Hamlet), my second novel, is set in the East Bay during the first three months of 2020. This was when the coronavirus was first spreading. So was the belief in conspiracy theories, especially QAnon. Adam and Julia, my major characters are respectively a professor of computer science who cannot believe that QAnon could attract so many followers and decides to investigate it, and his wife who becomes so afraid of catching Covid-19 that she listens to conspiracy theories and endangers the family through other actions she takes to counter the stress she feels. Meanwhile the presidential primaries are unfolding and the violence that the White House encourages through its QAnon followers echoes the violence that enters Adam and Julia’s life in the form of an old boyfriend of hers.

Let’s say your best friend was visiting the area and you wanted to show them the best time ever. Where would you take them? Give us a little itinerary – say it was a week long trip, where would you eat, drink, visit, hang out, etc.
Even now that the lockdown has all but ended, it is ironic being asked about my favorite places to visit when I’ve barely begun to once more venture out to public spots. I live in Venice. Abbot Kinney Boulevard, the supposed “coolest street” in America until the virus hit, is still a shadow of what it was like a year and a half ago. It was almost completely boarded up after the murder of George Floyd. It is coming to life again, but most stores still require customers to wear masks and ration how many can enter at one time.

Assuming my best friend is a fully vaccinated man, the majority of the stores along Abbot Kinney cater to women. There are a few cool men’s stores. I specially like Enda King who has some of the best selection of men’s clothing on the westside. Robert Graham has some amazingly designed colorful shirts at amazing prices. I love going to Tom’s where you can buy a latte and sip it while trying on their own brand of shoes. There are also several shops selling denim and a number of eyewear stores, including Warby Parker where you can buy surprisingly affordable designer sunglasses.

Abbot Kinney Blvd. also has some fun eating places. Salt and Straw offers handmade ice cream with exotic flavors (like Black Olive Brittle and Goat Cheese) that we would normally have to line up for. If we wanted a medium-priced meal, The Butcher’s Daughter offers delicious vegetarian dishes (such as eggplant steak au poivre) on a patio stretching onto the street. If we were ready to go upmarket, we might try the special Italian-Californian hand-made pastas at Felix. Or if we wanted an evening at home, we could get an unusual salad pizza with sesame crust from Abbott’s Pizza. If we were in the mind to just phase out we could visit Medmen where you can find every variety of marijuana – from Wedding Cake to Ambrosia.

I am still hesitant to go to indoor entertainment locations. Normally I would take my friend to our nationally awarded theatre company, Pacific Resident Theatre, in the 600 block of Venice Boulevard, walkable from where I live. But it still largely offers only virtual events. Nearby is Beyond Baroque, which stages cultural events and shows. But I’m not yet ready to go to crowded indoor events. We do have a world-class art gallery in Venice, L.A. Louver. If we’re lucky it could be showing the work of one of their artists – Dale Chihuly, Leon Kossof, or a favorite of mine, David Hockney: like me he has made Southern California the subject of much of his art. And there is always the choice of walking through the Venice Canals, a unique traffic-free historic district, that is a haven for ducks, egrets, Canadian geese and occasional cormorants, besides a bewildering variety of architectural styles in the houses overlooking the tidal canals.

Seeing that we are still so affected by Covid-19, I guess we would spend a lot of time at my house in Venice, reading in the front yard, drinking wine as soon as we could designate it cocktail hour, and watching movies and video series. That’s how it is today. Hopefully it will not be too long before we will feel free to go anywhere we want again.

The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
My last three books have been self-published by choice. I find that this gives me far more control over everything to do with the writing, editing, publishing and publicizing my work, besides offering a far higher royalty payment. But so many books are self-published today that it would be easy for my book to get buried beneath the flood of other works. To circumvent this, I engaged the exceptional services of Nanda Dyssou and her Coriolis Company. She has made a specialty of steering authors with little knowledge of today’s media through the process of bringing their work to the attention of readers interested in their genre of writing. She is so attentive to an individual’s strengths and weaknesses and so knowledgeable about the latest trends in publishing that she has made all the difference to how my last two novels have been received. Without her experience, contacts and advice my novels would never have gotten the interest they have. I would recommend her to any writer self-publishing their work.

Website: www.bhfinney.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/brianfinneywriter/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/brianfinneywri1

Image Credits
Photographs by J. K. Lavin