---

On her book, These Are the Good Times: A Chicago gal riffs on death, sex, life, dancing, writing, wonder, loneliness, place, family, faith, coffee and the FBI (among other things)

 

Patricia Ann McNair talks about her most recent book of essays about death, sex, life, dancing, writing, wonder, loneliness, place, family, faith, coffee, and the FBI (among other things).  Patricia Ann McNair’s most recent book is an essay collection called And These Are the Good Times: A Chicago gal riffs on death, sex, life, dancing, writing, wonder, loneliness, place, family, faith, coffee and the FBI (among other things.) Her short story collection, The Temple of Air, was awarded Book of the Year by Chicago Writers Association and Southern Illinois University’s Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award. She is the director of undergraduate programs in creative writing at Columbia College Chicago.

I first met Patricia Ann McNair in class, as my professor teaching advanced fiction, but her reputation preceded her. I was excited to be in her class and learn from her, and she has far exceeded my expectations. Interviewing her in tandem with being in her workshop class has allowed me to see the multi-faceted talent that she is; both teacher and writer.  I interviewed her about her newest book of nonfiction essays, AND THESE ARE THE GOOD TIMES: A Chicago gal riffs on death, sex, life, dancing, writing, wonder, loneliness, place, family, faith, coffee, and the FBI (among other things). If you think the title says it all, just wait until you read the book itself and what Patricia Ann McNair has to say about it.

 *

Your book AND THESE ARE THE GOOD TIMES: A Chicago gal riffs on death, sex, life, dancing, writing, wonder, loneliness, place, family, faith, coffee, and the FBI (among other things) truly does address all the things that it promises in the title. How did you decide what you wanted to put into this book? 

I probably think about each of these topics at least once a day, and many of them overlap for me. I find loneliness in many places, drinking coffee, thinking about the death of family and friends. These things, too, fill me with wonder, and wonder leads me to the writing. Dancing and faith come from the same impulse the way I see it, and my family, father, especially, but not only, has a complicated relationship to the FBI. You get what I am trying to say here. To me, these “riffs” are interlaced in many ways.  As I was collecting them (and one might say this is more a book of collected essays or riffs, as opposed to a collection of essays, which is often more focused and deliberately circles one or two themes and not more than a dozen as my book does), it was almost harder for me to choose things to leave out than to put in. They all seemed linked to me, they repeat a lot of the same defining moments from my life, but switch up the vantage point some. 

Most of these pieces have been published, some in more than one place, a few have garnered some awards. When I finally started to collect them in one place, I had a lot of arranging and rearranging to do, and a few holes to fill with new essays written specifically for the book (“Roger the Dodger,” about my grief and guilt over my brother’s death and life, is one of these) and then I went back to my subtitle (“A Chicago gal…”) and added and subtracted from that until I felt as though I pretty much covered everything with it. Still, the “among other things” allows me even more latitude, because to me, a good essay cannot be boiled down to just one theme, one thing to be about. There has to be a broadening of the scope in an essay for it to gain resonance, the way I see it. And that sort of opening, discovery, possibility, is always what I am trying to achieve.

 

In a few essays from the book, you say they were written in the late 90s—what was it about these essays and these topics that you kept coming back to?

I first started to explore creative nonfiction in the 1990s. I didn’t know what it was before that; I thought nonfiction was just sort of history and journalism, literary criticism (that I had no patience for) the epiphanic personal essay that we studied in high school and freshman comp and lit. Nonfiction (even creative nonfiction, a name that a lot of nonfiction writers do not approve of, but I like) can be those things—history, journalism, criticism, personal essay—and more, and that is appealing to me. I had a few things happen in my life—mostly to do with my early years and family—that I carried with me all the time, and rightly so. I don’t mean this in any sort of victim mentality, or let-me-tell-you-about-this-bad-childhood-I-had kind of way, but events that I would think about, look at, consider in relation to who I am now, wonder at how they formed me. My father’s death when I was a girl, a summer I spent in Honduras as a volunteer when I was 17. Losing my virginity, coming from a religious family whose religion pretty much stopped with the generation before my parents. Who wouldn’t think of these things if they experienced them.

As part of my day job as a professor at Columbia, I was on a committee that did research on Creative Nonfiction as a potential course for our students, and the more I read about it and of it, the more I realized that it would allow me to explore these things from my own experience in ways my fiction wouldn’t. And even so, you would be able to spot similar topics or ideas in my fiction as you can in my nonfiction (absent fathers, complicated families, faith) because these are the things that I think about. Always. They are part of my DNA, I guess. New things are added to my wonder, to my mulling over, but a few things—like those topics of my early pieces—are always there, hanging out in the corners.   

 

What did you learn from writing and publishing your first book, the collection of short stories titled The Temple of Air, that you utilized while writing and publishing your new book?

The Temple of Air is much more linked than these essays are. The stories are not totally dependent on one another, but if you read them all in the order in which I organized them, you would see the logic of the book as a whole, would learn more about the recurring characters. And from the beginning I knew that I was working on—if not a novel in stories, because it isn’t quite that—then a linked story collection. Each piece in there was written with the others in mind. And These Are the Good Times, with few exceptions, was written piece by piece, meant to stand on its own. That made it a little hard for me when I started to envision this collection, because my only experience with my own book-making was to be ultimately very purposeful in the way I built one thing onto another. I don’t mean that I wrote the stories one after another as they appear in the collection, but I did always think about how they would work together. 

When I started to think that these nonfiction pieces could be a book, I had to let loose in a way that sort of mirrors the writing of an essay. Meaning, this thing does not precisely inform this next thing, this is not exactly about the same thing. I think of this book as more scattershot, ultimately, than my collection of stories is. I go back to that idea of “among other things.” 

I think what I’ve said so far here is what I learned while writing the stories was not so useful to me while writing And These Are the Good Times. What has been useful to me, is always useful to me, is relying on my sense of story, my devotion to narrative. I am not so much an idea writer as I am a story writer, and from the stories I tell—in my nonfiction, especially—I come to understand the ideas I am exploring. I don’t understand everything about them, I don’t really come to conclusions, but I do begin to understand the questions they pose.

And publishing—well, I had a fabulous experience working with the independent publisher Elephant Rock Books for The Temple of Air. Very hands-on. And that prepared me for this one, too, working with another fine indie publisher, Side Street Press. It is a very collaborative experience, and one I understand I need to jump into wholeheartedly, because that is what I had to do the first time. This means packing books into my trunk and hitting the road occasionally, it means a lot of social media chatter (much more so than even six years ago with the first book), it means recognizing that I have to feel responsible for the business side, too, not just the fun part, the creative side. 

 

Your first essay in the collection, “And These Are the Good Times,” talks about your love of jukeboxes. Theoretically, if you were stranded on an island with one jukebox that only had three songs in its library, what would they be? (You would, of course, have unlimited dimes on this island to play the songs.)

Wow, fun question! And you know that if you asked me this same question in a couple of days, the answer would probably change, but I will try.  First would be Frank Sinatra singing Jerome Kern’s “All the Things You Are” because that was the song my dad used to sing to me. The second would be “Trista Pena” by the Gipsy Kings. Sad pain. Because I love Latin rhythms and the amazing vocals in this song. And this piece is achingly beautiful, it creates in me (and probably others) an emotional response I would love to be able to capture in my writing. Like, this hurts, but pain can be lovely, too. Lastly, it would have to be disco song, because disco is so much part of my young adulthood, my formative years. Maybe “Young Hearts Run Free” by Candi Stanton, but played really fast. It would make me move and would make me happy. You know, you can go into a grocery store in just about any part of the world, and if they are playing music, they are probably playing American disco. Maybe because of what I said—it can make you happy, and something as tedious as buying potatoes and dishwashing liquid can be sort of fun if you are happy. 

