Do you consider yourself a late bloomer?

We’ll have to see.

You’ve written a lot about late bloomers and what it takes to find success creatively and professionally later in life. If you had to give one piece advice on how to become a late bloomer, what would you say?

Whatever it is that you’re going to do, you’ve already done something that’s relevant. You need to work out what that is and turn it into something productive.

How does one choose?

I’m always tempted to say that you shouldn’t have to choose. Also, people often conflate two things, motivation and success. I joked that I’m not a late bloomer yet because I haven’t bloomed. But clearly I am in the sense that I wanted to be a writer and I’m doing it, whether or not I become rich or acclaimed in the New York Times. That’s not what it’s about. I have motivation. I’m following the motivation. I’m doing the thing. I earn money by writing. That’s what I wanted to do. I’m not Malcolm Gladwell. That’s a separate point.

People often ask, “How do I find the thing where I’m going to be successful?” And it’s like, what does successful mean? Doing what you’re motivated to do? Or does it mean meeting certain external measures? If you’ve bundled these two things together, that may be a mistake.

What would you say to people who might ask, “Why focus on late blooming? Why not just focus on acceptance of current circumstances?”

Clearly plenty of people don’t accept their current circumstances. To me, it’s obviously inherent to a certain type of person to not accept your circumstances. That’s why people crossed oceans and founded new places. I think that’s an essential part of being human.

You’ve written about moments of crisis being important moments for people to change their lives and blossom. Is a logical conclusion that we should all be having life crises at age 20 and then again at 40 and 60?

I don’t think everyone should be doing this, but there’s a prevailing idea that a crisis when you’re young is an opportunity to rethink, explore, and do new things. But a crisis when you’re middle aged is generally seen as, well, don’t screw it up. You know what I mean? You’ve got to get through that. I think a lot of that is now becoming psychologized. This thing that gets called therapy talk and “doing the work.” It sounds like what people are doing is trying to turn the crisis to some kind of new state. But I suspect that a lot of the time, it doesn’t really lead to very much actual change in your life. It may lead to reorganization of how you think about some personal relationships. But I think there should be more of a sense that if someone has a midlife crisis, sometimes that is a signal that you should make some changes.

A midlife crisis might be less dramatic than the way it happens in the movies—new cars, divorces, all this stuff—but maybe it’s a good old-fashioned feeling of, “My life has lost all sense of purpose. What am I going to do?”

Obviously it’s not simple to actually then undertake those changes. But not all crises are crises that you can analyze your way out of.

There’s long been debate over whether suffering is necessary for art. How do crises fit into that? You have kids and theoretically you want them to be able to find something meaningful in their lives, without going through a crisis or suffering. How do you get them there?

I don’t want them to suffer. But your children will suffer, you will suffer. The people you know have suffered, your parents have suffered. It’s really unpleasant when your children are really sad about something. But it’s also how they grow up, how they learn. It gives you very good opportunities to talk to them about the way things are or what you know. I’m not convinced most parenting talk makes much difference. But sometimes when they’re really upset about something and you just say one thing, it can make a little bit of difference. So you have to learn to live with their suffering sometimes. It can be very sad. But that’s not their fault. That’s not their problem. That’s my problem.

Did you have a life crisis that inspired you to write this book?

In a very small way—and this is what I mean about small crises—I was just bored. I think boredom is genuinely bad for people. I was so bored, I was on the edge of tears. It was just so dull. And I was convinced I’d need a different job. And I had cancer about seven years ago. I didn’t think that was one of those turning moments. The doctor said to me, “You’re going to come to me afterwards and say this is the best thing that ever happened to you. You’ll write your book.” I said, “Just tell me what time to get here and how bad I’m going to feel. I’m not going to have a spiritual moment.” But I did start blogging while I was having my treatment, again out of boredom more than anything else. So I wasn’t having dark nights of the soul or whatever. It’s very hard to make a movie about someone going through a crisis of boredom, but I think it’s happening a lot and it’s absolutely corrosive.

It’s all too easy to treat boredom with stimulation. Social media, YouTube, TV, what have you.

But also, chatting in the pub.

So how did you avoid those usual drawbacks?

Who’s saying I avoided them? The biggest thing was the confluence of factors. I wanted to change my career. I was incredibly bored. I’d started blogging. I’ve written in my book about nuns. There is a moment when they’ve discovered their vocation, but either before or after that moment, there’s a prolonged period of becoming. The vocation coming to be true or coming to be real. It’s not, “I woke up one day and found God, so now I’m a nun.” It’s instead, “I realized my thing. Now it’s going to take quite a long time to work through that.”

Do you have to fall in love with struggle or the challenge?

I think you have to have motivation. I interviewed the economist Robin Hansen, and he told me motivation is the closest thing we have to magic. I come back to that a lot. If you have motivation, the struggle is not really a problem. A lot of what people complain about at work is that usually you like something about your job, something motivates you, but it’s encrusted with all sorts of other stuff to do, bureaucratic, administrative, making your laptop work. You have zero motivation for these tasks. So you can feel miserable in a job that you love. It’s more about getting the balance right between doing things you’re motivated to do with the things you’re not. I don’t think you can learn to love the struggle as such.

How young were you when you started writing?

I don’t really know. I’m not one of these people who knows a lot about their childhood. Some people can be like, “I wrote my first story when I was 4, and it was about a caterpillar in Wellingtons.” And I’m like, how do you know? I don’t remember.

You might have written that.

Yeah, I probably could have done, but I have no idea. I don’t understand how people know these things. What I really was and am is a reader. I think that’s the essential thing. I think what I’m doing is being a public reader more than anything else.

Do you think that reading can be a creative act?

Some people would say so, but I think what they really mean is that your response to the book is the creative act. I think creativity means you make something. And I think reading isn’t quite like that. If you have an idea about what you’ve read and you tell that idea to someone, that’s creative.

You’ve quoted Samuel Johnson as saying that all young men should read five hours a day. Do you read five hours a day? Did you ever read five hours a day?

I may even read more now than when I was young. In a good week I read for 20 or 30 hours or more. I can go to the library and do seven hours of reading and that is actually a sensible use of my day.

What is your usual daily schedule between writing and reading and other things?

I am very messy. I see all this advice about getting a schedule and habits and I’m the polar opposite of all this. I just do whatever is most worrying me on the to-do list. A lot of times the to-do list is not that urgent. So I go to the library and read and write and do whatever I want. I like to have screen free time in the library. No phone, no laptop. Other days, like today, I owe a lot of people a lot of things. I’m going to have to scramble through my list.

You’ve written that expertise can lead sometimes to illusions of competence. Do you ever worry about your own illusion of competence?

All the time. Well, that’s why I try to read so much. I don’t think someone writing criticism should stop learning.

So reading is the way to counteract that.

It depends on what you read. For literature, what I try to do is keep following footnotes and keep reading people whose work I’m unfamiliar with, whose ideas I might not like. I try to understand other ways of thinking.

Does anything come to mind of a writer or idea that you were skeptical of at first, but then came to appreciate?

Modernism. I hated modernism. I thought the whole thing was just a terrible mistake. Now I quite like it. I’m still fundamentally very different to a lot of the post-modernists and the literary theory people, but I do try and learn from them. I don’t do a good job. Substack is good for this because I have a lot of people reading me now who have a wide range of literary views and they’ll leave comments or disagree with me on Notes. And I think that’s very useful. That’s what I like about it. The other day I said to someone, “I really liked your review.” And they were like, “But I thought you hated that. I thought you loved that book. And my review said that I hated the book.” And I was like, “Yes, I did love the book, but it’s good to read a review that’s like, no, this is trash.”

You’ve also written about the importance of connecting different areas of thought. Like how Michelangelo started by painting bodies and then becoming an architect. Do you have any strategies to diversify your areas of thought and intelligence and keep it fresh?

I don’t need strategies for my own interests, but I do need to find other ways of writing about them. I helped to write the Progress studies Wikipedia page last year, and that whole area is kind of absent from my work because I’ve become a bit more focused and specialized. I used to write more about those things. I might have a piece coming out soon about related topics. Also, I’m quite interested in AI and a lot of literary people aren’t, so I might be writing more about that as well, but I don’t know. Some people hate me for that.

What is your take on AI and the opportunities that it presents?

My take is basically, it’s here, it’s not going away, and it’s not just slop. You’d be insane to just ignore it or think that it’s only a lot of scams. But I am seeing literary people saying this, and I’m like, guys, they’re trying to cure cancer with this. What are you talking about? Give me a break. How it applies to literature, I think there are two ways. The first is that literary culture was changed hugely by things like photography, radio, the movies, and television. And literature always incorporated that and responded to that, even if it was hostile to it. With the internet, though, the novel has not done a good job of writing about the internet. And if it keeps doing that with AI, that will be a mistake. But sometimes it takes novelists some time. In Charles Dickens, famously, the first train to appear in his work is in Dombey and Sons in the late 1840s, quite late compared to how long trains had been around.

I’m not saying writers have to turn around and say AI is amazing. But I don’t really see how we have a viable literature if it’s all set in 1974, technologically. That’s just weird, isn’t it?

If you had to reinvent yourself right now, and take on a completely new vocation or passion, what would it be?

Well, because of AI, I might have to. I would quite like to be a gardener. I used to do a lot of gardening, and my wife is very talented at it. So I’d be the helper. She’d be the thinker. I don’t know if I’d be good, but I’d enjoy it very much.

What do you like about gardening?

I like the arrangement of shape and color, and I love growing things. I love being with the soil. Robert Frost, one of my favorite poets, wrote a lot about soil. Writers today, they don’t understand that stuff at all. The earth, plants, all that kind of thing. We have a very urban literature. But it would be good for them to get a new pastoral tradition.

This post was originally published on The Creative Independent.

What’s your work situation right now?

I’m a working writer and have been for a while. I started working the way I do now in 2020. I was working at this VICE vertical, Garage. It folded during the pandemic. I really hated that job a lot. I had to write two posts a week and they could kind of be about whatever I wanted, but I found it made me hate writing. When I got laid off I was like, “I’m never going to work in media again.”

Because you had to just come up with bullshit all the time?

Yeah. That’s a horrible way to work. But also around that time I started a really serious reading practice. I was reading a ton of novels, like 50 or 60 a year. Now I’m friends with all these novelists and they read, like, 100 books a year, but 60 is a lot for me… So I was reading a ton, and I was starting to write fiction. I decided I was not going to have another writing job again and that this was the only kind of writing I can tolerate. I impulsively applied to the Columbia MFA program and then got in, and since then have been doing whatever bullshit a person can do to be able to pay my rent, maintain a creative practice, and support my fiction habit. I’ve done every sort of shitty job, from Photoshopping vibrators onto white squares for SELF magazine, to ghostwriting women’s OnlyFans messages, to ghostwriting copy for a grey-market watch app. Most recently my jobs are that I teach at Columbia and I’m a fact-checker at Graydon Carter’s Air Mail.

Did you experience a learning curve when you shifted from writing for digital media to writing fiction?

Yeah, totally. I always wrote stories as a kid, from a really young age. As soon as I was able to write anything I was writing fiction. But then I completely stopped in college because I was like, “This is a hobby for a child and I’m going to become a serious writer.” When I switched gears to writing fiction again after I quit working in media, it felt so scary. But it also felt like the most intuitive kind of writing that I had ever done in my life. The potential energy that I thought I needed to do it felt impossible initially, but then once I was actually doing it, it felt easy, like it just makes sense to me. The stuff I was writing was bad, but I realized that I understand how to do things like form a narrative because I have been doing it my whole life.

Were you doing writing prompts? What was the ideation process like before you started writing your book?

The way I started writing fiction was I decided to write 200 words of fiction a day. I was seeing [my ex-boyfriend] at the time and he encouraged me, “You should really try writing fiction because you have all these opinions about novels.” He and his friend were sending each other 200 words of fiction a day, and I decided to do a version of that for myself. Once I realized I loved doing that, I was writing short stories pretty much immediately. I had the idea for this novel in the back of my head. I knew I wanted to write it, I just couldn’t figure it out for another several months. But within about six months of me starting to write fiction, I was working on the book.

You’ve rejected the label of autofiction for your novel. What were you comfortable leaning into and what were you pushing against in terms of mining your own life?

That’s a really hard question. The small story of my book is based on some real things that happened to me. But if I were to write the small story as the whole thing, I would find that deeply unsatisfying. That doesn’t feel like a book I would want to read. Like, okay, it’s a book about a girl in her early 20s who lives in a punk venue with her boyfriend and the relationship doesn’t work out. I was trying to find a version of that story that was packaged in a style I actually want to read. My taste was and is geared towards writers like Kafka or Donald Barthelme or Kathy Acker. How can I make my stupid story about being a young woman in New York more exciting?

