In a good way?

In a great way, like an old soul. You have so much wisdom in your writing… I was curious who your influences are and what you might attribute to this wise voice.

I read many coming-of-age novels while writing this book, but I’d say generally my big influences are Gary Indiana, Jean Rhys, and Toni Morrison. Similarly, I feel like their books could have been written at any time. Even though my book is historical fiction, I tried to strip it of temporal markers that would make it feel stuck in a particular period. Obviously the world and historical events intrude into the narrative, but I like books where that’s tangential to the story and there’s something timeless about the quality of the writing. I also really love Barbara Comyns for the same reason. Her fiction has a lot to do with class and downward mobility. There’s a sense in her novels that artists take a vow of poverty, maybe unintentionally, and that’s very different from how it’s treated in Lonely Crowds, where art makes them upwardly mobile.

As far as sounding older than I am, the way my parents speak certainly seeps into my writing. There’s something idiomatic and old-fashioned about the way they talk. I don’t say that in a disparaging way; I think that the quality of the conversations I heard from adults during my childhood was very high. It just seemed so out of step with the way Americans speak, because [my parents] are not American. I always want to express in my writing the friction between generations. Listening to older people speak has been a huge inspiration for my writing.

Like your influences, your novel explores class, especially within the context of New York’s art world. Given that the character Maria’s upbringing was even harder than Ruth’s, why do you think Maria is better at assimilating to that social class?

Maria’s very chameleonic and has less reservations about moving from one world into another. I don’t think she feels as beholden to her past as Ruth does. She’s a bit more ruthless, coincidentally, than Ruth because she needs it more. Her life has been so precarious. In the book Maria is always characterized as being more beautiful and more capable, but all that information is delivered to us through Ruth’s subjectivity. It’s never really clear that Maria is any more beautiful or talented or actually charismatic than Ruth is; it’s what Ruth projects onto her. I wonder now if it’s Ruth’s admiration for her that makes Maria feel entitled to outsized praise and attention, because she’s always gotten it from this one person.

Lonely Crowds** reminded me a lot of Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend and Toni Morrison’s Sula, stories told from the perspective of the friend who’s more meek or less bold, and seeing the other friend on this sort of pedestal.**

Thank you.

Both Maria and Ruth rely on romantic partners as their patrons later on. Is this out of necessity, or is this just something you’ve noticed in the art world?

In a tongue in cheek way, people always give artists the advice to marry someone wealthy. Not that I’m necessarily taking advice from Bret Easton Ellis, but he had a recent Louisiana Channel interview where he was asked, “What advice would you give young writers?” And he laughed and said, “Marry someone rich.”

Ruth and Maria are definitely thinking about marriage and relationships in this strategic way. It’s pragmatic to date someone who has generational wealth and Maria is very aware of this. Whereas Ruth sees herself as more moralistic and as someone coupling up for love or coupling up in spite of her own desires. It actually ends up being an advantageous relationship for her. I was thinking a lot about the evolving value we attach to marriage and that maybe now it’s the first time where people are marrying primarily for love. These practical questions of, “Is this marriage viable in terms of how much money we have?” are crass to talk about, but that is what marriage has been for so long.

It’s interesting to me that there’s something going unspoken, this arithmetic people are doing in their minds when they enter into a relationship. Because I think everyone is doing it implicitly, even though that’s maybe not the reason you stay with someone or fail to stay with someone. I think Ruth and Maria are making practical choices about the lives they want to live. And, at their core, they’re both equally ambitious and materialistic. Maria is just unapologetic about expressing it; she’s willing to say, “I want nice clothes, I want a nice apartment. I feel entitled to certain things.” Whereas Ruth just conveniently does the same thing but is unwilling to talk about it for a host of reasons. I relate more to Ruth in this way.

I noticed that, whenever Ruth was longing to return to her apartment with her nice bedspread and set-up. I was like, “Oh girl, you want it too.”

Yeah, of course. I think that’s true of many artists.

You said that your novel is historical fiction but it doesn’t really have time markers. I was thinking does it take place in the ’90s or early aughts?

It begins in the mid-‘80s, when the girls first go to the Catholic school they receive scholarships to attend. By the end, I would say it’s unclear, and purposefully so, because I wanted it to feel like, after certain events in the book, time stops mattering, in a way. Or you see that the characters’ lives are so cemented, since everything that’s consequential has taken place in their childhood and adolescence. But the novel ends during the early aughts.