 

In the essay “Coyote on the Sidewalk” you wrote: “That coyote, I thought, unexpected and slightly exotic on the city sidewalk, was going to be a metaphor for the wild possibilities in even the most pedestrian (sidewalk, get it?) of stories…. But as happens with all of my writing, I don’t really know what it is about until I have written it. So let me see.”  That essay continues on to contemplate its own meaning, unplanned. What part of your book surprised you the most, and why?

Perhaps it is the brief memoir piece “Dentist Day,” about when I was in Honduras at 17. This was a story I wrote as fiction about a real experience in my very first writing class at Columbia College Chicago in the 1980s. It surprised me that I would come back to it almost thirty years later, and that it would still be as vivid to me in my memory now as it was so much closer to the event. And who knows if that is because the memory is accurate in its vividness, or if it is the time and distance that allows me to recreate the memory in a newly aware sort of vibrancy. In any case, it feels real and recent to me, the way I see the clinic where I worked in my mind’s eye, the smells of the place, the people. I know that the writing of the experience moved it from the past to the present for me, the lens drew things closer, I could see better. 

 

Lastly, do you have any plans for your next project? 

I am at work on a novel now. In what I hope to be the very nearly final draft of it. Climbing the House of God Hill. It is set in the same fictional small town as The Temple of Air is, and it is told through multiple voices and points of view. I am working with characters in first person in a way I haven’t before, and it is an exhilarating challenge for me. Fingers crossed I am on the right path.

Interview by Zoe Raines

Keyword/Tags: Patricia Ann McNair, And These Are the Good Times, Chicago, Death, Sex, Life, Dancing, Writing

 

---

On writing of the present, creating inclusion, and how gentrification treats gentrifiers out of long-term residents

 

Luis Tubens, a.k.a “Logan Lu”, was born in Chicago’s West Town neighborhood and raised in Logan Square. In 2014, he earned a B.A. in Communications, media and theater from Northeastern Illinois University. He is the 2017 Artists-in-Residence at Oak Park Public Library. Luis has performed poetry across the United States including with the GUILD COMPLEX, Tia Chucha Press, and the National Museum of Mexican Art, as well as toured Mexico City in 2016. He has also held workshops for the residents of the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center and students in the Chicago Public Schools. On stage, he has opened for notable acts including Saul Williams and Calle 13. In 2014, Luis Tubens joined the acclaimed Mental Graffiti National Poetry Slam Team which represented Chicago at the National Poetry Slam. He is the author of Stone Eagle (2017) published by Bobbin Lace Press, Chicago. Currently, Luis is the resident poet for ESSO Afrojam Funkbeat (2016 Best New Band and Best International Music Act,Chicago Reader) and is featured on both of their last two albums. 

Your book Stone Eagle, speaks of your experience growing up as a Puerto Rican male in the Chicago’s neighborhood of Logan Square, however, your book doesn’t fully talk about your past life but rather your present life and where you fit in the neighborhood today. Why did you choose to start here?

 I do have some poems in the book that refer to my life growing up in Logan Square, for example; “Get ‘Em”, “Piragua Man”, and “Rent is Due” are poems from my childhood through early 20’s. However, the bulk of the poems do speak more about my later and more recent experiences. I hoped to make the book a current lens instead of just memories. The book in this way is more of an active camera rather than a photograph.

 Your piece “Red is Rojo” is written almost entirely in Spanish with no translations offered. This reminded me of Junot Díaz’s thoughts on not needing to be a “native informant” for readers. In “Ode to the Piragua Man” you translate some of the Spanish words used. Why did you choose to translate this piece?

 I have received many questions about this same issue. My intention with providing a glossary of words with “Piragua Man” was to give readers, Puerto Rican or not, a full understanding of this experience. I use words that are specifically Puerto Rican but I want everyone to relate to the poem. With “Rojo is Red” I am writing to Latinos raised in the U.S. It is almost a coded poem for a secret club of people that share this experience. I of course want everyone to understand the piece but the intended audience for that poem would not need it translated. In retrospect, I think that providing a translation for one poem and not another serves more to confuse the reader and that is the last thing I want. I think, at the time, I was approaching the poems as individual pieces rather than a collection. I most likely will fix this in future editions.

You write about Logan Square’s gentrification but also how you are a “Gentrifyer”. What do you mean by this?

In the poem “Stone Eagle” I wish to draw attention to the changing neighborhood but also to our roles in this change. By “our” I am speaking of the members of the neighborhood that consider themselves natives of the neighborhood but actively contribute to the gentrification that is destroying it. I also want to examine the benefits that long-time residents are reaping from gentrification, whether it be their property values increasing or internet cafés or whatever. More personally, I am talking about the artist rewards that I am taking advantage of by being a born-and-raised poet from a Chicago neighborhood. There is more credibility when you are born and raised in Chicago but the places that give you those rewards are gentrifying institutions.

Who has influenced in you in terms of what and how you write?

Wow, so many writers. Local writers like Reginald Eldridge and Mayda Del Valle, as well as writers like Carl Sandburg, Junot Díaz,  and Paul Laurence Dunbar; Hip Hop in general. I don’t know if I will ever finish answering this question.

 
Who are you currently reading?

Right now, I am currently reading local writers. My friends and colleagues mostly. For years I have glazed over their work and focused my attention on “established writers” but I have been making it a point to read the work of those writers that are closest to me.
 

What worries you the most?

 I’m not sure if you mean in general or with my poetry but I’ll answer both. The constant state of violent tension worries me. I have a 3-year-old son and thinking about him growing up in a world of such unrest frightens me. In regards to my poetry, I fear losing my inspiration. Thankfully I have yet to fall short of things to write about.

 
Our country’s current president loves labeling. What would you label yourself (if anything)?

Hahahh if I had to label myself I guess I would label me. . . a poet.

Interview by Maria Mendoza Cervantes 

---

On chemistry, fiction, and Beluga whales

 

Laura Katherine Manardo was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan. She attended Kalamazoo College, where she was Pre-Med, and there discovered her love of writing toward the end of her freshman year. A current graduate student at Columbia College Chicago, her book of poetry, Lemon Water in Lake Michigan, was published in April of 2018. 

I first met Laura through the English & Creative Writing department of Columbia College Chicago in September of 2017 when we were placed in the same MFA Fiction workshop. Laura’s fiction writing immediately grabbed my attention. She had an incredibly poetic way of writing prose that stood out to me, and her focus on the sea and whales served as a beautiful backdrop to the stories she was telling. When I heard she was a poet, I was not surprised, and eager to know more about her writing. Laura, a natural-born storyteller, did not disappoint as we sat down to eat cookies in Columbia College’s 33 East Congress graduate lounge. 

 

So, have you settled on a title?

 

I haven’t run it by the editor yet, but I’m pretty sure that it’s going to be titled, “Lemon Water in Lake Michigan.” It’s the title of one of the poems in the collection and it is the one that kind of, as soon as I wrote it, realized … you know, this can actually be a whole thing, this can be a collection, because it kind of encompassed everything that I’ve been working on. 

 

How did you get started with writing?