There are all these opinions about MFAs and how they shape writers. In one piece, you were quoted comparing MFA peer feedback to the Goodreads comment section. But I feel like you had a positive experience in your program overall?

Definitely. I’m glad I did the MFA. I don’t recommend going to Columbia for a lot of people. It’s very expensive; I got a ton of [scholarship] money and I was still paying for a lot of it myself. But what I got out of it was being forced to work on my novel. When I started I think I had 40 pages of it written, and I basically just worked on it the whole time I was there. I also was in a really good community of writers who were as serious about it as I was and cared about books in the same way that I did. It was great to be reading each other’s writing and pushing each other to be better.

Do you like teaching? Has it taught you anything about your own practice?

I love teaching. I never thought I would do it until I got offered the opportunity to. I teach undergrad; a lot of them are teenagers, and are both not self-conscious at all and at the same time so self-conscious. All this stuff has made me a better editor of my own work because I’m thinking all the time about how to help other people with theirs… I love seeing how a lot of [my students] are goofy and funny and willing to go there.

I can see the consensus of your book being, “Oh she really goes there.” Did you have moments of thinking you needed to pull back? Did you ever think to yourself, “No, I am not allowed to include doodles in my novel.”

There was stuff I was pulling back on because I felt like I was culling from my own life too much and I want that to just be for me. But in terms of worrying if it’s too crazy, no. Later, when I was working on my book with an agent and editor, they were the ones who were saying that at times. I was like, “Actually there should be more of her getting anally fucked in a parking lot.”

How much does the thought of outside perception affect your work?

I try to think about it as little as possible. I have my life set up in a way so that when I’m writing fiction I just want it to feel fun, like it’s my weird little hobby. Even though now it’s my job, it’s my income. I definitely think about how my work is perceived at large, but I try to never think about it while I’m writing. My goal is for the act of writing to be as pleasurable as possible.

You’re already working on another novel, right?

Yeah.

How do you structure your writing time? Is it still some version of the 200 words a day?

I’m really not working on it much right now because I’m too stressed about everything with this book coming out. [laughs] I have a lot of [the next book] written. I mean, it’s a mess. All the times that I’ve gotten writing done I’m writing like 10,000 words a week or something insane. I won’t work on it for two months and then that will be the only thing I do for a bit… So much of writing novels is a logic problem. A lot of that is not happening on the page.

Back to the interspersed doodles in Paradise Logic—how did you come to include them?

I come from a background of making zines and that’s a big part of that book. And when I was feeling frustrated in the editing process for this book, I decided to just doodle until I figured out what I wanted to put there. Then I realized I could just literally have the doodle in the book.

What is your relationship to zines?

I still make them. I started making zines when I was 15 years old because I was a really big fan of Rookie Mag. I thought it was such a cool way to think about the intersection of writing and art and DIY culture, which was really appealing to me as a teenager. I was doing it with girls on Tumblr, like, “This is my fashion magazine.” Then as I got older, I saw zines as a special part of my writing practice that really, really feels like it’s just for me. I do it when I’m feeling hyper-graphic. I make them myself and lightly edit them myself and just post a link on social media, like, “Hey, you can Venmo me…”

Do you have anxiety around sharing your work and having it be publicly accessible online?

All that stuff really freaks me out. I try to not think about it, or to think about it in a way of, “Oh this is just like when I was posting on my blog that had 10 followers.” I try to be as humble and normal about it as possible, but it is weird to have people who don’t know you have opinions about you.

You’re publishing with Simon & Schuster, one of the biggest publishing houses in America. How did that element of the institution shape your process?

I have an amazing agent and an amazing editor, and everyone who worked on my book I really respect. Honestly, I decided to go that route [of a major publisher] because I’m extremely ambitious about my writing. I want it to be a big deal and I want it to reach a lot of people because I think I’m really good at it. It’s definitely weird and scary and I’m always nervous about it, but I don’t think I would have done it another way.

Dude, I love that. People are very scared to admit to their ambition. Have you always been this way?

I’ve always been extremely ambitious. When I had a fashion blog in high school I was like, “I’m gonna be so famous from this because I’m so good at writing.” And it was horrible, but I took it so seriously. I remember when I was in college, the Pitchfork critic Jessica Hopper was touring this essay collection that she wrote and she came and gave a talk. She was like, “No one is ever going to hold a door open for you as a woman. You have to do it for yourself.” However way you think about that, it’s basically true. So I was always going to be my own hype man, because I think that I do a good job.

What are some of the artistic references that shaped Paradise Logic or informed its protagonist, a girl named Reality?

She’s a classic girl who hangs out at DIY venues, which is what I was doing at that age. She’s cool; she’s listening to a lot of kraut rock and Todd Rundgren and Brian Eno. She’s listening to pick-me “DIY girlfriend” music, which is also stuff that I think is really good. I was listening to a lot of music when I was writing my book. Like, really shitty music. Like Eminem.

What era?

Early Eminem.

So you’re not someone who needs silence to write.

No, I actually need to be listening to music. I feel like that’s where all the weird stuff comes from… I sit at a desk and I listen to music uncomfortably loudly. I have to get into the zone. [laughs] I’m not that religious about how I write, I just know when it’s time to do it. When I was in grad school, people were always like, “No one sits down to write and feels like they’re taking dictation from god.” But I’m like, “I have to feel like I’m getting dictation from god.”

The book feels like that! Is that a voice that is going to carry over into future writing? Or do you think it’s specific to this project?

I think it’s been absorbed in my larger aesthetic, which has been carved out since writing a draft of my book.

How did you develop that aesthetic?

It happened naturally… I figured out how to write the voice of the book because I read Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day and Sheila Heti’s How Should A Person Be in the same week. I was like, it has to be someone who is a world-class love but who is also the best butler of all time.

Your book has some great writing about sex, something it feels like authors aren’t necessarily doing a lot of right now.

It’s so annoying. I’m just like, people think about sex all the time. I mean, I think about sex all the time. So why wouldn’t I write about the main thing I think about? People should write about whatever the main thing they think about is.

Do you have a specific audience in mind for your book?

It’s for everyone. I feel like I’m realistic about what my audience is, which I think is mostly going to be really famous girls, like celebrities. And early-twenties nympho sluts.

What’s the best thing you’ve read recently?

My boyfriend gave me this sex manual from the 1920s that I was obsessed with: Manuel de civilité pour les petites filles à l’usage des maisons d’éducation. It’s supposed to be a guide for good girls in school. It’s like, “Don’t put your pussy on the table when the teacher is instructing!” It’s kind of incredible that it exists. I read it in French which I was really proud of.

I’m always worried that I read too much contemporary fiction and stay in too narrow a lane. Do you push yourself to seek different things?

I actively avoid reading contemporary fiction. I love it and I do read it sometimes. I read the Tony Tulathimutte book [Rejection] over Christmas and it was amazing, so smart and funny. But there’s so much else to read right now and the stuff that feeds me the most, creatively, is not stuff written in the last ten years. I think everyone should diversify their reading, all the time. I read mostly 20th-century fiction, and then force myself to read stuff that’s a little bit older. I got really into Henry James last year. I read Portrait of a Lady. It’s incredibly impressive. It’s 700 pages long and has no plot. I read it when I was in France and it’s about a beautiful, smart woman who is living abroad and rejecting guys all the time.

I’m reading The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy right now.

Oh I love that book. It’s a beautiful, sexy book from the 1950s about an ingénue in Paris—love!

She’s so quirky, I love her. Wait, actually, how do you feel about that word, “quirky”? I feel like you’re going to get it in relation to your writing, if you haven’t already.

It’s pretty sexist, honestly. It’s fine that people are going to use it to describe my book… When I was querying my book, I had a really hard time finding an agent. When they were rejecting my book, people were like, “This is so quirky.” And it’s like, I don’t know, I think it’s saying some pretty serious things about art, death, relationships, and sex! But okay, fine! Pynchon was quirky but you’d never use that word. These words are applied to women’s writing more than men’s writing. But ultimately I don’t really care that much.

This post was originally published on The Creative Independent.

So, full disclosure, you and I know each other because we both work at T Brand at the New York Times, where you serve as one of our creative directors. Can you tell me a little about your journey before arriving here?

A lot of people don’t know I was a rapper first—I mean, I’m still technically a rapper—but I grew up emceeing. It started probably around the age of six or seven. There used to be this show, which is still on, called Video Music Box. It was hosted by Ralph McDaniels. We were the last folks on the block to get cable, and that was when I was in fourth grade. At that time, I was either hearing hip hop through my brother, Dwayne, who was playing music in the crib or from watching Video Music Box, because that was the first real actual hip hop show I ever saw. It was on Channel 21 and it would come on every Saturday at 12:00 and then it would come on weekdays at 4:00. That was my real introduction to hip hop. Dwayne would have me videotape episodes of Video Music Box for him when he went to work, just to make sure he didn’t miss any of the videos. I loved the videos and the music, but I could never remember the words, so I’d start freestyling the words and making them up on my own. That was how I learned how to rap, and it was just a thing that I was doing, mostly because it was safe. There was a lot of unsafe shit happening in my neighborhood and in the household.

Where was that?

In the Bronx. Creston Avenue. When I tell people who are from the Bronx that I grew up on Creston, the response is I’m like, “Shit, you grew up on Creston?” Creston is notorious, but that’s where and why I learned how to rap. That was my first form of poetry — before Whitman or Yeats it was Nas, it was Jay-Z, it was Biggie, it was Rakim. Those were my first poets, and that eventually led me to theater and poetry and spoken word art, but the journey all started with hip hop.

Did you go to school to study performance or writing?

I eventually went to LaGuardia High School, which is the performing arts high school, and I was always the kid that was in plays. I remember when I was younger having a teacher, Ms. Petrowski, taking a liking to me and encouraging me. She would say, “Oh, my God, you can memorize things so fast,” which I could. I think a lot of that came from rap. There was another kid at my school, Damien, who wound up going to LaGuardia. I remember seeing Damien in a play when I was a kid and he was a few years older than me. They did The Wiz and everyone was going crazy over him. Granted, he was playing Toto the dog, but he stole the show, and I remember watching him and also watching how people were gravitating toward him. I was like, “And he’s going to LaGuardia,” so my Capricorn energy is like, “I have to be better than him. I must also go to LaGuardia.” I was very competitive very early on. I made it a point to make sure that I got into LaGuardia and I also made it a point to be the star of every show from there henceforth, and that’s what happened. It was like a mini conservatory in that it was the first time that I felt grounded in an art practice. I’d been pursuing art, but not in a way that was structured. The theater also gave me a bit more of the practice and the skill set for using my voice, which then lends itself to a lot of the spoken word stuff I started doing after high school and my brief period in college as well.

So how did that lead you to working for creative agencies and stuff related to advertising?

Well, that’s the weird part. Not weird, but I started working in the nonprofit sector first, which plays a really big role, I think, in how I show up here at T Brand specifically. First, I was a HIV/AIDS case manager for about two years. This is my early twenties. I had some odd jobs, moved around a bit, and for seven years I was a discharge planner. I was going to Rikers Island once or twice a month and my office was based in the Bronx. Anybody who was getting released from Rikers Island, who suffered from mental health disorders specifically, it was my job to place them in programs.

That really gave me a strong connection to the community and to understanding what the community needs, because I was conducting home visits. Reassessments, assessments, I was following their progress, and those people were also coming to my office. I was learning so much about them. I came to learn a lot about the systems at play, especially here in New York. Also about the way the systems limit how people move forward in life. That job also paid shit. I found out I was having a child around year six of the job and I was like, “I need to make money.”

All I have is my high school diploma. I had some college but no degree, and there’s no real growth in the social work sector, specifically social services, without some level of higher education. Around that time, I was growing my social media platform and I was writing. I started writing essays right around that time. The Ferguson uprisings had just happened in 2014, and I was trying to figure out a way to communicate all the things that I was feeling and seeing in the world, especially being a Black man in America. Rap didn’t really feel like it was doing it for me, specifically hip hop, because you write 16 bars, you write an eight bar hook. That didn’t leave a lot of room for me to really talk through what I was feeling, what I was processing, but writing essays did.

I had built my audience on my own at that point, mostly on social media platforms. I was trying to figure out, “Okay, what’s a job that connects social media and writing?” I didn’t know what any of it was, but I was looking for job titles and roles, and I landed on being a social media manager. I was like, “I guess I could do that.” I started applying for social media manager jobs, and that got me into advertising and marketing. There was an agency, Deep Focus, that took a liking to me and also took a chance on me, because there was no real experience on my resume. Still, they could look at my online profile and say, “Okay, well, he understands social media, he knows how to write.”