Did you have to do much research into that timeframe or did you just imagine a world without internet?

It was a relief when I finally decided this was not going to be set in contemporary time, because I didn’t want to have any social media in my book. I really didn’t want to write about Instagram, about Twitter. I think that this desire to write something that’s hopefully timeless was one of the motivations for setting it in this period.

There were interesting parallels between that period in the art world and what happened just after the death of George Floyd, in that there was a boom in the market for Black artists. Initially I wanted to write about that: the tension of obviously wanting to make money from your art, and making representational art, and accepting—maybe begrudgingly—this task of doing auto-ethnography and making work that’s seen as being about your group. Art about oneself is often mistaken for art about one’s group.

In 1993, there was a Whitney Biennial that was very controversial, as it was one of the first biennials where white male artists were not foregrounded. And you can imagine the criticism was very concerned with how “overrepresented” non-white artists were in the show. I thought about that being a meaningful moment in terms of the professional possibilities that were available to young, non-white artists such as Ruth and Maria, and how it seemed artists at that time were contending with similar questions and very real grievances [around] violence being done to members of your group. Though it’s typically the most educated and the wealthiest members of an ethnic group who become pundits or spokespeople—to be the faces of grievances that are actually not happening to them, but which are felt indirectly.

Simply put, George Floyd dies and then you sell a painting for more than you would otherwise. And obviously it’s not one-to-one. I don’t think people were cynically cashing in. Still, I wanted to capture some of what was happening when I got out of college in art and in culture without having to write about being 22 and about the internet.

My thesis advisor in undergrad told me not to do any research when writing a novel, the idea being that you can fact check it later. That gave me a lot of permission to speculate and then fill in the blanks.

Were you at all worried about it selling because it is an historical novel? I mean, I know it’s not that historical, but was that a concern that you had regarding the market?

No, because I had no expectations that it would sell.

Really?

It’s not that I think it’s a bad book, but you don’t know what you don’t know. It was my first time doing all of this. I mean, I imagined it would eventually sell to someone. But at the time that I was writing it, I was just writing it as a student and as someone who wanted to write, and I didn’t think about those things at all until they were happening. I don’t think that’s something you should care about because you can’t anticipate what will be marketable in two years or three years or five years, or however long it takes to write a book. Trend forecasting is so detrimental because you have to like what you’re writing. If it fails, it’s still yours.

Your author bio and novel share some parallels: a Rhode Island upbringing, Kenyan ancestry, Bard for undergrad, current residence in New York. In what ways do you draw inspiration from your own lived experiences, and when do you decide to completely fictionalize?

I usually like to do one Kenyan-American stand-in. It’s interesting to do a self-insert that’s deceptive and that’s not me, although it signals something about where I’m from and my background. I think the conflation between narrator and author is interesting. In most of my fiction the characters are not me at all. But I’m interested in the culture I come from. It is more religious, much more collectivist. A school like Bard is the exact opposite. There was a huge emphasis on self-discovery, self-inquiry, what kind of person you want to be, the real possibility of being an artist if you wanted to be one. And so I thought, “I could invent a place like this.” But why invent it if I know what it’s like and I can reconstruct it in fiction?

Aside from money, what are the rewards of your creative practice and what do you get out of this work?

Aside from money. I love the way you start with “aside from money.” I think it would be being part of a lineage of writers, or doing something that you find aspirational. It’s a wonderful thing to encounter a book that maybe went through a long period of obscurity, or a book written by an author who died penniless and the manuscript was posthumously found. It seems like a gift to be able to speak to people across generations and talk to people when you’re dead.

I know that the tone of Lonely Crowds is fairly somber. I mean, obviously there are moments of levity. But I laugh so much when I write. I find it incredibly funny. I find writing dialogue very funny. It reminds me of this anecdote I heard about Kafka, where he was reading The Trial to a friend and he was laughing to the point of tears reading it. Even if something ends up being fairly heavy or grim or severe, there’s something so pleasurable about writing that I can’t help but laugh and feel happy that what I spend most of my days doing is something that I did when I was a kid: to sit down and think about language and invent.

