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JERALD PODAIR

The UFT Has Made Sausages: an interview with Jerald Podair

In November 2020, the NYC United Federation of Teachers endorsed the Black Lives Matter in Schools campaign. About 90% of the union delegates voted for this. This was a stark contrast to previous years, when the UFT hierarchy plotted to filibuster or derail attempts to have the Delegate Assembly endorse this national campaign for liberation.  And this is, unfortunately, a deeply rooted part of the UFT history, from its recent collaboration in ballooning school segregation, back to its battles in Ocean Hill-Brownsville strikes in 1968 and its cold shoulder to the largest student boycott in 1964.

In the following interview, I discuss the UFT’s history with Jerald Podair, the author of the book THE STRIKE THAT CHANGED NEW YORK, we cover topics from the 1968 UFT strike through present-day conflicts over NYC’s unequal schools, considered the most segregated in the country. The 1968 strike pitted Superintendent Rhody McCoy, the black superintendent of the local Brooklyn school board, against Al Shanker, the powerful president of the UFT (and later the American Federation of Teachers). McCoy insisted on his right to fire or at least reassign teachers who openly resisted his afrocentric, liberatory, and postcolonial pedagogical vision. Shanker refused with great zeal, sending the teachers union into a confrontation with the city lasting several months. The media tried to frame the event as a conflict between blacks (the community) and Jews (the teachers). The UFT ultimately was successful and became a stronger force in its role as co-manager of the NYC schools, but the reaction to the UFT’s principles and tactics during the strike has ranged from glowing adoration to harsh critique. 

While Podair is ultimately pessimistic about the UFT’s capacity for embracing radical action for social change as a primary priority – and one can’t say he doesn’t have 60-plus years of history to back him up – the recent Delegate Assembly vote on BLM in Schools suggests the UFT may be ripe for a change in attitude and direction. Can the UFT break its 60+ years of following the business unionism model of Samuel Gompers? Can it put educator union power to work in a fight that many NYC communities are ready to join against material and racial inequality? These questions and more are discussed below. 

 Jerald Podair, professor, historian, and author of numerous books, including THE STRIKE THAT CHANGED NEW YORK. http://jeraldpodair.com/ 

How did you become interested in and research the Ocean Hill-Brownsville strike? 

JP: The Ocean Hill-Brownsville strike was almost a part of my DNA because I lived through it as a high school student in the fall of 1968. I was in the New York public school system when the strike occurred, and at the time I didn’t pay all that much attention to it. My main concern was getting out of school, not having to go to school. Ocean Hill-Brownsville basically kept New York City public school students out for about 3 months. I wasn't very political then. It struck me maybe 20-25 years later, when I was thinking of a dissertation topic, that it was really not only an important event in New York City education history, it was really an important event in New York history, general New York City history, and especially racial history. So I guess what I felt and heard and read and listened to during the strike sort of stuck in my DNA. or somehow got hardwired into me, because when I started thinking about a dissertation topic, I was a graduate student in history at Princeton, it's really the first thing I thought up, and so I began researching it. 

This was in the 1990s. It was not an easy topic to research, as you might imagine, because emotions were still so raw on each side, and not everybody I wanted to talk to was willing to talk to me. Albert Shanker never talked to me. As I understand it, I gave a presentation at the American historical association convention in the early nineties on Ocean Hill-Brownsville and he went to it. He was the president of the UFT and president of the AFT, at the time. He was in Washington, so he came and apparently he didn't like what I had to say because he had promised to give me an interview. After he heard what I had to say, he didn't want to talk to me. And that’s not the fault of Albert Shanker. He had his position. 

It wasn't the easiest topic to research and I found it much easier to just go through a newspaper run and I had to pretty much read every word of the New York Times, the New York Post and The New York Daily News for about a year to get quotes, to get reactions, to get information. Now newspapers are not always the easiest and most reliable sources, as you know. They are known as the first draft of history for a reason. But what I found is that they were more reliable than some of the people who would talk to me because I felt in many ways I was being spinned, again, by both sides, and I was always reminded as I did research of this of the great Japanese film Rashomon; basically people on both sides of the conflict were telling me things that were not necessarily true but we're basically filtered through their own self-interest so just like a little Rashomon the characters were not necessarily lying out right but they were just shaping the truth to fit their own sensibilities and their own agendas and that's what I found when I interviewed both, so for this dissertation I found relying on newspapers and at least what people were quoted as saying was my most reliable source. I went through the papers of the UFT at NYU and also the city board of education at Columbia.

So to make a long story, the PhD dissertation writing took me about 4 years but I had some road blocks along the way I got my notes stolen then it cost me about a year so I would say it took me 6 years to research and write it.

How did the notes get stolen? 

JP: It's become a family legend and a legend among my colleagues. We were living in Princeton at the time my wife and I and our daughter and we drove up to the Bronx to visit my parents who still live in the Bronx. I don't know if you've ever been a graduate student or know graduate students but they get very obsessive about things.  I took all my notes and I piled in the back of the trunk of the car because I thought I was going to look at them over the weekend, which was unrealistic, and I took basically everything, and the car got stolen and it was pretty horrific to go back to that parking space and not see it there. They found it in the South Bronx completely stripped and everything was gone and the notes were gone as well, so I basically had to start all over. I had to go back to Columbia. I mean it was easier the second time around because I knew where to look but it basically cost me a year and a half, maybe 2 years, of my life. I always heard it said you have to be a little crazy to be a graduate student and write a dissertation and that helped because the same person who would say that would have viewed that lost a dissertation notes as a sign from god and just quit. I didn't. 

Otherwise, why was the book hard to write? Basically just because it was hard to get access to people? Was Shanker the only one that didn't give you access?

JP: There were plenty of people who didn't give me access, or gave me only partial access, or they gave me access and didn't really give me what I needed. So the second time, after all my notes were stolen I decided to sit down and go through the Daily News and all the New York City dailies for every day for 1968 and the beginning of 1969, as well as the Times, who's the most accessible, to see what they said. I also feel that my own knowledge of Ocean Hill-Brownsville was so deep, right down to the ground level, and I certainly could tell whether somebody was stating the truth, so access was also complicated by the nature of the dispute. Usually there are heroes and villains in most historical stories – not in this one, because they were you know it was almost like everyone was right and everyone was wrong and I think it's very difficult for historians even today to approach Ocean Hill-Brownsville because it's so paradoxical and doesn't really fit into any sort of a coherent narrative like that all whites are racist or these teachers were racist; it doesn't fit into the narrative that they you know that all blacks were were unrealistic and anarchistic and violent. It fits into some of those categories but it doesn't fit into all of them and so it's not the easiest story to tell and I think what I had to do is sort of leave my own baggage at the door. We are all people, we have backgrounds: we have ethnic backgrounds, religious backgrounds, racial backgrounds. So I tried to leave all of that at the door and try to get into the heads of all of the participants in this, to get into Al Shanker’s, Superintendent McCoy’s, Mayor John Lindsay's heads, and try to do that in a reasonably just passionate way. Hopefully I did a fair job. I think that's a good thing because I think if I surprised and maybe even just made both blacks and whites can I get that meant I was doing a good job and trying at least to be if you want to do a fair job.

Can you explain just a little more why Shanker didn’t want to talk to you? Talk a little bit about why people thought you were black besides just the cover?

JP: Shanker was looking for an exoneration basically and endorsements of pretty much everything he and the union had done during the strike; in other words, journalists who would say this is not about race or the strike is not about race, it is only about due process for teachers who are unfairly fired. To deny that they were racial issues is completely unrealistic. You have to confront those issues in order to do a good job with it historically, so I think what Shanker was looking for and of course he's not an academic historian. I know that many of my fellow historians would agree to disagree with me on that but I think you have to try to hold yourself outside of it, leave your baggage at the door, and try to be fair to both; historians have to criticize, I mean that's our job, but you also have to have some sense of sympathy for a person who is in a position that you are not, in knowing much less than you know 20 or 30 or even 100 years down the line, so you have to both be critical but sympathetic. I understand he would want me to completely exonerate the UFT, but I couldn't do that and I think that's sort of what bothered him. He was emotionally invested in ocean hill Brownsville as much as anything in his entire career. That probably was the most emotionally draining situation that he had been in as the union leader. I can't think of anything else that came close and he was so emotionally invested in it even 25 years later that wounds were still raw. To a lesser extent I got that from a lot of people that I tried to talk to about it: just too emotionally involved.

How do you see the UFT development since then?

JP: The UFT established itself as co-manager of the New York City public school system through the strike. Most of the strikes right now are about money but Ocean Hill Brownsville though was not about money it was about control. It was in 1968 that this strike established the UFT as a co-manager of the public school system which it was not before 1968. Before Shanker and the union leaders’ goal was to get money, but control in many ways was was more important than money; in other words, if Shanker had allowed Lindsay to buy him with money during this trial, if he allowed for everyone in the system to get a check but go back to work, Shanker would have turned that down, because he understood that that would have been a short term victory but the long term goal would have been lost: control.

The same caucus controls the union, the UNITY Caucus, since Shanker was in power.  

JP: Really, wow. Didn’t realize that. So they’ve been around over 50 years? 

Basically. And they filled a power vacuum left by government purges of “reds” and other socialist-leaning unionists. UNITY Caucus themselves were staunchly anti-communist when they were founded. The previous union, the Teacher’s Union (TU), was actually filled with many socialists and communists and the UFT, led by the UNITY Caucus, filled that void.

JP: You're absolutely right. It’s really crucial to understanding the history of the UFT. They're really tough anti-communists and they were one of several competing associations trying to get collective bargaining power for teachers. 

What would it be like if  the union had been less opposed to social justice and done less damage to community ties in the 60s in some of those neighborhoods? Is it possible for them to both win protections for the workers and also further social justice in terms of integrating schools and that type of thing and promoting black empowerment. 

JP: My book shows how complicated that was for the UFT.  First, Shanker and most of the UFT higher ups would say “we are for social justice” and what they would say is “you know we supported Martin Luther King and all of his campaigns. Martin Luther king is a personal friend.” He did address the U.F.T. On many occasions, he supported them when they were establishing their own union, and they supported him at the March on Washington and at Freedom Summer, so they thought they had the social justice bona fide. What what Shanker and other union higher ups would probably say in 1968 is “you don't know what it was like to be a teacher in the New York City public schools in the forties and fifties, but we do and what we know is that teachers had no control, no power, no dignity.” So the UFT was founded to change that – did change that. As for social justice, at Ocean Hill-Brownsville they were asked to make a choice between the 2 and the UFT leaders ended up choosing the power of the union and the power of the teacher over ideals of more radical militants interested in social justice. In other words, they were for social justice but not at their own expense. 

Albert Shanker, founder and president of the United Federation of Teachers 1964 to 1985 and president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) from 1974 to 1997.

Wildcat teacher strikes in recent years in West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Oakland were fighting for higher wages, benefits, protections, and other working conditions. The LA strike and then the Chicago one in 2019 they were more fighting for expanding funding for the schools and increasing counselors and that type of stuff. Do you think that had Shanker had the union mobilized at that time that they would have fought for those issues? Because public schools in NYC were basically gutted in the 70s and 80s. 

JP:  Back when Samuel Gompers was the president of the AFL testifying before a congressional committee in the early 1900s and somebody said, “You know Mister Gompers, what does labor want?” and he just says, “More.” That's it. “More.” And that's what Shanker wanted. He wanted more. He wanted more counselors, he wanted more money to be spent on schools. He wanted it for two reasons: he wanted it because I think he was honestly committed to some form of social justice but also he wanted more jobs for his teachers and more power for the union. He did want all those things but what he didn't want to do was cede control over education to a community group or community groups that he felt threatened his teachers and threatened their jobs. All the money in the world,  he was very happy to have. The New York City government spent lots of money on teachers, or social justice, to fund counselors, special ed,  everything. He wasn't into allowing the community school board to fire one of his teachers. That he would not do, and that's what caused the Ocean Hill-Brownsville strike. So you know in many ways as we look at it retrospectively: it didn't have to happen, and that means that if both sides had compromised, it probably would not have happened. But we can't go back. From the standpoint of community people and parents in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville community, they see that their children are not getting good education and even more specifically not getting the kind of education the kids in the white middle class areas of New York City are getting, who are getting the better teachers, better facilities.  There’s something colloquially called combat pay in the 1960s, where teachers in poor neighborhoods get paid more money and also get a chance to transfer out after like a certain number of years.

There’s something in the most recent UFT contract where if you go to teach at struggling schools in the Bronx or Brooklyn you get higher pay.

JP: In the 1960s there was some sort of a provision where if you put a certain number of years and in those schools then you could leave and what happened in the sixties is that they were trying younger teachers, the beginning teachers (not veteran teachers) to the schools in communities like Ocean Hill-Brownsville, who could see that the education their kids were getting was not the same kind of education that that white middle class kids were getting and they were angry about that and I think justifiably angry about that, and of course Al Shanker would say, “I'm angry about that too and I want to do something about that and the way I want to do something because it is I want the school board to hire more teachers, more counselors, more administrators” and the community said, “well that's that's not really what we had in mind. We want control.” And that’s not what Shanker had in mind and he wouldn’t stand for that. 

Now a big fight in New York City schools is over the screening process. Are you aware of this?

JP: I'm actually not really.

So kids take screening tests. The original schools like Bronx Science and Stuyvesant had to take tests to get in, but starting with Guiliani, then it was expanded during Bloomberg. Students take these tests at the end of middle school and there's some schools – like the school where I teach – that are unscreened but there's some schools that are screened, where you have to have a certain test score to get in and those schools are predominantly white and Asian and then you have schools that are unscreened that are predominantly black and brown students, so you really have a segregated school system, arguably the most segregated in the country.

JP: Well I was going to say that at least in the sixties you had the zoned school and Bronx Science, Stuyvesant, only a certain number of students.

So I guess my question, returning to social justice,  but through the lens of focusing on teachers' working conditions, and Weingarten and Mulgrew were Shanker’s successors, so I'm just kind of wondering how that fits into this? 

JP: They really had the same agenda as Shanker. In other words, they're all tough union bosses who put the interests of their membership above all. The conceit for the UFT all through the years is that the interests of their members coincide with the interests of social justice and you don't have to make the choice between one or the other, but of course that's not always the case as we saw in Ocean Hill-Brownsville. When push comes to shove they're going to protect members; if they have a chance to get more money and more hiring but taxes go up and taxes go up for everybody including poor people they're going to do it because that's what comes first. The social justice component is important but when it collides with the interests of the union members, they come first and. I think most union leaders, even the public sector union leaders who say they're for social justice, they're going to make that calculation. 

Do you think we still see some of the same forces at work in the contemporary struggles over education?

JP: From what you've just told me, in New York you have a school system that is more segregated than it may have been even in the 1960s and it's pretty segregated in the 1960s and that was the basis of community control, the philosophical basis of it. African American parents in the mid 1960s basically gave up on the integration struggle because white parents had certainly given up on the integration struggle, and what black parents said is, “Well it looks like our schools are going to be segregated almost permanently and if that's the case, we might as well control it.” They're really being segregated by class, it seems to me, so that is that is going to be the issue going forward now. What is the UFT going to do with that? Well they may want to do something about it but I think again they are beholden to their members and their members may not have that will. Everyone in America says we want to be equal. But when you get into real life situations you sometimes wonder how many Americans really want to be equal, and take it to the UFT I would imagine that the majority of members view themselves as liberals or even on the left, and they vote for Democratic candidates, but when push comes to shove do they want to teach in an unscreened school or a screened school? Well a lot of them are going to make the choice to go to the screened school and they may give you all sorts of justifications that nothing to do with race, but it does come down at least to some extent to race and it also comes down to maybe something inside of them that does not want to be equal, that's wants to be elite or special, and maybe that's part of human nature but I don’t think the UFT itself is going to contribute to breaking down the system because I think in many ways the membership has an interest in perpetuating the system as it is.