At Deep Focus they had what’s called stretch roles, and that allowed me to “stretch” into the creative department, because I was working in strategy as a social media manager. Because of the creative department, I was able to start getting some junior copywriting work, which allowed me to build up my portfolio, so when I eventually got laid off, I could start applying for copywriter roles. I worked at an agency for about three years and I went from copywriter to senior copywriter to associate creative director. Then I made my way into T Brand as a creative director about three years ago.

For a lot of creative people, myself included, part of your strategy for living is figuring out a thing that allows you to make money that speaks to your skill set in some way, but also allows you to do this other creative thing. Obviously, there are many different kinds of creative people and creators, but I was always one of those people who, by necessity, always felt like “I can’t just be an artist. It’s not feasible, it’s not realistic for me.” Also, my psyche doesn’t lend itself well to that. I need some stability and structure. I want to like what I do for a living, but I also don’t need it to fulfill me creatively. I can do that for myself. Doing a job that asks you to be creative, but isn’t necessarily inherently about creative practice, feels good to me. Do you feel like your work life and your personal work inform each other?

I think that they absolutely do. Also, it’s good to have perspective. When I was talking about how the nonprofit background allows me to show up in this space, it’s like…not to discount the importance of this work, but working with people who are coming home and going to a homeless shelter and need housing because their Medicaid is not working and they need their psychotropic medications now*, *or working with people who are going into an unsafe situation, people who can’t go back home to the projects now because they have a felony charge… Working in that world for so long makes working in this world feel very different. It keeps you grounded and grateful and helps you keep things in the right perspective.

When you come from where I come from then you just feel fortunate and grateful to be here, to have had the opportunities that have led you to this place. A lot of folks who I grew up with are still stuck in the Bronx or they are locked up or they just didn’t make it. It’s really about community for me. When we are brainstorming in a room, that’s probably the most fun part, because it’s also seeing how people show up to the environment and about building relationships in that way. That’s the thing I enjoy most about working in the studio. Then there is having to present work to clients, which is very much a performance. All of it is about performance, really. It’s the work, but it’s also how you sell the work and get them excited about the work, getting them comfortable with the work, and also having them buy into you as the person who’s delivering the work.

So this work in a creative studio is no different than being a part of an ensemble. I can recognize how much my work as a theater practitioner can apply here. It’s about being present and being in the moment and in front of an audience. You either make it or break it. I’m very comfortable being in front of the camera and also being in front of people and presenting work and presenting my ideas in front of people. They’re very much connected, there’s a very clear throughline for me when it comes to the performance and the creative and how it connects to the nine-to-five work and then also how that connects to the work that exists outside of it.

You published a book of essays this year and you also are very active in the poetry world. You are also very much a part of an active community of people who are doing very public-facing work and performance stuff. How have you managed to strike a balance between those things and being in an office full-time?

In 2024 I thought a lot about moving away from balance and trying to use the word “Harmony,” because that felt more appropriate. I don’t know if I’ve ever really ever had a balance of anything. Some things are going to demand 70 percent of your energy, some things are going to be 30 percent, or 20 percent depending on the season. Someone asked me, “How do you manage all this while also being a dad and maintaining these other relationships?” I’m like, “I don’t know if I do actually manage it.” I guess I do, because I get to show up and I feel good about myself and the work that I do and who I am as a human, but that means I forget people’s names sometimes or I might respond to an email three days after. I’ve missed opportunities, because I’ve just been late to a thing, because my brain is filled up with so much information, there’s so much going on. There’s that. The harmony for me, though, speaks to feeling good and feeling aligned, even if things are imbalanced on paper. That’s how I like to think about it.

Part of the way I try to lead as a creative director is to understand that there are people who are skilled craftsmen in their disciplines, and my job is to support them in that work and give them more tools. You’re not just on an island by yourself when it comes to creating anything, especially in a place like T Brand.

I feel supported. I’ve been fortunate enough to be supported by the people I work with. I also have a meditation practice. Walking meditation is very much a thing for me and I try to pour myself into that as much as possible. A lot of things just come back to community. It’s one-on-one coffee with your co-workers, it’s being curious about people and asking questions and building relationships, so that folks feel like they can lean on each other. Even in the most subtle of ways, I think that is really important and inherent to the work. It’s not perfect, by any stretch of the imagination, but I was able to write a book because I think I’ve just become really good at how to manage my time. I’ve always done creative work while also having a nine-to-five.

And what does that look like?

I get in a rhythm and I know where to find my pockets of time. Also, thankfully, I’m creatively inspired most of the time because I feel like I’m really present in the world. Especially living in New York. I’m inspired all the time. I’m inspired by you, I’m inspired by walking outside. Except here, because this is Times Square, but you know what I’m saying? I’m watching everything and I’m trying to listen and be observant. When there’s a gap in my schedule I’m going to be writing something or I’m going to be doing something that’s helping push the other stuff that’s happening outside of here.

Ostensibly, everybody is very busy, or at least feels like they are. Everyone feels like they are multi-tasked to the very edge of their capabilities, but I actually think that In general most people don’t give themselves enough credit or really understand how much they’re actually capable of if they want to be. I think we live in a culture that wants us to feel busier than maybe we actually are.

Man, that’s it. We take you for example, there’s a speediness in which you do things, but it’s also accurate and correct, because you have a practice and a way of working. I aspire to always be that way–you try and do the thing as soon as it is asked of you. Just do it, don’t belabor it. I think part of that comes from always being on deadlines, but it goes beyond that as well. There’s a way that I think I choose to live my life that is very malleable. There’s a level of fluidity and I think some of that is connected to the way I work. That level of fluidity allows me to not be attached too much, whereas I think a lot of folks, to your point, get caught up in the box of a thing. So it’s like, “It has to be done this way, and if it’s not done this way then it’s not going to work,” and that’s not really how I’ve ever lived my life. I just move. There’s a level of ease that I feel like I move through the world with so that I don’t feel restricted. I have two kids and a dog and a partner and community and work, but you can do it too, actually. I’m not any braver than you, I’m not any smarter than you, or well-read. I’m not the most organized at all, but let’s get it done. You have to do the thing.

I can relate to that. I know this isn’t always true, but generally I feel like if you care enough about something, you’ll find a way to do it.

Creativity is desperation for me, to be honest. I have to create in some way, shape, or form as much as I can.

I hate to admit this, but I feel like I’m actually more productive when I’m busier. A lot of people have this fantasy idea of unlimited free time. And of course, there is something really decadent and incredible about, say, getting an artist fellowship where you can go somewhere and just do nothing but create and think about creating. I don’t actually find that kind of situation to be very productive. I actually create more stuff when I’m under duress, and the work I produce actually feels more vital and necessary. This idea that, “Well, if I just had more time, I could devote all my energy to this and I’d finally do it.” You’re never going to have that time. It doesn’t exist.

No, you have to carve it out. I sometimes tell my mentees, “If you’re struggling to do a thing, put it on your calendar,” and that sounds wild to some people, but if you need rest, put “Rest” literally on your calendar. Even if you don’t do it, visually seeing it on your calendar might help to induce something in you, but you have to carve out the time. Even if you don’t do anything in that time period, just the practice and the habit of the thing might allow you to do that. I’ve never been a writer that’s like, “I’m going to sit down and write for 20 minutes or 30 minutes at this same time every day.” That’s just not been me, it’s very much when inspiration strikes, which can be any time. Again, everyone is different, but I think the reason why this works for me is because I’m in the world and I’m present and I’m connected to real people and real things, the inspiration is always there. Even if I don’t like what I’m writing, I’m going to write if I know I need to.

That’s valuable. Even if it’s bad, you gotta cycle through it in order to get to the good stuff.

It might not be good the first time around, but that’s fine. I don’t have to be the person that’s editing the thing right now. I can do that later, and that’s a skill that I had to learn that took me years to get. I think rap allowed me to do that too, because you write a verse and you practice it, and it’s like, “This is just not landing,” and you go back in. That’s something that as writers, we are generally not skilled at at first, because we want that first draft to be perfect. The first draft is never perfect.

This is another thing that I think is a tricky thing to grapple with, especially if you’re balancing a lot of different kinds of work. Being creative for the sake of being creative, enjoying the practice for the sake of the practice, and not because you are trying to sell it or share it or show it. This is a hard one, especially because we work within a culture that measures success in such a very straightforward and obvious way. It’s important to remember that there is value and pleasure in doing something creative just for the doing of it.

Oh, absolutely. Even if you aren’t particularly good at it. Just do it.

In your opinion, what makes something creatively successful?

This is such a good question, man. I’ll use my recent book as an example. I got an email about the book from my editor who said, “We’re not putting out paperbacks for this book.” For folks who don’t understand that, that means the book did not sell well enough for them to issue paperbacks. The bookstores are looking at pre-sales, deciding whether or not this makes sense, and it just didn’t make sense. Now, if I was measuring my success based on book sales, then I would’ve been incredibly disappointed. I’m aware and astute enough to know that this is not on the New York Times Best Seller list. It was highly-regarded in certain circles and among people whose opinion I value, but I am basing my “success” on the Black folks who were coming to talk to me about it at readings, as well as the all the other folks who read it and wanted to talk about it.

What was that like?

You know, I would have white men or white women saying, “I know this book wasn’t for me”—which I have to correct folks sometimes when they say that. Just because a Black man wrote it and it’s a Black man’s “reimagined soundtrack for the future” does not mean it’s not for you. They would say, “I really got something from it,”which is great because the book is so much more than just an essay collection, it’s an archive. I grew up in a certain period in New York and a lot of those things that I grew up around don’t exist anymore, and the people don’t exist anymore physically either, so the book was also an opportunity for me to pay tribute. It was an homage to those things, those people, that time and place. The essay collection itself is very much inspired by hip hop and hip hop culture in the Bronx and in New York. That is all to say that success for me is me seeing and hearing from people who are affected and impacted by the book.

So, what is creative success? For me, that is it. It’s about how people are responding to the art once they have engaged with it. That is the indicator. I’ve done my job. Also, have I made my brother proud? And how proud am I of myself for having done it? Because I did it—I wrote a book. That was the thing. I wanted to see my book on bookshelves, so the first day, when the book was released, I walked into McNally Jackson and I saw my book on the table for New and Noteworthy Non-Fiction, and I was like, “Okay, that’s it.” I could have ended it there and been happy. Because, for me, that was the thing. I wanted to see my book there and I did that, so it’s like, “I’m good.”

Just to follow up on something you just said—it’s weird when there’s this idea that you are speaking to and for only a specific audience and that’s it.

Yeah. I think we forget how multifaceted our experience is as humans. While we can’t necessarily conflate one person’s experience for another, and they’re not interchangeable, hopefully there is some shared level of understanding. I think about cultural language a lot. What are the intersections of language that connect us to each other? There’s a language of New York and certain places here that, if you grew up there, there’s a very specific way that you understand it. There’s a richness to growing up specifically in the timeframe that I grew up in with hip hop. I can talk about certain rap groups, and if you grew up past that time, you might have heard the groups, you might have listened to the music, but it’s very different, being in that moment when that music was new and was happening around you. Same way if you were old enough to experience your first house party with actual house music. That language is so important, but it speaks to the different intersections and layers of how we communicate with each other and how we see the world. Still, there are larger ideas and themes in this book that lots of people can relate to—what it means to leave a place behind in order to become what you want to be, what it means to leave people behind. So you want it to have some element of universal appeal, but also I’m really writing for the 40-something-year-old kid who grew up in the Bronx and having them feel seen. It is perhaps a very small population of people, but I was fine with that.

This reminds me of why I often struggled so much with writing music criticism. There are a lot of things in the world that I would encounter and feel like, “This is not for me.” It doesn’t mean it’s bad, it doesn’t mean it’s not successful at what it is trying to be, but it’s literally not for me. Like, maybe this is for a tween girl or maybe this is for my boomer grandparents, but it’s not for me. It doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy those things, but it also doesn’t mean that they’re bad just because I don’t connect with them. It’s all so subjective.

It requires a little bit of relinquishing of the ego. There is an essay in my book where I talk about good Black art versus bad Black art. It was really me asking, “My mom loves Tyler Perry, what does that mean?” I’ve been very dismissive of his work, but then what am I saying about my mom and my brother who look forward to watching a Tyler Perry movie or a TV show? How much of this is just me needing to stop being a dick about art? I mean, I still kind of am, but it’s also recognizing that it’s just not for me, and that’s okay.

Oh, you are speaking my language. I grew up at a time when there was so little mainstream gay art or gay movies. And even though a lot of them were truly bad, it always felt like, as a gay person, you weren’t allowed to criticize them and you should just be grateful that any of it was allowed to exist. Also, I am old.