For a time I was doing a lot of readings, and I really liked when people would laugh and when people would come up to me and tell me, “Something like that happened to me, too,” even though the stories are not biographical at all. I loved being a container, a vessel for that feeling where people are able to have these unboundaried interactions. I wrote a story once where this woman goes to a funeral and she has this very strange threesome and this really sad, come-to-alter moment. Someone approached me after I read and said, “Oh my god, I had a very similar experience.” And I was like, “Well, I’ve never had this experience, but it doesn’t matter. That’s wonderful. I’m glad you could tell me that.”

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Shy Watson.

Hester’s journey across the country is obviously a very compressed timeline relative to the scale of ecological devastation. But it is somewhat extended in the sense that she could have just bought a first-class ticket and flown out to kill her dad within 24 hours. I wanted to make sure she would be up against a death sentence that would make it feel urgent and raise the question of mortality, while also giving her time to undermine herself and resist the fate she claims she actively wants.

The main way the climate element surfaces in the book is by driving through these sites of pollution, these Superfund sites. And those are on their own time scale of when that pollution happened and how long it’s taking to recover those places from that pollution—some of them ultimately are not recoverable.

Did you take this cross-country Superfund roadtrip in real life, or did you figure it out through research?

Largely through research. I’ve considered doing portions of it, but I was never able to get the funds and time off needed to make that a reality.

I feel like most debut novels nowadays read like auto-fiction. Bad Nature definitely does not. I know this is your debut, but is it the first book-length manuscript you’ve written?

I wrote one full-length book before this that had similar ecological themes, but I couldn’t quite make it work. It featured a younger protagonist, and it was like, “nobody’s going to know if this is YA or not.” I ultimately wound up abandoning it.

How did you come up with the idea for Bad Nature?

It was a combination of reading a lot of terrible ecological headlines and existing during the pandemic. I wrote it in 2021, so COVID wasn’t at peak badness, but I did still feel that closeness and scariness of death. And then there was some personal stuff going on at the time that also made me feel close to death. For some reason that closeness to death is what produced Bad Nature.

You earned your MFA at Brooklyn College. Were you working on this novel then?

No. I went to the MFA between 2016 and 2018, and I didn’t start this until 2021, so there was a big gap. That gap is when I was working on that first abandoned novel project. After that died, there was another months-long gap before I began Bad Nature. When I was in the MFA, I was mostly working on short stories.

Looking back on going to the MFA, it was a strange decision—not because it didn’t make sense for wanting to be a writer, just that I was unprepared. At the time, I didn’t realize how unprepared I was. Now that I do, I can recognize how lucky I was to even get into a program.

In what ways were you unprepared?

I’d been working since I graduated college as a civil servant. I’d written in private, but I had absolutely no connection to or knowledge of ongoing literary trends or lit magazines beyond like The New Yorker or anything like that. I didn’t know what the landscape of being a writer looked like. I don’t think any of my friends or family realized I wanted to write because I never shared my work or talked about it. I just thought, I write and read a lot, and that alone should qualify me. I just didn’t quite understand what I was about to get myself into. Maybe no one really does until they’re in it.

Are you glad you did it?

Oh yeah. I feel like a lot of people hate MFAs and think MFAs all produce the same kind of writing, and that they’re boring and professionalizing—and they are, at least in my case for sure, professionalizing. But I still think the people I met through the MFA and the entree that it gave me into this world were one hundred percent worth it. I had a great time during the program even though I was still working full-time during it and pretty sleep-deprived for the duration, and I’m still pretty close with a fair amount of my cohort. So I’m in the pro-MFA camp, if you can swing it.

What does your writing look like on the day-to-day? Can you walk us through your process?

Unfortunately it’s really variable. I’ve never been the kind of person who has a great amount of day-to-day discipline. It varies depending on what else I have going on in my life at the moment. So with everything going on with this book, I have not really had time to substantially write for the past couple of months. But when I am working, it’s the kind of thing where I will be pretty intense about it, and my weekends will just be dedicated to writing.

How do you edit your work?

I usually go through several drafts on my own first, and then I sit on it for a good long while, and then I’ll come back to it. I’ll repeat that a couple of times, though sometimes I’ll send it to friends right after that first settling period if I feel pretty confident. I have a writing group and that’s been very nice to share work with. I’ll continue doing edits from there. Sometimes it takes several cycles of doing that before I feel like a piece is finished. Often even when a piece is technically “finished,” I’ll feel like there are still tweaks that could be made. I’ve sat on some stories for a long time, waiting for that feeling to go away.

Does that prevent you from publishing?

