We Chat With Writer, Filmmaker, and Actor B. R. Yeager

Born in the early 1980s, B. R. Yeager has spent his life in Western Massachusetts, America. An area known for it’s deep history, universities, and lush landscape. Growing up in those surrounds, B was a bit of a self-described creep in his youth – Listening to heavy metal and rap, playing RPGs; and delving into the untamed depths of the early internet. A locale and moments that B continues to draw from in his work.
It was in his late teens and early 20s that B fell in love with writing through exposure to underground comics, along with both classic and transgressive literature. Causing a major splash with his second novel, ‘Negative Space’ (2020, Apocalypse Party). Which tells the tale of how “four teens in a New Hampshire mill town abuse a bizarre hallucinogen called WHORL in order to cope with a devastating suicide epidemic.”

3 books by B.
Left to right: ‘Amygdalatropolis’ (2017, Schism Press); ‘Negative Space’ (2020, Apocalypse Party); and ‘Burn You the Fuck Alive’ (2023, Apocalypse Party).

Since the success of ‘Negative Space’, B has released further written works to much acclaim, and expanded his talents into the world of filmmaking. Acting in various independent films, and writing screenplays. Often in collaboration with fellow Western Massachusettsan, Nick Verdi. With the films being otherworldly, stark, bursting with moments of violence, and at times darkly humorous – placing them in a similar vein to much of B’s fiction.

Wanting to learn more about him, we sent B some questions to answer over email.
Get to know him, below…

Getting Acquainted

Name and date of birth?

B.R. Yeager, and I was born in the mid ‘80s.

City, state, and country you currently call home?

I live in Western Massachusetts, USA.

City, state, and country you’re from?

Same as above – born and raised.

A teaser for the 2021 film ‘Cockazoid.’
Written by B in collaboration with the film’s director, Nick Verdi.

Please describe some memories – such as art, music, writing, friendships, adventures, study, romance, politics, film, travel, work, crime… anything really – from the stages of your life noted below:

* Your childhood:

I remember my mother watering houseplants in our bathtub.
I remember a dog, a creek and an elementary school.
I remember thinking there were hidden cameras tracking my every move.
I remember wanting to believe there were portals in the forests.
I remember putting together a haunted house in our basement.
I remember being terrible with my hands.

* Your teenage years:

Socializing never came easy to me. I didn’t understand the cues, I didn’t know how to behave. Much of my teen years were spent studying the mannerisms of others, practicing, replicating.
My personality became a composite mimicry of the people around me.
This may still be the case.

So I came to high school a shy goody-two-shoes, but was fortunate enough to fall in with the wrong crowd early on. Smoking, streaking through school fields at night, and creating the shittiest music the world has ever known.
Getting high, listening to Sepultura and Cypress Hill and fantasizing about going into rainforests, becoming fucked up jungle cowboys, fighting off deforesters with giant hammers.

Alone, I pretty much lived online. Late-era Web 1.0. AOL Instant Messenger. LiveJournal. Rotten.com. Ogrish. A crude MMORPG called Clan Lord.
Alternating between anonymous and known personas.
A lurker. A troll. A creep.

* Your 20s:

First loves. Wet brain. Dance nights every night of the week. Playing music poorly.
Smart phones weren’t a thing yet, and I was living in an apartment with an ancient computer that took five minutes to load a single webpage, shared between three roommates, so this was probably my greatest period for reading. Got really into classic English lit and Bukowski and transgressive fiction. Got really into comics, both underground stuff like Peter Bagge and Joe Matt, as well as Vertigo and Avatar fare like Garth Ennis and Alan Moore. Read the entirety of Cerebus almost exclusively at the laundromat.

Lost a best friend to suicide, lost my mind a bit, went back to community college, and took up writing seriously.
Also met my wife!

* Your 30s so far:

My life evened out. Stability. Pleasantly boring.
I could say more but I doubt it would interest anyone.

Personal motto(s)?

“What the fuck is wrong with you?”

