Mountaineer
An Interview
with author Craig Bernier

“I can’t keep away from sentimentality,” Craig Bernier admits. “I’ve just got a weird heart. I want to be laughing or crying. Maybe in the rewrite process it goes from campy sap to quasi-sentimentality.” His credit to revision comes as a shock; the paragraphs and pages of Bernier’s first published piece of nonfiction, “Mountaineer,” seem spare and, at times, almost somber, the whole story made to fit within the walls of a West Virginia racetrack. The essay, Bernier says, was edited down from 70 pages.

“Mountaineer,” which opens at a horserace and spans incidents from Bernier’s childhood and early adulthood, came as a shock to its author. “There are certain sections that just got completely away from me. Just in the process of sitting down and writing. It was really supposed to be a piece about the process of handicap, but at a point, another story came out. I’d just take long looks around in the writing process, and the things that surprised me were all the things outside betting that came out of the piece. I’m sort of stunned at it now.”

As the essay changed direction, Bernier encountered a new range of problems and challenges, unfamiliar to him as a writer of fiction. “I worked a lot harder on the rewrites than I do in fiction...And my fiction’s a lot more edgy. It feels different. Fiction is a cloak. It’s so easy to generate things from my life—most of my fiction, to some degree, is out of me or somebody I know, but fictionalized. But even with the name change, it feels so delicate because of the people involved. I’m more concerned about them than I am about me. That’s the danger in this.”

A pivotal and emotional scene between a young Bernier and his father held all the promise of his “laughing or crying” aesthetic, as well as the risk in committing an individual’s story to the page. “What do I owe him? What’s mine and what’s his? And that maybe is the toughest part about creative nonfiction. Ownership of this thing. We don’t know what his story is in this case. It’s just not something that’s talked about.” 

The essential qualities of nonfiction—the truth, the responsibility for it—seem to be his reward. “I’m most true when I’m tapped into the closest thing to memory. Those moments, when it’s not time-compressing, when it’s not the other buzzwords of the genre—it’s the most true at those points in time. The rest of that stuff, oftentimes, just seems like it’s the transition to the next most-true moment.” An essay’s seams and skeleton, then, seem unimportant. “At a certain point,” he says, “I just say ‘keep me in the beautiful moments.’”

For Bernier, those beautiful moments could be the moment of realization, or the seconds before the horses cross the finish line. The most beautiful language and images of “Mountaineer” are of that place, a shiny gambling facility which Bernier says “is surrounded by these giant turbines, these smokestacks, and all these depressed towns.

“But that thing about gambling, there’s something essentially wondrous. Every one of these people has the next thousand dollars spent, and it’s beautiful for that minute. You see the best of society. To some degree, handicapping is this process that’s just as hard as figuring out life. You are mimicking trying to figure out life. But the direct result is, you get a report on your success in 20 minutes, as opposed to 20 years.”

Figuring out life, then, is the key to these beautiful moments. And, to Bernier, writing. To young writers, determined to create, his only advice is “join the Peace Corps. Join the Army. Go do things, and have something to write about. Go find amazing things.”