Sometimes I’ll send it out anyway if I see an opportunity that seems to make sense for that specific piece, even if I don’t think the piece is perfect. I also think that, knowing that I’m just never going to consider a piece to be one hundred percent perfect, sometimes I have to send it out regardless and just let somebody else decide if it is, in fact, done.

Someone with a timeline.

Yeah. At least when it comes to my short fiction, I am not particularly aggressive or organized about sending my stuff out. I will see an opportunity and if I think it makes sense, I’ll pursue it. But otherwise, I’m content to let my work cook for a very, very long time. Bad Nature I probably would’ve sat on even longer had Anna Dorn not basically told me it was ready—without her encouragement I honestly don’t think I would’ve recognized that.

Throughout the novel, there are italicized sections that signify the chatter of talk radio. How did this element come to you? And how did you hope for it to function in the novel?

I wanted to bring in an element that reminded readers that Hester is in fact on a road trip, and the radio is one of the most salient parts of just driving around. In my younger years when I was in cars more often, the radio was always a big part of the experience. I wanted it to reinforce Hester’s weird thing about art in all its forms: she hates her dad’s visual art, she hates music. I wanted her to be listening to the radio chatter to help signify that, and then also to connect her to the milieu that she’s driving through and the element that news brings into the American landscape, how it impacts how you feel about or interpret the space you’re traveling through.

Brilliant. Hester changes a lot throughout these pages. How did you go about pacing and tracking her change?

I had some trouble in the early phases keeping track of how much time had been spent on the road. In early drafts it was significantly longer; in the final draft it was shortened to just two months. But Hester’s whole thing is being consistent and sticking to a goal, to one particular way of being. I wanted to slowly, through these variably weird encounters, chip away at her rigidity. Every encounter she has is doing that a little bit more.

Obviously, by living 40 years before the novel picks up, she’s had quite a long time to build up her defenses, so they’re tough to dismantle. But I do think that by the end of the novel, she’s begun to maybe see the light. I also think it was important to me to have it end the way it did— with something that’s not in her control, and to have what is outside of her control be a symbol of hope.

As far as creative work is concerned, how do you define success and how do you define failure?

There’s obviously an element of external validation that I would like to pretend does not matter to me, but it does, and that plays into my conception of success. I think it’s also a little bit about being true to the goals of your specific projects, whatever those might be, whether or not other people recognize or appreciate those goals. Failure would be not meeting those goals, however vaguely I’m articulating that, right?

Betraying one’s vision for what someone else thinks?

I think that’s an element of it. I think it’s about that consistency of vision and saying something you consider is worthwhile and sticking to your guns about that, even if other people come in with changes.

My definitions of success and failure are probably only going to get more complicated with time.

What’s the most surprising thing you’ve learned along your creative path?

I was surprised that I am even capable of finishing a book—I mean not just completing a draft but also seeing it through to publication. When I was younger I often self-sabotaged in elaborately stupid ways and so it was a pleasant to find that I could carry this through various obstacles, keep to deadlines, etc. I hope that lasts.

I’m also surprised by how social writing is, especially because, before doing the MFA, I was just writing off on my own and not connected to any community. I think that, plus this myth of the “solitary genius writer” or whatever, made me imagine things happened more in a vacuum. But nothing at all happens in a vacuum. It is an extremely social process. Any time you show your writing to somebody, that’s social.

Do you mean “social” mostly in editing and collaborating? Or do you mean attending literary events and meeting other writers?

Both. The writing process is more collaborative than I imagined. Even to get an agent, you have to demonstrate that your work is speaking to an issue that people want to read about, or show that you have an audience to speak to. Every step of it is supporting other people’s work, other people supporting you. You’re offering edits on people’s work; they’re editing your work.

Maybe once you reach a certain level, it’s a little more isolated and independent and you can just go off into the woods alone to make your masterwork, but that’s not my experience. It’s been pleasant for me to find that writing is a mutually supportive experience.

In Alissa Nutting’s New York Times review of Bad Nature, she notes a theme of American individualism and its harm to the collective good. Hester’s father is a mercurial and selfish artist, a painter. And Hester, on the other hand, is so driven in her own way, albeit without creativity or even an appreciation for the arts. She’s on the opposite end of the individualist spectrum by being an absolute girl boss. Was it intentional to have Hester and her dad both be individualists, just in opposite ways?