Well, I think we’re allowed to criticize things and it’s not the end of the world for art. I think what tends to happen to us, as marginalized people, is that we feel like this work needs to be the end-all, be-all about our shared experience, and it never is. It’s okay. What I was reckoning with in the essay is that we need more bad Black art and we need to be able to critique it in a way that will allow us to develop our own language around criticism within Black culture. It feels like that is really lacking in this moment and we need more voices who can put a lens to art and critique it in a way that makes sense within our culture. Now everyone thinks that they’re a critic, but no one has critical language or understands how to actually critique a thing without just saying it’s good or bad. In order to do that, people need to be talking more about art, and even if it’s not good, we actually need to be able to say that out loud.

Yes. I also am willing to admit that I like a lot of bad things.

There’s a lot of bad shit. I can look at New Jack City—an important movie, a movie I loved—and there’s a line at the end of New Jack City where Ice-T is like, “I’m going to shoot you so bad, my dick is hard.” He made that line up on the spot. The movie’s not great at all, but it’s nostalgic for me. I go back to it because it makes me think of a time frame that I love. There’s this movie, Jason’s Lyric, with Allen Payne. Not great, but I still cry when I see it because there’s a sentiment to it that gets to me. I could critique it all I want, but it’s also like, “I just want to watch this and also enjoy it.” That’s fine.

Coming off the experience of publishing your book, are you having a kind of postpartum feeling? I think it’s easy to get lost in that sometimes, or to rush into a new project. For you, is it the thing where you just have to wait for something new to coalesce and it will happen when it happens?

It’s the latter. I’m not much of a futurist in that way. I remember when people used to ask me things like, “What’s your goal? What do the next five years look like? What’s your five-year business plan?” I’m like, “I don’t have one and I’d rather not.” There’s a level of preparedness I have, I think. I know what I want to do in the larger sense—I want to make art that pushes the needle. I want to keep writing poems, I hope to maybe record another album. I have a lot of things I hope for, but I don’t know who I’m going to meet before then and I don’t know what I’m going to see that’s going to change how I show up for the creative practice. I like that level of availability, I like being open to things, as opposed to having hard-set rules of what I imagine to happen.

I just want to make our art, man, that challenges us. To your point, there’s a couple of books in the works, there’s a fiction novel that I’m just rough outlining right now, and that feels exciting. Sometimes I’ll just walk around the apartment and I’m freestyling, and I’m like, “This feels like maybe… Do I want to write music? I don’t know, do I want to record? I don’t know.” I just am waiting, because I’ll know it when I feel it.

This post was originally published on The Creative Independent.

How did you first decide you were going to be a writer?

To some extent, always. When I was asked when I was little, “writer” would always be on the list of “what I want to be when I grow up,” along with “witch” and “marine biologist.” I was always writing. But I’m from a family that’s very sensible, so I didn’t allow myself to think it would be a possibility. There are moments when I could have just become a public servant working in Australia.

When I finished university, I hadn’t really taken writing that seriously. I hadn’t really tried to get things published, anything like that. I took a year and I made a list or plan for myself. I said, if I can make some headway on this plan of being a writer in a year, then I’ll see. If I didn’t, I was going to apply for a PhD. By the end of that year, I’d made enough headway that I didn’t feel I needed to go back to school, at least not yet. It was a sort of make-or-break 2013 for me.

When you say “taking it seriously,” what do you mean? What sort of things did you do?

Part of that, for me, was moving to America from Australia. I needed to get away from everything and everyone who had ever known me, or that I had ever known. For various reasons, when I was 22 or 23, I felt like I had to become a different version of myself, to allow myself to think of myself as a writer.

Part of the work of being a writer, early on, is convincing yourself. You tell people for years that you’re a writer, but you don’t have a book, and you don’t have much published. People will look at you and they’ll roll their eyes. So, you are the only person who you answer to. I had a job all through my twenties, but I would tell myself that writing was my most important job, and so that would take precedence. I made space and time for writing, even letting it take precedence over my social life. Like a night where I could have gone to the movies with a friend, I would sit in front of my laptop for two hours.

When I did an MFA program at Columbia after a couple of years, I encountered a lot of people who were like, “I’m here because this MFA will give me discipline,” and I felt glad that I had already developed that discipline on my own. Once you’re out of the MFA program, you don’t have deadlines anymore, so you need to have an internal drive to sit down and write into the void. As much as you wish they were, nobody out there is waiting for your book.

It sounds like you went through this intense process that was possibly a bit lonely. Has there come a point where you feel like you’ve been able to relax while still feeling like a writer? Or is the struggle constant?

It’s funny, my first book came out during COVID-19. There’s how I felt about writing before the book and how I felt about writing after it, but some of that was the pandemic, so I’m not quite sure which is which. Right now, I feel like I have a good community of people around me, many of whom are writers, and many of whom inspire me. I like talking to them, I can feel my own thinking expanding and my own thoughts improving. I can feel it in the work that I’m making. I think that’s helped me relax a little and actually understand that it’s important to go for walks and have friends. If you work so hard all the time, you’ll burn out eventually. I think my life is a bit more balanced now.

Between the constant hustle of writing and the pace of the news cycle and maintaining day-to-day existence, the burnout risk seems very real. Could you talk a bit about how you avoid burnout, or cope with it when you experience it?

In the last few months, I’ve definitely thought to myself, “Maybe I’m just burnt out?” I hadn’t necessarily thought that before, even when I was going through rough periods. It’s never about the creative side of things—I have ideas I want to be writing—but I do get burnt out with the other things I have to do to support the writing. I wish I could write full time, but I can’t. Freelance jobs or teaching, all that kind of stuff can feel exhausting when it’s not the work you really want to be expending your resources on. There’s also ambient, circumstantial political stuff which I think a lot of people are finding draining right now.

What I’ve found helpful is reducing my phone and social media use. I have a distinct memory of getting my first iPhone for my 21st birthday. I remember after 48 hours of sitting engrossed in it, I popped my head up and thought, “I’m so glad I didn’t have this in high school, I would’ve never gotten anything done.” I also don’t sleep very well, and that can turn into a vicious cycle. If my phone is in the room where I sleep, I’ll start reading the news in the middle of the night, and that will worsen my wakefulness, because it’s not conducive to being calm. I think it’s smartphones specifically; the Nokia I had when I was younger was fine. I’m very much on the verge of getting a dumb phone.

I used to use Twitter a lot but find it incredibly toxic now. I’ve told myself I’m not allowed to delete it until this book promotion is over—my last event is on May 9th, and I made a calendar reminder to delete Twitter on May 10th.

It sounds like you’re sort of always “on,” creatively speaking. What is your process like?

Well, I’m not some wunderkind. I don’t feel creative all the time. I don’t sit down at a laptop and try and force myself to write when I feel panicked and burnt out anymore. I used to, because I felt I had to work all the time, but I’ve learned that’s a counterproductive practice, because what I write will turn out like crap, and the quality of my thinking won’t be any good.

But if I’m not actually writing, then I have to make sure I’m at least leaving time for it. Sometimes I facilitate that by going away for two days. I like getting on the train to the edge of the city and going for a six-hour walk. I also often go into art galleries. It’s like giving my mind a shower or something—like I’ll just feel cleaner and better and calmer afterward.

I agree that walks are incredibly helpful.

I was in England the other week with my in-laws and I went for a six-hour walk with like ice on the ground. It’s the coldest hike I’ve ever gone on, and I was covered in mud because I’d slipped a bunch. But I felt so happy afterward.

One of the things I think TCI readers are curious about is how artists make a living and how they balance their work and their creative lives. You touched on this a bit earlier, but could you speak a bit more about supporting yourself as a writer?

It still feels kind of tenuous. A friend and I were talking a few months ago about the fact that we’re in our early to mid-30s, and we’re still getting asked to write for free, even though we’ve published books now, and we’re still getting asked to do things that aren’t necessarily lucrative but might be “good for our careers.” We were told it would be good for our careers a decade ago when we were starting out, and we’re still being told it will be good for our careers. We thought we would already have fully established careers by now. When do we get to actually have careers—in our 50s?

I think this dynamic—and this is probably a millennial thing—is common for people who were impacted by the global financial crisis. There’s just been this slowdown or degradation—you know, the enshittification of everything—since we became adults. I don’t necessarily feel like I’m successful, in so far as I once thought that success would have some relationship with stability. I sort of feel like I’m stable right now, but that could change. Before I sold this book, I was in the very early stages of applying to law school, because I just didn’t see how my writing career, such as it was, was going to be sustainable. This book sold, and I’m okay right now, but I don’t necessarily have any confidence that I won’t be in that position again a few years from now.

From 2014 to 2020, when I was in grad school and writing, I worked four days a week at the original McNally Jackson bookstore. That was wonderful. I don’t think I’ll ever love a job as much as I loved that one. It was adjacent to writing, but didn’t make me hate books in the way I think I would’ve had I started working in actual publishing. I didn’t have a ton of money, but I had the time I needed to prioritize writing. I left that job in 2020 and since then have been balancing things with teaching, which I love, and freelancing.

It mostly works OK, except when it doesn’t. You don’t have the ability, which I miss, of truly being able to take two weeks off when no one is emailing you, and you’re not responsible for anybody. I’m now at this stage where I set an out-of-office email on my general inbox if I go away for three days. The need to be constantly available can be difficult.

Another important thing for me was leaving New York. I moved to Berlin 11 months ago. I love New York, it feels like home, but it was increasingly clear to me that there were things I wanted and ways I wanted to be able to prioritize being a writer that weren’t tenable for me in New York anymore. The cost of living in Berlin is a lot lower, and there’s a huge English language writing community. Berlin isn’t perfect, but in comparison it’s so much easier to make art here.

I feel a similar sense of instability—of trying to write while also working. For a while I thought that would be solved by selling a book, but I’m coming to terms with the fact that it’s just going to be a lifetime problem, unless you get very lucky.

Yeah. My husband is the reason I live in Berlin. When we met, I lived in New York. Initially the plan was that he would move to New York, but in the meantime, while we waited, I was going back and forth, spending big chunks of time in Berlin. Spending a significant amount of time outside of New York for the first time in a decade really changed things. I realized, basically, that there was another way to live. One where I wasn’t stressed about buying groceries and could have a washing machine in my apartment. In the end Berlin won out.

Earlier you mentioned going to galleries to replenish yourself. Elegy, Southwest is also full of references to art, and characters are constantly making themselves into art by photographing themselves. Could you talk a little bit about how other art forms relate to your writing?

It’s not necessarily deliberate, but it often frames how I’m thinking. In terms of this novel, a lot of the artwork is mediated through screens and Instagram in particular, because it’s so woven into the way we experience the world and into the processes of discovery.

I’m particularly interested in photography, because it’s losing its specialness—the punctum that Roland Barthes talks about in Camera Lucida is so often absent in photography now, because everything is being photographed. I’ve always been interested in film and photography, maybe more so than other representational art forms. In Elegy, Southwest in particular, there were a lot of films initially that stirred something in my imagination, and art. There are two films talked about at length—Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point and Buñuel’s Simon of the Desert. Georgia O’Keefe, and land art are deeply embedded in the book. I was also watching a lot of Wim Wenders films—Paris, Texas and Alice in the Cities and The American Friend—so they’re threaded through in ways that aren’t necessarily discussed but were very important to how I thought about the book. Even the way perspective works in the novel comes from spending a lot of time in visual worlds and translating that into sentences. I was very captivated too by Judy Chicago’s ‘Atmospheres’ series, which I got to see once I’d finished the novel when it showed at the New Museum. I think a lot about the ways in which bodies, particularly female bodies, inhabit those desert landscapes, and so even if a certain artwork isn’t necessarily there in the content of Elegy, Southwest, it’s there in the way I was responding to them. When I go to galleries, I like to go alone, and I will often write all the way through them. I went to see the Nan Goldin retrospective here in Berlin last week, and I was writing the whole time.

What do you write during these sessions?

Just a lot of sensory stuff: smell, taste, touch. It’s also tracking where my mind goes. That particular form of notetaking actually ended up being the basis for this novel. I took two trips to the American southwest, one in the fall of 2018 and the other in the spring of 2019, and I didn’t at that point know what I was writing, or even if I was writing anything at all about the southwest, but I took hundreds of thousands of words of notes. Every sign I could see, all the details about how the landscape smelled, all that sort of stuff. Note-taking is huge for my process.

Is your process consistent across projects?

It varies. Note-taking has become much more important the longer I’ve been writing and the more I read. I’m very reliant on it. In college and high school, I kept diaries, which I stopped doing because I realized I wound up narrativizing my life in a way that was running me into problems. I make a distinction between diaries and notebooks. I’m not going to spend a long time describing how I feel about something, but I will spend a long time detailing what I’m interested in: things I hear on the street, the way the clouds look, what people have said to me and how they’ve said them. It’s a little more external than internal. It’s a way of remembering.