 

Okay, so, I managed to escape out of almost all my English classes in high school because I didn’t like reading, and I took all science classes. I was obsessed with chemistry. Essentially, I just really wanted to be a doctor, I wanted to be a pediatrician, so I went to Kalamazoo College, because of their science program. I did pretty well—I mean, I wasn’t totally A’s, but it’s pretty hard in pre-med. So, after my first year, at the very end of my winter term I was signing up for classes and I had taken all the required classes for my first year of pre-med, so I had these three free courses. I took an Anti-Apartheid course … and it was amazing, and that was the first class that I took that I was enjoying what I was reading and writing. I also took an Intro to Creative Writing class. I had never written creatively before, except in second grade, when I wrote a short story about a woman who lived in a barn with ghosts. And, essentially, I started writing in the creative writing course and my professor kind of made a comment like, “Wow, Laura, what’s your major?” “Pre-med.” “Oh, that’s so interesting, have you ever taken any English courses?” “No, I haven’t, I wasn’t really planning on it.” “Well, you should just take a ‘Reading the World’ course.” Which was like an Intro to English course at Kalamazoo College.

So, for the reading, he asked me if I would go first, and I got an A+ in the course and I enjoyed myself more doing that than I ever had doing anything with chemistry, so I was like, “This is kind of crazy.” So then, in the fall, I was still taking the pre-med courses, but I deferred one of the credits and took a ‘Reading the World’ course. It was about classical film and I got a B in the course, but I enjoyed myself and it was very rewarding. So, I think that freshman year of college was where I really started writing and enjoying it. 

 

Where did the inspiration for this collection come from?

 

So, in my senior year of college, I took an Advanced Poetry course, with one of my favorite writers and professors of all time, Diane Suess. She was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for her most recent collection and I honestly feel like I’m like her daughter, based on what she writes, if that makes sense? I read what she writes, and I feel like I am her child of writing! So, my final collection for that course was about marine life and the ocean, and my relationship to myself, and my relationship to men, and my relationship to the world that I live in as a woman. And so, I took two years off before starting grad school and in those two years I continued with that collection, I continued with that final project, and it kind of morphed into just different bodies of water and my relationships with men. So, it kind of follows my relationship with my father, my relationship with my brother, and my relationship with men in sexual and nonsexual ways. That’s kind of what inspired the collection. In the very beginning of my Advanced Poetry course, I had to pick a topic, and of course I love the ocean so much and I’m obsessed with whales so that’s kind of where it started, and it just kind of leached on beyond that and I saw it kind of unfold in front of me. 

 

What is the first book that made you cry? If a book ever has!

 

Yes, books have made me cry. I honestly think that the first—and it’s a short story, if that’s okay—the first short story that made me cry was “A Small Good Thing” by Raymond Carver. The reason that it made me cry is because I read “The Bath” by Carver as well, prior to reading “A Small Good Thing”, and felt not great about it, honestly. Like, okay, this is a good story, it was well crafted, but it wasn’t … it didn’t haunt me, it wasn’t something that left me feeling a certain way that I couldn’t describe, like so many short stories do. When I read “A Small Good Thing,” which is the revised version, essentially, it’s the same story, it made me realize what revision could do to a story. 

I was actually working on my senior thesis at the time, and I was totally against revision, I couldn’t open up my stories again after I’d written one version. I was like, “This is crazy, it has a beginning, middle, and end, it feels complete, it feels whole, I don’t want to mess it up.” I would be afraid to mess it up, and so I wouldn’t revise. Finally, my thesis advisor, Dr. Bruce Mills, gave me both those stories and said, “Laura, take a look and tell me which story gets to you more and why?” And I just started crying after I read the second version of it. I was kind of like, “Okay, ‘A Small Good Thing’, I get it, you have to open up a story”. Because the bare bones were there in “The Bath” but once Carver finally took it away and added all those new elements and added a new role for the baker in the story it totally shifted my feelings of revision. 

 

Does writing energize or exhaust you?

 

It energizes me, for the most part. So, I think that, in general, it energizes me because once I complete something that I feel is whole or beautiful or something that sparks something in me when I reread it or rewrite it, I’m elated, I feel finally like I’m doing something that I’m supposed to be doing. But it exhausts me sometimes if I have to write a certain amount of pages for a project or classes and I don’t get to what I need to get to in those pages. 

 

What period of your life do you find you write about most often?

 

I would say fourteen to sixteen, because that’s the first time that I fell in love. I fell in love with a boy named Evan and it was deep and pretty chaotic and I find myself falling back into that moment, a lot, of falling in love and falling out of love. I write about now, and my relationship to men as it is now. 

 

If you didn’t write, what would you do for work?

 

I would work with beluga whales! I would be a marine biologist. I would for sure go into marine biology and work with beluga whales because they’re my favorite animal in the whole world. They’re the canaries of the ocean and they deserve so much attention because there are not many of them left. 

 

What is your favorite childhood book?

 

Are you there, God? It’s me, Margaret. When I was going through puberty, my mom was really worried about me because I wasn’t getting along with my father. He didn’t understand that I was growing into a woman and he wanted me to be this young girl forever. He didn’t understand that I needed to be treated like a woman. So, my mom gave me that book before I started my period and it helped me understand that not everything works out the way you expect it to, but it’s going to be okay. 

 

Do you listen to music while you write? If so, what kind of music?

 

I don’t listen to music when I write. Like, at all. But, I love going to coffee shops and listening to other people speak and have conversations. It helps me, in fiction, because I’m able to think of realistic dialogue. It also helps me in poetry because of the white noise of it.

 

How are you feeling about this publication? 

 

I’m really excited! You never forget your firsts, so I think that it’s going to be something that I look back on, hopefully. I think it’s going to be really rewarding. 

Interview by Grace Smithwick

---

On her new book, Hothouse

 

“Nurture your obsessions”—Poet Karyna McGlynn talks about her new book, Hothouse, where she finds her inspiration, and offers some tips and tricks for new writers.

Karyna McGlynn is the author of Hothouse (Sarabande Books 2017), I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl (Sarabande Books 2009), and several chapbooks, including The 9-Day Queen Gets Lost on Her Way to the Execution (Willow Springs Editions 2016). Her poems have recently appeared in The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, Black Warrior Review, Ninth Letter, Georgia Review, Witness, and The Academy of American Poet’s Poem-A-Day. Karyna holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Michigan, and earned her PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston where she served as Managing Editor for Gulf Coast. Her honors include the Verlaine Prize, the Kathryn A. Morton Prize, the Hopwood Award, and the Diane Middlebrook Fellowship in Poetry at the University of Wisconsin. Karyna recently taught in the Creative Writing department at Oberlin College and is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Literature & Languages at Christian Brothers University. Find her online at www.karynamcglynn.com.

Last year you published your second book, Hothouse. What was most challenging for you while you were going through the writing/editing/production process?

The hardest part for me is trying to figure out which poems are speaking to each other and how they might come together to form something I could plausibly call a “collection.” I often feel like my poems are too thematically or stylistically diverse to live comfortably together. I wasn’t really able to conceptualize the book or figure out what should go in it until I knew what the title was. Once I came up with the title Hothouse and started thinking of the book as a series of rooms (which I was inspired to do while reading Bill Bryson’s At Homewith Grey Gardens playing in the background), the poems pretty quickly snapped in to place—both in terms of sequence and revisions. This, by the way, is exactly what happened when I put together my first book. I hope I’ve learned my lesson: I don’t know what the hell I’m doing until I have a title! It’s funny that it took so long for me to figure this out since I’m always telling my students, “If you don’t have a good title, it probably means you have no idea what your thesis is.”

 

In both Hothouse and I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl, I noticed a lot of your poems incorporate very unique formatting choices. To what extent does form follow function in your poetry, and what value do you think that adds to a particular piece?