Yeah, that was definitely a deliberate choice. I wanted her rigidity and individualism to manifest in complete opposition to his; it’s like a reaction against him, but she winds up being almost the exact same in terms of her total obsession with the self. I hoped Bad Nature would come across as a critique of that hyper individualistic approach.

And John, the environmentalist hitchhiker she picks up, is such an angel. He’s so unconcerned with himself or even the comfort of living. He’s totally just out there for the cause.

Hester considers him to be this alien almost, where she’s like, “How are you even alive right now, given the way you go through the world?” She sees the world as this very vicious, dog-eat-dog place. She can’t imagine somebody like John making it as far as he has with the trusting attitude that he’s shown along their journey. He’s like, too weird to live but too rare to die.

Nutting’s review ends with this sentence: “Capitalism eventually destroys even those it seems to benefit most.” Is this, in fact, a message in your work? And if so, could you speak more to it?

One of the things I was trying to get at about hyper-individualism is that terminal capitalist logic of “You pursue your desires, and your desires are all that matter.” That is the ultimate form of self-fulfillment, the pursuit of those desires. I wanted to show that as being a hollow and rigid way to live, the way that Hester is hollow and rigid.

One of the ways her rigidity and control manifest is that she becomes extremely well paid and successful, and is confident that her money insulates her from outside influences and the vicissitudes of fate. She is the master of her own destiny because she has money—and in this case that is not a good thing.

I don’t have a clear conception of what a better alternative is, but I think that’s where a lot of us are right now—in an all-consuming system we don’t know how to escape, but would like to be able to.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Shy Watson.

Etta Friedman: Allegra and I are definitely the full package type. We’re full package people. We see music as visual as well, not just what it is. We’ll collab on a lot of ideas, but I do like the graphic design work for it. And then Aron [Kobayashi-Ritch], our bass player and producer’s sister, Daria [Kobayashi-Ritch], took all the photos that are physically on our record.

Allegra created a really awesome mood board for not just the record but also for a few music videos and stuff like that. We’re really hands-on in that sense. I feel like I need to have control of what’s happening. Because there have been times where it’ll be like, oh, I don’t have enough time to make this tour poster or something, and then we outsource and I’m always like, “Let me just do it, honestly.” I just can’t. It needs to all be in one little cohesive storyline. We are both just really hands-on in that sense because we just care about every aspect of it.

Your album bio says that Welcome to the Blue Sky is less concerned with sounding “cool and heavy and rock and roll,” and much more focused on “good, clean songwriting that hopefully inspires people to sing along and mean every word.” It also mentions aiming for the most direct vessel for sharing an emotional experience. What inspired this shift toward newer sincerity, and how does this new direction impact your songwriting?

Allegra Weingarten: I think what inspired the shift towards sincerity was just where we were emotionally in our lives at that point when we were writing the record. People keep asking us what inspired this change or this shift, but it was not a conscious decision at all, ever. We were just in such a fragile emotional state and we had so many big emotions happening at that time so whenever we sat down to write, it just ended up being autobiographical and tender. We just spent a lot of time on the lyrics. And once the songs were done, we didn’t want to distract from the meaning of them because we knew that this record was going to end up being the personal record in our discography. We wanted that to shine through. But that was all after we wrote the songs, when we decided that, production-wise, it wasn’t going to be too loud or heavy.

Does having more tender, autobiographical lyrics than before affect your experience as performers?

Allegra: We don’t really know.

Etta: Well, we played a lot of these songs for the first time at our release show. One or two songs made me feel emotional for different reasons. I noticed that when we played the last song on the record, “My Old Street,” which is what we ended with…Even listening to that song makes me really emotional, because it’s so personal and so much about our family and, yes, ourselves, but also just a lot of reminiscing on things that have shaped us. That’s an overall theme for the whole record. But this song concerning family—as opposed to the specific event that the rest of the record is entirely about is—just cuts deep.

Certain lines choked me up at the show, which was interesting. But I think it’s because we’re singing about our moms having similar problems while we were growing up and things like that. But then on a separate note, playing “Fever,” which is what we opened up that set with, was really fun. To play in front of people who were there for us, to see how excited everyone got, how they’re gauging it. When we had played “Fever” in the past, it was to crowds that weren’t really ours. So, seeing our own crowd’s receptivity was great. We wanted to know if it was going to be a good single. I think the vulnerability in content is going to show itself in different ways, but in terms of being super tender and sincere, I don’t think that’s necessarily hit while performing just yet.