You're a labor historian. Can you think of an example of a union or labor movement that was both focused on working conditions for the workers in the union but then also focused as a primary concern on the community or in the society? 

JP: The Wobblies was a union that focused not only on working conditions for their members but also wanted to change the entire economic and social structure of the United States.

Poster for the Industrial Workers of the World, or Wobblies, a trade union across industries that has fought for work protections and power as part of a larger campaign for social revolution. https://iww.org/assets/One-Big-Union.pdf 

Similar to the Teachers Union (TU), the socialist and communist -oriented union that came before the UFT and was destroyed by the red scares in the 1940s and 50s. 

JP: Yes, and former members of that formed a caucus that was against Shanker’s UNITY caucus in the UFT. They are trying to do that massive social change and that caucus within the UFT opposes the strike from the very beginning and they're saying we have to align ourselves with the communities in which we teach so that we can change them for the better but in a sense they are making choices too. They’re unselfish in the sense that they would say well we're willing to forgo raises to help the community, we're willing to give the community control, in order to get equity and social justice in these neighborhoods. But I would argue that most teachers were not like that; they're much more self interested, much less willing to sacrifice themselves. I think what distinguishes these teachers is they were truly selfless. Because the right has many problems of its own, which we know, but one of the major problems on the left is hypocrisy and the idea that they want other people to do what they themselves will not. You talk the talk, but you don't walk the walk. Well these anti-strike teachers in 1968 in the UFT, they walked the walk. They were willing to make personal sacrifices, not have somebody else do it.  Shanker opposed them and tried to destroy the caucus, but I think on some level he had to respect them. 

Yeah the caucus I am in, the Movement of Rank and File Educators, is sort of the descendent of that caucus. 

JP: The only UFT leader who spoke out at the time was John O’Neil. Also, George Altomare, one of the only living and remaining members of the UFT hierarchy, and I talked to him a couple of years ago and he's the only really high ranking UFT who really tries to settle this and make a compromise and he got estranged from Shanker and the leadership over that. And Shanker basically just kept saying, “Fuck you, we want these teachers back in the classroom now” to the city and the media. And possibly the person who was floating a compromise of reassigning the teachers to other duties was George Altomare. He's the last one left from Ocean Hill-Brownsville who's actually alive as far as I know. He was sort of half in and half out and I think he was trying to be sort of a go between the community and the union hierarchy. Shanker was very absolutist over this and I think they had a falling out over that.

I also found it interesting that you said that your book doesn't really fit comfortably in like a right wing or left wing historical narrative. I took it to show that the UFT failed to work with communities for funding and equality and instead had been focused on working conditions only. What would have happened if the UFT had worked more with communities on more systemic changes that could have been more mutually beneficial? 

JP: You could make that argument. But based on my research,  I think most city school teachers were and maybe are politically with the cops, the firemen, the sanitation workers. They're just interested in “more”. They're not politically active and what they're worried about are their salaries and their jobs. So when you have a union that is mostly composed of people like that, there's a limit to how far you're going to be able to go in terms of social justice. Again the UFT always said, “We're for integration.” Shanker said all the way through: “We are pro-integration”, but when Bayard Rustin (who I actually wrote a biography of) organized a student boycott and the UFT at least nominally supported that but they were not willing to go to bat for their members who boycotted that day. They said, “Take a sick day” or something like that,  and didn't necessarily confront the board of education directly over this. The organizers of the boycott were disappointed in the UFT hierarchy's reaction to it. They didn’t oppose it but they didn’t use work stoppage. The UFT at that time was in favor of school integration. It's not like they were ever, you know, against it.  But again, there's you know then idea skin in the game. And resources. I think the UFT was worried about that and the reason they're worried is - it's related to this idea of social justice clashing with the goals of union power -- this is 1964: they're not that powerful a union and they may not want to piss off the board of education with whom they're trying to share power. They're not necessarily a struggling union but they’re young, only like 4 years old, and they may not have wanted to throw in fully. Sometimes you have to to do what you have to do. When I wrote my biography of Rustin, I was struck by an incident in the late 1950s, where Rustin is a close adviser to Martin Luther King, and Rustin helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and probably was going to be the managing director of the SCLC. What happens is Rustin, who is gay, gets caught in rumors of this and they reach Martin Luther King, who cut off Rustin and they reunited for the March on Washington in about 3 years. He basically cut Rustin off, and they don't have all that much contact. I think that King's thinking here is, “I have enough problems with what I'm doing without also having a gay man as the director of the SCLC I'm already being called a communist. I'm already being called an anarchist, a revolutionary. King made a strategic decision and cut this guy off, and that's how it works sometimes. In many ways, the UFT was generally thinking in 1964: “We've got enough problems with the Board of Education, establishing ourselves with the union, do we really, really want to go all in on this boycott and support every teacher? That's probably going to hurt us down the road when it comes to bargaining with them.” There’s that saying that watching legislation get passed is like watching sausages get made. Well, King was making sausages, and so was the UFT. 

[5questions]

RICHARD CHIEM

BIO: Richard Chiem is the author of You Private Person (Sorry House Classics, 2017), and the novel, King of Joy (Soft Skull, 2019). His book, You Private Person, was named one of Publishers Weekly’s 10 Essential Books of the American West. His work has been published by NY Tyrant, Fanzine, and The Nervous Breakdown, among many other places. He was named a 2019 Writer to Watch by the Los Angeles Times. He has taught at Hugo House, Catapult, and at the University of Washington Bothell. He lives in Seattle.  

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1.    You have Corvus, the protagonist. You have Tim, a pornographic film director who somewhat takes advantage of her. You have her tragic boyfriend, Perry. You have her close friend Amber. Each of these characters is very fully developed. How did you originally conceive of each of these characters? How did they develop through your drafting of this book? I know in some of your early writing you took inspiration from pop cultural media like television and movies, was there similar inspiration here?

I started writing the novel after watching Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers (2012) and I felt possessed to write one of the first scenes in the book, where Corvus is watching Amber burn down a tree. I am very much a sentence by sentence, sentence level writer, and the film showed me something new about style and plot. In watching the film, I learned that style in a way can transcend form to become story or narrative almost on its own. If something could make emotional sense, it could resonate with the reader. This thinking liberated me and gave me permission to write my weird book. Once I knew who Corvus was, I knew I had a novel project. All the characters are me, or some weird version of me, with inspiration from what I’ve seen in the world. I worked through and processed a lot of grief in writing the novel. I would say I was also very motivated by pop music writing this book, such as listening to a lot of Robyn, Elliott Smith, and Frank Ocean. Movies are also big for me as a model for writing. Films by Robert Bresson, David Cronenberg, Hayao Miyazaki, Wong Kar-Wai, among others. The film Blue Valentine. The novel Breaking & Entering by Joy Williams.

2.    Was it weird for you as a male writer to take on the task of exploring a female main character? Did you think about this as you wrote? It’s obviously been done before, and vice versa, and done well many times, but I’m just wondering how self-aware you were about this as you wrote.

I wanted to write a book I wanted to read. I wanted a book that would be hard for me to write with a character I loved with great emotional capacity. I knew I wanted a book about Corvus and her survival, and I knew I wanted the book to feel true to its characters and feel emotionally authentic on the page.

In finding truth in fiction and finding truth in her identity, because I am a cis male and not a woman like Corvus, I had to be accountable to her and her life on the page, so I was very self-aware of her as I was drafting the book. It allowed and motivated me to be constantly asking questions about what story would reveal this truth for her and about her. If I wasn’t doing that precious and crucial work of pushing outside myself, the novel would not have been worth the effort for any reader.

3.    Your prose has a deft touch to it, where you pack power into terse but flowing sentences. What writers specifically influenced your stylistic approach to the mechanics of writing, on a sentence-by-sentence level? How do you think your prose has changed since your last book, the story collection YOU PRIVATE PEOPLE?

Thank you so much, Andrew. There are so many writers that have influenced me powerfully, especially on the sentence level, but to start:

Fanny Howe, Rebecca Brown, Dennis Cooper, Joy Williams, Gary Lutz, Renee Gladman, Jean Rhys, Jane Bowles, Agota Kristof, Alissa Nutting, Melissa Broder, Édouard Levé, Unica Zurn, and Blake Butler, to name a few.

I feel as though I am coming into what feels like the height of my powers with prose. Or, the prose feels really good right now. I think what has changed in my prose between the two books is that I have such a stronger sense of what I want to say. Although I am a shadow boxer, I am no longer swinging in the dark, and everything is landing. I am always ready to throw hands.

4.    What is your daily life like? How do you organize your time and space around writing and related work?

I would say I try to center my whole life around writing and the writing life. I work an office job (9 to 5) at an accounting department at a book store to pay the rent. I treat my writing time like I treat my sleep: I will take what I can get. I am also an insomniac, so I often write when I can’t find sleep. Otherwise, I try to schedule and manage of an hour of writing or editing every day. But I also allow myself rest when life catches up to me and I just can’t put words to the page. I’ve realized this rest is also crucial to the process and the art of listening to yourself. I also make time to show up for other writers, and I try to attend as many readings as I can, as well as read my peers’ work. I believe this is also crucial to who I am as a writer, being a listener.

5.    What kinds of projects are you working on or do you plan to work on now that this book has been published?

I am currently working on a novel, a book of short stories, and a book of poetry. They are tentatively called CAVE ME IN, MESS YOU UP, and NOTHING KILLS ME, respectively. Give me another year or so before one of them is real for the world.

[5questions]

Joselia Hughes

Joselia "Jo" Hughes is a Black 1.5-generation Cuban-Jamaican-Guyanese-American writer and artist from the Bronx. She lives with Sickle Cell Disease (HBSC) and ADHD.

Where did you find the 3rd grade poem? How did you decide to include it? What other collage or found art/poetry do you like?

The 3rd grade poem was from a collection of student works, Witch’s Brew, released by my grammar school, Horace Mann. I have two issues from 2nd and 3rd grades. Both of my works were quartered in the “Fantasy” section. There was another section called “Feelings” and, I think, The Sky more accurately suggests a feeling. Scratch that: it explicitly discusses a feeling. This misidentification by academic administration/curatorial staff (which doubles as a political demonstration) is telling. I think it explains a lot about the root confusion between what I have felt/feel to know as Experientially True versus what I’m told to know as The Truth. When considering the emotional and material lives of Black femmes, we must remember Black femmes have been historically disallowed, disavowed and dispossessed of creative virtuosity. Too often, we are strapped in the monolith of stereotyped caricature dictated by the manifested destiny written into commandments/constitution of misogynoir. Black femme virtuosity is reappropriated, regesticulated and worn like some earned bloody body wisdom by the Opps (Oppressive Forces). While I didn’t have those terms as a child, I experienced the consequences of misogynoir in conjunction with dis/ableism and classism, which aren’t separate entities but necessary vices that amplify asphyxiation. Is disabled Black femme loneliness only permissible when classified as fantasy? That shit don’t sit right in my spirit. I also used the poem because the title is Witch’s Brew and my zine, Heartbeats But No Air (HBNA), is a kind of exorcism. A few years ago, I pieced together that my maternal grandmother was a covertly practicing Bruja. With the widening reclamation of ancestral wisdom by BIPOC, in an effort to decolonize our existences, I was tapping into that tender tendon of wisdom.

Understanding my grandmother’s practice reminded me that she wanted to name me Darthula Verbena (daughter of God, enchanting and medicinal). I started referring to myself as DV, my pre-name, and inspected my childhood. That’s been a remarkable endeavor. I had to teach myself to play again. Through play, I learned how to feel. Learning feeling meant learning the qualitative and quantitative nature of the labyrinth of my thoughts. Once I learned some of the turns of the labyrinth, I could feel to know how to navigate the terrain without fear and engage in the rigorous study that’s always characterized my central self. Play is a code switch. I often think of code switching as a means to subvert/refigure power differentials. To hide in plain sight by retooling “seeing” to perception/sensing. How much are we perceiving/sensing? How often do we mean perception/sensing yet default to “sight”? Perception/Sensing adds dimensionality that isn’t always articulated with and through “sight” and “seeing”. Ralph Ellison’s identification of “lower frequencies” and J. Halberstam’s configurations of Low Theory do this work. I toy with these multiplicities in the zine. I work low to the ground which means I work close to my heartbeat, my central drum. I work meta; I go beyond. I like to sprinkle codes, tickle clues, tuck in questions, sew in wisdoms so I know what I’m doing, why I’m doing it, who I’m doing it for and to always remember the fun of FLiP (Feeling, Learning, iPlaying).

Some of the works/folks who’ve helped me FLiP are Dana Robinson’s meditative and piercing collages; Zulie’s mind bending, heart wrenching, time suspending zines; Nikki Wallschlaeger’s I HATE TELLING YOU HOW I REALLY FEEL; Seth Graham’s tattoo practice/paintings/unbounded love of outer space (they’ve done 3/4 of my tattoos); Amanda Glassman’s razor sharp poetry and encyclopedic curiosity;  L’Rain's music has literally helped me scale the side of a mountain and carried me through hospitalizations; KT PE Benito’s multidisciplinary liberation praxis and collaborative friendship; Zoraida Ingles' holistic creative prowess (a conversation with her is why Heartbeats But No Air, as a title, exists); and Marcus Scott Williams’ writings/video/sculpture work that readily embraces the persistence of ephemera. This isn’t an exhaustive list—I have a solid library of books and papers and zines and tunes at my crib—but, genuinely, I’m inspired by everyone I’ve had the honor to encounter.

There are themes of love and race and beauty and culture and self-transformation in this book. Paired randomly, some pieces may not make as much common sense together, but as a whole, it feels powerful and cohesive. What was the structuring process like for this chapbook? Each zine is different, right?

It is one zine. I find it cool that you consider HBNA a chapbook made up of many zines. The word chapbook had never crossed my mind. I walked into the process with DIY zine logic and HBNA was printed using office photocopiers. I think the feeling of cohesion you mention is what happens when you witness a lot of parts of one person. In this case, you’re witnessing a lot of different parts of me, my thoughts, my actual labor. Whole is the goal ‘cuz people are whole. I am whole. I consider HBNA a single revolution of myself— one big twirl around a fire, a sun. I was in a very strange place. I’d alleviated, with the help of acupuncture and CBD products, a significant amount of the chronic pain I’d been experiencing since August 2014. I fell around love with someone and rose in love to myself (thanks Ms. Morrison and Ms. Stanford!). I was in an unfamiliar painless trance. I created and tinkered with all of those pieces during a very short period of time from Summer 2017 to Summer 2018. HBNA was originally named Girl Pickney (the prose pieces were written under that moniker) and before that NggrGrl (a nod to Dick Gregory). I wrote the poetry in an even shorter period of time—March to July 2018—and the poems are actually part of a full length collection that I wrote in those four months. I didn’t decide on the layout of the zine until I was with two friends formatting it for printing two days before I was going to read at The Strand and sell it. I kept all the pages, the puzzle pieces, in a folder. A lot of book structuring, for me, is based on emotional knowing—when to slap, when to pound, when to breathe, when to confuse, when to stun, when to anger, when to tell, when to soothe. All of my structuring decisions are fly about to get swatted dead but fast enuf to fly away first intuitive. If I’m channeling that intuition, I know I’m in running in the proper heat and lane.

You were in an MFA program at one point. How does this chapbook contrast with your style from before that program and during that program? Did that program have an effect on your writing? This doesn’t feel like the most MFA-y writing, which is why I ask, and which I mean as a compliment.

