Andrew Kaufman was born in the town of Wingham, Ontario, Canada, the birthplace of Alice Munro. This makes him the second best writer in a town of three thousand. He is also a film maker, radio producer and a regular contributor to the McSweeney’s website. Andrew’s debut, All My Friends Are Superheroes was a cult bestseller, and his new novel, The Waterproof Bible, is published by Telegram Books in July.

Are you a Bookgeek?

Defiantly. Aren’t we all? Is there a Bookcool? Are there readers out there with cooler haircuts and who’re carrying around cooler books? What would these books be? And would they change with the times? Would the Bookcool people be carrying around Kerouac in the 60′s and … Dave Edgars today? Ali Smith? Doesn’t really matter, their parties would be lame anyways.

Tell us about your new book, The Waterproof Bible.

The Waterproof Bible asks this question: is it more important that what you believe is true? Or that you believe it with all of your heart? It does it with three different story lines, all of with overlap and intersect and unknowingly influence each other. A woman, Rebecca, discovers a literal connection between the objects in her self-storage area and the memories that haunt her. Lewis, her brother-in-law, who has recently failed to attend his wife’s funeral, meets a woman who claims to be God and he slowly begins to believe her. And a giant green-skinned amphibious creature named Aberystwyth drives a stolen car across the country to save the soul of her dying mother. There are also rainmakers. And a guy building a boat in the middle of the Canadian Prairies. The plotlines are pretty metamorphic and epic so if you’re into that sort of thing, this is definitely the book for you.

What was the inspiration behind it?

A friend of mine told me that he had started taking his family to church and then he told me, “You just looked at me like I puked on your shoes.” And it was true – this shocked me. More shocked than I would have been if he’d told me he was having an affair, or that he’d picked up a drug habit. It was an extreme reaction and it made me look at why, as a generation really, we’ve become so disdainful of religion, organized or not.

What are you working on at the moment?

Right now it’s called The Anchor Children. At the moment of their birth a grandmother blessed all five of her grandchildren a special ability, which has inadvertently ruined their lives. Now, she’s charged the oldest grandchild to find the other grandchild and bring them to her hospital room so she can lift the curse before she dies.

Tell us the book you most wish you had written?

Raise the Roof Beam High Dear Carpenters, The Children’s Hospital, Come, Thou Tortoise, Cloud Atlas, Box of Matches, The Metamorphosis, Cat’s Cradle. How much space do you have here? Literary envy is sort of a hobby.

Which book(s) are you reading at the moment?

I’m reading a collection of short stories by Jessica Grant called Making Light of Tragedy which is amazing. I’m also trying to get through Gogol’s Dead Souls.

Do you plan your plots, or fly by the seat of your pants?

I fly by the seat of my pants to plan my plots: first I do a really, really ugly messy, mostly handwritten draft, which no one ever gets to read and this lets me know who the characters are and what the plot points are. It takes about five months. Then, once I know where everything is going I spend years and years making it readable. It’s sort of like eating all the icing off the cake first. Story comes much easier than craft for me.

Do your characters take on a life of their own?

Sometimes I can get them to do what I want them to do but it takes a lot of convincing. I understand that my characters are some thin slice of who I am as a person, or some literary manifestation of an issue from my life that I’m working through – but when I’m writing they truly seem completely detached from me. Quite often I don’t even like them and they certainly don’t think much of me.

What’s the best piece of writing advice you have ever been given? (and do you follow it?)

The American writer Tim O’Brien was my old writing teacher and one day, unannounced and freshly dumped, I showed up at his door. We talked for a while and then we got to talking about writing. I’ll never forget this because he’d just set down his cigarette on the edge of the kitchen sink so he could pick up the coffee pot. It was at this point that I asked him, ‘how you continue to write, without getting lost in it, without getting obsessed by it?’ I distinctly remember him setting the coffee pot on the counter and then lighting another cigarette. So one burned in his hand while the first burned behind him by the sink and he said, “I don’t think it’s possible. I think that just happens. It always happens.”

In All My Friends Are Superheroes, everyone has a superpower. What’s your superpower?

On a good day I’m Inthemoment, with the ability to see beauty and truth in the tiny things going on around me. But on most days, I’m unfortunately trapped in my head and I become little more than the Narrator.

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