Proles

Barry Bergman reads from his new book, Proles, in conversation with Linda Watanabe Mcferrenin.

Proles themes resonate today as seen through the lens of a working-class refugee from Queens, heading for Berkeley. In Bergman's new novel, Simon Bussbaum’s a film junkie without a cause, a spiritual drifter looking for light in a long-ago time of social tensions, cultural turmoil, political paranoia, and criminal conspiracies in high places. Inspired by a McCarthy-era reenactment of a triumphant miners’ strike–and freshly liberated from Nixon’s draft—he flees Queens for the Arizona desert, to join an American workers’ march to the promised land of liberty and justice for all.

But his working-class hero’s journey veers off-script. Instead of the “marvelous adventure” trumpeted by his new proletarian bedfellows, Simon tumbles headlong into a long, hot summer of hard labor, toxic masculinity, unrequited love, and unexpected insights into the power and perils of myth.

Barry Bergman has been a newspaper reporter, a magazine writer/editor, and a communications pro at UC Berkeley and assorted Bay Area nonprofits. Before earning his journalism degree at San Francisco State University, he worked in a variety of industrial settings, including two years in an Arizona copper smelter, an experience he would reimagine, eventually, as the fictional background for Proles, his first completed novel.

Linda Watanabe McFerrin is a poet, travel writer, novelist and contributor to numerous newspapers, magazines and anthologies. She is the author of two poetry collections, past editor of a popular Northern California guidebook and a winner of the Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction. Her novel, Namako: Sea Cucumber, was named Best Book for the Teen-Age by the New York Public Library. In addition to authoring an award-winning short story collection, The Hand of Buddha, she has co-edited twelve anthologies, including the Hot Flashes: sexy little stories & poems series. Her latest novel, Dead Love (Stone Bridge Press, 2009), was a Bram Stoker Award Finalist for Superior Achievement in a Novel.