I’m pretty much obsessed with typography, lineation, enjambment, and white space. I would get even crazier if I thought people would like it. (As you might imagine, I aesthetically swooned when I started reading Douglas Kearney.) I’ve always loved finding ways to write poems in columns and boxes. I think it has something to do with how maximalist my style is. As a student recently told me, my poems are “very extra;” I think the formatting is a way of harnessing some of that “extra” energy and making it manageable. In terms of value it’s a mixed bag. Personally, I think there’s something interesting about forcing an “excessive” female voice inside the boundaries of a specific shape or lineation. It excites me (like a corset!), but I know it frustrates some readers, who are like, “Which way is this supposed to be read?!” And then I’m like, “Stop trying to ‘solve’ my poetry with your gender binaries!” And perhaps it’s also worth noting that I grew up in the slam poetry and drag communities in Austin. I love performing the drag of my gurlesque poetry, and I sometimes think the formatting is a way of costuming and performing on the page instead of the stage.

 

What was most influential for you in finding your voice as a writer?

It’s a six-way tie: Sharon Olds, drag queens, TCM, Frank Stanford, the Austin Poetry Slam in the 90s, and Robert Lowell.

 

Where do you find the most inspiration for your poetry? Or, where do you do your best writing?

If I’m ever feeling uninspired I go to an art museum and force myself to write a loosely ekphrastic poem in every single gallery. That usually produces some good work, or at least gets the faucet flowing again. It sounds cheesy, but my students are a big source of inspiration, as are my writer friends and stand-up comics. I spend a lot of time trying to spin embarrassments, regrets, and fears into something surreally and sonically interesting.

 

Just for kicks, why should people writefewer poems about bees?

Ha! Bee poems don’t bother me so much anymore, but Zach Martin and I were the editors of the literary magazine Gulf Coast at a time when there was a lot of news circulating about how bees were disappearing. While I totally agreed that this was an alarming trend (and still do), I remember getting very irritated by the huge uptick in the number of self-satisfied and baleful bee poems we received at the magazine. The more pervasive obsession for poets is birds. Too many bird poems! I’m guilty, too! At this point I just want poets to stop putting birds on their book covers.

 

Do you have any final comments for aspiring writers?

1) Nurture your obsessions via your writing and research (as long as you aren’t obsessed with birds).

2) Don’t be so precious about (and protective of) your early work. Just perform it and send it out. It’s probably terrible, but so what? The practice of submitting and sharing your work publicly will make you better. Just write more stuff. Write until the gold falls out of your mouth.

3) Find a group of writer friends who are better than you. Organize regular writing, editing, and submission sessions with them.

4) Try to win a poetry slam! It’s very educational. I’ve seen young writers improve ten-fold after participating in a few slams. It makes you much more aware of audience, compression, refrain, internal rhyme, rhythm, organization, ambiguity, and sensory engagement. Also, it’s fun (even when it’s terrible).  

5) Read more contemporary writers, obviously. Imitate the ones you like mercilessly. (Don’t worry; you’ll still eventually develop a “voice of your own.”)

6) Write in a journal (with a pen) during hypnogogic states—right before bed, or right when you wake up.  

7) Be weirder! 

8) Don’t “aspire” to be a writer; just be one.

Interview by Kristin Rawlings

---

On prose, poetry, playwriting

 

Sam Pink is a blunt, inimitable writer with little to no tolerance for any form of bullshit. His work, whether in prose, poetry, or play format, has been celebrated in the online and indie writing communities. Pink’s work captures the sense of modern urban malaise more accurately and with more stylistic flair than most any other current author. But above all else, he’s someone who makes anyone who reads him re-think the little things. He forces you to examine the small parts that build up your life. In this interview I ask him some pretentious questions on art, writing, and his place in the world. He responds accordingly. Pink currently lives in Florida. His next two books, The Garbage Times and White Ibis, are slated for release by Soft Skull Press in May 2018.

 

First off, introduce yourself and your work to someone who has never read your writing.

I would say, “Hey, what’s up. I’m a writer. I write romance novels and romance poetry. You’ll probably either really like it, or be mad it exists. Either way, I’d still kill for you.”

 

You’ve written novels, short story collections, plays, poetry, and sometimes you’ll combine more than one style in one book. How do your first drafts take shape? Do you set out to write a novel, or a play, or a poem, or does the story itself shape how it will be told?

I don’t have any creative control. The books write themselves. I’m just the stooge. The fall-guy.

 

You’ve made it clear through your books and online presence that you’re a working artist – how do your day jobs inform your process?

The artist is the filter or grinder, and everything else gets pushed through it.

 

As well as being a writer you’re a visual artist, but your work in that field sometimes feels like the opposite of your written work. Does one form of art inform the other? Do you see yourself gravitating towards one or another at different times?

Everything informs everything, you just have to tune in and try to learn. Yeah, sometimes I just want to draw, and other times writing really bligs my snitzers.

 

You have an uncanny ability to tap into base emotions without any bullshit “writerly” techniques. When you read, do you tend to seek out other writers who cut the flowery language, or do you find value in the long-winded approach?

Most of one’s approach towards writing is decided long in advance by how they choose to live and think. The process of writing extends from that, no matter who you are or what you’re writing.

 

Speaking of other writers, you recently had a cameo in Scott McClanahan’s “The Sarah Book”. You both are often kind of fucked over when it comes to genre labels – do you think there’s any point to trying to define the kind of work you do?

Hell yeah, Scott’s awesome. I love that guy. Fuck genres man. You don’t call Scott’s writing “neo-southern emo memoir” or something, you say, “motherfucking Scott McClanahan shit.” Predate the label. 

 

As a person who has interacted with the so-called indie-lit world for years, what do you make of the DIY scene today, deep in the internet age?

I think we’re about to enter another really good time for online/indie/what have you, type of writing. I can feel it. It is, and always has been, a force of tension. The more tension you have, the better the artists to emerge. Greater tests, greater wagers. Big bad wounds and better healing. I also think the increasingly more boring and sterile limitations society keeps pushing on people is going to tease out the real motherfuckers. The wolf smiling in the woods listening to its crier if you will.

 

You’re on a reading tour in the Florida area right now – do you enjoy reading your work? How do tours impact your writing?

I really enjoy reading my work and getting out. Tours impact writing in many ways. It helps you understand your own work better. It puts you in touch with sometimes otherwise hard to find people, and I think it really reminds you of why you do shit like that. It always makes me feel like I need to do way more and be better overall, in a way that feels positive and not self-loathing.

 

Interview by Tom Ronningen

 

September 18, 2018

Tags: Sam Pink, Author, Indie Lit, Florida, Soft Skull Press, Alt Lit, Blig, Snitzer

---

On embracing the “science fictional” in his latest novel, Sourdough

 

In this interview with New York Times Best Selling Author Robin Sloan, we talk about his influences and idols, the challenges of writing a sophomore novel, and his latest book, Sourdough.

I picked up my first Robin Sloan novel about a week before my nineteenth birthday. It was two weeks after I’d moved away for college and I was feeling particularly lost. Naturally, I’d wandered into a bookstore a couple blocks from my dorm. Sloan’s debut novel, Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, practically jumped off the shelf and into my hands. This book had set the tone for my first year of college and I’m really glad to have read it.

So imagine my excitement now, as a senior in college, with yet another Robin Sloan book coming out just days before my twenty-second birthday. I’d bought it without hesitation and devoured it immediately. This time around, I’ve got a lot more experience under my belt and an email interview with the author himself! What a perfect way to wrap up my college career!