What role did toys play in your childhood?
… and any favourites you remember?

I was really into robots and Transformers, to the extent where I got extremely burnt out on the entire concept – there are few things less interesting to me now than robots.

I was also a big gamer. This was the SNES era, and one magical aspect of that time was that games had advanced to the point where they could establish an extremely evocative atmosphere and mood, but they were still fairly crude – you had highly pixelated images blurred by the CRT set, and the developers would give you traces of character traits and vague storytelling and that was it – and I loved filling in the gaps with my own imagination.
Likewise, I was fascinated by tabletop RPGs, but this was prior to their popularity, so I didn’t really have anyone to play with. But I’d read the sourcebooks as though they were novels, absorbing the tone and lore, and reconfiguring them in my head, adding my own embellishments and flourishes.
That was all extremely formative.

Creativity

When and why did you first become interested in writing, movies, acting, and everything creative?
… and any pivotal moments / influences regarding each of them?

I can’t remember a time when the impulse wasn’t there.
I was always writing short nonsensical stories, or drawing up shitty comic books, or drawing out ideas for video game levels. I wrote a few attempts at screenplays, or even stage plays. I spent a lot of time in my own head, just dreaming up fantastical scenarios, vibrant structures, etc.
I wasn’t so interested in people/characters – just scenarios or locations I thought were cool.

By the time I hit my teens, things like making a movie or a video game, or even writing a book seemed completely insurmountable. I didn’t know anything about indie filmmaking or game design or publishing, but even if I did I doubt I’d have the discipline to pursue any of those endeavours.
I was a lazy kid.
But all my friends were musicians, so I went in that direction, taking up keyboard and making beats (both poorly – I was still lazy and more interested in getting high and partying).

I was one of those assholes who only wanted to be recognized for making art, rather than find joy in the actual damn process of making art. I wanted participation trophies.
I fucking squandered myself this way for years.
When my friend killed himself, that was a big shock to the system. And it became a huge part of what set me toward writing. Because that event left all this trash and shit inside me, and I needed to figure out some way to deal with it. I needed to stop being a slacker. So I wrote a short story that later became ‘Negative Space.’ And I kept on writing, any moment I had.

Photos of B acting in Nick Verdi’s 2023 film ‘Sweet Relief.’

If you had to explain your creative endeavours to some recently crash-landed aliens…
What would you tell them?

If I’m feeling pretentious, I’d say I’m attempting to document my era using intuition and myth.
Works of fiction are just as much documents of time periods and the people inhabiting them as non-fiction. But that’s also naively egocentric – pretending my work will last the test of time (I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t a big part of adopting literature as my form, as books physically last much longer than digital formats).
If I’m really honest, though, the chances of my work being relevant in ten or so years is close to nil. My books have received a good amount of (cult) attention at this time, but that doesn’t in any way mean they’ll be forever relevant. You could even say that they’re exceptionally likely to date, as they revolve around current youth sub-cultures and trends. Which is fine, it’s the way of things – creating for the sake of longevity or legacy is delusional at best.
So maybe instead I would tell them that I’m flailing against inevitable obsolescence.

Who are some of your favourite writers, filmmakers, artists, and musicians?
…and what is it about their works that so inspire and move you?

I’m a basic bitch and a dilettante.
I used to have favorite authors but I’m not sure that’s the case anymore. I’m so scatterbrained and my interests shift so frequently I almost never read more than one book by any given author, even if I love their work. But generally I like stuff that’s disgusting and messes with form and breaks my heart. I like stuff that reminds me to be wild and free in my work, and that breaks things a bit. David Simmons’s ‘Ghosts of East Baltimore‘ did that for me recently.
I’m always fighting my internal critic, because my internal critic wants everything to be sensical and grounded, but that’s the opposite of what I’m interested in art. That’s not entirely true – I want everything to be grounded emotionally, to ring emotionally true. But sometimes in order to accomplish that the writing needs to be wild and unreal.