I’m not interested in writing a traditional 19th-century style novel. What excites me are books which are structured differently, embrace the world differently. You need new and different forms to capture the world as we experience now. I think the notes help me remember and define my experience of the world, and they’re the building blocks for whatever I end up creating.

Are you taking physical notes, like in notebooks?

I hate using my phone, I hate being someone who does this, but I’ve found it’s just easier to do it on the Notes app—this is the primary problem jeopardizing my dumb phone ambitions. It’s easier to take notes on my phone partly because what I’m doing is sort of creepy—like if I’m on the train and somebody’s having an interesting conversation, to take out a notebook and pen is very obvious and possibly unsettling, but if I’m on my phone I just look like I’m texting. I’ve recently started trying to systematize the notes such that I have a folder on my computer that collates my notes month by month and year by year.

I’m interested in the theme of climate change in your writing. Can you talk a bit about how you came to focus on that?

I talked about this a little bit when my first book came out, but I didn’t necessarily set out thinking I was writing about climate change. I started writing that book when I was 25 and living in the US, and some things about place became obvious to me in a way I’d never thought much about or been very interested in before I left Australia.

But when I was living in New York, it became clear to me that I didn’t really know any of the names of the plants. Or I would see daffodils blooming in January, and even though I’m from the Southern Hemisphere, I knew daffodils shouldn’t be out in January. Becoming more attuned and thinking about place in turn made me think about climate change, which effects every place, every environment on earth.

It used to be, let’s say fifteen or twenty years ago, that climate change was a topic confined to dystopian fiction—Margaret Atwood or Cormac McCarthy or Octavia Butler. That always annoyed me because it confined climate change to something that was going to happen in the future, which minimized the threat. But it’s happening now, we’re seeing the effects, and it’s important to describe and to recognize its immediacy. It’s an imperfect comparison, but the only thing that you can sort of compare it to is war, except that war is a completely circumscribed temporal event. Climate change is very slow, with processes that are geological and exceed our lifetimes, except when it’s very fast, and will extend far beyond our individual lifespans. It’s global but also manifests locally. These events cannot all be captured by the story of one family or one person. You can either view these as challenges to writing about climate change, or you can use them as structural possibilities and innovate your form to respond to them.

When my first book was out, I was asked a lot of questions about climate change. To some extent, because I hadn’t started with the explicit intention of writing a “climate change novel,” I didn’t feel like I had great answers to those questions, or that the answers I had weren’t satisfying enough. This book, Elegy, Southwest, is to some extent an attempt at answering those questions I was asked four years ago and actually representing what it’s like to be alive right now.

To some extent I’m happy to embrace being a climate change novelist. But I when I teach writing about climate change or nature writing I sometimes find it helpful to frame it this way: you can take a Victorian literature class in college, but that’s a span of nearly 100 years, and at the time those writers and their movements didn’t necessarily think that they belonged under the same subheading, or that they had anything to do with one another. In the same way, I think you can basically call anything produced since 1988 “Anthropocene literature.” You can just choose to make it more obvious in your work, or choose not to address it at all, but even in omitting it you’re making a choice. You can’t live outside your era. I think if you’re being mindful and honest about the time you’re living in, and really want to accurately represent the world, then climate change needs to be there, because here it is.

There’s this part in Elegy, Southwest where the narrator gets accused of enjoying the catastrophe, like she’s excited about the idea of everything falling apart. I’ve wondered that about myself—that I almost enjoy writing about climate change, like it’s a little bit of ruinenlust%20Obsession%20with%20ruins.). Sites of environmental disasters and degradation produce human suffering but also these striking images. And I don’t go through life like this all the time, but I feel this awareness when I’m passing by regular, seemingly unaffected places now, this sense of ruin, which was always possible but is now a little more accessible to the imagination. Do you feel anything like that in your writing?

It can feel really complicated, and I suppose it can sometimes feel a bit like ruinenlust. I think 10 years ago or so there were ethical conversations being had about the complications inherent in the fetishization of ruin. I think in general, though, it’s very human to make art about crisis and to make art out of a crisis.

That particular line in Elegy, Southwest about catastrophe I think is me chastising myself a little bit. I do have a morbid streak. I’m the kind of person who likes sad music and depressing books. I like engaging with work that scares me, or that makes me sad, because getting closer to those feelings makes me feel like I can control them, or that once you’ve merged with them, they can’t control you. I think too that some of the most interesting feelings, and creative responses to these feelings, come out of engaging with a catastrophe.

This book has its roots in the early days of the pandemic. In March of 2020, I wound up inadvertently stuck in Australia and ended up being there for four months. I was quarantining, because I’d just been in New York, so I would go on these long runs into landscapes where I knew I wasn’t likely to see anyone else and risk infecting them. During 2019 and into 2020, southeast Australia experienced nearly six months of catastrophic fires, and close to where I was in those months, in the Blue Mountains, had burned quite badly. I would run down a road and underneath a line that said “do not cross,” behind which the fire had burned up over the ridge and almost reached the town. I’d been down that road so many times before, it’s incredibly familiar to me. And everything I would run past was black, the trees were charcoal. There was no sound. Everything was dead. The first time I ran it, I stood in the middle of the road and burst into tears.

Over the next few weeks and months, I saw greenery start to come back, flowers. It still looked catastrophic and remined incredibly silent, but I kept going back there because continuing to engage with the grief—the grief of knowing a particular landscape and seeing it decimated in that way—is very human.

Last question: Is there anything right now that gives you hope?

If I’d written a book about difficult female friendship, I don’t think I would get asked about hope so much [laughs]

I don’t know that I’m the right person to offer hope. On the other hand, yes, there are works that give me hope. One writer I’d mention is Daisy Hildyard and her novels Emergency and her non-fiction book The Second Body, which I think about all the time. Another is When I Sing, Mountains Dance by Irene Sola. I thought both of those books were incredible creative responses to living in the particular world we live in, even if not necessarily fitting neatly into the box of ‘climate change novel.’ I’m such more interested in work that doesn’t fit into that box.

I also get an enormous dose of hope from teaching, which I feel like is such a cliché. I’m often 10 to 15 years older than the people I’m teaching, which doesn’t feel like that much time in the world, but there’s a real difference. I think I’m used to a certain amount of cynicism and bewilderment from people my age, and I see that less in younger people. I think there is more of a steely resolve that they may not even recognize in themselves. But I love it, I feel energized every time I come out of a seminar.

This post was originally published on The Creative Independent.

When I had just started reading your new book, No Fault, I ran into my friend [Winnie Wang] who’s actually reviewing it for the Los Angeles Review of Books. And I said, “What do you think of it?” They were like, “I love it. Divorce is so romantic.”

Very early on, I realized I was writing a romance. That was influenced by the way I started looking at cultural representation of divorce. So much of it is about what you need to express, something that goes against what you thought you wanted, or what other people think is best for you. And also maybe something that is dark and tortured, and has the potential to kill you if done correctly. That’s my definition of romance. So it made sense to me to apply the two contradictory emotional experiences together.

There’s a large section at the beginning that’s very research-focused, on the socioeconomics and history of marriage. We don’t really know about your personal experiences until we’ve gone through that. Was that always the structure?

[The book] started as an essay originally. I had pitched to my editor at The New York Times Magazine a letter of recommendation for divorce because I thought that would be really funny. He very wisely was like, “I can’t let you do that. You’re going to get destroyed on the internet.” And I was like, “No, that is why you let me do it, but I respect it.” I was telling that story to my friend Dayna Tortorici, who’s the brilliant editor at n+1. She was like, “Well, why don’t you just write that for me?” Then when she read my first [draft], she was the first person to say to me, “I think this is a book.”

I love that one line you quote from Phyllis Rose’s Parallel Lives, which you did end up writing a letter of recommendation for, about how the most successful marriages are the ones where both people believe the same narrative of their marriage.

Yes, exactly. I had established this very clean, very well-defined structure for my book: there are going to be four parts and it’s going to map the first year of my separation. Right after I signed the book contract, I went over to my friend’s house to have dinner—Jazmine Hughes, another brilliant editor. I told her I had this plan to get through all the chapters as I’d outlined them in the proposal. She was just like, “Okay, well, now that I’ve spoken to Haley the project manager, can I speak to Haley the writer?” Which is a very revealing sentence about my process. That proposal is probably a very funny document of my delusions, about the idea that this was a subject that I could contain that easily. I had to let go of a lot of my assumptions about what the book was going to be when I was writing it.

The decision to start with history and a more social, political, and statistical context was really inspired by the writers who were most important to me. Stephanie Coontz’s Marriage, a History is still probably one of my favorite books. One of the things that I find almost unbelievable about my finished book is that Barbara Ehrenreich is not in it. I’m so indebted to her; she is so masterful at bringing in her personal experience to her political values and analyses.

How did you organize that research on a day-to-day level?

I’ve used Scrivener for a long time, for writing everything. They have a feature where you can upload any sort of PDF or webpage link. I could have the research in one window and the draft in the next. Even when I was paraphrasing, I was always checking because I feel very strongly about properly referencing people as a way to honor the work that’s already been done, and to make it clear that I see any work I do as being a link in a chain. I remember a long time ago, my friend Doreen St. Félix called it having a citational ethic.

Finding one really good source always leads to at least twelve more because everybody has collaborators and communities. It’s just following the thread. I will admit that even now I still have those little moments of being like, “I could have done so much more.” But there’s a huge part of this that is a luxury and a privilege. I remember having days where my job was to finish reading Middlemarch. Even when things would drag on, having those little pockets of purely pleasurable research helped. I think it’s really important to note that, technically, I think this book took me—from that first essay idea to what’s going to be published in February—probably 10 years.

I feel like it’s good to talk about that.

A lot of that time was not spent writing or researching. It was spent trying to find work that would pay my rent. Sometimes I’m wistful, like, “Oh, well, if I had just run myself into the ground a little bit more, maybe I could have squeezed in more about this decade, or more research about this person.” Then I remember that advice I’ll never take, but I do think is true: it’s not done because it’s perfect. It’s done because it’s done.

The book made me think of marriage as a container for fate, or destiny, or something really transcendent. By getting married, you’re making a decision for yourself for the rest of your life, which is a thing that you basically never do otherwise, right? Is thinking about marriage a way of thinking about mortality and infinity?

I could obviously talk about this forever. Okay, bear with me: I took myself to see Nosferatu over holidays. I went to a matinee with what must have been every goth teenage girl in Montreal. I felt so happy to be in there, just knowing that they were all having a formative experience. Surprisingly, Nosferatu proved to be a great example of how I define romance. I don’t know if you’ve seen it, I won’t give away the ending—but with the ending I was like, “Right, yeah, that’s love, baby.”

Oh, my god. I need to watch it and return to this.

You’re going to be like, “What’s wrong with her?” A reason that romance has been such a feminine art form for so long—something that’s directed at women and femmes in pop culture—is because it speaks to this idea of having agency over your lack of power, really living inside of a decision that’s been made for you that you are compelled to follow through on, one that you can’t resist. Joan Acocella has an amazing essay about the Dracula trope called “The Bloodied Nightgown” that talks about the narrative of it beautifully.

I love the way marriage is depicted in that movie because I think it’s one of the rare times I’ve seen somebody demonstrate the way marriage is a talisman. That it’s intended to keep something out as much as it is keeping something in. There is something so beautiful about believing you’re going to feel a certain way forever. Yet marriage is a structure that is stronger than all of us. It’s a political unit, it’s a social unit, it’s a cultural unit that has its own roots in the world that we’re entering into, not the other way around. It doesn’t enter our lives. We enter its life.

There’s this one devastating Lauren Berlant quote you put in the book: “Who is to say whether a love relation is real or really something else, a fantasy, or a trick someone plays on herself or on another in order to sustain a fantasy? This is a psychological question about the reliability of emotional knowledge, but it is also a political question about the ways norms produce attachments to living through certain fantasies. What does it mean about love that its expressions tend to be so conventional, so bound up in institutions like marriage and family, property relations, and stock phrases and plots?”

Absolutely devastated by this idea. And then I love that after that quote, you just write: “Anyway, me and my friends have an obsession with endings.”

Just leaving that there.

It’s perfect but knowing all of the institutional baggage of marriage—and this part of what the book is grappling with—what do you do with all that information on an individual level?

As Lauren Berlant writes about in The Female Complaint, the most devastatingly impossible romances were often written by people who knew better. And especially when you look at melodrama as a genre, many of the people working in that industry were marginalized in so many ways. Because who better than somebody on the outside to show what it looks like on the surface? At the same time, I want to be a product of my culture. I want to feel the influence of the community that I’m a part of, the world that I live in. I want to participate. I don’t want to hold myself apart. And so I guess that is the tension between participating in these structures and critiquing them.