Robin Sloan is the New York Times Best Selling author of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. His latest novel, Sourdough, follows the life of Silicon Valley programmer, Lois. After her favorite restaurant closes, the owners leave Lois a parting gift, the starter for their sourdough recipe. When the bread becomes a total hit at work, Lois sets her sights on getting her bread into one of the many farmers’ markets happening on around the city. While she doesn’t make it into any of the mainstream markets, she does get into the mysterious Marrow Fair, an upcoming farmer’s market where Silicon Valley meets The Food Network. Throughout the story, she struggles to find a balance between life, making bread with a robotic arm, and the mystery of the Marrow Fair.

  

You are a man of many talents in my opinion. Not many other people can boast that they write, code, and make olive oil (and I’m sure even fewer people can do them all at once). You’ve also worked on a literary magazine of your own creation. But to start things off, I do want to focus on your beginning. How did you get into writing? Were there any authors or stories that inspired you particularly?

 

Robin Sloan: Like any voracious reader, there are too many to name! Some books and feelings are with you almost from the start, though. Ellen Raskin’s Westing Game is one of the first books I can remember loving—I probably first read it when I was 10 or 11?—and across many years and many readings, there’s just something about it—the suspense, the puzzle, the spirit. I hope some trace of that is present in all my books.

 

With technology and society changing at a rapid pace, a lot of people have been forced to find new and innovative ways to get their creative work out there. You call yourself a media inventor. How has this influenced your writing?

 

Robin: Like a lot of people my age—I’m 37—I feel like I grew up with the internet, and I’ve always had curiosity about computers and how they work. The result has been that the challenge of being a writer and writing on the internet has always felt, if not easy, exactly, then at least welcome: I’ve always been eager to try new formats and figure things out.

 

I have to ask (and I’m sure you’ve gotten this one before) why glow-in-the-dark covers? I read in your interview with NPR that you wanted to create a physical copy worth buying, but of course, you could have chosen any number of different designs.

 

Robin: Well, I have to give all credit to the designer of both covers, Rodrigo Corral! In my estimation, he’s the best book cover designer working today. I didn’t even know glow-in-the-dark ink was an OPTION! But of course, as soon as it was proposed, I said: yes. I must have it. And I’ve received surprised emails from readers, time-stamped 2 a.m., ever since!

 

Are you the type of author who spends a lot of time researching information for your novels? If so, was Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore more difficult to research than Sourdough or vice versa?

 

Robin: I definitely did more research for Sourdough. I feel like the world of Penumbra was my world; I’d been researching it, in a sense, my whole life, just by being a nerd about books and computers and typefaces and everything else. As I wrote Sourdough, I was getting deeper and deeper into the world of food, but I never felt like a native: thus, a lot more reading and research.

 

You write fiction in a way that seems like fact. I know that in my reading of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, you could have told me that it was creative nonfiction and I might have actually believed it. The same instances happen in Sourdough, like with the existence of the Mazg or the science behind Jaina Mitra’s Lembas bread. Does this kind of matter-of-fact writing come naturally to you?

 

Robin: I think it does. The trick I love most of all is to tuck things into the gray space between the real and the fictional—to make people wonder, “is that really . . . ?” and then maybe hop over to Google to check. I think that’s a fun opportunity for writers in the internet-connected 21st century—something to be embraced, not avoided!

 

After the success of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, what was it like jumping into Sourdough? Did you find it difficult? What inspired you to write about a rather mystical sourdough starter in the first place?

 

Robin: I knew I wanted to write a story set in the world of San Francisco Bay Area food, simply because it’s so weird and interesting—it deserves to have stories told about it, and through it. I’d baked sourdough bread before, and as I started to piece this novel together, I realized it would be fun—well, a challenge, but a fun one—to try to make a supporting character out of a sourdough starter.

 

Both Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore and Sourdough showcase very competent women working in the tech industry. Was this something you intended from the start?

 

Robin: That’s a good question! In Sourdough, it was at least somewhat by design. As I introduced new characters, even really minor ones, I purposefully avoided the “default male” approach that can sometimes occur if you’re not paying attention. I have to say that I had a direct influence, which was the terrific science fiction novel Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie. I don’t want to say too much and give it away, but the book has a very interesting and, I thought, inspiring approach to gender.

 

Was Lois’ ending something you had planned from the start? It was very lovely, by the way. I don’t think I could have seen it go any other way.

 

Robin: I’m glad to hear it! Endings, of course, are always tricky. I didn’t have this one planned from the start, but I agree with you: I think Lois ended up in a good place. I’m glad the robot came, too. (I hope that’s a little bit enticing to people who haven’t read the book yet!)

 

What do you hope the reader takes away from reading your latest novel?

 

Robin: Oh gosh—lots of things. First and foremost, I hope they simply enjoy it. I always want my novels to deliver pleasure, at the most basic level. Beyond that, I hope they regard the microbial world with perhaps a little more awe than they did before! When I think about all the things that microbes do—for us, in us, with us—I think maybe our world is more science fictional than we realize.

 

August 21, 2018

Tags: Silicon Valley, Robin Sloan, Sourdough, Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, Interview, San Francisco Technology

---

Chicago Latina playwright, turned Hollywood TV writer

 

Tanya Saracho is a Mexican TV writer and playwright. After going to college for acting at Boston University she moved to Chicago where she lived for most of her early adult life. She’s been living in LA for many years but still considers Chicago her home. Saracho has written for a number of TV shows including Looking, Girls, Devious Maids, and How to Get Away With Murder. She has written many plays and was named “Best New Playwright” by Chicago Magazine in 2010.

            Her most recent work is a play called Fade. Fade follows two young Mexican and Mexican-Americans living in Los Angeles. The first is Lucia, a Mexican born writer who moves to LA to begin her career as a TV writer. There she meets Able, a Los Angeles born janitor from an immigrant family. Saracho puts a unique twist on the story of immigration and shines a new light on the writer in Hollywood. Fade ran at the Victory Gardens Theater in Chicago in 2017.

  

Was getting into theater something you always knew you wanted to do?

Tanya Saracho: I didn’t know I wanted to do theater until I fell into it by accident, it’s kind of a long story. When I first enrolled in school I had a thick accent from living in Mexico for so long and people would point out my accent and pronunciation. So when I was in seventh grade I kept seeing “Speech and Debate” posters in the halls. I thought it would be like speech therapy and if I joined, it would get rid of my accent. The very first meeting, they had me read the poem “Cinderella” by Roald Dahl. I kept going back every week and I would do voices as I read. I thought it would help with how I talked. Then the meetings turned into these competitions every Saturday, and I didn’t really know they were competitions, and I was winning with my reading of this dark Cinderella story. I thought these judges were like, speech therapists? I don’t know what I thought. I just kept going and kept doing it and I made friends. When we went into high school all of the kids who did speech and debate did drama too, so then I just joined drama and I fell in love. Like a lot of things in my life it just happened. I’m so glad I didn’t know what “Speech and Debate” was because I never would have done it.

  

Do you think, later in life, having an accent and being Latina limited your creative opportunities?

 Yes and no. For a long time, I didn’t notice. When I was in university I don’t think it was limiting, or maybe it could have been, and I just didn’t have the eye to see it yet. Where I grew up in Texas I didn’t really experience racism because we were all Mexican, Mexican-American, White-American but it was on the border, so everyone just understood who was around and what it was like. Then in university I needed to do Shakespeare and all those classics and they casted us all over the place. It didn’t matter who you were for a part. We could be an old lady or a little boy or anybody and that went across racial and ethnic lines. My school kind of shielded me from what was out there, and it was lovely, and then I got to Chicago. 

            I had this classical training. I went to Oxford to study Shakespeare. I had Alan Rickman and Fiona Shaw and Ben Kingsley as my amazing teachers. But in Chicago the only roles that I could get were the maids and the prostitutes. All of this was in 1998 so there was even less visibility than there is now. I couldn’t understand it. I kept saying that I have classical training! I kept being told that wasn’t going to matter because I was fat and I was Mexican so the only parts were going to be a maid or a funny prostitute, those were my choices and I thought it was bullshit. 

