About Bradley Bazzle
Bradley Bazzle is the author of the story collections In the Shadow of the Architect, forthcoming from the University of Wisconsin Press, and Fathers of Cambodian Time-Travel Science (C&R, 2020), as well as the novel Trash Mountain (Red Hen, 2018). His stories appear in the Missouri Review, New England Review, New Letters, Copper Nickel, River Styx, and elsewhere. He lives with his wife and daughter in Athens, Georgia, where he teaches improvisation.
website: bradleybazzle.com
A Profile of the Author
Notes on the work
“Diminution” arose from two separate incidents, one years ago and one more recently. Years ago my publisher and I paid for my first book to be displayed at the Decatur Book Festival, which was much as I describe it in the story. I live in Athens, an hour and a half from Decatur, which is a suburb of Atlanta. A friend in a different Atlanta suburb told me he’d pick up the unsold books (meaning all the books), but he forgot, whereupon the books were supposedly donated somewhere.
More recently, I met some college friends in Atlanta, and two of us ended up walking around a pedestrian-unfriendly zone while the others slept. I walked on and on without realizing that my friend was struggling, tired as he was, and slightly hungover. As he fell behind, he started taking videos of me from the back, and seeing myself from that unfamiliar angle, oblivious to him and the world around me, was a strange experience. He didn’t shrink, though.
The final layer to emerge as I wrote and revised was the description of the forest, near the end of the story. The words came almost unbidden, as sometimes happens, and I sensed right away that the shrunken friend, the tall trees and the hippyish carved mushroom belonged in the same constellation.
Music, Food, Booze, Tattoos, Kittens, etc.
We recently added chickens to our household. I’m not an animal person, so their presence makes me anxious, but I can’t help but be charmed by their strangeness: the way they stretch their legs and wings, the way they straighten to swallow water they’ve just sipped, their unflagging attachment to each other. My daughter, nine, named them Esmeralda and Baba Yaga. Happily, Baba Yaga is the weirder and more erratic of the two.