There’s a section in your book where you’re talking with your friends about everyone having epiphanies. You write, “There was no shortage of epiphanies in my world. Everyone was always realizing something.” Then you say that the epiphanies didn’t require anyone to do anything, and “They didn’t even necessarily have to be true.” How are epiphanies a part of your writing process? Is a book a way to make a sequence of epiphanies into something substantial?

I think [epiphanies are] so important as a form of energy, especially for a writer working on a very long project where motivation does not get you very far. It’s not a reliable resource that you can just call up anytime you need it. The work that an epiphany does, I think, is that infusion of a new energy, or a renewed interest in the topic that lets you feel that you haven’t gotten to the bottom of anything.

It’s a reminder that there are still things to be thought. I keep joking, but it’s so serious. I’m like, “I’m not going to write another book because I used up every word I know; I’ve got nothing left.” But that’s not true. It can’t be true. The longer you think about anything, the more it’s possible to surprise yourself.

I love the portion of the book where you’re talking about the documentary The Continuing Story of Carel and Ferd (1972), and their idea that everyone is secretly thinking of their lives as an anecdote they’ll tell on TV. You also write about Gary Indiana, who knew the couple, and who said that when he wrote about Ferd, he released himself from the myths he told himself about their relationship. Were you thinking about those ideas in relation to your experience writing memoir?

The fear that I still have is that there is something about speaking, or describing, or writing, that reifies a narrative in our heads. We’re easily influenced by other people, but we can also be very influenced by ourselves. And it’s dangerous to decide exactly what something means, or what it represents, or what somebody else’s intentions were, because you could live under a mistaken impression for so long. I was thinking about how writing my memories as they occurred to me in the moment of writing would probably have the effect of solidifying something in my mind. And that made me feel very careful about how I wrote, and what I ended up publishing.

Like, while you were actually writing, you were pausing?

Yes. I was really thinking, “Is this a memory that I can describe in a way that will not preclude me from having it challenged, or questioned, or cut off from the fact that the person I’m writing about has their own interpretation?” A rule I made for myself pretty early on that I hope I kept: I wouldn’t ever write anything that assumed what the other person was thinking. I ended up editing out [parts] where I would say, “He must have thought this,” or, “I knew he meant this.” I do think for all memoir writers, it’s really important to protect your own experience and your own way of telling the story and to really commit to it, to stand by it. And the best way to do that is by acknowledging that it is fallible. It can be challenged. It is just yours, and that’s enough. The thing about a book is that it exists forever. You have to stand by it.

This post was originally published on The Creative Independent.

I’ve known your work for a while because of Giancarlo DiTrapano and New York Tyrant. I had not yet read Layman’s Report… Do you feel like your style or your sense of writing has changed in the decade or so since you first wrote the book? What was it that made you want to reissue it?

There are always sentences that bother me in stuff that has been published. There’s a deadline, so you have to let it go, but there’s always room for improvement. It’s really as simple as that. And I think in the last 10 years, maybe [I have] gotten a little more refined and I don’t have to try so hard to get the voice that I want. I can also relax a little bit without something getting too plain or banal-sounding or ingratiating, for that matter. I’ve grown a bit. Standards are slightly different and so you want things to be at a certain level.

That’s really comforting to hear. I’m facing down a manuscript I’m about to start and part of me is just like, “Oh, it’s hard every time I’m starting a new one.”

Yeah. Oh, yeah. In first drafts, I just give myself license to really suck. And my first drafts are so bad. If you read them, you would be hard-pressed to believe that this would be something you might like later, honestly. So, first drafts are about getting there, about getting all the big pieces down and the content and so on, and then things get more and more refined. I kind of like that blank page at first because I’ve realized that it doesn’t have to be great right off.

How many drafts do you feel like you normally go through before you feel like something’s ready to be put out in the world?

First, I do two longhand drafts, and those are complete drafts. Every word is gone over and considered. The third draft is when I start typing, but it’s the same process again. The whole thing is reread. I think after three or four, I start to be able to be satisfied with certain sections. And then I start concentrating on things that just are more problematic, that are going to be a tough nut to crack, probably for the duration of the process. But that doesn’t mean that I won’t come back to things and have an “aha” moment, or say, “Oh, wait a minute, this sucks. I thought it was okay, but I found a better way to do it.”

Wow, longhand drafts. I know that there’s a mind-body connection between actually writing something out rather than typing. I feel like that must do something different to the story.

It reflects the way I think, physically. In longhand, things run together and they’re a bit sloppy and tentative, and that’s the way I think in those early drafts. It’s kind of [to] let it all hang out. So it does feel like that kind of connection, a sort of physical, visceral thing. And then as you go into typing, the words become more discrete units of sound. William Carlos Williams, the poet, came up in the industrial age and he compared it to nuts and bolts when he would type. It had that kind of feeling of working with something, of interlocking pieces and so on. And as I make the transition from longhand to typing, that’s kind of what it’s like.

In a recent interview you did, you talked about how it’s always content before form, but it’s clear that that form is still something that you look highly upon. What is it that you think makes it so compelling, those interlocking pieces of language?

I think it’s just about sound for me in writing. Before I faced up [to the fact] that if I wanted to do something creative, it was going to have to be writing, I would try other things. I was interested in filmmaking, and I tried to be a musician for a while. And I think it was the visceral aspect of those things that appealed to me. I thought, “Well, writing is just some dead words on a page. There’s no real connection to it.” I think I finally got to a point where I began to see that you can have a voice, and that is what brings the story to life for me.

I don’t like it when writers talk about, “Well, style is something ornamental. Here and there you can do something, but other than that, you just let the story tell itself.” I don’t believe that. I don’t think there is a story unless it has a voice in a certain sound. I think great writing has a sound. There’s no song if you can’t sing. I think what I was looking for in other mediums I’ve managed to try to achieve in writing. You have images, you have sound in that. Between form and content, I’m just looking for this perfect synthesis where the wine and the bottle are the same thing. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a real obscure and challenging style. It could be very simple, like Raymond Carver edited by Lish, or a lot of Hemingway, or Joyce, or Joy Williams, a writer that I’m really addicted to. Her stuff is very simply written, but she still achieves that effect for me.

Where did these personal rules of style and form come from that create your voice? How did they evolve?

I don’t know. I really don’t like the obvious being belabored. If it’s something that we both know is there, then it’s almost a neurotic thing. I always feel like I’m insulting the reader’s intelligence by saying something [obvious]. Let’s say you’re describing a TV show. I would rather describe it by the narrative than say what the name is, unless the name has a certain ring that’s valuable in that context. But other than that, I think it’s a cheap way to try to identify with the reader by naming brands.

In Firework, there’s a scene where people are staying at some weekly-rate motel and they’re watching cable, which they’ve never had before. And they’re watching a movie that’s obviously The Terminator, but I don’t say “The Terminator.” I thought it was more interesting to say it’s about a robot who comes from the future to kill someone before they can grow up and kill them—or something like that, whatever the plot line was. I thought that just had a lot more resonance and permanence to put it that way. I think it evolves from personal things that annoy me, even conversational things that have extended into writing.

Could you talk about the ways that you’ve worked to prioritize your writing over the years? And has it ever been hard?

Yeah, yeah. As I got a bit older, when I started writing, I could write at any time during the day. I would get home after working an eight-hour day and I would write in the evening with no problem. I was married, still am. We had a five or six-year-old girl, and a new baby had just arrived. I had no problem with any of that, but later on, I just didn’t have that energy. I can only write in the morning. But I can also do some things in the evening now because I don’t have a day job anymore. Now I’m on a fixed income, but we’re getting by, so I don’t have to worry about that. I remember living in Portland, Oregon. It was a pretty tough time economically. I remember I was working 12-hour shifts at some job, and then in the morning I would get up, see my son off to school, and I was just not getting enough sleep and I was blocked. That’s the only time I’ve ever really been blocked. I assumed it was a creative problem, but I just couldn’t get rest. And I ended up getting frustrated and I burned this manuscript that I’d been working on for a couple of years. I think you have to develop routine and you’ve got to get enough sleep. That sounds simple, but that’s what works for me.

What was it that you were feeling so frustrated with in the manuscript that you left behind?

That became Firework. There was a particular problem that I just could not solve in that. Writing is like a series of problems to be solved, for me, and I just couldn’t do it. So I destroyed it and then a few years later, the solution occurred to me. About eight years after I had destroyed it, it was kind of given back to me. I could feel it come back in, which was really cool because I thought it was just lost forever. It was a really hard feeling to live with for years. It felt like I’d sacrificed one of my own children or something. I couldn’t get over it.

Your main characters live on the peripherals of experience, but often in wildly unique circumstances. I feel like one of the hardest things for me to do as a writer is to make a character that is very unlike myself feel believable on the page, especially if they’re not redeemable. How do you work to get into that mental space of an environment or a person that is not necessarily familiar to your own experience?

I think it’s just a matter of the longer you do it, and it’s all part of cultivating that process. All that stuff that you’re talking about of [characters] “unlike yourself,” there’s always some of it that’s in you anyway. It’s just in this different form or from a different point of view. It sounds maybe a bit corny, but all of us really do contain these whole populations, and not in some psychic way, but as you take in the world and other people, that’s just how it gets processed inside you. And the longer you write and the more you keep at it, you just get this clarity about it.

There was a point when it was a bit more of a struggle to try to think of somebody that seemed radically different. And still, it’s not easy, but you just have the faith that it’s going to happen through successive drafts and working through things and not forcing things but letting them happen. There’s effort involved in writing, but that’s not where the effort has to be.

Is the effort more in the problem solving? Is that what you mean?

I think it’s in the early drafts when you’re like, “Okay, I’ve got the scene and these two people, they have to get together. They have to talk about this, or they have to do this, or this has to happen.” And then I just throw it in there and just try anything, and put one foot in front of the other. That’s sometimes where it does feel like you’re forcing things a bit. But whatever you’ve put down—and this holds for whatever stage you’re in in your writing—there’s always a reason for it. So I’m loath to throw anything out. I always build things. Everything has a bit of a seed. So, even though it might seem arbitrary or random, there’s an artistic reason that you put it down there, maybe a psychic or psychological one. And you might end up replacing it later, but you have to just follow it through and give it its due.

When you’re working on a first draft, how long does it take you, usually? Or does it vary?

Life being what it is, there are interruptions. For what I’m doing now, I just finished this first longhand draft, but it’s long. It’s like, over 500 pages. This November, it would be two years [of writing the draft], but I had interruptions. I had Layman’s Report. I had to start revising that or working with my editor. Also, I moved from Ohio to New Mexico. Crap, that’s a story in itself… One day, I might just get a paragraph done; another day I might get three pages done. But I don’t get massive tons of pages done, ever. I’m pretty deliberate. I like to stop and think because I really enjoy the process. I savor it. And I always try to find myself in that proverbial zone, which the longer you do it, the more that seems to happen.

When did it start for you, with writing? Waste was self-published at first, wasn’t it?

Yeah, that was back in ’99. I pretty much did everything. The cover and all that, I did on a Xerox machine with Scotch tape and an X-ACTO knife. I had a hundred copies printed. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen it, because I no longer have a copy and I can’t find any more. But that was fun. I would just leave copies laying around in random locations with a bookmark [and] had my contact in it. It’s like a message in a bottle.

I think the first time I tried to write a novel, it was a horror novel. I had this concept for it and didn’t get further than one paragraph. When I would start things, I would just get a few sentences into it and the whole thing would pile up and become so overwhelming that I couldn’t imagine how I would finish or how it would get done. It was literally paragraph by paragraph till I was able to actually finish a whole story, but even then, I had no idea of what rewriting was. When I was done, I was done. It was terrible, but I had no idea how to make it better.

Actually, when I met my wife, I was living in this one-room place in downtown Cleveland, and I don’t know, I think all those ingredients combined… all of a sudden, I figured out the trick to rewriting. I could feel the thing come to life. That sense of something being alive, that’s the whole attraction to creativity for me. Before that, they were just inert words on a page. Once I met this person and we committed to each other, that seemed to jar something loose. And it’s corny to call someone your muse and some people might think of it as sexist, but that’s what she’s been for me. It seemed things started to fall into place then, although it still took a long time and there was still a lot of back and forth. My relationship with writing was sometimes like the relationships people have, where they’re with them one second, then no, they break up; they go back. It was like that. But each time I returned, it was with a greater degree of commitment and a little better idea of what I was doing.

I feel similarly, where I think my first attempt at a novel was a sci-fi novel about Project Blue Book and aliens. I think I got maybe 30 pages into it and then I was like, “I don’t even know how to write a novel. What am I doing?”