            The reason I built my career was because I was being affected by being Latina. I was being affected by this racism, but I didn’t just sit down and take it, I made something out of it.

  

You went to school for acting and you were dead set on being an actor, how did you come to be a playwright? Was that something you were interested in before?

 In the beginning I had no idea I was going to write plays. I just knew I needed to act so I was like: I’m going to write a play. I’m going to write a play so that I can act. So it did limit me in some ways but pushed open doors in others. It was the start of me creating an all Latina theater company, Teatro Luna. 

            At that time, I didn’t know anybody in Chicago, I hadn’t even been there a year so it was just me going door-to-door asking if anyone knew of any Latina actors. I went to Hispanic community centers asking for Latina actresses and there was a guy there who kept saying, “You mean Latino,” and I just kept saying no, Latina. I spoke Spanish, I knew what I was asking. He told me that starting an all-female Latin theater company would be counter-productive to the movement, but I’m so glad I was only in my twenties and didn’t listen to him. So I just kept hanging flyers and knocking on people’s doors. It was so hard for me to wrap my head around. I was in a city as diverse as Chicago, and I couldn’t find eight Latina actresses. When I finally got it going I was able to run it for ten years and it was amazing. We did all our own work and created ethnographic performances based, basically, on our own lives and as we grew, our work grew with us and I think that was one of the most magical parts of being a part of Teatro Luna.

 

You were able to carve out your place in Chicago but how was it in LA? Were they more welcoming and accepting? 

No. It was shitty. I was not mentally and emotionally prepared to write for television. I was doing a play and a UTA agent. (I kept calling it oota and my friends were like, “its U-T-A, dummy.”) I didn’t know shit about it. I knew about Chicago but I didn’t know anything about Hollywood. I didn’t need to know anything, and I didn’t need to be bothered with anything beyond my Teatro Luna stuff. But the agency had gotten a hold of a play I wrote called Mala Hierba, I don’t really know where they got it from, but an agent had reached out and wanted to have lunch. And in theater you never have lunch, you only have coffee. I was like, shit they wanna take me out to lunch? Yeah! This happened sometime in 2011 and I wasn’t doing that well financially, but I was super happy. None of my artist friends in Chicago are ever doing well financially but nobody knows it, they’re just happy. We’re all doing the work we want to do. We love our area, we love our friends. I loved my apartment, I loved my cats. It was a great life! 

            Then during the summer when I went out with that guy from UTA, he said he really thought I could write for television but that wasn’t anything I had ever even considered that was a thing you could do for a living. I watched The Sopranos and I watched True Blood, that was the only TV I watched at the time. So the guy just said that I had an eye that could work on TV and he said just go to LA and “take meetings” and just go to talk about myself. That’s exactly what I did, and it was so weird. You just have to go and basically charm them. I don’t know. Then one of those meetings resulted in a job. I didn’t even know that we were on that track and then the next thing I knew I was working in a writing room but I knew nothing. I couldn’t pitch, I didn’t know what an outline was, or a final draft. And in that first day they wanted me to write one act. I didn’t know what that meant because my plays were ninety-minute one acts, but they wanted five acts to fit into a one-hour TV show. 

            I was walking that first day with a coworker that I had just met and he turned to me and said, “You do know you’re the diversity hire, right?” I asked him what that meant and he just says, “Oh honey.” Like, oh you poor thing.

            I called my agent later that day to ask if I was the diversity hire and he said technically yes but he didn’t want to tell me, so it wouldn’t get in my head. I couldn’t believe it. I was the only person of color in that room. The only Latina working on a Latina show. And it was a diversity hire. I was getting paid because of affirmative action. After that I didn’t know how to contribute. Did they only want me for the Latina suggestions, was I supposed to actually contribute at all? I didn’t know what my value was. And that was just the first day!

 

How has your writing and writing style changed from writing plays to writing for TV?

So a one-hour TV drama is usually five acts and the commercials are at the end of each act and it was so different. I used to write one act for an hour and I never wrote for a commercial before, I thought that was so weird. In the theater I write really long scenes but on TV a scene is only like, a page or two. That was something that was really hard to adapt to. Now though, I’m trying to go back to writing for theater and I cannot write the long scenes anymore, and it’s so bad. It’s tainted my theater writing and I don’t know how to get that back. I haven’t been able to write a play in almost three years. Fadewas the last play I wrote and that was three years ago when I was still making the transition to TV but I’m still mainly a theater person. But now, I try to go back, and I don’t know how to do it. I don’t know what’s going to happen. The whole point of coming to TV was so that I would have the means to do theater. 

 

How much of the Mexican culture influences your writing beyond having Mexican characters?

Its changed a little bit. The play I mentioned before, Mala Hierba, had a much stronger cultural influence because the setting was closer geographically to the border. Fadeis set in LA in a film studio, but I have characters with backgrounds in Mexico so they reference Mexico all the time but they’re also American. They’re navigating what it means to be a first and second generation Mexican-American. Then I have another play, El Nogalar, that takes place in Mexico. So it all really just depends on the play but they’re all connected to Mexico whether it be close to it or far away.

 

Interview by Cali Lemus

July 24, 2018

Tags: Tanya Saracho, Latina, TV Writer, Playwright

---

On performance, melding politics with art, and the importance of writing and studying genre

 

C. S. E. Cooney is an audiobook narrator, the singer/songwriter Brimstone Rhine, author of World Fantasy Award-winning Bone Swans: Stories (Mythic Delirium, 2015), author of the Dark Breakers series of novels, as well as several poetry and prose anthologies such as How To Flirt in Fearieland. Cooney’s work blends inspiration from fantasy and myth, while also maintaining a fresh voice and lyrical cadence well-suited to be read aloud. I had the lucky chance to talk with her about her past and future work, as well as topics such as performance, melding politics with art, and the importance of writing and studying genre. 

 

You write across many forms of prose, poetry, and some enigmatic mixes of the two. Your work often falls into fantasy with roots in European folklore and mythology. Has your work always swayed towards the fantastic?

Oh, you know, I was born in 1981. My childhood was Krull and The Dark Crystal and Legend and Labyrinth and Willow and Ladyhawke and Dragonslayer and Faerie Tale Theatre and Star Trek: The Next Generation. Add to that a liberal dose of musical theater blasting about the house—Rogers and Hammerstein, Lerner and Lowe, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, but above all—Stephen Sondheim!—and that’s a helluva lot of fairy tales and show business. 

I was born “swayed.” 

 

Your full-length novels, The Breaker Queen and The Two Paupers, are parts of the Dark Breakers series. How did you go about worldbuilding for the Dark Breakers series? Is there anything more for the series?

I started with the notion of an alternate world. Somewhere very like Earth (very like, in fact, Newport, Rhode Island, circa 1900-ish), but not Earth. I decided to stick the Dark Breakers series in the same world as some of my shorter fiction, but further up the timeline. In other words, a fantasy world that had had its industrial revolution, and its vaccine shots. 

Seafall and Southern Leressa are both mentioned in my novella “How the Milkmaid Struck a Bargain with the Crooked One,” in my collection Bone Swans. But in the Dark Breakers novellas we’ve fast-forwarded about a thousand years give or take. Whole eras have passed between the “then” of “Milkmaid” and the “now” of Dark Breakers, with great shifts in politics and technology and even mythology.