I’ve attended a few schools. I’ve completed fewer than I’ve attended. Until my late 20s, I was shy and desperate for people, those noun-verbs, to stay. This desire for people to stay meant I spent an inordinate about of time and energy relegating the difficult parts of myself to the margins of the margins and continually stepped into social/academic shoes that did not fit. HBNA was the first fitting of the bespoke shoes I can now emotionally afford to make. The first copies I sold had typos! I misspelled my own pre-name and that’s exactly what I needed to happen. It needed it to happen because I’m full of mistakes and yet! I try! I understand HBNA as a radical refutation of embarrassment. Depending on when you purchased a copy, you’ll see I used white-out to make a few corrections. No two zines are the same; only 80 copies exist. I’m printing 12 more copies (they’ve already been claimed) and then on to new pastures! The zine was printed in three different places (two offices I don’t work in and a local printing shop) and I was lugging around 800 individual sheets of paper that I stapled, numbered, indexed and decorated with stickers by myself…standing barefoot on the carpet of Staples in Co-Op City, listening to Ryo Fukui’s Early Summer on repeat until I finished and then I jetted to the Strand to read. HBNA was how I knew to embody my physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual labor. I’m a goofball with zany ideas, an indifference to external definitions of relevancy, sickled cells and a lot of chaotically grounding love. I write for myself first. Of the school lessons I did receive and learn, there weren’t many I didn’t later disassemble to rebuild, freak unfamiliar or completely misunderstand. J. Halberstam calls this “failing”. Rejigging failure has been such a gift to me. How wonderful! A failure AND still happening? Fuck yeah! I was a wildly uneven student whose knees buckled at mere thought of rigid academic authority. After years of shame and refusal, I can finally admit I am an autodidact. I intentionally get lost and navigate in and to the direction of my own senses. School didn’t teach me to write for myself and that’s who I always have to write for. If that’s selfish, so be it. I am my first audience. If I’m sus of me, then me and myself got foundational problems. I know my writing is non-institutional and that lack of institutional alignment and support, while scary as shit, pushes me to make and take risks to believe beyond the immediate demands/plans/remands of whatever external force I am facing. My writing is constantly colliding into A New I can’t predict. I’m fully committed to unfolding, unraveling, for curiosity’s sake.

What’s a typical day like for you?

My day to day life is as predictable as it is unpredictable. I am formally unemployed and have been for awhile. I live on very little cash and am kept afloat because my mom is a gem and hasn’t kicked me out. My days are 100% influenced by the weather and I spend a good portion of my time negotiating how to minimize the occurrence of vaso-occlusive crises and other complications from the disease I have, Sickle Cell. Between January 2018 and January 2019, I was hospitalized three times. Each hospitalization was about a week long and recovery took significantly longer.

Here’s a sketch of what I call a really great day: I wake up before 10. If the night’s sleep was especially restorative, I can comfortably rise at 8. Depending on how my body feels, depending on how much pain I’m enduring, how much fatigue is shrouding/clouding my faculties, I decide if I have the energy to take a shower. I do the bathroom routine, get a cup of orange juice and take my medications (Endari, sometimes Adderall, Folic Acid). I use the first hours of wakefulness to connect with loved ones via text-phonecalls-DMs and browse the internet for headlines-news-updates-new smiles. I wear my fits comfortable. I call comfort my uniform—upend normcore to body sensible—sweatpants/leggings, pullover, one earring (although I’m leaning to pairs again), handy dandy baseball cap and sneakers. I keep it simple. If the weather is aight—if it isn’t too cold or too hot and if precipitation is mostly at bay and air quality isn’t extremely poor—I go outside and get some living exercise. When able, I take extremely long walks. Once I walked over 50 miles in a week! It’s my preferred form of meditation. Walking/body movement grounds my ADHD symptoms more effectively than stimulants, strengthens my body for potential Sickle Cell episodes and satiates my unyielding need to feel connected to other people. I’m at my best when outside and happening. Illness can create an inescapable interiority. Inside reminds me of the hospital and my relationship with the hospital is, at best, fraught. Walking allows me to follow myself. I engage in peek-a-boo with babies, witness accidents, smile at strangers, duck the eyes of leering people and learn how to love differently too. I go to playgrounds and swing. I take photos and notes. If I’ve got a lil cash, I ride the subway for fun. I poke into shops, admire graffiti and other street signs. I have one woman dance parties on sidewalks. I rest on park benches and read. I pick up grub from hole in the wall spots—you know—I live my life and embrace as much as I can while centering kindness and gentle flow. The walks are my favorite part of my job, which I do not have. When I return home, I rest then get to crafting which I sometimes call spelling. Crafting/Spelling can be anything from adding to my I-Box, spitting verses from the abstract (poetry), spinning short stories, detailing journal entries, doodling, painting, knitting, researching & studying,  dancing & stretching, bugging out on Twitter or reading. My bedroom is my studio so I work small yet widely. I intentionally provide myself with many targets so I can a) keep my thoughts and feelings flowing b) find the connections between all of my actions and c) mitigate the stress that sits in the heart of a lone project. I am a multifaceted, multifauceted being. Why not turn on all the taps?

The more long form prose pieces in here have the feel of nice punch-y flash fiction. Are you writing a fiction collection without poems and collage in it? I want to read that, too :)

Hahaha! You’re onto me! Yeah, I am writing another book of poems, a manifesto zine and a collection of fiction. I’ve been writing a collection of fiction since 2012. I had a lot of the difficultly writing the fiction because I was too attached to the title, the characters I conceived needed to grow up with me, and I experienced many years of unremitting and improperly managed mental and physical illness. I was holding onto and telling lies. The shame woven into those lies kept me silent and scared. All of that shit needed to get integrated or dropped. I couldn’t enter the prose/fiction I’m currently writing without learning how to survive myself and the world and bottom-belly-believe in survival too. I’m getting there— healing with primary, secondary and tertiary intentions. Won’t say much about the fiction pieces of than: ~15 stories, lyrically speculative fiction, capital B Black, disabled, and queerfemme parables of creation and destruction and maintenance. My website is in flux but I do readings and performances. Hit me up on Instagram , Twitter or email me at joseliawrites@gmail.com. Might take a minute for me to respond because I’m thoughtful yet questionably organized. Now go play, ya’ll!

Unintentionally wrote a poem in the interview. I call it A.B.B in Lieu of A.B.C

beyond

fly, about to get swatted dead but fast enuf to fly away first,

always believe beyond

[5questions]

Matthew Bookin

“Honest Days is an unexpected delight. Bookin writes how he sees it — weaving images, dreams, and truth into tight addictive prose. It's a book that captures the haze of the everyday and buffs it into magic.” 

-Noah Falck, author of Snowmen Losing Weight and You Are In Nearly Every Future. 

“Matthew Bookin is my second favorite dead Russian comedian, and my first favorite living American fiction writer." 

-Lucy K. Shaw, author of The Motion and WAVES

How long did it take to write this? When did you know it wasn’t just some unrelated stories but instead a cohesive narrative? Can we call this a novella? Is that OK? I’m OK with it….

I feel very okay calling this a novella.

Fragments of the book were written as early as 2011, but a majority of it was written in 2015. During the summer of 2015 a publisher I really loved approached me about putting out a short story collection. I put one together very quickly and immediately felt like it didn’t work. Over the course of the next six months, I broke the collection apart and turned it into something more cohesive, eventually becoming what the book is now. The book didn’t end up with that particular publisher, but it probably wouldn’t exist at all without their initial interest.

How did you decide on Dostoyevsky Wannabe as publisher for this book? What other books do you like on that press? How did you like working with them?

Dostoyevsky Wannabe was always in the back of my mind as a possibility for the book. I’d been sort of obsessed with DW’s Cassette compilation series ever since it had started and was absolutely in love with the way their books were designed.  I eventually contributed to an entry from the Cassette series that Oscar Bruno D’Artois edited and I really loved the experience. After the initial publisher that had shown interest in the book fell through I kind of shelved the book for over a year, opening it up to do a long weekend of edits every few months. In the fall of 2017, shortly after the conclusion of a reading tour I did with some friends, I felt motivated to get the book out into the world again. I sent the manuscript to Dostoyevsky Wannabe and they accepted it less than 24 hours later.

Working with Vikki and Richard was akin to undergoing a very gentle and expedient exorcism, after which a beautiful paperback with a deer on the cover appeared. They’re both incredibly generous and incredibly hardworking. I can’t imagine the book ever having a better home.

Apart from their Cassette series, I’ve really enjoyed Dark Hours by Nadia de Vries, You Are in Nearly Every Future by Noah Falck, and the all the work Shane Jesse Christmass has published with DW.

The novel focuses very much on the everyday and mundane during the first parts, then becomes very absurd and plot-driven in the latter parts. Was this a conscious choice in terms of story development? Or did it happen more naturally? Or was it both? Or neither?

It happened more naturally as a result of its early stages as a short story collection. Most of what I write tends to dip into the surreal, so it’s not something I really consciously make a decision about, it just tends to be the direction I gravitate towards. However, when it was finally complete, I did start editing out some of the more surreal later chapters because I thought it robbed the emotional arc of the book of genuine feeling. Originally there was more sex and more talking animals. And as strange as the book is, I feel like it’s far more tame and straightforward than a lot of DW’s catalogue, which often leans hard into experimental noise punk prose.

What books did you like reading while you were writing this? Did any of them influence you? And if so, how?

The only book I really remember reading during the time Honest Days changed from a collection to a novella is Last Days by Brian Evenson. It’s about a detective who falls into the grips of a cult obsessed with self-amputation. I interpreted the whole thing as a very dark and very funny take on male bonding. Apart from ruthlessly ripping-off its title, I’m not sure how much of an impact it had on my book.

What is your day-to-day life like? What is your writing routine? Or do you not have a routinized schedule?

When I was writing Honest Days I had a schedule that was extremely similar to the narrator’s - I would get up extremely early, usually around 4am, and drive to one of several hospitals in Buffalo to work. The job was pretty much what’s described in the book. Now my life is slightly less ghoulish and a lot more square - I work a pretty standard 9 to 5 office job.

I don’t really have a writing routine. Mostly it’s long periods of compiling notes and fragments of things followed by occasional manic periods of obsessively stringing all the little pieces together.

[5questions]

Sebastian Castillo

Sebastian Castillo’s 49 Venezuelan Novels is a magical book of unique and surreal micro-fiction with a new story on every page. Full of depth and imagination, Castillo uses imagery in a simple yet intense way. From stories of fish markets to spiteful violins, it almost seems that these novels are snippets of family stories long passed down, just now put to paper. With the nature of a born storyteller, Sebastian Castillo provides readers with gorgeous stories.

-from the publisher; buy the book here

How did you plan and edit this book? How did you decide on “49”? How did you decide on “novels”?

I wrote it slowly, piecemeal, like most things I’ve written. I’m not sure when, exactly, I decided to frame them as novels. Right now, I’m remembering how Félix Fénéon’s Novels in Three Lines affected me when I first read it—maybe some of that seeped in. Another big influence was the Borges quote I used as an epigraph: that one could reduce a 500-page book to a few pages. I wanted to push that further by crystalizing a novel in a paragraph, or a sentence. Calling them novels felt right to me—I wanted to believe they were novels, and by believing that for long enough, they became novels. I decided on 49 because the number felt incomplete, like there was something missing which the reader would have to put together, somehow. I wanted to invite the reader to play with me.

There is a constant tension of transition and change in each of these novels. Why is time and its movement so hard for us to grasp?

I’m glad you thought so.

I don’t know if I’ll be able to answer the question well. But I’ll say—one of the things that I’ve struggled with most in my life is accounting for my experience of time. I’ve dealt with a lot of death: several family members, my mother, my friends. I’m sad that things which felt so long, so detailed, so exact, can often wash away the longer you live. There’s entire portions of my life I barely remember! Georges Perec said, “I can’t remember my childhood.” Me neither, and sometimes I would extend that to yesterday.

I had to write my mother’s obituary last year. I was in a state of shock at the time—I think I still am. She was the person I loved most in the world. While writing it, I was heartbroken by how an entire life—with all its flavor and peculiarity—was flattened into a list. It felt both comedic and merciless. Maybe that’s one of the reasons I was drawn to writing fiction: to work in a medium dedicated to damaging time and its dull, insistent violence. If that sounds grandiose and pathetic, it’s because it is. But I have to do something.

There are no markers of products or pop culture allusions in these pieces, and yet we live around popular consumer culture everyday. Why did you decide to disregard these influences in your prose?  

There are a few echoes from real life scattered throughout, mostly from my childhood: cheese arepas, Parque Central (the neighborhood where I grew up in Caracas), and maybe one or two other things. I did, however, intentionally limit those real-world markers. I wanted the book, and the world it evokes, to live in a different reality, somewhere between a street corner you can smell and a poorly remembered dream. The “Venezuela” of the book is an imaginary place, I think—one that exists only there.

What is your day to day life like? What’s your work? When do you write?

I’m an adjunct instructor. I teach English and Creative Writing. I used to live in Philadelphia for many years, and I now live in Mount Vernon, NY, where I grew up after leaving Venezuela. I love teaching and hope I can do it indefinitely. In terms of writing: I tend to have periods where I’m working on things consistently, and fallow periods where I’m somewhat ignoring writing. I used to think it was important to write everyday—and I’m sure it is for some people—but I’ve come to accept that it’s not for me. I read every day, and that’s always been more important to me than writing.

What future projects are you working on? Do you see yourself ever returning to this medium of mini concept novels?

I’m not sure if I’ll return to the mini-novel. I tend to build larger projects off a formal conceit, and am frequently prone to starting new things and never finishing them. So I think, at least for now, I’m done with them.

I’m almost finished with my next book, Not I, which is in the tradition of formalist autobiographical texts—things like Joe Brainard’s I Remember, Édouard Levé’s Autoportrait, and Lyn Hejinian’s My Life. I take the 25 most common verbs in the English language and run them through every verb tense with a first-person statement. Here’s an excerpt, from the Simple Future section:

I will be something very small.

I will grow into jealousy.

I will do what has to be done.

I will say plain, nasty things.

I will get what I want.

I will make do.

I will go to the poet’s moon.

I will know too much about the government.

I will take out the trash.

I will see Atlantis, but not for a long time.

I will come when called by my lord, unfortunately.

I will think about serious illness.

I will look up my own skirt.

I will want more when I’m rich and lonely.

I will give coal to both friends and traitors.

I will use your porcelain bathtub now.

I will find the things you’ve been hiding from me.

I will tell your secrets to nationally distributed magazines.

I will ask for nothing in return.

I will work until I can get away with doing nothing.

I will seem suspicious, but please trust me.

I will feel that terrible pressure.

I will try a new path.

I will leave you with this.

I will call the police on myself.

I started working on it a few years ago as a bit of a diversion. But what began as an Oulipean/conceptual exercise became, at least for me, something exciting and playful. I hope to publish it at some point.

The other thing I’m “working” on: an audio commentary for 49 Venezuelan Novels called “The DVD Commentary of 49 Venezuelan Novels Deluxe Edition.” Remember those commentary tracks that used to come with movies on DVDs? Maybe they still have a version of that, but it’s been a while since I’ve seen one. I always liked how they created a separate experience, something distinct from the original movie—watching someone watch something. So I’d like to do a version of that with the book. My plan is to disparage the book and the person who wrote it.

[5questions]

Richard Wehrenberg

Richard Wehrenberg was born in Akron, Ohio and is the author of Abracadabrachrysanthemum (2018), Hands (2015), and River (2014), co-written with Ross Gay. Their work has been published in The Academy of American Poets, Peach Mag, Bad Nudes, Monster House Press, & elsewhere. They are a poet, writer, artist, & designer living in Bloomington, Indiana.