“Fever” is a great single. It’s so catchy. In general, compared to your earlier albums, Welcome to My Blue Sky feels catchier. Was this intentional?

Allegra: No. I think we just got better at songwriting. I’m trying to deflect a lot of the assumptions that we sat down and were like, “We’re going to make a pop record, we’re going to make radio hits.” In a way, the record sounds like that, but that wasn’t because we were trying to do it. I think we’ve just gotten to a point where we’re a little more confident in our songwriting abilities and we just have gotten a little better, if I do say so myself. So, no, I don’t think it was a conscious thing to be like, “let’s sit down and write a bunch of catchy hooks and melodies.” I think it was just like–

Etta: “This is what we’re doing.”

Allegra: Yeah, we just did it. That’s what we were into at the time. We were probably listening to a lot of catchy hooks and melodies when we were writing the record, and that’s just what we wanted to do as opposed to writing a weird, I don’t know, someone said we should write a krautrock record, which we don’t want to do.

Did you say crowd rock?

Allegra: Krautrock. Don’t quote me, because I think it’s like German techno music.

Like sauerkraut.

Allegra: Yeah. It’s not techno, but it’s like synths and post-punk. I don’t know. Anyway.

You’ve played with a lot of big bands like Weezer, Death Cab for Cutie, and Alex G and also at some major festivals like Coachella. Is it everything you hoped for? Is it more, is there any disillusionment? What’s the sense of having those experiences?

Allegra: It lived up to my expectations in terms of how fun it all was. The Weezer tour was the most fun I’ve ever had, period. And same with Coachella. But for the actual playing, I guess for Coachella, I mean, that’s a hard crowd. We’re not playing to thousands of adoring fans. We played in a random-ass tent at 5:00 PM. And with Weezer, we’re basically the walk-in music because we were one of three and people were finding their seats when we were playing. So, until you’re playing your own songs for a stadium of people who want to hear your songs, I think there is just a sense of like, okay, “I’m doing this really big thing, but I’m humbling myself because these people are not here for me. It’s just, I got really lucky that I’m in this position right now.” But singing on stage with Rivers [Cuomo] was–

Etta: Incredible.

Allegra: That was a very surreal experience.

Etta: Yeah, so cool.

What song did you sing with them?

Etta: “I Just Threw Out the Love of My Dreams.” It’s a B-side on Pinkerton. The original girl who sings in that is in the Rentals and That Dog. Allegra and I have also loved that song for a really long time, so it was really awesome. We did not think that was going to happen. And when it did, we definitely didn’t think it was going to happen every night. And then it did.

I just got chills. I know that you have both worked in the service industry while working on music. How do you balance your work and creativity?

Allegra: It’s really, really hard and we’re both exhausted all the time. There is no other way to say it. Etta and I have burnt the candle at both ends for so long, and especially these past couple months, it’s been really hard. Etta works during the day. I work nights. Etta’s off days are the days that I work, vice versa. So we have to be really committed to using every single minute of our free time and devoting it to this. And be flexible. We try to move our stuff around for each other when we can to make time to work on music.

The whole thing is just like, you have to just be really passionate about music, and we both are deeply passionate and have really good work ethic. To be honest… You know what, let me stand on a–

Soapbox? Go off.

Allegra: A lot of really great bands don’t have good work ethic, and you have to have both. You can’t just have talent. You can’t just write great songs. You have to have a really good work ethic, and you have to know how to run this operation and to keep it moving. And Etta and I have been doing that since we were 16 years-old, even when we went to different colleges. We have always worked towards this. Okay, bye.

Did it ever feel like it was taking too long? How did you deal with patience or impatience during that trajectory of working hard?

Etta: The timing of how everything worked out for us was really lucky. And it’s going to start by sounding like it wasn’t that lucky, but Two of Me, for example, the first or second record came out June of 2020. It was right when Covid started. And we were like, “Okay, cool. Well, we can’t even do promotion.” I didn’t think Covid was going to make us leave college and have to go home and all of that. So I was like, “I’m ready to take a year off of school to tour. I’m ready to do the whole thing.” And then we were like, “Oh shit, well, it came out. We can’t even promote it.” And we just got really lucky by, in the interim of the pandemic, finding our management, getting our whole team together. We were able to sit and focus on that and writing more so than touring or trying to get our name out there.