As far as world-building for Dark Breakers, I feel like I’m continually doing research on early 20th century America, and then bending that research to my will. I want verisimilitude, but I’m not interested in unadulterated devotion to fact. That’s why I write fantasy; it’s a whole different world! And it’s MINE! That means the parallels between Earth’s history and Athe’s history don’t have to be exact. I can play with patents and fashion and invention and slang. I just want the worlds to be similar enough that Athe will feel familiar and welcoming to the Earthling reader. Then I can make the really weird stuff happen. I found the books Gilded Suffragists: the New York Socialites Who Fought for Women’s Right to Vote and The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensics in Jazz Age New York to be particularly inspiring. 

 

The Bone Swans of Amandale was directly inspired by the Pied Piper myth, but told with elements that you filled in yourself. How do you balance inspiration from the old with your elements of the new?

You know, a former classmate of mine at Columbia College Chicago, Luke Herman—he took some of the same playwriting courses I did—once told me that my works were “marvelous collisions.” Leaving “marvelous” aside, I think the keyword is “collisions.” That’s where the newness occurs. In the “What if?” What if I took “The Pied Piper” and rammed it at full speed into Grimms’ “The Juniper Tree” and gave it a 1st POV named Maurice the Incomparable? What if he were a RAT? That would be funny, right? 

That’s not so much an act of balance between old and new as an act of, I don’t know, cheeky alchemy. I don’t want to ever depend upon a reader’s familiarity with an old story to carry my new one. Myself, I’ve come to so many story origins backwards, and never lost a moment’s enjoyment because of that. 

For instance, I saw The Sword and the Stone first, when I was little. And then I listened to (and memorized) the musical Camelot. Only in my late twenties did I even read T. H. White’s The Once and Future King, which was the seed of both the Disney cartoon and the Broadway musical. And I confess, I haven’t even read Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur yet, which is the seed of The Once and Future King. To take another example: I learned the musical Rent in high school. Later on in my teens, I was reading an old book of opera stories I’d picked up for a dollar at a library sale. I came upon the description of La Bohème, and went shouting through the house: “THIS SOUNDS JUST LIKE RENT! Look! There’s even a MIMI! Only she dies of CONSUMPTION, not AIDS!” And my dad said, “I think you’ve got it backwards.” 

If someone comes to “The Bone Swans of Amandale” before they ever encounter the myth of the Pied Piper, I want my Pied Piper to leave such a lasting impression, that when they finally stumble across the Arthur Rackham illustration, or the Brothers Grimm story, or the Robert Browning poem, or even Terry Pratchett’s The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents (which I never even READ before I wrote “The Bone Swans of Amandale”; I named MY Maurice after the illustrator Maurice Sendak, misremembering him for Mercer Mayer in my faulty brains!), they will say, “Hey! This is just like that C. S. E. Cooney story!” 

 

Do you believe there is a performance aspect to your readings? Has your work as a singer and musician informed this?

I so very much believe in writers learning to perform their own work well that I sometimes teach workshops about it. Seriously, it’s called “From Page to Stage.” I’ve had the advantage of intense theatre training for most of my life—both at Columbia College, where I minored in Acting—and before that at my performing arts high school, Arizona School for the Arts, where I double-majored in Theatre and Voice. And before that, from years of children’s theatre and choir, and a captive audience of younger brothers and a mother and a best friend who listened to me read aloud, and, and . . . 

I’ve felt the double-call of vocation my whole life—as both an actor and a writer. Sometimes, I was working so many jobs, I didn’t have time to be in plays, and the only time I got to perform was my own work at open mics and fiction readings and 24 Hour Festivals. Now, I’m an audiobook narrator, so I get to read books aloud all the time—and pay off my college debt with a job in the arts. WHO KNEW SUCH THINGS WERE POSSIBLE?! I don’t get to sing in public very often anymore. Usually, I have to put on a concert as a birthday present to myself, just for the pleasure of singing my songs in front of people. Sometimes I embed songs in my text just so that I’ll get to sing them aloud at a reading. That’s sort of cheating, but that’s okay. It’s all in good fun. It’s super important to know how to read out loud well for an audience—sometimes, it’s a reader’s first impression of your work, and might inspire them to go out and pursue more of it, or recommend it to friends!

 

Do you think it’s important for all writers to study genre fiction, even if their own work may not be? Why or why not?

I recently heard writer and National Book Award-winner Will Alexander tell an audience, “Read widely and wildly.” I love that. Let’s do that. 

Anyway, to ignore genre is to ignore the current culture. What’s hot, what’s selling. It’s Star Trek and Star Wars and Harry Potter and Game of Thrones and Zombies and American Gods and Superheroes and Dystopias. That’s genre. Also, to ignore genre is to ignore possibility. To limit your own horizon. It’s sort of like a poet saying, “I want to write ONLY LIMERICKS. Sonnets, go sit in the corner. I don’t even want to be in the same room as those haikus. The sestinas can sleep in the barn.”  But, also, more practically: “genre” is as much a marketing term as anything else. It’s arbitrary. It changes. I studied Toni Morrison’s Beloved in one of my Fiction classes at Columbia. It’s a ghost story. It’s horror. It’s pure genre. We also read Marquez’s “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” in a Dreams and Fiction Class; that’s Magical Realism, a Latin American sub-genre of the Fantastic. Genre! It’s everywhere! 

 

Where do you think the modern fantasy genre is going? Of your peers, what themes or root texts seem to be taking center stage?

I think Modern Fantasy is at the vanguard of a larger literary movement that will be remembered as the most diverse, the most inclusive, many-voiced, many-peopled, genre-exploding, gender-bending dazzling firmament of genius and imagination that the world has yet known. I think, finally, we will begin to see literature in all genres that will reflect the world around us in all its variety, and not just the received narratives of conquerors. 

I see the roots of it now. And the burgeoning wings. And I think the artists upholding and driving this movement will take us to places even science fiction writers cannot yet imagine. 

Well, yeah, okay. Maybe them. They probably can. 

Interviewed by Bec Ucich

July 10, 2018

---

On writing novels and stories for Businessweek

 

Interviewed by Cody Lee, Reviews Editor

I bartend at a little Irish bar on the north side of Chicago, and people come and go every day—mostly bodies without faces or names. However, I remember first seeing this fellow sitting in the back, typing away at his computer, a stack of papers by his side, and a PBR in his glass. My manager, well aware that I consider myself somewhat of a writer, too, jumped on the opportunity to tell me that that’s Bryan Gruley, a Pulitzer-winning author that lives in the neighborhood. I didn’t believe him, so I googled the name, and there it was.

Fast forward a couple of weeks, and Bryan and I chat about books, and the processes of writing. I give him a drink or two free, and in return, he supplies me with some of the knowledge that he’s picked up over the years, dealing with agents and publishers, etc. etc.

He is the author of three mystery novels, and currently works as a reporter for Bloomberg Businessweek.

Cody Lee: What would you say is the difference between writing professionally and writing for fun? How would/should students entering the “real world” bridge the gap between the two?

Bryan Gruley: I don’t make much of a distinction between writing “professionally” and writing “for fun.” I suppose by the former you mean getting paid to write, but I have as much fun writing stories for Businessweek as I do making things up (for which I also enjoy getting paid). My first piece of advice to any aspiring writer is simply this: Ass in chair. Write. Write every day, whether you’re getting paid or not, whether it’s fun or not (some days are more fun than others, if you know what I mean). If you can find a forum for your writing, be it a website or a magazine or a book publisher, all the better. The only way to find the forum, though, is to write. I have a quotation taped to my laptop, supposedly from the novelist Jack London. It says, “You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.” 

CL: First published novel—could you walk us through the steps it took to get there? What did the aftermath consist of?