I want to start with the cover. I admire its minimalism but also the way that minimalism allows the title to speak for itself, carrying the reader along as they go to the next page. What are some of your favorite book designs? How has your own design aesthetics changed since you first started designing chapbooks and websites over ten years ago? Do you have any sort of codified process for your design work?

I perceive Text as Image and Image as Text, in a kind of infinite stirring/reworking. My aesthetic/process for design feels necessarily influenced by how my specific body-form perceives/reads the world, via its various miracles and supposed ‘deficiencies’—ie. having one barely-able-to-see (left) eye and one incredibly-over-achieving (right) eye, as well as having benign hand tremors (ie. my hands shake, inexplicably). I understand designing as the praxis of ‘de-signing' (ie. removing the signs from) this Earth/traditions/meanings/images. To quote one of my fav poets, Mahmoud Darwish—“I love your love / freed from itself and its signs,” which to me means: I love you ‘best’ when we shed the layers/masks/images that bury us in stories, when we dwell in our original and base-form—which of course has to be, for me—Love—the desire to see the world as un-riven, as One, despite everything working against the infinite forms love embodies. I feel my design aesthetic as ‘spiritual,’ or at least to me it feels like it springs enigmatically from a spiritual impulse/condition/base. All to say—my style/praxis is mysterious, even to myself, and my design depends on this kind of unknowability/improvisation. For Abracadabrachrysanthemum (and Three Crises by Bella Bravo, which share almost identical design elements), I viewed the circle on the covers to be a kind of gravitational wormhole into the book’s work, like you implied. A simple entranceway that has, like a planet or black hole, its own gravity to pull/cull others in, to merge and connect worlds. As far as design influences—I love love love Quemadura’s work (who you probably know as Wave Books’ designer.) I remember seeing their stark, simple, text-based covers as a younger poet/designer and being moved by space they allow for the text (exterior and interior) to become its own image/meaning apart from other visual suggestions. Also, Mary Austin Speaker’s work—who does design for Milkweed Editions—is always so precise, gorgeous, and enchanting. Outside of the poem-world, I am constantly inspired by fellow Bloomington designers/friends Aaron Denton and Sharnayla. The beauty they channel is astounding. Since I began designing, I feel that I’ve just become better and faster at designing, and my core aesthetic has mostly stayed the same. Being self-taught, you kind of just pick up little preferences, skills, and potentialities randomly along the path of work. I’m in a constant state of knowledge-acquisition re design and thus my process is really just experimentation. One codified process I do have is to meditate on a book’s content, to summon its image by intentionally dwelling on it within an unconscious states of meditation, dream, trance, etc. Usually I can call up a color palette, or image/font/et al that each individual book/design is calling for via these means. I believe in this kind of prayer/listening in my work, and I cite the unconscious as my main source of artistic capacity and production. I’ve also dreamed book covers before. That’s the best.

Many of the poems in this collection have geographic allusion, descriptive precision, and a general sense of place becoming character. This reminds me in many ways of your book RIVER, co-authored with Ross Gay. While that was prose and this is poetry, this is something I have noticed in your writing. How would you describe your aesthetic connection to geography? nature? environment? This book seems to expand beyond America in ways previous writing of yours doesn’t...

I can’t not attempt to constantly locate my Self in this World—can’t not see/feel/attempt to understand where/how/who/why I am in relation to ‘others’—to the land, rivers, oceans, to other animals, to the incredible manifold instantiations of plants, to the water with which without we would vanish, to all the ostensibly separate “I’s” on this shared Earth/consciousness/World surviving, dwelling, praying, creating—Being. I am an empath and embed/imbibe my surroundings almost automatically/unconsciously into myself. I become wherever I am. And thus its violences and gorgeousnesses alike become my own. And thus I speak for them, to them, of them, with them, in service and toward the healing of them/us/I/we. I unbecome my self to reset my churning and lumbering around this planet, to geographize ‘my’ position within this unpositioned House we find our selves. I am also quite of the mind that we are indeed both Here and Not Here. This Not Here is completely devoid of the drama of the body/ego, which we so often encounter and identify with today (and have since arriving on Earth.) My body, it’s specific forms and desires, languages and impulses, with yours, in conflict with theirs, with the scarcity, the low amount, the abundance, the never-ending forsaken nothing-everything, all of it, all the time, ever, ever, never-enough or always-too-much, the never-quite-right. You compared to me, thine in yours with mine of we. In spirit realm, there is no time and ID like we think here. Both Here and Not Here are real/valid places—the corporeal realm and the spirit realm—and I know, at least for now, I live in both places. I realized recently one of my main hopes for my writing is for it to re-embed the divine into the every day, re-pair it with the quotidian—to reunite these worlds-torn. What I mean is: I identify heavily with wherever I am in this 3D reality called life, and also identify heavily with the spirit realm as an (un)geographic place where I also reside. Over-identification with either realm leads to misery/suffering or disassociation/location, to paraphrase A Course In Miracles.

There is a sense of unity between the voice of these poems and everything else in the world, seen best, in my opinion, in “Signifying Brown Bear” wherein a stuffed animal becomes a virtual tunnel into all sorts of real human and existential experiences. Do you think something fundamental has changed in contemporary consumer society from ancient or medieval or even early modern societies, in which we have too many outlets for our emotions and experiences? Maybe too many is good (whatever "good" means)? In this poem, the stuffed bear almost represents your own yearning to connect as fully as you already are with universe around you. It has many of the conceits of a love poem and, at times, a tongue-in-cheek tone. In the end, the poem is what makes us think. You have turned a mirror on the reader. Was this your intention? How do you decide when to write in second-person versus first person etc.? Is any of this interpretation at all on point?  In “Signifying Brown Bear,” I am referring to an actual brown bear (ie. Ursus arctos) and the poem is just kind of about how people/entities who I become close with can begin to feel like sweet-tender-almost-cryptozoological-creatures to me and I want to also just be a sweet-tender-almost-cryptozoological-creature—or hell, I’ll settle for even a plant or a rock—back to them. Anything but this warbling, incomplete, stammering-maunderer of a human being! (Exaggeration.) I do not want my humanity at times—my human-being-ing—which has been categorized, documented, and shrink-wrapped for societal use and relation, who is part of the decimation of Earth via capital. I want the freedom (and I’m sure we could say unfreedom) of the brown bear who is in relation to the Sycamore by the river, and the salmon floating above the stones, the water gliding over, ever-thinning rock into sand granules—slowly—and back again—and back. I don’t want to be (and can’t be, is perhaps my thesis) relegated to the realm of signifiers and signs imposed via any of the manifold categorization machines we navigate on the daily to obfuscate these kind of otherworldly, ancient connections I feel as Real. To decimate that last paragraph—I also believe in becoming fully-embodied/present in the form we are in in this life, too. So, it’s confusing, this ever-always-transforming-ing perceptioning. The confusion about what energy/thing I am and what you are is a little about what that poem is about, too. I was reading Agamben’s The Use of Bodies and came across this ancient Greek word, poiesis, which appears in the poem and means, “the activity in which a person brings something into being that did not exist before.” I love that idea, and think it is what we are here to do, in part. So often for me the unprecedented-something we are trying to bring into existence is ourselves and the art/energy we carry in us must be made into song. I want to always make the reader aware of their presence in my writing—to me writing is a collective act and readers are always existent, even if they never ‘read’ your work. The imagined, the dead, the unborn, the spiritually uncanonized, the already-gone-never-was reader, writer, seeker, be-er. I switch between tense often and freely, because in poetry, at least for me, we feel/fall into each word/line we write and there’s less of a need to be ‘coherent’ in the sense of the popular notion of storytelling/fiction, which (I might have another thesis here) feels like a symptom of capitalism, too. Of course it feels really nice to have a coherent story. I love television and pop culture. I want to write for television. I want to be perceived as coherent. But I want to say too: the ‘incoherence’ of poetry is a kind of coherence, a prayer toward a ‘new’ form, if you will, despite being so old itself. Poetry coheres to a perhaps more experimental way of telling a story, a precedentless next-ing, and this variation is vital—these unforeseen forms, stories, ways of being. We are a species that evolves, and because the mouth/mind is the site of evolution now, I am playing accordingly.

What ended up happening with MHP?  Why did you decide to stop active involvement in it? What are you doing now in terms of day-to-day life? Monster House Press has evolved through many forms. In 2010, it began, semi-naively, as a collective publisher of zines and chapbooks in the eponymous punk house. It then expanded and evolved into a project I was maintaining, mostly on my own, from 2012-2016 in Bloomington, Indiana. In the summer of 2016, MHP rose again as a officially collective project—an amorphous mass, as we liked to call it—primarily because the workload had become unsustainable for me to do on my own, and we were doing more and more, gaining recognition, et cetera. We decided to lay MHP to rest at the end of the 2018, as many of us involved in keeping it going are moving onto graduate school and/or starting new projects/lives. It felt apt to end this specific instantiation in my career-form of publishing, as I have moved away from the punk/DIY scene from which it was born, and the name itself has too become divorced from its origin and who I/we was/were then. I’m sure I’ll always be editing, publishing, reading, designing and helping steward others’ work in this world, as that impulse is something part and parcel of my being, this collaboration; however, the terms and boundaries within this specific modality as MHP have expired to me. In my day-to-day life, I am a freelance graphic designer, artist, editor, and writer. I usually sit at my house with my dog, working on whatever project I have in my docket at the time, or go out to a coffee or tea house to do work. I also just finished auditing a graduate poetry workshop called Joy & Collaboration with Ross Gay, which was, in a word, divine—and I currently spend my days/time helping out with the growing at a communal greenhouse as well as generally just reading/writing/watching/listening to the Earth/Universe, hoping to be of service, use, and care.

What future projects are you working on? Do you still play music with organized groups? Have you thought of writing long-form fiction?

I’m hoping to start my MFA in Poetry next year. As far as writing projects—I’m writing a collection of sonnets about my alcoholism/being an alcoholic in the United States. (I’ve been sober for 5 years now.) The sonnets are these kind of little, tender love-songs to my alcoholic/former self (who I can never fully extinguish) which—I hope—also reckon with and help shed light on addiction, malevolent masculinity/whiteness, and which also seek to forgive and release—to heal. I also have this big, kind of far off ditty of a dream to open a Poetry Center one day, in the Midwest ideally, kind of a little like Poets House in NYC, where events, workshops, reading, writing, and magic can happen. A hub for poetics/healing/joy/collaboration. There will probably be an herbal/plant element too, somehow, as I love working with/growing plants. And music! I haven’t played music in an organized group in a while, but enjoy being able to play piano and saxophone here and there, when I can, however that happens. I helped transpose, sing, and record a score for a little art movie project, along with Ross Gay and Lauren Harrison, which was super delightful. Music is the literal heart of the world, imo. I listened to 36 days of music this year, ie. for 1/10 of the year I was listening to music, which was kind of staggering and incredible for me to realize. I love writing long and short form fiction, but have found it removes me from the world too intensely, which, I feel I am supposed to stay more rooted/involved in the World in a proactive sense, so I tend to write poetry and other forms over fiction. I am interested in the hybrid essay form—with poetry hidden inside—and creating/seeking new hybridized forms. There’s so much potential for greatness—and so much to come.

[5questions]

Peter BD

as the young man gazed up at the eclipse

he thought

“damn, i’m looking at

the

eclipse”

So begins acclaimed poet Peter BD's dizzying journey into the depths of the textual Self, in which reflexive phrases play off one another like a thousand points of light shining through a fifth of cognac and illume the striving and conniving which defines our current moment. From treatises on chicken to the moral quandaries of Winona Ryder, touchstones of the Now seep through Peter's verse like osmosis like milk through lace like the blinking of your fifth eye. Buoyant humor and steely irony mix together to form a wild combination which goes down easy but lingers with you for the rest of the day.

BUY IT TODAY FROM INPATIENT PRESS

How many of your famous/infamous email letters have you sent out? By your estimation, what's the ratio of positive to negative feedback you have received (could also throw in neutral)? Or is it hard to categorize them as such? What are the most wild responses you have ever gotten? Define 'wild' as you will. 

i'm not sure how many stories i've emailed people. i've never kept count. in the beginning i'd write a lot of people things but don't do it now as much as i used to. all i can say is that it's probably a big number overall. or maybe not. sorry for not being able to answer this one. feedback to the stories is either positive, neutral or no response at all. i'd say it's about 60% positive and 40% neutral. this is just going on my responses in my inbox. i don't have any social media besides twitter so unsure what the overall reaction is, if there is any. no one really replies to me in a negative way. i remember one person corrected my grammar once which was funny. i think my most memorable negative response came from you. i sent you a 3 part email and here was your response: FUCK YOU ASSHOLE STOP SENDING ME YOUR FUCKING EMAILS ITS FUCKING FICTION I HATE YOU PEOPLE JUST KIDDING ABOUT ONE OF THOSE PARTS NOT ALL OF THEM FUCKING ASSHOLE I AM UNIMAGINATIVE I STALK PEOPLE GIRLS BOYS WOMEN MEN ANIMALS PLANTS SO FUCK YOU DID YOU HACK MY EMAIL PLEASE DONT IM SORRY I  LOVE YOU PLEASE LOVE ME BACK this was one of the most memorable responses because it's around the time i first started doing this and also because it's wild. i guess it's more wild than negative. whatever it is i enjoyed it. i don't receive too many wild responses but one i did enjoy was when this artist named jacob sanders wrote a song about me. i was working this shitty job and was up at 5 am when i received it. it just talked about how i can accomplish whatever i want or something like that. i was really happy at work that day haha. it made feel really good and humbled that someone would do that for me. i think someone sent me a dick pic once. that was wild. another person responded to one of my stories with a story of their own about me that was thousands of words. that was wild as hell.

What was the writing process like for your recently released book? How did you decide on your publisher? 

i don't think i would've written these poems if i hadn't gotten sick last winter. i had a lot of down time and just began writing a bunch of short poems/stories every day. i saved them in my drafts not thinking anything would come of them. i probably wrote hundreds of them. then one day, over the summer, i was eating a burrito somewhere and mitch anzuoni from inpatient press approached me and asked if i was writing anything he could publish. he saw me read at an event and guess he thought i was book publishing material. we talked for awhile and that's how this 'milk and henny' idea came to life. i didn't even have a finished work to present him and we already got to the point of discussing a second book. it was really weird and serendipitous. so i went back in my drafts, put together some things i liked, and presented them to mitch as a powerpoint presentation a couple of weeks later. i didn't even know if anyone would like the poems except me. it was all pretty random haha

What's your day-to-day life like? Will you answer this question?

my day to day depends on what day it is. either i'm at work, or recently, going to see some doctor. i've been feeling ill again but anytime i go to get checked out they tell me i'm 100% fine so maybe my illness isn't easily traceable or it's all in my head.

i write some days. other days i just read. i think i'm gonna meet a friend to get drinks in a couple of hours. life is pretty random these days. i'd like some stability. being alive is strange and hard as you know.