Music has always been a big part of my life and a major influence, and the ambient quality of the form – not ambient as a genre, but the fact you can engage with it either in the background or with full attention – lets me really dig in with specific artists, whereas it’s difficult for me to do that with authors.
Boldy James is someone I’m really enthralled with right now. Extremely vivid lyricist. “Drunk in a Porsche, trunk full of corpse.” Great voice and cadence. Rap being all about rhythm and cadence – I try to pull aspects of that for my prose. I want every line to inhabit a sort of subliminal meter. Not saying I’m always successful, but I try to craft sentences that bounce and punch quasi-musically.

Nick Verdi’s 2020 short film, ‘Angel of the Night.‘
Starring B.

If people wanted to check out your stuff, work with you, or buy some of your wares – Where should they visit and how should they get in touch?

bryeager.com is my barebones site – it has just about everything you need to find.
Email is best – bryeagerauthor@gmail.com

Any news, upcoming projects, or releases you would like to share?

Currently keeping my head down and working on the next novel, which will probably be finished in another two or three years. Also, not sure how much I can talk about this yet, but I – along with the terrific author and noise musician Maggie Siebert – helped co-write the lyrics for a fantastic new record by one of the best bands operating today. I think that’s dropping this year.

Odds & Ends

If you could live in any place, during any historical era – When and where would that be?
… and why would you choose that time and place?

Man, I don’t think I’d do great in any previous historical era, unless it was a case of being born into and conditioned to that life, in which case I’m guessing I’d make due.
I’m not at all one of those guys who wishes they’d been born during antiquity or something. I’m a wimp. Big fan of modern medicine. I’m all set with dying from a tooth abscess, or using liquor as anaesthesia.
So realistically speaking, as a forty-year-old creature of habit who only speaks modern English, I’d likely only be suited to live during the twentieth century in a country that predominately speaks modern English. Nothing I’m proud of, but it is what it is.

That said – I would love to omnisciently observe early Mesopotamia, or any other cradle of civilization, as well as the Neolithic Age. I have a good friend who is much smarter than me, who is a history and theology buff, and we often talk about how the sheer scale of human history fucks us up when we really try to think about it.
Like, what truly constitutes as “a long time ago?” It’s easy to think of the Renaissance as being a long time ago, or the Roman Empire, but even then recorded history stretches thousands of years before then. And even then, homo sapiens go back hundreds of thousands of years. The mind reels.
So I’d be curious to see how the earliest historical humans, and the last pre-historical humans, lived, to see what’s the same and what’s different.

Do you have a ‘day job’?
… if so, what is it?
… and what impact does it have on your creative life?

Absolutely – attention for ‘Negative Space’ has been great and has definitely been a financial boon, but it hasn’t quite earned me quit-your-job money.
If I was still twenty and washing dishes with no plans for the future it’d be quit-your-job money, but that was a long time ago.
But I can’t complain. A few years ago I lucked into an office admin job – I make spreadsheets and write emails and answer the phone and order supplies and so on. Very nerfy, low-stakes stuff. Not at all interesting, and that’s fine.
It doesn’t leave me dead exhausted at the end of the day, and it provides financial security, which allows me to write whatever I want without caring about whether or not it’ll sell.

The Spanish edition of B’s novel, ‘Negative Space.’

Does sex change everything?

It can! It can make things better and it can make things awkward for a while, depending on the situation.
But that’s true of most things.

What does God mean to you?

God is the hidden process behind all things. It’s (God to me is an “it”) the entirety of what is beyond our comprehension.
It’s pre-awareness. It’s everything undivided. It’s everything pressed against everything.

Of everything you have done so far, what would you most like to be remembered for?

I don’t know.
I’m torn on this – my egotistical side wants to be remembered, but sensibly I’m a private person and if I’m being honest there isn’t any real great reason I should be remembered by anyone outside of my friends and family. There are plenty of other artists much more deserving of being remembered. So I don’t know.

I hope my friends and family remember me with love.