BG: I’ve wanted to write novels since I was in grade school. I took a pretty serious detour to nonfiction by way of newspapers from Kalamazoo to Washington D.C., to Chicago. In retrospect, it was also a necessary detour, because I didn’t have the personal experience nor the skills to write a novel until I actually wrote one. In 2000-01, I wrote about 25,000 words of a novel that my agent did not like. There was a glimmer of hockey in it, though, and my agent said, “Why don’t you write me a story about these middle-aged guys who play hockey in the middle of the night?” I had an idea that very instant.

It took me four years to write Starvation Lake. Then I endured a year of rejections—twenty-six in all—before the Simon & Schuster imprint Touchstoneoffered me a three-book contract. That was an exciting day in 2007. The book wasn’t published for almost two years. I wish I could tell you why, except to say that the publishing industry doesn’t move quickly. Meantime, I wrote what I thought would be the second book in the series. It wasn’t very good. I basically threw it out and started over. Seven months later, I turned in The Hanging Tree, much improved. In between, I enjoyed the thrill of being a first-time author. The best part was traveling around and talking with friends old and new about the town and characters I’d created. Starvation Lake sold very well for a debut, but I wasn’t about to be able to quit my day job.

CL: What, in your opinion, is missing in contemporary literature?

 BG: I can’t really say. It’s a little embarrassing to admit, but between writing for Bloomberg Businessweek, working on my next novel, playing hockey, and enjoying my family and friends, I don’t have the time to read as much as I’d like. I do read almost every night before going to sleep, but not widely enough to answer your question. That said, my favorite book of the last couple of years is a contemporary novel, The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach. It’s old-fashioned in the sense that it takes its time about moving the story along and developing the characters. Great story, great writing. I looked forward to picking it up every night. 

CL: What would be your critique of schooling, and how could teachers and programs (specifically, related to writing) better prepare their students for the writing community outside of a school system bubble? 

BG: I honestly don’t know enough about what’s happening in academia to answer the first part of your question, but the answer to the second one is simple: Write. Or, as my friend the essayist and novelist Brian Doyle told me years ago: 1) Ass in chair 2) Type better than sixty WPM 3) Shut up 4) Get a job. If #4 is a job that pays your bills, all the better.

CL: How important is understanding business as a writer, if at all? 

BG: If you mean the importance of understanding the business of writing—selling your articles or books or poems or whatever—you certainly need to understand how things work if you’re going it alone, say, as a freelancer. You can be less worried about the sausage-making if you work for a large company that focuses on that.

CL: Quality or quantity in regards to online publications?

BG: Maybe I’m naïve, but I think you ought to always try to do your best work. That said, sometimes you have more time or freedom or resources than you do other times. Especially when you’re just getting started, you want to get your name out there, and the more it’s out there, the more likely you are to attract readers, viewers, sources, hiring editors. Still, crappy work is crappy work, and won’t help you regardless of how much of it is out there.

CL: In your own words, what significance does “mystery” have as a genre?

BG: I am fond of arguing that most novels are essentially mysteries in which the writer poses a question that the book seeks to answer. Holden Caulfield is in insane asylum. How and why did he wind up there? Salinger tells us in the rest of that book. As a genre, though, mystery attracts huge numbers of readers. Along with their close cousins, thriller, mysteries are by far the most popular books. Alas, some are formulaic, predictable, unimaginative. But the best ones are literature: Lehane, Mosely, Chandler, Hammett. Mystic River is one of the best novels I’ve ever read (and a lot better than some of the navel-gazing drivel that the elite “literature” reviewers love so much).

CL: Who are the best writers out right now, and why?

 BG: Again, I don’t read enough for such superlatives, but in addition to Harbach’s novel, books by contemporary authors I’ve enjoyed in the past year or so include Frank Bills’s short-story collection, Crimes in Southern Indiana; Emma Cline’s The Girls; and my pal Doyle’s semi-autobiographical Chicago.

CL: Why do you write?

BG: You might as well ask why I love my wife and kids, why I get up in the morning, why I eat. It’s what makes me me.

CL: Donald Trump is our president. What is next for America? What is next for Bryan Gruley?

 BG: I won’t hazard any specific guesses, except this one, which has been played out in history time and again: the party in power will overplay its hand and the political pendulum will swing back in the other direction. As for me, I’m finishing the rewrite of a novel called The Last of Danny, about the kidnapping of an autistic boy. Wish me luck persuading a publisher to take it on.

Cody Lee has no sense of humor, and hates everyone. He’s smart, too.

June 12, 2017

---

On the passion of photography

 

Interviewed by William Grant

Doug McGoldrick is a fascinating man. I met him while attending Columbia College Chicago where he teaches photography classes part-time. When I took his class, I was in the process of creating a new photographic series that I was incredibly passionate about. Doug was one of the biggest influences for me during that time. His encouragement and insight helped push me to create some of my best work.

When I was assigned the task of interviewing an artist for Hair Trigger 2.0, I immediately reached out to Doug. From my time working with him, I knew he would make for an interesting interview. He’s done a bit of everything and seems to always be ready for something new and compelling. In the interview below he tells me about his passion for photography, his favorite things to shoot, and how he defines his success.

Will Grant: When did your passion for photography begin?    

Doug McGoldrick: When I was in grade school my dad was an amateur photographer, and we would sometimes go out on weekends and take nature photos together. What sparked it? Getting photos back from the camera store and seeing my photos when I was a kid was super exciting.

WG: You’ve done a wide variety of work ranging from weddings to industrial factories to motorcyclists and more. Is there one subject you’ve done that interests you the most or is there fun in always changing?

DM: For me whenever I can get to see behind the scenes someplace where most people don’t get to be, I’m happiest. I think in my heart doing documentary-type work is my favorite. I think part of it is, growing up I was very shy and bringing my camera into a place to take pictures gave me a reason to talk to people.

WG: Do you have other non-photographic hobbies and do they ever bleed into your photographic work?

DM: I do a lot of painting and drawing and they tend to go together with my photography nicely. Also bike racing and motorcycles are things I’m into, taking photos in those communities gives me an excuse to talk to people and get more involved than I would normally be.

WG: Is there a series/subject matter that you’d like to explore in your work that you haven’t yet?

DM: Oh man, so many. I would really love to go on tour with a dance company or band and shoot everything. Also any sort of big, dirty industry.

WG: You’re a part-time teacher at Columbia College Chicago. What is a key piece of advice you share with all your students? What is something unexpected or valuable that you’ve learned from your students?

DM: Lately I’ve been teaching a business of photography class and I like to let all the students know that in the photo biz moreso than almost any other, competition is incredible and to make it you need to be a person who hustles harder than the rest. I’m always learning so much from the students, a lot of it is tech stuff, but to me the most exciting thing is seeing how people’s way of seeing the world changes.

WG: How do you define success and, by your definition, do you consider yourself successful?

DM: I think if you are making your living from photography you are in a sense successful, because it’s really hard. In my head I have this picture of success where I’m not pushing myself out there for work but work is just coming to me; I don’t think I’m there and probably nobody really is. Sometimes I feel like a success, sometimes I don’t. I was talking to another photographer recently, joking about how some months you want to start driving for Lyft and some months you feel like you could buy a Tesla. It’s a strange biz but way better than going to an office every day.

See Doug’s work at dougphoto.com

William Grant is a Photography and Fiction Writing major at Columbia College Chicago. He enjoys broccoli and Anna Kendrick.

May 01, 2017

Tags: Will Grant, Doug McGoldrick, Photographer, Photography, Interview, Art Editor, Teaching Photography, Business of Photography, Subject Matter, Impulse to Create, Columbia College Chicago, Advice for Artists