How do you find your online persona to be different than your real life personality? Is there any separation between these two or just different gradations and systems of perception that make the two seem separate? 

at this point i think how i present myself online is similar to my real life personality. i went from thinking i'd just do this for a couple of months and then go to grad school to it becoming who i am completely. it probably sounds dumb, but creating this fake internet character brought me closer to myself. most likely, i would've gone to medical or pharmacy school if i hadn't began writing when i did. being in the sciences seems crazy to me now, even though the money would've been nice. this is a hard question to answer completely because i think we all show people certain aspects of ourselves and hide others. i don't feel any different than anyone else in terms of persona presentation although what i do might seem strange to some. 

my family and a couple of my friends still don't know about whatever this is that i do. maybe i don't think it's important enough to tell them or maybe i just want to keep it to myself. probably the latter. there's some shit that you just need to have for yourself, ya know? especially when it comes to being creative. i think growing up i was steered away from the arts and told that i had to do something practical. but now that i'm a grown up i can be as impractical as i want to be 

What are the best things you have read in the past year? Why? 

a read a lot but i didn't read as much in 2017. trying to change that this year. i really liked this book by ralph ellison called living with music. it's a collection of his jazz writings but it's mostly about music in general. a lot of what he says applies to music of today and how people react to it. he's very good at criticism. i picked up rome poems by pasolini off my roommates bookshelf and enjoyed it. ed mullany gave me man and his symbols by carl jung. i'm enjoying it thus far because certain topics that he discusses interest me lately. it's strange how you can begin a book and it ties into what you're going through in your life. there's nothing like a good book to take you somewhere else for however long you're reading. it's like a instant mental vacation. 

i read twitter daily. that's where i get most of my news. i want to read more richard wright this year. and octavia butler. i want to read a lot of the books i saw on your bookshelf. excited for your upcoming book. there's never enough time to read all these good ass books that exist.

[5questions]

James Payne

AW: What poetry or other writing are you working on now? Are you working on another book? JP: Last year, when I was living in Berlin, I hit a wall with poetry. I wanted to write a book that was more focused than Things Just Aren’t They. But, when I’d finish individual poems, no one would agree to publish them. The process of sending out poems, having them returned, sending them out again, etc, felt ridiculous – and boring. I came to the conclusion that if no one wanted to publish my poetry besides the press run by my friends that started in my garage, then there was probably a good reason, which is fine tbh because I don’t personally think the world needs more poems from me or someone like me. (Here are a few of those poems now at DittoDitto, Jettison, and Monster House Press.) I then turned my attention to essays. I wrote the catalogue text for an art exhibition titled Framing Beauty: Intimate Visions that came out on Indiana University Press. Then I wrote an essay, “Two Cults, One Boy: My Lives as a Jehovah’s Witness & DIY Punk,” for the Monster House Press Quarterly about the structural similarities between DIY and the JW religion. One of my favorite painters, Keith Allyn Spencer, hired me to write an essay for his exhibition Shits and Giggles with Cody Tumblin at Skylab Gallery, which I later expanded for Command Art Zine. Then I wrote a long piece for Refigural, “The Health Goths Are Really Feeling Zip Ties RN For Some Reason,” about latent fascisms in Internet fashion countercultures during the Obama-era. It was the most visible piece I’ve written because its content was extremely online and I had hired Joelle Bouchard a.k.a. Namaste.At.Home.Dad to make memes for it. I wrote a few more art exhibition essays. I’m currently working on a piece for Columbus College of Art & Design’s Beeler Gallery about curator Jo-ey Tang’s first season of programming. I need to finish my MA thesis on the relationship of the Black Panther Party’s designer Emory Douglas to the Cuban poster agency OSPAAAL and its magazine Tricontinental. I’ve also been taking notes and writing sections of what I’m hawking as “an accelerationist novella,” and murder mystery, about the gentrification of Columbus, Ohio, centered on a compulsive jogger in Goodale Park who is losing their identity with every lap. I read a section of it a few months ago. Shortly, I will publish some newer poems in a zine called No Future Like No Future. I’ve been unable to push through my depression to get to the point of feeling like it’s worth finishing any writing for the past six months. I sit immobilized for days at a time. AW: How do you see your earlier writing (I was reading you as early as 2010, I think, with chapbooks from Monster House Press)? I find it weird to look back at my earlier writing but then I often find more and more that I like something from 5-10 years ago more than I did in the 5-10 years preceding that. I guess as Blink-182 said, "That's just growing up,” but question still stands. JP: Yeah – I’m not sure. The aspects of Austerity Pleasures, my 2011 chapbook, that feel Alt-Litesque are embarrassing, but then again, people are still writing through that voice in 2018 – which is confounding. If I had a choice now, my 2015 collection TJAT would be half its size, because I don’t want to be a poet who writes poetry about my personal relationships. But, at the time, I looked at that book as a firesale. I was suicidal, so part of my thinking was, well, why not get rid of as much as possible? I want my voice to be pure. I don’t want to be “What if Frank O’Hara but communist?” Or “Bad Andrew Durbin cut with shitty Diane di Prima.” There is a chasm between the poet I am and the poet I want to be, but I hope there is also an ever-widening chasm between the poet I was with AP & TJAT and the one I am now. I come out of DIY, and, in that community, publication is seen as an end in and of itself, as an emancipatory act, regardless of quality or demand. One becomes an agent in the world through publication and then one worries, or doesn’t, about what exactly one published later. I’ve turned away from that and purified my sensibility. Intentionality is important. Most of what I see published are vanity projects, intended to make people seem more interesting on social media. I have little patience for creative projects that take up undue bandwith. I don’t respect the people who promote them. Cultural production is not a good in and of itself. Devalorizing cultural production and decoupling it from online fame is important. Until we problematize production, or at least ask for more out of it, we’ll continue to see rich kids gentrify independent cultural spaces for an easy come up, capitalizing on concepts working-class kids created decades ago. Not everyone has to be in a band, have a book, a label, a shirt company, a gallery; I wish it were as cool to be a political organizer as it is to be in a retread 70s garage rock band that no one sincerely likes or will remember in a year. What could be more boring than starting a band in 2018? Starting a meme page? What are we doing with our time? Why? I’m inspired by my friends enrolling in law school, running a books-to-prisoners program, learning a language, or starting a reading group. Writers should have to defend why we need their book. People in bands should have an answer ready if asked why. Currently, it’s the opposite - people have to defend why they aren’t Venmo-ing every person they follow because they made a meme once. What we valorize and support online is bewildering: it’s mutually assured narcissism, sure, but is anyone enjoying themselves in this cultural economy? I’m learning how to play chess right now, and one of the precepts is to always have an underlying idea as to why you are making each move. Are you attacking a certain square? Setting up an exchange? A lot of people are just moving pieces. I don’t want to just move pieces anymore.

 AW: What is your teaching experience like? Where do you teach? How do you find the curriculum to be? Do you ever find yourself in a generational divide with your students? JP: I’m an adjunct instructor in the History of Art and Visual Culture department at Columbus College of Art & Design. It’s my second semester. Prior to this, I TA-ed at Indiana University for a year. The first class I taught at CCAD was Art Theory and Criticism, a class I took over from Carmen Winant, whose work I love, and I changed about half of the inherited syllabus. I had a blast teaching it: a seminar with eight upper-level undergraduate students. I had them read Hannah Black, Ben Davis, Emory Douglas, Laboria Cuboniks, Marx and Engels, Nick Srnicek, etc. The highlight was definitely hearing the guest-speakers who agreed to visit the class, especially McMansion Hell’s Kate Wagner, who was kind enough to come and lecture on Fredric Jameson and Post-modernism in architecture before speaking at the Ohio Statehouse later that night. It’s a cliché, but I got more out of the class than anyone else. To teach a text requires one to engage it in a wholly different way. Learning how to speak at length, to experience it as performance, was enlivening. It felt like all the years I’d spent observing professors actually constituted useful experience I could meaningfully draw on – and it gave me much more insight into their pedagogy. This semester I’m teaching a survey class – Antiquity to 19th C – which, again, has been an intellectual wayback machine for me, bringing me back to my undergrad but with new, or, rather, older eyes, and I’m seeing so much more.

I rarely feel any generational tension with my students, partially because I still hang out with, or am around people who hang out with, college aged people. It’s a blessing and curse to be so thoroughly damaged by youth culture via punk. I just turned 32, so this is probably the last time in my life I’ll be able to say that. But, idk, until I have a real job, a stable relationship, and some idea of a future, I’ll probably continue to have more in common psychically with a college student than with my peers who are bearing children and owning property.

 AW: What has been your experience working with art and archives? How did you become interested in art history and theory? JP: I gravitated to my high school’s art room. I was a skateboarder and a punk rocker and visual art bled into both. I made my first zine for school credit in my high school independent study art course. I had always been in advanced classes, etc, but I became convinced that doing well in mathematics, for instance, was a fool’s gambit as it was immaterial if any one individual was excellent in high school-level mathematics. I was headstrong, and always looking for reasons not to do something, but I was also convinced – because this was in the middle of the Bush-era – that American culture itself needed to change, not its math, nor its chemistry. I began painting a lot, playing in bands, booking shows, and going to galleries and museums. I doubt anyone in Ohio went to as many exhibitions as I did from when I was 16 to 25. The art college I enrolled in after high school did not have a well-rounded curriculum. I wanted to learn how to write well, to continue writing journalism in the vein of my zines, as well as make visual art, which I continued to do after I transferred to Ohio State, especially posters and record covers. For whatever reason, I didn’t pursue a BFA at OSU, and instead did the equivalent in credits to two BAs, taking a major in Journalism, a personalized study program called Art and Media Criticism, and a minor in Film Studies. While I was at OSU I worked at the Wexner Center for the Arts in the bookstore, as an Arts Reporter at The Lantern, on the Wex prep staff, and then at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Research Library and Museum, while I was also working as a gallery assistant for the only real contemporary commercial gallery in town, Mahan Gallery. Colleen Grennan at Mahan was kind enough to bring me in on curating an exhibition on avant-garde comics called This is a Comic Book. From there, I interned in the Prints and Drawings Room at the Art Institute of Chicago and then I became the gallery director at a non-profit contemporary art gallery in Columbus called ROY G BIV Gallery. Simultaneously, I was living at Skylab Gallery, a long-running experimental music and art space, and co-curating its programming with a very special group of inspiring people I learned a lot from. I then moved to Bloomington, Indiana, to pursue a MA in Art History. I worked in the Print Department at the Eskenazi Art Museum and curated a special projects space I created called Breezeway Gallery, where I was able to show some of my favorite artists like Aidan Koch, Peter Shear, and LA Warman. In terms of art history, I’m interested in how contemporary cultural practices – especially marginalized and ephemeral ones, like posters, publications, and memes – intersect with and invigorate radical politics. At heart, I’m a polemicist, a critic, but I have a journalist’s training and so I excel at synthesizing information and producing readable narratives. These two strains together, but directed backwards, make an art historian, if a bad one. I love archives, especially working with them, as a librarian, I mean, not a researcher. But recently I’ve been going to the OSU archives to view their collection of police photographs of the 1970 months-long protests that shut-down OSU and brought the National Guard to Columbus. The photographs are striking, because they were literally taken to build evidence to arrest and imprison students who were asking for things like a Black Studies department and a Planned Parenthood clinic on campus. The fashions and aesthetics captured are redolent of the era but the photos convey even more in terms of how this public institution, OSU, has morphed from a kind of ratty agricultural laboratory into this 3-billion dollar military industrial factory, sucking in student loans and churning out 10,000 Adens, Kaidans, and Bradens a year. When you look at 1970, you can see 1920 as much as you can see 1970 when you look out the window today. It’s a strange looking-glass, everything in it confirming and denying your own experience.

AW: How would you describe the political culture of Columbus, where you live, compared to the other parts of Ohio? Are you involved in any political organizations, and if so what is your capacity with them?

JP: Columbus is, as my friend Alex Mussawir put it, a dumb person’s smart city. Columbus, until a few years ago, was lorded over by a media monopoly run by one family, the Wolfes, who were conservative Republicans, to the extent that they even endorsed McCain over Obama in 2008. The city is under one-party rule by Clintonite Democrats, but its media sphere is still outright conservative, though it is changing. But even its “Underground” blog is, like its City Council, utterly in the pocket of capitalist developers. Our police murder our citizenry without compunction, at unparalleled rates per capita. But our police chief is a lesbian woman: that’s the kind of politics Columbus likes. It likes its Pride parade with big Bud-Light floats and no black people protesting police brutality or actual people having actual gay sex. Columbus is eternally the last to the game: innovations have to go through New York, then Chicago, then Cincinnati, then maybe, maybe they’ll come to us – we just got bike lanes and recycling canisters, I’m not even joking. The lack of public transportation is criminal, but the history of it is telling. Columbus once had a street car that serviced the whole city. Columbus also had passenger train service to New York. It got rid of both. It also got rid of the Daniel Burnham-designed Union Station edifice, at night, with no notice. It’s the most populated city in the US without rail service. No Amtrak, no Megabus. It’s a city without memory, public debate, or sense of self. The media monopoly has left the city in a fog, unsure of who its luminaries even are besides the corporate spokespeople vetted by the local oligarchy. An oligarchy, which – this is how unlucky we are – is composed of nouveaux-riche mall money – we’re talking the Limited, Express, Victoria’s Secret, and Abercrombie. Les Wexner, the local billionaire, is an art-hoarding, Mitt Romney-supporting, right-wing sponsor of pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, who, in any rational world, would have his assets seized and redistributed. Instead, he lives in a faux-colonial estate of his own devising out of sight of the city’s plebeians like a god in the clouds. The going style in Columbus is to buy a suite of disparate, garish contemporary art, and then, instead of donating it to the local museum, hold it ransom until the city gives you a ten-year tax abatement on your equally garish “luxury art hotel.” Once you finally deign to share the collection with the city, you slap your name on your personal museum and charge the plebs $10 a head for the honor of walking in. You then call this bait and switch, three-card Monte rip-off “philanthropy.” The university’s employees aren’t allowed to join a union, let alone the grad students or adjuncts. The employees have to sign a pledge of allegiance to the US and swear they won’t support “terrorist” organizations with their wages. The university privatized its parking to externalize costs onto its own employees. There isn’t a historic building or cute avenue the university will not buy, raze, and replace with what amounts to cheap hospital building-esque architecture, either concrete with fronted brick or glass and prefab everything – it’s lowest-common denominator, lowest-bidder aesthetics, and they won’t rest until every locally owned business is turned into an Amazon delivery store that looks like it was made by Ikea but assembled by your kid brother. There is a statue downtown, facing the Statehouse that honors the man who ordered the Kent State murders. It’s in front of the tallest building in Columbus, which is named after him. A block down is a fifty-foot-tall statue of Christopher Columbus, a man with no relation to the city, who managed a genocide against an indigenous population and is responsible for the murders of over three million people. No one has ever seriously thought about changing the name of the city. Columbus sucks, and not because you suck, but because the capitalists who have made the decisions regarding its governance have chosen, for generations, myopic profits over the people’s long-term benefit. It’s a staging ground for capital now, nothing else. The perfect place for Amazon. The worst place for a poor person to live. I go to books-to-prisoners, protests, and I vote. I hope to help the SEIU unionize the adjuncts at my college. I’d like to be more involved with the DSA. BTW: I’m reading in Bloomington, Indiana, on May 20th with Jasper Bernes.  

[5questions]

Precious Okoyomon

Precious Okoyomon is a Brooklyn-based poet and artist. She is the author of Ajebota (Bottlecap Press, 2016). Her work has been performed and exhibited at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, Exo Exo in Paris, and SXSW. Her writing has been published in Lit Magazine, Fanzine, New York Tyrant, and elsewhere. She loves her sweet toy poodle Rainbow and is a Leo who is very low-key evil. She’s currently working on a book or two. http://preciousokoyomon.com

Ajebota is the confessions of little bleeding lamb, babbling milk out of her wound, still reaching for the warmth of the sun. Ajebota is Precious Okoyomon’s debut chap and is completely representative of her unique writing style. Okoyomon’s poems are sexual, healthy, and full; or moreso an exploration of what it means to be all of these things. Precious Okoyomon’s poetry is an exploration of both the body and pure emotion.

https://products.bottlecap.press/products/ajebota

TWITTER:  https://twitter.com/yung__coconut?lang=en

How long did it take to write Ajebota? Where did you write it? What were major events happening in your life, or just like what was your job and where did you live?