There’s almost a feeling of embarrassment: “Why did I think this is just so easy?” But you need that kind of naive confidence to get started. That novel, Firework—the first draft was almost 700 pages and it was just complete shit. It was through sheer force of will that I was able to get those down. And I think that’s when I talk about putting one foot in front of the other because I wasn’t in the zone yet then… There’s this film called* The Taste of Things*. It’s just about food and cooking and this chef. But he says he didn’t believe in prodigies in food, that you can’t even be a chef before you’re 40. That’s how I feel about writing, actually. I see these novels by people who are, like, 25 and the time is all over it. You see all the errors of youth that are in there and the clumsiness and the contrivance. I think things are rushed into existence, especially now in the age of gratification and whatnot. I trust writing from older people who have learned their craft, because you really can’t rush it and [they have] lived a bit.

Maybe being young means we can make mistakes, but now that I’ve had a little bit of years behind me, I have hit this point where I feel not so rushed. I see the value in saying, “No, this takes work and time.”

Right, and enjoy the process. Because when I’m in the thick of it, I really don’t want it to end. I kind of get pretty bad postpartum now when I’m done with something. Maybe sometimes I won’t start on something right away, but even if I do, I have to use that initial writing to push that out and displace it. But yeah, learn to love doing it. And for me, publication comes with all kinds of pains in the butt. So I savor the act of it all the much more now.

This post was originally published on The Creative Independent.

Often when we think about magazines, we see the person at the top of the masthead, and think they are the sole genius behind the publication. In reality, there are so many people making the work happen—editors, writers, illustrators, photographers. To start, how do you decide who to collaborate with?

It feels extremely case-by-case. First and foremost, I think collaboration is about complementary skill sets and what we can offer each other. Depending on the project and what I can offer, I’m looking for something different in my collaborator. I want us to challenge each other, support each other, balance each other out. Also, we need to make sure we’re checking all of the boxes in terms of what we need in the group to get the project done.

In addition to that, it really depends on the length and scope of the project. If I’m going to hire a freelance writer to do an article, typically I will look into what they’ve written in the past. I’ll Google them and check out their socials. I might even ask, depending on the scope of the story, editors I know who have worked with them, but I won’t require meeting in person or anything like that. I’m pretty open to just taking a chance on someone who cold pitches me.

On the other side of the spectrum, if I’m hiring someone as a constant collaborator [as a member of Them’s staff], if I’m working with them on every single cover, video, even the captions and the assets on our Instagram, I tend to think about deeper things a little bit. Of course, I’m considering skills, experience, and ideas, and if that fits into the role that I’m looking to fill. But I have a joke that I only hire nice people, which feels maybe basic and silly, but genuinely is really important to me. It matters if someone brings their skills to the table in a way that is kind and conscientious, when they are open to back and forth. I think that when you are on a team with people, there is so much of yourself that you bring to as far as your sensitivities, your insecurities, your communication style, the way you express feedback and ideas.

It’s important to me to be able to imagine having a disagreement with that person and feeling like we can–in a positive way–have different ideas about something and have it be productive. I think that is really the most exciting part about collaboration, which is not having everyone be the same, but actually having people be as different as possible. And be the type of people who are willing to lean into that difference in exciting and productive ways.

What qualities do you think define a successful collaboration, and do any projects stand out in your mind?

Honesty is a big one. Complementary skill sets and different experiences. Diversity. That’s a buzzword, but genuinely people who are willing to see where each person is at and fit together in supporting each other in a non-hierarchical way. Often, when we are working on teams, we have hierarchical roles and titles, but that doesn’t fully encompass the nuances of what people bring. Even if you are, “below or above another team member,” I think recognizing that’s not always going to dictate what the dynamic should be or what the dynamic should look like. I think it’s best when people are willing to speak up and people are willing to listen, and not be stuck in those hierarchical kinds of roles as much.

How do you approach collaboration with people who you have relationships with that extend beyond work (friends, partners, etc.)?

For me, with every bigger collaboration, I try to be transparent from the beginning about what I feel like I can bring, and what I am hoping to get out of it. I think people’s intentions for being part of a project and what they want to get out of it can really dictate [the outcome.]

I think it’s actually not common enough that we just state outright, “This is my reason for being here.” “I’m really here, because I want this for my resume. I’m really here because I deeply care about this story. I’m here because I need money, and honestly, I don’t really care about this that much,” which is totally valid. Often, reasons are going to be multiples of those.

I think with friends, it can be especially important to do that. Maybe this is just me, but I’m always concerned when asking friends if they want to collaborate on something if they are doing it as a favor, so I try to be really upfront about expectations. I usually will say, “I thought of you for this because I appreciate this and this about the way you work. I only want you to do it if it feels like something that you really want to do, and if it feels genuinely fulfilling and generative, or worth your while.” Because everyone has different needs, especially for freelancers.

When me and Alyza [Sarah’s partner] were making Transnational [an award-winning VICE documentary] together, it was our first time collaborating long-term on a project. It was also early quarantine and we were living in a studio apartment. Hierarchically, I was technically managing the team, so I was giving Alyza a lot of feedback on different cuts of the show. After work, if we’re talking about household chores, there’s not really a difference. You don’t reset the clock. You already told me five times today what to do, and so it doesn’t really land the same if you’re telling me again. That was an interesting lesson for me. Even if we try to say we maintain boundaries between work and personal relationships, emotionally, a lot of the dynamic does carry over and it’s important to be sensitive to that.

Have you ever had collaborative projects fall short or not meet your expectations? Why do you think that happened and what did you learn that continues to inform your work if you feel like it has?

For me, being in a position where I am often giving feedback or making decisions, collaboration often involves a constant series of decisions around how much I want to push my own perspective versus how much I want to trust someone, even though maybe it’s not what I necessarily would do in their position. That often goes different ways. At the end of something, sometimes I’ll find myself saying, “that was so great. I’m so glad that I let that person run with this idea that maybe I wasn’t fully on board with but I trusted it. Other times, if there were flags in my head that end up becoming bigger issues and making a project difficult or less successful, I’m kicking myself. I knew, but I didn’t say it, because I wanted to trust the process, you know? I think the big thing for me has been just also recognizing that it’s okay, and that it’s better to more often just trust people and trust the process, even if you have moments where you’re like, “I kind of knew that wasn’t going to work.”

It’s worth the relationship to let the process happen.

I’m also someone who suffers from perfectionism, so if something goes wrong, I tend to focus on that. I try to redirect my attention to the times when I’ve been wrong, where I’ve been like, “I didn’t know about that” but then it turned out to be amazing, and it was a total learning moment for me. Those are the times when I feel most inspired, ironically.

Letting go makes you happier.

Yes, and letting go of things always works out.

You obviously have a very public role. How do you balance your time spent with other people, and a private creative practice, if you have one?

To be totally honest, I’m not that good at it. Part of my process has been being kinder to myself about not being good at it. I think that I kick myself sometimes, because I’m like, “Oh, I haven’t worked on my personal projects. I haven’t done personal writing or been painting.” But I also think that we have this unreasonable expectation of people that we can just do everything at once. The reality is that I put everything into my role at Them right now, and I enjoy that so much, and I wouldn’t have that any other way. I wouldn’t want to show up and just be putting half my energy into it. I’m really in it with my team. But that also means when I get home, I’m pooped. I’m focusing on other things. I’m focusing on my relationships. I’m focusing on my relationship to my body. I’m hanging out with my cat. I’m trying to recognize that there’s time and it’s okay to be like, “I’m putting my all into this project that isn’t a personal project, that is actually a huge ongoing collaboration, and that’s just what I’m focusing on right now.” I’m sure I’ll focus on personal projects at another point.

Is it okay to abandon a project, and how do you come to that decision?

It’s definitely okay to abandon a project, and there are so many reasons to do it. The biggest question is, “Am I getting what I need out of this?” I don’t want to say that it’s just about, “Is this fulfilling me?” because sometimes projects are just about making money or things like that, and I think we need to recognize that in this world of freelancing.</sapn> So I think it’s more like at the beginning when I set out with the intention of, “What do I want to get out of this? Am I getting that?” Sometimes you’re not getting that, but you’re getting other things that are keeping you around, and that’s okay. But I think if you feel like a project is zapping you of energy and inspiration, it’s definitely time to put it down. That does not mean you wasted time because with each project you’re building on your practice, even if it doesn’t get shared with anybody.

Yes. Relatedly, what’s been the most surprising thing about your creative path?

I mean, so much has been a surprise. It’s interesting, because I’ve had people say to me, “You’re so lucky that you’ve known what you wanted to do since you were young.” I knew since elementary school that I wanted to be a writer, and I knew in middle school that I wanted to be a journalist. I do feel grateful for having that passion and clarity, but to me, I feel like there have been so many twists and turns and “trust the process” moments, where I’ve taken a leap and trusted my gut. I started as essentially an art critic and culture journalist, and then thought I was going to move into curating, and then I pivoted to writing about identity.

From there I got into special projects and was really excited by this idea of “How do you bring people together around storytelling and collaboration, and bring stories to life in multimedia ways?” I think probably the biggest surprise has been moving into documentary because to me that was the biggest kind of “aha” moment. I hadn’t expected myself to land there, but it felt like producing was exciting all the parts of me, as far as thinking about story, but also thinking about visuals, audio, setting, sourcing, access, and collaborating in a big team. It felt like the most exciting challenge that I had encountered. I think that was kind of the biggest surprise, besides getting this job at Them. When I took the role, I had many friends say, “We’ve always thought of you as an Editor in Chief. The way that you approach collaboration and thinking about projects and editing, this makes total sense for you.” At the same time, I started writing about art and I’m not a queer media veteran. So becoming this person who is really embedded within [the queer media landscape] was definitely a little bit unexpected for me, but obviously something I’m extremely grateful for.

This post was originally published on The Creative Independent.

Vivienne Volker, the fictional protagonist of your debut novel Vivienne, is the widow of Hans Bellmer. Although Volker is a fictional character, Bellmer was very real. What made you decide to zero in on his life and work, and the work of the Surrealists in general?

I’m interested in his strange, discombobulated doll sculptures, which he’s most famous for. They’re gross and disturbing; some say he saw them as a reaction against the Nazi regime and the idea of the perfect body. I wanted to create this alternate universe around that. I’m also very interested in the uncanny, so the notion that this real artist would be in the book, but also that he would have this alternative existence felt appropriate. I wanted people to be able to read [the book] and then deep-dive into his work, but at the same time, not necessarily have to know who the hell he is or who any of the artists that I mentioned are in order to have fun reading.

I thought it was interesting that you decided to invent a fictional art world controversy that tangentially involved a real artist rather than creating a totally fictional scenario—or, alternatively, focusing on a real controversy.

I wanted to anchor the story, but at the same time, deform it—almost like Bellmer’s dolls—because I think of Vivienne as being set a little to the side of this world.

Passages of the novel are composed of social media posts and comments sections. I noticed that many of the comments, even though they take on typical internet lingo, abandon traditional syntax and structures of meaning and start to sound almost poetic. I was reading your interview with Margaret Welsh, where you described poetry as an “alternative language.” In giving these passages a sense of disarray or discombobulation, were you intending to highlight social media speak as an alternative language as well?

Yes—I was trying to highlight social media speak as an alternative language that can be deadening and repetitive and awful, but also have this potential for poetry or a dreamlike, otherworldly quality. It’s kind of absurdist because there are, I think, very realistic “comments” or social media lingo, and then there’s some that are straight-up poetry. But when you cruise around in comments sections long enough, there are some really poetic comments.

I read Internet comments a lot, but [while researching this book] specifically, [I sought out] comments on “controversial” female figures, because Vivienne needed to be this icon that people had a lot to say about and had conflicting views on. I looked at comments on [posts] of people like Kate Moss, Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, and Camille Paglia—canceled or controversial people—and video tributes to dead icons.

Do you remember any comments that stood out to you as particularly striking or weird?

I don’t know if there’s a specific one, but when a comment opens up into its own world—when you get a sense for what’s going on in that person’s life, and it gets very personal or sad—that can be quite moving. There are a few places in the novel where people are expressing their torment with the world [through social media comments], and then they find these intimate connections with other commenters.

What’s your own relationship with social media, both as an artist and as a consumer of art?

It’s tormented. I think social media is a pharmakon—it can be both healing and poisonous. I try to be pretty distanced from it. I don’t post a lot about my personal life, but I use it for research and I like to know what’s going on, so I don’t like to divorce myself from it entirely. It can be evil and it can be good, and I tried to explore that in the book. I’m addicted to it like everyone, I guess. I don’t have Twitter, but I do haunt it.

Twitter can be a total time suck. I had to delete the app from my phone.

I feel like everything is becoming social media now. There’s a social media-fication of life, in the sense that we’re in constant conversation with other people. Whether that’s actually a way for us to be more intimate and to know more about each other, or whether that’s a cover or a distraction [remains uncertain]. It could be both.