I wrote Ajebota over the corse of two months i had started dating my first girlfriend and was deeply in love mmm realizing i was very gay and also depressed. I was realizing things lol but also in a weird place of finding myself, I was living in Cincinnati, Ohio where i mostly grew up and i was getting ready to move to Chicago and finish my last two years of college. I was working a kinda shit job at this train museum painting lil trains and tiny people all day with 70 year old white men it was funny. old white men make me laugh they most hate everything.  

How did you and Willis Plummer decide to collaborate on Wild Horse Rappers together? What was the creative process like for a co-written series of poems?

LOL idk willis and we're really into horses and thought let's do a book together .. i think i was trying to make him a low key horse girl. We sat in his room and i got stoned and we ate salads and wrote a lil book in an afternoon about all our lil feelings then we had a book.

Can you elaborate on this line from Ajebota: “Trying to reclaim my Nigerian heritage with my iPhone.” ? How did this come to mind when you typed this? Would you agree with my sense that this brings together some of the big themes in the collection in one line? (or should I clarify what I mean?)

mm i think that's my whole dam life trying to figure out my emotions and feelings thru the net lol my identity is so jumbled i think moving around so much s a kid made me this lil mix of madness so trying to figure out my identity while also being so alienated from it really leaves me in a interesting place trying to find out who i am .. that's a big theme of my work trying to figure out my identity

You used to live in the Midwest / Ohio (right? If not, then I’ll send a different question). You somewhat recently moved to NYC. What are the biggest cultural differences you notice between the two places? What is your life like in NYC right now?

I did grow up in Ohio in Cincinnati from Nigeria to Ohio lol. I love the Midwest it has this really lovely honest charm to it like that's America at it's purest corn and milk .. New York is weird is such an insane mix of people and sometimes it feels like it doesn't mix together correctly but still the city is magic lot's of wonderful people .. I work at a bookstore i write poems i drink raw milk it's an honest good life lol

What kinds of creative projects are you currently working on? Have you considered writing a full book of fiction ever? I think it would be really good.

I haven't thought about writing fiction but i really want too i've been thinking about it more like a lot of my stories make more sense as fiction than poetry so like yeah maybe one day i will write some flash fiction or a lil book of short stories. I'm working on my first full length of poetry, it's coming along and a cookbook of sorts. I've been thinking about writing a book as my dog looking at my life lol

[5questions]

Ken Baumann

Ken Baumann lives in Santa Fe with his wife, two cats, and a 125 lb. St. Bernard. He acted in film and television for twelve years, then studied at St. John's College. He wrote the novels Solip and Say, Cut, Map, then the nonfiction book EarthBound. He is looking for a publisher for his third novel, titled A Task (you can read its first five parts here). He’s also written these things. He edits, designs, and publishes books through Sator Press and its imprint Satyr Press, and designed the covers for Boss Fight Books. He organizes the Santa Fe chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. 

1. Your 2013 book SOLIP was sort of Jocyean or Beckettian in its style and scope. How does your upcoming book A TASK compare to that? I remember publishing an excerpt of it as part of the defunct magazine Keep This Bag Away From Children; it was politically-charged and seemed to revolve around a cult or commune of some sort. How has it developed since then? You’re also trying to get it published right? Or already have a deal?

Most sentences in A Task are simple, and the book's structure is complicated. A Task is a story about dissolution told as clearly and concisely as possible, whereas Solip and Say, Cut, Map use polyphony to create something more alien to everyday experience. I want people who don't often read novels to pick up A Task and feel welcomed by its language.

The excerpt you published was from the book's first draft. I finished that draft five years ago, then threw it away and started over. I wrote the new draft by hand, with pen and on paper; I wanted to work against quickness, and get more of my body into the book. It took me five years to realize I should cut one of the book's core sections; it took me four years to hear the book's last sentence. A Task is the record of an attempt to distill my severest fear, love, and patience into a novel.

A Task is a 55,500 word novel told in five parts, each consisting of four sections, plus one section near the middle (which works like night).

A summary: A young woman named Rose runs out of a forest and onto the road. Having escaped a cult whose leader preached the justice of mass suicide, she is sheltered by Paul, a black police officer scarred by war. Warren, entranced by the cult leader Daniel, struggles to live through mental illness; back home, the fragments of his life are regathered. And in a text transcription of a 24 hour-long performance, a famed painter recounts the beauties and losses which constitute him, and the role of art in a collapsing society. As they voluntarily dissolve their lives, fleeing new fascisms, Rose, Paul, Warren, and the artist map the terrain of life amid nihilism. A Task is a novel about wounded people escaping our world’s suicidal logic.

I'm looking for a publisher and an agent. The only editor whose work I admire is Cal Morgan, so he has A Task in his inbox. To let someone publish the book, I want three conditions satisfied:

1. I work with an editor whose first editorial principle isn't salability;

2. I work with a publishing company that prints and distributes at least 10,000 copies;

3. I work with a marketing department that grants me final approval of the cover.

I want the book to be beautiful and discoverable in many bookstores and libraries. I don't care about an advance. (Though if you're an agent, I've got a scheme to get you paid.)

If the book hasn't been published within a couple years by a corporation willing to satisfy those three conditions, I'll publish A Task via Sator Press.

2. What other writing projects you are working on? You’re always publishing new stuff with SATOR PRESS. What’s next with that?

I've been writing essays then publishing them on Medium and Tumblr. Since I don't try to make a living from my writing, I see no point in trying to get these essays published online or in print by other people. The only editors I've enjoyed working with are Claire Evans and Carolyn Kellogg, but Claire is a supremely busy polymath and Carolyn publishes reviews about new books, with which I rarely keep up.

Most publications are like political parties: they exist primarily to homogenize and react. If you want to avoid enriching capitalists via addiction and reaction, you should try as rigorously as possible to not support big media platforms. More often than not, goodness and scale are inversely proportional. (When I have some time, I'll move my writing from Tumblr and Medium to my personal website.)

3. Here’s a big question (or four): Why do you write? What motivates you? How about with publishing? Why publish?

When I was young, I wrote to make places more vivid than life's. Now, I know life is immanent; the fictive places are in the real places, and the real places are in the fictive places—and neither have anything to do with purity. I no longer read or write to transcend; if the universe is an ocean of infinite eddying complexity, I read and write to go further in. More practically, I write to lessen my anxiety. I write to make a document untouchable by cruelty while making myself unconcerned with history. (Oedipus and Hamlet, two great pretenders, were out of time's joint for a reason.)

I publish books because they are the only mass-produced objects which bring me peace. For better and worse, I've been concerned for decades with those who spoke before me, and with those who further that conversation. I love compendiums of quiet questions. I publish books because to refuse to publish a great text when you have the health, money, skills, and time to do so is an act of cowardice. And because I want to pay comrades for doing the work that makes them want to stay alive.

4. I’ve noticed you’ve become active in the DSA in your area. Would you say Bernie or Trump was more of a cause behind your involvement? What’d you think of the recent DSA national convention? What issues is your chapter of DSA most involved in? Does your chapter have an electoral working group?

Sanders' policies and rhetoric were life-affirming, contrary to that of other massive political campaigns I've seen. I volunteered for his campaign, but its scale upset me; I'm learning that I'm not meant for most of today's magnitudes. The DSA advocates for decentralization as much as possible, while also affirming democracy (i.e. making the decisions which most affect you) and socialism (i.e. owning the means by which you live and thrive). And I love the DSA's emphasis on the interrelatedness of cruelty: capitalism, racism, sexism, fascism—they must be fought at once. Good.

I didn't know about the DSA until November 2016. With a handful of friends, I started New Mexico's first chapter in January.

Donald J. Trump is a demagogue and a fascist (i.e. a person who violently maintains a belief in one group's supremacy over all others). I wasn't surprised he was elected, because I grew up with people who yearned to be granted permission by history to lynch minorities. These people were my friends, until I became friends with some of those minorities. Though it didn't surprise me, Trump's election radicalized me—it made me embrace fully my political desires. Capitalism is a system by which we assure life's suicide. It must go, and with it, all systemic exploitation.

I didn't attend DSA's recent convention, but our chapter's two elected delegates did. They came back roiling with hope. So far, we've done a lot of organizing, and a bit of mobilizing. We've picketed with and fed striking CWA workers. We've made content and raised money for Chainbreaker, a local group that's been fighting for tenants' rights for years. We've lobbied at our state legislature and City Council. We've taught over 100 people about the New Mexico Health Security Act. We've run reading groups. We've fed day laborers and homeless folks near downtown Santa Fe. We've raised a mutual aid fund, then paid a comrade to replace his car's shattered back window. Soon, we'll help defeat a racist and nativist group's City Council candidates. We've got so much work to do, yet I trust those with whom I'm doing the work.

5. You started teaching at a charter school recently. How do you like it? How are your class sizes? How is your view on charter schools informed or intersected by your ideas about democratic socialism? I seem to think of charter school as being a move towards governmental politics of privatization and anti-unionization, but it’s possibly that’s very informed by me being from Ohio and working in NYC, both states with big histories of unions, specifically teachers unions.

I've been teaching for three weeks. Nearly all of my students are Hispanic, Chicanx, or Latinx. Many are from working class families; some already work to support others. It's a dual language, project based school—which means we take our students into the world outside the classroom. Between 10 and 28 students attend each class.

It's my shaky understanding that charter schools in New Mexico are more strictly regulated than those in other states. I receive health benefits via the New Mexico Public School Insurance Authority, and my salary is near that offered to first-year public school teachers in Santa Fe. My school doesn't charge tuition.

I attended and graduated from a charter high school in Los Angeles, and was glad to do so. As a professional actor, a charter school was the only school to meet my needs. This was also true for many young people who recently got out of juvie; for many young people who were working two to three jobs to support their families; for many young people whose illnesses prevented them from attending schools which expected them to show up 8 hours per day, 5 days per week. In principle, I support and affirm the right of every human to a decent and free education, but I do not automatically decry schools which teach different constituencies in different ways. (Again, scale is important.) It's sad to me that many capitalists use poorly-regulated charter schools to steal taxes while providing subpar educations for young people; I am against any system whose zero-sum logic harms the vulnerable.

So far, I believe my school isn't exploitative; many of my students and all of my coworkers argue that it's been great for them. But I've got a lot to learn. (And there's another charter school in Santa Fe whose teachers are unionized, so there's some homework for me, too.)

[5questions]

MOLLY BRODAK

Bio: Molly Brodak is the winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize. She teaches at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, and has published one book of poetry and two chapbooks. BANDIT is her first full-length book of prose.

1. Did you find it difficult to publish a book that was prose after having previously published poetry? Or was prose a genre that you wrote in a lot but just didn’t publish much? How is your work process different for prose than poetry?

Writing prose was very hard for me as a poet. I'm so used to condensing thought as much as possible. In the rough draft stage I would write a longish paragraph and be like, 'there I did it, a whole chapter!' I had to learn to be patient, put pressure on myself to stay in the moment and really tease out meaning in a totally different way from poetry. I learned a lot and I think it was instructive to my poetry as well.

2. Do you think you will write more books in prose? What writing or other creative projects are you working on right now?

I have another prose book in the works right now. I'm planning on writing a kind of travel narrative in the summer, so I'm doing prep work for it now. It's called Alone in Poland and I think the title says it all. It's funny, I'm starting to think prose may be the more flexible and freeing genre than poetry right now.

3. What is your day-to-day life like? When and where do you do writing?

I write in bed, surrounded by pillows and snacks. I like to be comfortable when I write, and I have no set schedule for it, just whenever the mood strikes. I never understood people who take these extreme austerity measures, like waking up at some miserable hour and sitting on a hard chair in the dark to write. I just wouldn't do it. I think writing is hard enough.

I teach some days of the week, and the rest of the time I'm reading, writing, baking, hanging out with my chickens and my husband. I believe, though, that 'writing' is always happening. The mind of the writer never really stops, and so being a writer is a way of experiencing the world all the time, a way of seeing and remembering.

4. You are really into baking. You are an amazing baker, it seems. How does the creative process of cooking overlap with the creative process of writing for you?

I don't like making comparisons between baking and writing. I like to think of them as opposites, in fact, and that I need them both in my life for balance. Baking is mechanical, precise, egoless. If you want to figure out how to make butter and sugar and flour do the thing you want, you have to submit your will to them. Writing is sort of the opposite of that--it's an exercise in self-talk a lot of the times, in saturated selfhood. I think I would go crazy if I didn't bake.

5. Michigan is a looming, ubiquitous background for your memoir. The memoir almost feels as much about Michigan as it does your family or even your father. How intentional was that in your writing process for BANDIT? What books do you like that have a real overwhelming sense of setting and geographical mood?

Yes I was definitely thinking a lot about Michigan as a character when I was writing Bandit. I hope it's clear that I really love Michigan and I think its a special place. Detroit especially, is so complex and complicated, and has been such an integral part of my family's story. It both is and isn't its stereotype, and Detroiters are famously both very defensive and very begrudging of their city's reputation. I think any good memoir must account for its characters' terroir, to be honest. In the Ubuntu tradition, babies are not born people, but grow into being people only in context, through experiences and relationships to people and place. Setting in any story, especially a real story, is integral to character, I believe.

[5questions]

IRIS SMYLES

Bio: Iris Smyles is an American writer. Her debut novel Iris Has Free Time was published in 2013 by Soft Skull Press. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt published an informal companion novel to Iris Has Free Time in 2016 called, Dating Tips for the Unemployed, which is a semi-finalist for the 2017 Thurber Prize for American Humor.

http://www.irissmyles.com/

https://twitter.com/irissmyles

NOTE: This interview was originally conducted in the winter of 2017. Sorry for the delay.

What books or other creative projects are you working on now? How often do you focus on long-time projects versus short-term inspirations?

I am finishing a book of light verse and cartoons called "Single Life." It's a sort of Dorothy Parker meets Ogden Nash and Edward Lear type of thing. I am also half finished with a book of novelettes, which I am thinking to call "Iris Smyles' Novelettes, by Iris Smyles." Then, too, I am always writing essays, long and short, and have in mind to complete a book of them this year. And then, I have a new novel I have been making notes for and am researching, but I haven't started properly on it. I am trying to clear away these other projects first, in order that I devote myself exclusively to the novel. A novel, I find, requires a deeper level of engagement than short pieces. It requires, at least for me, living within a sustained dream. This is what is so wonderful about writing something long, but also, why I feel like I need to carve out a space for it. Once I start, really start, I don't want to have to commute to it.

Do you see your upcoming work changing stylistically from your previous work? I've written a lot more than I've published so far, and I write in many different voices, so the new books--especially the novelettes (which are sometimes surreal and mostly have no "Iris" character) and the poems--may seem a departure from my first two books which both have a first person "Iris" narrator. But there are glimpses of that surrealism or whatever you want to call it in both Iris Has free Time and Dating Tips for the Unemployed, most often seen in "Iris's" asides. The novelettes will turn the structure of my previous books inside out a bit. Iris's very fictional novelettes will make up the bulk of the book, and there will only be one story that features, "Iris," the character from my first two books and their author, who is also a character.

I read the graduate school scenes of IRIS HAS FREE TIME with great interest because it was very transparent to me the world that you were describing, as a fellow City College MFA writing grad (or were you a different concentration?). Now that you are several years removed from the MFA environment, what takeaways do you have from when you were there? I mainly found MFA to be a time to write and live very cheaply.  Do you keep in contact with any of your professors? Frederic Tuten is the greatest living fiction writer in America today. He is one of a very few writers left who write with scope and wisdom and far reaching imagination and music. Most contemporary fiction, with its smallness, its banality, its leaden prose and lack of originality, makes me want to put my eyes out and wander the desert. Most contemporary fiction makes a good case against reading, and so I regard most contemporary authors as the enemies of literature. But about CCNY--I met Frederic Tuten while a student at CCNY--I went there to study with him after having read his great Tintin in the New World, and he changed my life. He has been a great mentor, inspiration, and friend. I do not exaggerate by saying he changed my life. He believed in me and my work and by example helped me to believe in myself, at least enough that I could continue. Self doubt, self criticism, can be so strong as to snuff out any project before it's even halfway to complete. I think to be fine at anything an extremely self-critical nature is required--high standards!--but then, in order not to be defeated by self criticism, a great amount of counter-confidence is required, too. This is probably why artists tend toward monstrosity--they house a terrible combination of self loathing and delusions of grandeur. What do you do for your day-to-day "work" life? Do you like it? Do you like living in NYC?

New York City is more of an idea than a place. Every generation comes here to find something different. I moved to the city I saw in Ghostbusters and Hannah and her Sisters, which is gone, if it ever existed. Now they come for the city surrounding Carrie Bradshaw. And then all the generations before mine--what did Dorothy Parker come to find? And EB White? And Djuna Barnes and Herman Melville and Edgar Allen Poe? Once, my neighborhood was farmland. It's settlers came for the grazing, I guess. I do not like New York City today. But I am married to her, in sickness and in health, and I love her despite the way she chews at breakfast. New York City was my home before I ever lived there and even if I leave, it will still be my home. It's the only home I've ever known.

As for work, talking about money is historically considered impolite, I think, because it asks one to confess how one acquires it, which, if one is to answer truthfully, may lead one to confessions of criminality and/or moral bankruptcy; I do not want to tell you or anyone else what I've traded for a living. I'd sooner answer you my number of sexual partners, which, at least, I've come by honestly.

A lot of artists and writers have had calls to action or predictions that art/literature in America will change greatly in this new era after the recent election. Could you or do you see your own work changing? I guess all writing will change at least contextually, although all writing is also always changing contextually. I think it's important for an artist's work to stand outside of politics. Writing with a clear, localized agenda or message is propaganda (even if for a good cause, even if useful propaganda), but not art. In art, I admire work that engages politics by transcending it. I'd put Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain in that category, all of Kundera, Frederic Tuten's Talien, The Adventures of Mao on the Long March, and Tintin in the New World. As for my own work, we'll see.

[5questions]

TRACY O’NEILL

Bio: Tracy O'Neill is the author of The Hopeful. In 2015, she was named a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree, long-listed for the Flaherty-Dunnan Prize, and was a Narrative Under 30 finalist. In 2012, she was awarded the Center for Fiction's Emerging Writers Fellowship. Her fiction has appeared in Granta, LitHub, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, The Literarian, New World Writing, Narrative, and Guernica. She has published nonfiction in The Atlantic, the New Yorker, Bookforum, Rolling Stone, Grantland, Vice, The Guardian, VQR, and the San Francisco Chronicle. Her column Body Language appears in Catapult. She currently teaches at the City College of New York and is pursuing a PhD at Columbia University.

What writing or other projects are you working on currently?

I've also been working on a novel set from the 1970s to the present, spanning from Northern Ireland to Germany to China to the United States. The central characters are a spy and an advertiser. They are living in a time where it seems to them that change has accelerated, especially technologically, but they still aren't able to understand the ancient stuff of intimacy.

Your novel, The Hopeful, along with some of your nonfiction work, focuses on the world of sports, particularly figure skating. What are some of the experiences that influenced your writing of this novel? What fiction about sports has influenced you? What about nonfiction?

There are so many great sports journalists. I tell almost everyone I know to read Wright Thompson's profile of Michael Jordan, which is called "Michael Jordan Has Not Left the Building" and essentially tells the story of a man at middle age who never thought he'd make it fifty, who's enjoyed an excellent, inspiring body and doesn't quite know what to do with the remainder of his life with it. You learn that Jordan watches a handful of westerns every night, and there is definitely the shape of a fallen cowboy story in there. Obviously, Gay Talese has written a ton of wonderful sports stories. People talk about "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold," but the DiMaggio piece is pretty glorious too. Kate Fagan wrote about the suicide of a young woman who was a runner at UPenn in "Split Image," and she manages to make it a commentary too about the doubleness of images in a time in which social media is prevalent. The cadences are just right. Michael J. Mooney's "The Most Amazing Bowling Story Ever" I loved. Finally, Anelise Chen wrote a stunning essay for BOMB called "So Many Olympic Exertions." 

Fiction-wise, I love End Zone by Don DeLillo. The Mare by Mary Gaitskill I wept over. I squeeze my fists wanting it to be different for the narrator of Jim Shepherd's "Trample the Dead, Hurdle the Weak" every time. Any semester I teach Intro to Creative Writing, it's in the first two weeks of the syllabus. I refuse to switch it out.

As for The Hopeful, I wanted to write a book about a young woman who has directs her life with force and vigor toward a project that is she feels is hers alone and does not locate her desire in the social conventions of marriage and motherhood. I'm acutely aware of the way in which women desire is frequently pathologized and trivialized, and so I was playing with these ideas in setting up the protagonist, Ali, as a would-be figure skating champion. I'm sure there could be readings of the novel that view Ali as "punished" for pursuing this dream, but I think for me the narrative proceeds from the premise that our human bodies are limited in time, space, ability, and that somehow, beautifully, I think, we hope against these limitations.

In the novel, there is an interesting repetition of health descriptions and images, both physical and mental. How intentional were you about describing physical feelings? How about mental landscapes? I guess I also want to know more generally how the craft of the novel worked: What were some intentional choices? What were some stylistic expressions that developed more naturally or without a lot of planning?

I suppose there are philosophical debates about whether or not we experience the world through the body, but it seemed obvious that Ali, as a former athlete, would operate on that premise. At the same time, her obsession means that much of her life is lived in the "indoors" of her self, hoping and remembering and planning. The book is a framed narrative, where the inner frame loops back on itself and memory frequently shatters the forward trajectory of the plot. I knew that I'd need to do this to follow the backward-facing longing of the character. The syntax is often inverted, too, to signal the way in which the narrator views the object as preceding the subject and action, just as she believes her desire precedes her.

What's your day-to-day life like? Do you like it?

I'm doing a PhD at Columbia, so many days I'm there reading and arguing. I walk my dog. Some days I teach at City College. There are a couple of side jobs. I drink too much coffee, and I write. Sometimes I complain, but the truth is, I'm lucky as shit to be able-bodied, living in a free-ish country, employed. Recently I got plants, and that seems pretty luxurious.

A lot of artists and writers have had calls to action or predictions that art/literature in America will change greatly in this new era after the recent election of Trump. Could you or do you see your own work changing? I guess all work is always responding to the context it exists in, but I am wondering what you think about your future work specifically in terms of the 45th President and America’s recently darkened political landscape.

Donald Trump is an aberrantly awful excuse for a public servant lacking nuance, reason, and empathy who has a knack for surrounding himself with other aberrantly awful excuses for public servants lacking nuance, reason, and empathy. His solipsism astounds. At the same time, the noxiousness of Donald Trump himself ought not make us forget that nearly sixty-three million people voted for him, too, and in that sense, we are still living in a country where large swaths of the population get down with systems of inequality as long as they're comfortable. This is not just a problem of the right. And I'm pretty disturbed at the number of people who recall with semi-joking nostalgia George W. Bush, saying things like, "Remember when we thought he was bad." I don't see how Donald Trump's flamboyant burn-it-down ethos should in some way make us think that lying to the American people about WMDs was not one of the worst betrayals in the country's history. 

The novel I'm working on now deals with complications arising from surveillance, nation branding, the way the terrorist event bleeds out across time, how our social relations are frayed by nationalism, and what happens when we begin to wonder if putative exhibitions of principle do, in fact, express principles. However this novel was begun far before the Trump presidency, and in many ways, it's critical of trends of deregulation, the role of intel in national security, and so on that predate 45. 

That said, when Donald Trump was elected, I wrote an essay called "To Face a Family." I wanted to address the way that politics are expressed within families, and I wanted to interrogate the nation-as-family metaphor. But I've also been invested in and continue to be invested in the way that politics entangle in our everyday lives in less obtrusive ways than Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, et. al. entering the White House. What are the politics of friendships? Of genius? Of selfhood? These are all questions that are central to my work. This is a long way of saying that I continue to take seriously the idea that the personal is political, that the lives I represent in my work offer a sort of subdermal political argument, even when all that's happening is a dinner at home.  

[5questions]

BEN TANZER

Bio:  Ben is the author of the just released book Be Cool – a memoir (sort of), among others. He also oversees the lifestyle empire This Blog Will Change Your Life (changeyourlifethiswill.com) and frequently speaks on the topics of messaging, framing, social media, blogging, fiction, essay writing and independent publishing. He can be found online at tanzerben.com.

What writing or other projects are you working on currently?

Given that my current efforts to overthrow the government are going slow, and the mid-term elections are still a couple of years away, I have been working on a follow-up to my novel Orphans titled Foundlings, which shifts from the point of view of the male protagonist to that of his wife. It's a road novel and a rumination on family, story and the act of moving from dystopia to utopia. I've been working on a novel about memory as well. It traces a relationship over several decades and the impact of that relationship on both the married couple at the center of the story, as well as their daughter. I'm also continuing to expand the offerings at This Blog Will Change Your Life, my ongoing and quasi cultural lifestyle empire, which has long hosted a Zine, podcast and book riffings, but is now launching a handbook series and T-shirt business too. If any or all of that works, or someone merely sends me a large sum of money, you can also look forward to a jeans line, perfume, doughnut shop, taco stand and Gin distillery.

Your recent memoir Be Cool, along with some of your past work, has a heavy sense of setting. New York State  and the City of Chicago are too of the settings that come to mind. I think setting is one of the most important elements in fiction. What do you think? How you see the Midwest as different than the Northeast? What’s similar?

Whether I'm writing fiction or nonfiction, I tend to start with a sliver of something, an idea, a conversation, a mood, or impulse. As I expand and mold that into an actual piece, I start to visualize the spaces where the story is unfolding and as I write I suck up whatever details I see in my head. In terms of the Midwest and Northeast, which are the places I have spent much of my life living in, my experience is that the small towns and urban centers have more in common with their respective small towns and urban centers than not, regardless of region. There are always unique qualities, food, industry, religion, sometimes, and music, but political leanings, and hobbies, day to day life, how people fall in love, how they fight, communicate, and don't, and how the towns look in terms of stores and plazas and gas stations, it's all very similar, something I think we saw more clearly in the recent election, though what all that means, continues to be misunderstood.

Your writing has a very detailed sense of memory and also a  playful sense of humor. Who are writers you like for their humor writing? What about writers who focus on delving into memories deeply?

I'm fascinated with memory, how we tell our stories, how they change, and how other people remember things. Among my friends and family I'm known as someone who remembers everything, and yet, I am also routinely told that stories which I know to be fact, I remember incorrectly or have embellished beyond anything recognized as truth. I am also fascinated by, and value, humor, always have, though in fiction, I never consciously try to ensure a piece has humor, and in essay writing I always do, consciously trying to balance humor and pain, sometimes sentence by sentence even as I'm editing. In one way, my earliest influence in terms of thinking about writing and essay and humor, was David Sedaris, but my first, and ongoing, influence, is Jim Carroll, and The Basketball Diaries in particular, a book that can be both shockingly sordid and depressing, but is also quite funny and electric and everything I aspire to be on the page. More recently, and possibly my biggest influence in crafting my previous essay collection Lost in Space, is the writing of Sam Irby and her collection MEATY. I would also include Megan Stielstra, Wendy C. Ortiz and Scott McClanahan in this mix, because I know they have influenced me with their love of word, truth telling and verve. I wouldn't want to leave out more random influences, however, or things that surely have had some impact, for example, watching Richard Pryor in Live on the Sunset Strip, the Mr. Natural comix that floated around my house when I was kid, listening to Steve Martin's comedy album A Wild and Crazy Guy, MAD magazine, Animal House, the Beastie Boys and the RAMONES. They're all influences as well, though when, why and how they've played a role, is not always clear to me.

What's your day-to-day life like? Do you like it?

To be clear, I'm terribly boring. I have spent much of my adult life working 9-5, worrying about retirement plans, vacation time and health insurance. I have two children who I make sandwiches for on most mornings and I have been married for twenty years. That said, I get to write nearly every day, the children are beautiful, when not calling me a hypocrite or reminding me that no one reads my books, I still laugh with my wife, I meet really cool people, do readings, and podcasts, and so much of it is so very good, lovely even. But do I actually like it? Most of the time, yes, though I am contractually obligated to say that. I do mean it though, it's just that, maybe not quite being 9-5 would be nice. Say 10-4. And being able to run and write every morning to start the day because that window would actually exist to do so would be cool. Also, time to drink and surf - and no, I don't know how to surf, it's fantasy, but all of this is at the moment - and tacos, every afternoon. I might also enjoy being counted on just a little less to always know where band-aids are, which will happen eventually, the house being empty more often, which may never happen and living near the beach. I want all of those things, and maybe, somehow, I will figure that out, and when I do, I want to believe that I will like a lot.

A lot of artists and writers have had calls to action or predictions that art/literature in America will change greatly in this new era after the recent election of Trump. Could you or do you see your own work changing? I saw that you recently attended the Women’s March in Chicago with your son.

The work will change because we will change because the world has changed and because while it will not always be conscious, our work will reflect what's happening around us. So, will my work change? I'm sure it will. I won't try to write in anyway that is any more political unless I'm asked to, but I'm sure bullies and liars will certainly become more prominent characters in my work. I have already been thinking of a thing where I can see characters like those creeping-in. Will I become more political regardless though? Fuck yes. I already was, but clearly not enough. I went to marches and I made donations, but I wasn't in it, or absorbed by it, and I'm going to try and figure out how I can be. One thing for sure, and this may be minor, is that I want to focus more on what's being said and calling that out. Words matter. Facts matter. Science matters. And when there are lies, and untruths, and alternative facts being treated as actual facts, people have to draw attention to that in the same way we have to call out bullying, misogynistic, homophobic, anti-Semitic and racist behavior when we encounter it. We can't sit by and wait for someone else to do something, because when we do, we get this, and this is fucking terrible. You also get me becoming very preachy and I do apologize for that.

[5questions]

BELLA BRAVO

Bio: Bella Bravo was born in San Diego, CA in 1987. She is a writer living in Bloomington, IN. 

What writing or other projects are you working on currently?

Currently, I am converting my story “Public Figures” into a play. A couple of years ago I converted a very short segment of text, which was mostly dialogue of a pizza delivery person recounting a strange experience, into a skit. A friend also wrote a skit from a story of his, and we performed them in a rec room at community center, so the audience was sitting and standing among the actors. The whole experience was so fun. Then, earlier this year, I adapted another story into a longer, one-act production, adding props, lighting and sound effects, and multiple sets.

This creative process gives me a second way into the story, like a back door, because the actors help workshop the script. They ask questions about the characters’ lives, and so I get to tell them things that didn’t make the final cut of the story. They improvise phrasing, so the lines sound how they imagine the characters speak. It’s so cool to see them embody these characters that have been living with me (in my head) for so long.  

Writing is normally such a solitary practice for me, whereas this is a community effort in every way. This month I’ll start reading through the script with the performers (wonderful actors from a local troupe called Sitcom Theater) and the musician who is writing a score (Jon Meador of Saintseneca and Kleinerwasserbär). It’s rejuvenating to finish a story and then follow other people’s ideas as they extrapolate from it.

Your recent single story chapbook Public Figures, along with your past collection The Unpositioned Parts, put some of the focus on the fringes of society. It isn't like a lot of the world of mainstream fiction, especially in this manner. What books or experiences influenced your development of this kind of focus in your work?