Your character Vesta is super precocious for her age; she cites famous artists and watches Ingmar Bergman films, even though she’s just in grade school. Were you similarly surrounded by art from a young age?

No, I was not. Vesta’s annoyingly precocious at times. I feel tenderly towards her, but I didn’t grow up around art myself.

I was endlessly curious as a child. My mother says I was a 20-year-old five-year-old, so I think I based a little bit of her demeanor on mine. She’s a bit of an alien and a worrier. But I didn’t come to people like Hans Bellmer until much later—I would say, late teens or twenties. Still, it was very fun to imagine a child growing up surrounded by these berserk images and this family lineage.

How did you eventually gravitate toward those areas of interest?

My parents and the people I grew up with, even though they’re not artists, per se, are interesting and strange. I started to write because I was curious about the world and wanted a way to try to understand what was happening. I don’t have an origin story in that way; [Vivienne isn’t] autofiction at all.

You do have a background in the art world—you’ve been an art critic before, and you’ve taught courses at different universities. I’d love to hear about how your study of art has influenced your practice as a writer—not just in terms of subject matter, but also whether it’s shaped your artistic philosophy in any way.

I think there’s something very visual and cinematic about the way I write. When I was writing Vivienne specifically, I was looking at a lot of different images, trying to saturate myself in as much text and image as possible to have it feel illusory or dream-like. I like to travel between different worlds. I don’t think I’m fully in any one of them, but I’ve worked with different art magazines, publishing houses, and gallerists, and Vivienne certainly parodies that arena.

On the note of bouncing between different worlds—before Vivienne, you published several volumes of poetry. What was it like making the shift from verse to more traditional, narrative prose?

Well, I don’t think I would have if this story hadn’t come to me. Vivienne and her story came to me and I realized, “The proper form for this is not poetry or visual art; it has to be a novel.” Crafting a narrative arc feels like a totally different thing than writing a poem. Writing a poem feels closer to making a piece of visual art—[you’re capturing] a moment or a burst of energy. [Writing a novel] was quite a change and it felt rather trippy. I think the only reason I was able to do it is because I used the unit of the line as a touchstone [via] the social media poetry and Vivienne’s poetry.

In terms of plotting, do you create an outline or follow any routine, or do you just dive in?

No. I’m a bit of a chaotic writer—but I will say because Vivienne came to me so quickly, I had a sense of where the story was going to go. I did create a very loose outline so I knew what I was writing towards, although the end came after everything was done. I didn’t know that would be the end—and then I had a lightbulb moment and crafted it later.

Vivienne deals with themes of cancellation and how people in the art world decide who they want to associate with or work with. Your poetry book Magenta was pulled from a small press because of supposed associations you had. [Note: Emmalea Russo had written several articles on film for Compact Magazine, which had published conservative op-eds by other writers.] I’m curious—amidst all the noise, how do you decide who to trust with your work and who to collaborate with?

That’s a really good question. How do I decide who to trust with my work and collaborate with? I think it’s trial and error, but typically I would rather take the risk. If someone reaches out and wants to collaborate or wants to talk to me about my work, I usually will say yes because I’m a very curious person. My problem with the association phobia we have now is that I think artists, just like any other human being, should talk to absolutely anyone, in public or not. Maybe that is kind of risky or dangerous, but I don’t understand how else to relate to the world.

In another poetry book, Confetti, you write about The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. There’s this pull toward the uncanny, like you mentioned before. Some of the surreal images described in Vivienne also have an uncanny or potentially disturbing quality—for example, Dorothea Tanning’s Tableau Vivant. What’s your fascination with these kinds of images?

I love horror movies. I think that because horror images take us to an edge or an extreme, there can be something almost sacred about them. Because they’re so disquieting, they’re almost like barometers. And I think I am most interested in the uncanny moments, which are often not the straight-up gory, disgusting, in-your-face horror, but something that is slightly tilted or a different version of itself. And with Vivienne, I focused on that because a lot of it takes place in the home, so I wanted there to be a feeling of familiar and home-like comforts alongside strange occurrences like the weird sculpture in the basement or even eerie resonances in the internet comments. Those things, to me, are the “scary” things that open into a whole other way of thinking.

**I like what you said about certain images taking on this almost sacred quality. Fear of the unfamiliar is a very pure emotion, and that’s what makes these images so universally resonant. **

You teach a course called Psycho Cosmos, which draws connections between astrology and artistic discovery. How has your work as an astrologer and researcher of the occult intersected with your creative process?

Astrology is built on the idea of synchronicity or meaningful coincidences. It’s not that the planets are causing something to happen, but rather that there is a relationship between something that’s going on on earth and something that’s happening in the stars. This idea of correspondence between times and places heavily influenced Vivienne because a lot of scenes are happening in simultaneity. I’m really interested in things that are happening at the same time, and how those events might tell us something about the quality or the atmosphere of a certain moment.

Last but not least: the exhibition that Vivienne’s work appears in is called “Forgotten Women Surrealists,” Who are some forgotten artists, regardless of gender or discipline, who have inspired you?

I don’t know if she’s really forgotten, but one of the artists that Vivienne was partially inspired by, [the poet and visual artist] Unica Zürn, is really interesting. She was a lover and a long-term partner of Hans Bellmer, and she committed suicide by jumping out a window. A lot of Vivienne’s story is based on this question of, “What if there was this woman who came after her and was with Hans Bellmer in those final weird days of his life?”

This post was originally published on The Creative Independent.

When did you know you wanted to be a writer and how did writing come about as creative practice?

Writing was a very formative event in my life because of my background as a German-Irish child growing up in Dublin, being prohibited by my father from speaking in English. I became a very silent child and a very silent grown-up person. The only way I could find to give expression to what I felt and what I experienced in my life was through writing. I couldn’t be understood in any other way. First of all, I had to always be careful what language I would speak. I wasn’t allowed to speak English in the house. German on the street was also kind of taboo because I would be targeted as a Nazi. People would call us Nazis. And then the Irish language was also not very popular in Ireland, because although lots of people were being encouraged to speak it, the Irish language was always connected with poverty and a history of trauma in Ireland. Luckily, that has changed now, and there are lots of Irish speakers who are very proud to speak the language.

You wrote your memoir,The Speckled People, from the perspective of yourself at a very young age. I’m interested in the process of writing from memory, but also from the perspective of being silenced.

In order to tell that story of my childhood, I had to effectively relive that time. That was enabled by the fact that my mother kept diaries. She kept a journal all the way through our childhood. All the events that are recorded in The Speckled People are there in my mother’s journal, along with the extraordinary loneliness and homesickness that she felt living in Ireland under what became a very strict, crusading regime that my father introduced. She did the groundwork, in some ways, for my memoir. In another world, I think she would’ve been a writer too. She had a way of mythologizing family life and stories. I suppose that’s often what mothers do. The funny or tragic stories that happen in a family become mythologized and told again and again. And my mother was brilliant at that.

Often that’s the most interesting aspect of storytelling—when someone doesn’t even realize they’re doing something creative, they’re just documenting. I think that comes out in your work.

Yeah, I mean, you asked me about when I became a writer or how I became a writer. I could give you an example from my childhood, when my mother asked me to put a bowl of mashed potato on the table for dinner. Instead of doing that, I brought it into another room and got my brothers and sisters to throw the mashed potato at the ceiling. It was a bizarre, crazy, childish thing to do, but it was the reaction of my mother that was so interesting. My father came in and he was furious, but my mother said, “No, no, this is something creative. It takes a lot of imagination to do something as wild as that.” So in some ways, that is where my writing career began: when I was encouraged by my mother to do something completely nuts. I suppose that still stands with me now.

It’s really great that she nurtured that instead of fighting against it.

There was enough punishment going on in our house, but this was a wonderful moment where she celebrated creativity. And not just creativity in the formal sense of painting and writing stories, but [creativity] completely outside the box. I’d say Marina Abramović would’ve loved that.

Yes, definitely!

It’s the kind of thing she would’ve thought of, I think. She possibly did something like that. That’s who I think of as somebody who completely breaks down the kind of intellectual guidelines, guardrails that we have in our lives.

That reminds me that your most recent book, The Pages has a very unique narrator: a banned book. That’s a very outside-the-box thing to do.

When you’ve read The Speckled People, all those kinds of crazy events in our family story, it’s not a million miles away from what I’ve done with The Pages, to take on the voice of a book speaking. It’s almost the voice of a child written again in a different form.

How do you decide what book is a novel and what is a memoir?

It’s a good question. I’m not entirely sure that there’s a huge difference. Of course, in a memoir, you are almost commanding people, commanding the reader to believe everything. You’re kind of declaring this as the truth. Whereas in fiction, you’re inviting the reader to believe this. It is a subtle difference, but ultimately memoir writing is not just a confession. It’s not like a book of evidence in court. It is a creative enterprise. Any kind of retelling or recreation of memory is a creative act. Lots of psychologists and neuroscientists are talking about memory as a purposeful tool. We remember with a purpose. It’s not just remembering abstract events. There’s a reason why we remember something. All memory has a strategy.

In an interview with Deborah Treisman in the New Yorker, I described the story I [published] in the New Yorker recently, called “Autobahn.” It’s a story about a reconciliation with my father, and I describe it as sort of a live engagement with memory. For me, that’s a very important thing, this idea of a live engagement with memory. It’s not just that you remember something and say, “My father gave me a mouth organ.” Me remembering him giving me a mouth organ changes my entire life. The memory of something that happened can be transformative. It can be life-changing. And that’s why I said it’s a live engagement with memory. And that story being published in the New Yorker has changed me. That has to be acknowledged. It changed me because it opened up a posthumous reconciliation with him.

In that story, you really found a way to use a small moment in time to tap into all these other histories and stories.

Well, that’s true. I kind of describe in the story how time collapses and it happens to all of us. A single moment in a person’s life is in fact an entire lifetime. It’s not just that moment. It’s everything that’s happened to that person before, and often even what’s going to happen in future. I mean, it’s a lifetime. We experience a lifetime in one moment.

I’m curious about your daily practice with writing. Do you have moments where memory comes to you and you feel like you need to write it down?

I keep a journal most of the time. One of the main characters in my book The Pages> is Joseph Roth, the German-Austrian author, and he said that writing, for him, was what allowed him to exist. Without writing, he would not exist. I think a lot of other writers have said this, and it’s not dissimilar to what happens to everybody. Unless we tell our story, then we don’t exist. If you don’t have somebody to talk to, if you don’t have somebody listening to your story, then you effectively disappear. You become voiceless. I had the experience as a child of becoming voiceless. So I’m very much aware of people and nations who become voiceless and who are not heard. The important thing about writing and storytelling is that it allows us to exist.

Do you feel like writing has helped you cope with those feelings of being voiceless in childhood?

Yeah. Growing up with three languages, and the kind of fear, the silence, the voicelessness that I experienced as a child living between those identities—it turned me into a writer as a way of establishing some kind of a home, of giving me some kind of a voice. I’ve said this frequently: I think, in my writing is where my home is. I live in Dublin. I often go to Berlin. I feel very much at home in Berlin, but there’s something else. I’m actually most at home in my writing. That’s where I exist.

There’s kind of a safety for all writers in writing because that’s where you can attempt to understand the world. Not that we want to control the world, but in some way the writer gives himself or herself a way of dealing with the world or fixing it down—fixing down all the things that are wrong or all the things that are beautiful. It reminds me all the time that we mythologize our lives and we mythologize each other, and that’s a very necessary human function, I think.

It seems, for many writers of memoirs, that writing is a way to reflect on and to really try to unpack and understand what happened.

I mean, it’s not like you can change the world and you can’t change your memory. You wake up in the morning and you still have the same mother and father that you had 20 or 30 years ago, or further back. And this probably applies to everybody; everybody has their own traumatic experiences, some much worse than others. But would you give them away, those bad experiences? I think it’s a mistake to try and get rid of them. It would be, in some ways, like cutting off your right arm. Cutting off your memory, even if it is a bad memory, is like cutting off part of yourself. And that’s what writing allows you to do, in many ways: to recognize your entire persona as a human being. It’s not just you and your own memory, but you in the community that you’re in as well. Nobody’s completely isolated, either.

Have you found a community through writing?

Yeah, yeah. Because I’ve been published, I know that I’ve been heard. I go on tour here in Germany very often. I read a passage from my memoir about my mother making cakes and how she rescued us with cakes and humor from our difficult time as children. And almost at every reading, somebody comes up to me and says they want to make a cake for me. It’s often happened that they have brought me cakes. It’s a funny thing, but they do connect with that story and that’s kind of lovely, the way my mother had of liberating us.

This post was originally published on The Creative Independent.