I feel like by fringe, maybe you mean, what my grandma would call “open.”[1] My grandma always says, “It’s important to be open.” Her gesture for that axiom is bringing her fingers softly to the corners of her eyes and guiding her hands out as though demonstrating nearly 180 degree vision, “open, not closed.” She has large brown eyes. I feel drawn to “openness”, spaces and experiences where I can have a wide outlook where the boundary is not closed. Let’s see examples of open experiences would be queerness, gratitude, crime, becoming, hope, communism. I guess I’m fine with opening boundaries as well. I write from experience, usually from a place or visual image stuck in my head. I think a sense of abandonment is a theme connecting many of those incidents or images. My family felt like an open container; I always felt exposed, a little to the side of their primary concerns. I tend to feel more at home or more confident in negative spaces or spaces that lack definition—absences. I think that’s where the focus on fringe or openness comes from.

Your prose has a heavy sense of control, with a strong feeling of power in the story and the kind of step-by-step way that sentences build up this huge staircase of words and narrative, where you end up really high and then you maybe fall off or make peace with being so high. Who are writers you really like for the craft of their prose? What really draws you in most to the works that you like the most?

For craft inspo, I read short-short fiction. Thrifty writers like Grace Paley, Italo Calvino, Lydia Davis, Donald Barthleme and Sophie Calle know how make the most of a syllable. I think of a given text as a closed economy. Its fundamental principle is circulation; stagnation is expiration. These writers experiment with different patterns to modulate the dynamism of a story, but every word, punctuation mark gives the story at hand energy.  

I tend to rely on incremental escalation, like a staircase pattern, because that’s what I do in legal writing as well. In legal writing, I have a rule of one new fact per sentence, which gives the text a slow and consistent building momentum. It’s easy to control. (Humor often relies on this same incremental escalation, and I think all of the above artists write hilarious prose.)

I love also poetry for its excesses and gaps. When I read Bhanu Kapil and Anne Boyer I feel like there is so much that I don't understand. I love how they use poetics to expand the genres of memoir and social critique, blurring them into one another. I keep a copy of Ariana Reines’s Mercury on my nightstand. She harmonizes within the complexity of gender, existence and species, in some moments with five-word lines surrounded by a blank page. Her writing is intricate and strong like a healed burn.

What's your day-to-day life like? Do you live in Indiana or did you just go to school there? What do you think about Indiana?

Let’s see, I sit a lot, ha. I’m a deputy public defender in Bloomington and I write, so much of my day passes seated behind my desk, in a courtroom or at my dining room table. In terms of the workday-to-workday, it’s my job to defend people from criminal penalty zealously. I have a complicated relationship to my work. For the most part, I defend indigent people against State prosecution. This is an easy position for me, because I don’t believe in prisons, police or the State. My job gets difficult emotionally when I know my client has hurt someone or when I can’t figure out a way to prevent a penalty that I think is particularly unfair. Many of my cases deal with the same conduct and circumstances, and that’s a consequence of the nature of criminal law, where the legislature has identified and proscribed specific behaviors. This pattern forces the facts of my clients’ lives to bleed together. I learn private details about my clients’ lives shortly after meeting them, but I try to respect the narrowness of my glimpses. I’m humbled by my job, because my clients have a lot of confidence in me from the very beginning. Fear and anxiety are excellent motivators for dependence and bonding. Despite the unfortunate circumstances, I feel grateful to be a public site for trust.

I moved from Salt Lake City, Utah to Bloomington to go to law school in 2009. Like 60 percent of Salt Lake County residents (approximate), I was raised in the Mormon Church. Many of my family are still practicing members, and it wasn’t until I left Utah and moved to Indiana that I realized how culturally isolated and cultish my childhood was. Shortly after I first moved here, I remember feeling shocked when I saw an undergrad, like a typical university student, smoking a cigarette on a public sidewalk. Salt Lake was such a sterile place, both physically and socially. To me in 2009, smoking was something weirdos and disestablishment folks do, not something for college kids. Indiana has become my archetype for the U.S., and that’s just because it’s my primary contrast to Utah, which is not representative of anywhere else. That estimate was validated unfortunately by the election. I don’t feel much affinity for Indiana at this point.     

That said, Indiana has many wonderful people. Bloomington is a small commercial center for south-central Indiana. I’m lucky to live here with a group of compassionate and thoughtful social heretics who have been drawn to Bloomington for various reasons, some from other parts of Indiana, some from other parts of the U.S., and some from other parts of the world.

Fuck this Midwest humidity though. My body was meant for the desert.        

A lot of artists and writers have had calls to action or predictions that art/literature in America will change greatly in this new era after the recent election of Trump. Could you or do you see your own work changing? I guess all writing will change at least contextually, although all writing is also always changing contextually.

You make a good point that art is contextual. I think resonance comes from historical patterns as they repeat and shift over time. The election angers me because it demonstrates a resurgence of far-right populism in the West. These trends are so dangerous as they build momentum. America has always been racist, but now anti-immigrant and Blue Lives Matter sentiments are the rally cries of a fascist platform and that platform will be publicly-funded first-term agenda. Many of my family members are immigrants who have practiced—with varying degrees of predictability—cyclic migration, living in both aboard and the States. The father who raised me is a cop. My mom voted for Trump and Pence. Since the election, I’ve had dreams—at night and during the day—where I scream at the top of my lungs in my mom’s kitchen and all nine of her small dogs mill around my feet. I think anger and absurdity will resonate over these next 8 years, lbh. I’m selfishly excited for a resurgence of punk.

Though, I think climate change will have a greater impact on my work and experiences over the next decade. Having an immediate environmental catastrophe will make explaining what I’m doing—writing, touring, gardening, developing relationships with many levels of intimacy—and not doing with my life—having kids, marriage, and a path to salvation—easier when I visit my mom. Last Christmas, she asked me when I think I’ll have kids, so I brought up an article about millennials are mostly having children out of wedlock. Over the next few years, higher energy storms will cause greater levels of damage to the coasts, fresh water will become a scarcer commodity, and both will cause higher prices at Costco, so I feel like we’ll mostly talk about that instead.

[1] They have complementary definitions: “of an outer edge; margin; periphery,” and “allowing access, passage; not closed or blocked up.”

[5questions]

JOE OKONKWO

Bio: Joe Okonkwo's novel Jazz Moon, set against the backdrop of the Harlem Renaissance and glittering Jazz Age Paris, was published by Kensington Books in 2016. David Ebershoff, author of The Danish Girl and The 19th Wife has called Jazz Moon "A passionate, alive, and original novel about love, race, and jazz in 1920s Harlem and Paris — a moving story of traveling far to find oneself." His short stories have appeared in Storychord, Cooper Street Penumbra, LGBTsr.org, Chelsea Station, Shotgun Honey, Best Gay Stories 2015, Best Gay Love Stories 2009, and Keep This Bag Away From Children. Upcoming work will appear in The New Engagement. His story "Cleo" received a Pushcart Prize nomination. Joe serves as Prose Editor for Newtown Literary and Editor of the forthcoming Best Gay Stories 2017. 

What writing, editing, and/or publishing projects are you working on currently?  

I found out a few weeks ago that my short story, “Picnic Street,” will be published by The New Engagement some time in 2017. It’s loosely based on an incident from my childhood in 1979. It touches on issues of race and division within the black community and what can happen when a member of a particular group does not adhere to the rules or beliefs or behavior sanctioned by that community. And I’m the Prose Editor for Newtown Literary, a journal devoted to publishing writers from Queens. Submissions for our tenth issue are open till January 10, so after that I’ll be busy reading and evaluating and helping to choose what we’ll publish. I’m also about to begin a gig as Editor of the 2017 edition of Best Gay Stories. It’s an annual anthology of gay male-oriented fiction and nonfiction. In addition to all of that, I’m planning new short stories and will begin researching my next novel very soon.

Your novel JAZZ MOON has a powerful and skillful element of historical detail. How did you conduct research for background? Did you start this while you were still a graduate student? 

I read a lot of books. Books about the Harlem Renaissance; about blacks in Paris during the 1920s; about gay men in Paris during that era; about ocean liners of the era. And I brought to the project a prior knowledge of jazz history and black entertainment that I had been cultivating for several years. I also did a lot of photo research online to learn about the era’s architecture, cars, and clothing. My goal with the research was to be able to weave vivid historical details into the narrative in order to make the story come alive for the reader, but do so in a way that was seamless. I didn’t want the research to come across as research. I hate it when I read historical fiction that feels like a history lesson instead of fiction. I did an MFA in Creative Writing, and in workshops I was particularly hard on fellow writers of historical fiction if their stories read like something lifted directly from a history book. You can’t just take each and every date and statistic and name and event your research uncovers and plug it into the story willy-nilly You have to find a creative, “novelistic” way of getting those historical details across. You have to be willing to leave some of that research out. As far as where JAZZ MOON started: it was born as a short story back in 2004, but it grew up in the MFA program at City College of New York.

What historical fiction books do you like the most? Why? 

I love David Ebershoff’s The Danish Girl, and not just because David endorsed JAZZ MOON! Also The Confessions of Max Tivoli by Andrew Sean Greer and The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller. All three of these authors imbue each paragraph with so much rich, vibrant historical detail and really do succeed in recreating the eras that they’re writing about. Each of these books intimidated me because they made me wonder if I was doing as good a job with recreating the 1920s in JAZZ MOON. Another favorite historical novel of mine is Toni Morrison’s Beloved because, not only does she accurately depict slavery, she makes you see how personally and emotionally destructive it was and how that destruction could be so deep that it lasts for and across generations.

How would you summarize a typical day in your life? When and where do you write? Do you teach? 

I don’t make my living writing. Yet. I work as a web production professional, I’ve been doing that since 2005. I write at home. I find it difficult to write anywhere else, although I do often take walks in my neighborhood in Astoria, Queens, so I can brainstorm and write in my head. I went through a dark period for several months this year and didn’t have the mental or emotional bandwidth to write, but I’m getting back to it now, thankfully. I write in the evenings and sometimes obscenely early in the mornings. 4am, 5am, although that’s when I usually go to the gym. By the way: I’ve found that the gym helps my writing. When I’m working out consistently, my writing is better, clearer, I’m more creative, and I have more mental energy for it. As far as teaching: I recently taught a writing workshop in The Bronx, and I’ll be teaching one at the Queens Library in May as part of an initiative from Newtown Literary. I would very much like to teach Creative Writing on a regular basis. Frankly, I think I’d be awesome at it.

How do you see the ramifications of the recent presidential election? I am asking everyone this question. How do you think your work will be affected by this new era we are in? 

I was on the train coming home from Brooklyn this past Saturday. I got off the train at Times Square/42nd Street to transfer. The train across the platform had been put out of service, apparently because someone had drawn swastikas on the interior of at least one train car. I saw the swastikas. That’s just a small sample of this election’s ramifications. We’re seeing bigger ramifications with the rolling-out of Trump’s cabinet nominations and White House staff appointments: people who are racist, islamaphobic, anti-immigrant, climate change deniers, and in favor of minority voter suppression. And our new vice president is one of the biggest homophobes in modern politics. But the deadliest and longest term ramifications will come with Trump’s Supreme Court appointments. How will my work be affected? I posted a Toni Morrison quote on my Facebook author page last week: "In times of dread, artists must never choose to remain silent." That’s how my work will be affected. I won’t be silent.

[5questions]

CHRIS DANKLAND

Bio: Chris Dankland has a head made of smoke, lives in Houston, and edits Neato Mosquito Show. More Dankland at Twitter and Instagram.   

What writing are you working on currently? What editing or publishing projects are you working on?

For the last year I've been writing a book called Space City.

I've always wanted to write my own version of The Decameron: a book of 100 stories that portray a culture and a time in history. It's my Houston book. All the stories take place in Houston on the same night, July 20th, the anniversary of the night that humanity first landed on the moon. ‘Houston’ was the first word that was spoken on the moon.

So far I have 66 short stories, about 130,000 words. Hopefully the rough draft will be done by this year's end, and then I’ll go back and revise the shit out of it. It might not be finished for several more years, but in 2017 I'm gonna start publishing stories from it.

I'm also spending a lot of time working on my spins: 

and my kicks: 

You have edited a website called Neato Mosquito Show and you've had a lot of great pieces published, including by me at Keep This Bag Away From Children. You've recently started working on some micro-fiction pieces with retro-ish photographs as their object. Who are your favorite short fiction authors? Who are your favorite writers who write about photos/objects (this could be a lot or most writers, I guess, depending)?

Thanks for publishing that story <3 it's one my favorites.

I love James Purdy, Giovanni Boccaccio, Scott McClanahan, Ray Bradbury, Christine de Pizan, Dennis Cooper, Ambrose Bierce and Aesop, among others.

In my mind, I think about those picture stories as being about trying to describe a human being in a sentence or two. I’m very drawn to writers who are geniuses of caricature. As Gogol said, the art of caricature is the ability to 'divine a person and by a few traits suddenly exhibit him entire, as if he were alive.'

Here are some sentences I look at when I’m thinking about picture stories:

Louie was a shoplifter who had lost what nerve he ever had. He wore long, shabby, black overcoats that gave him all the look of a furtive buzzard. Thief and junkie stuck out all over him. - William S Burroughs

Mr. Chadband moves softly and cumbrously, not unlike a bear who has been taught to walk upright. - Charles Dickens

He was a bull-like old man with a short head set directly into his shoulders and silver protruding eyes that looked like two fish straining to get out of a net of red threads. - Flannery O’Connor

These two brothers used to steal parking lot curbs from abandoned lots around where we lived.  They were strange brothers with bad acne. They used to rob stores at an early age. They used to hang out in the woods and drink rum and drink milkshakes and bet each other to eat mud and dirt.  They were always dirty, they reeked of fish and worms.  Both those brothers are on death row now.  Death row for murder.   - Harmony Korine

I’m not sure how often I achieve that high bar, but that’s what I’m aiming for.

When and where do you do writing most often? Who do you have read your writing before it’s published?

I mostly write in my room, or sometimes at a library. I don't really show my stories to anyone. Until this interview, I don’t think I’d even told anyone about the book I've been working on for the better part of this year. I enjoy keeping secrets.

What books have you read recently and liked a lot and why?

This year I've been really into reading folk tales. Much contemporary short fiction is very hung up on sentence level craft, often at the expense of everything else. Folktales are weirder, sloppier, more shocking and memorable than your average contemporary New Yorker whatever whatever. (Although I like reading those too.)

I love Strange Tales From a Chinese Studio, which is by a 300 year old Chinese writer named Pu Songling. He wrote about 500 folk tales in his life. That book has lots of stories about fox spirits, city gods, fish demons, ghosts, paintings that come to life, bee colonies that invade your dreams, etc. It's fucking awesome.

I'm also really into The Golden Legend, a medieval book about the lives of saints. My favorite parts are about the miracles. There are saints exploding out of dragons, saints opening portals to Hell, saints with talking decapitated heads, saints living in caves for 40 years. As a reward for their virtue and good works, the saints almost always end up get martyred in some sort of horrifically violent way. Saints getting burned alive, saints getting pulled apart, saints getting skinned alive, saints getting boiling hot liquid iron poured down their throats.

What is your day-to-day like? Do you like it?

After work, I have from 6pm to midnight to write and read, plus weekends. I used to have work, books, and weed, but I quit smoking weed. Now it’s work and books.

Honestly, it’s the greatest life. Everything I need to be happy can fit inside a bookshelf and a laptop. I’m creating a city in my mind and walking through its whispering streets every night. Most of the world could fuck off entirely, and it wouldn’t much change my cheerfulness.