Getting our team together was awesome. We are blessed to have found the right people for us. And I think that there was also a lot of patience that we had to learn there. Even signing a record deal or something, there’s people that are dangling things in front of your face consistently. It doesn’t mean that you’re going to get it. And I think especially when your dream is right there, you’re like, “Oh, I want all the cool things. I want it all. I want it all.” It’s not always going to work out like that, which is fine.

I realized our steady incline is a really good thing. I noticed a pattern in bands that were immediately exploding. There’d be a rise or a fall, a very quick shot up and a quick fall down. And I think we have pretty steadily been on this uptick, which feels great, because there haven’t been any major fall-outs that have made us think we aren’t going to be able to do this.

The patience of it all has been interesting in terms of comparing our growth to others. I’m like, “Okay, it will all work out.” Seeing the band Alvvays, who’s been our label, Polyvinyl, not release a record for five years and then get nominated for a Grammy. It happens. You just gotta make good work and strike at the right time for yourself.

How do you avoid burnout, or replenish yourselves when you’re feeling burnt at both ends?

Allegra: I don’t have the answer because I feel like we do just burn ourselves out. I guess when we come back from tour, we… No, we don’t even get to chill, because we’ve always had to go right back to work.

Etta: It’s crazy.

Allegra: We’re young, I guess. We have the endurance already built in. We have a muscle for it now, I guess. But yeah, I don’t know how to avoid burnout because I feel burnt out as fuck.

Etta: I know. It’s crazy. I feel like if anything, I turn into hermit mode and just turn everything off for a sec and then try to recoup. But that always makes it worse for myself. Always. It’s just like my brain can’t handle it and then I’m like, “Okay, we’re not dealing with it.” But then I look back at what I need to be doing and I’m like, “Well, that was actually not even relaxing.” So, damn.

You’re very open about the album’s autobiographical themes of infidelity, heavy drinking, and leaving others behind, which I think is really brave. A lot of people might not wish to identify with these actions or worry what others would think. Did this worry you at all, and/or has it led to greater self-acceptance?

Allegra: Yeah, it definitely was worrisome for us because people don’t like cheaters, obviously. I don’t like cheaters. I don’t really see people talking about that very openly. And it’s scary to talk about infidelity because you don’t know how people are going to receive it. And, to be honest, I still don’t really know how people are receiving that. I haven’t really seen any comments or read any press of anybody directly commenting with an opinion. So I think maybe we’re in the clear? Like, people just know not to have an opinion about it? But yeah, it was really scary and it took a conversation between Etta and I to be like, “Okay, are we going to talk about this? What’s the extent to which we’re going to talk about this?” And we just decided if we didn’t say everything, then the album meant nothing. Because that’s what it’s all about. And it’s so hard to talk about it in interviews and beat around the bush when, at the end of the day, it is about infidelity. And I think that people should just own up to their mistakes more. I think if you’re going to do something bad, it makes you a little better if you can at least acknowledge that it was bad.

Etta: That’s fair.

Allegra: Right? I don’t know.

Etta: Accountability.

Allegra: Yeah, accountability.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Shy Watson.

It’s hard to answer because generally being an artist versus being the artist that I am now, or what people understand of my work, is a shifty timeline.

I studied art all throughout college but never really made the commitment mentally or emotionally because I just didn’t know how it was going to pan out. The truth is that there is no answer to how it’s going to pan out. What happened was that my final semester of senior year, I thought, “Well, they can’t stop me from graduating. I did all my credits. They might not like my work I do now, but it’s too late.” And something about that took the pressure off and I made the work I wanted to and really got to deep dive into my interests, develop a quote, unquote, “studio practice.” And then in my exit critique, I was like, “Yeah, you know what? I think I do want to be an artist.” At that point I was 22. That should have been obvious, but I think I really just couldn’t commit until then.

How did you first find your love for kinetics? When did you start working with moving sculptures?

I was doing some soft sculpture stuff in my final year of school, and that was the work that I was like, “I feel free to make this. I don’t give a fuck anymore.” I was making these furniture pieces that were constructed out of soft upholstery foam, and then I surfaced them to look like marble because that was just this huge trend—everything was just marble everything. And I was really interested in that faux kind of sheen stuff. I was playing around with the sculptures and they just flopped over. They couldn’t stand. The point was that they were all surface and no structure. And they always had this animated quality to them. And there was just something so great about identifying emotions with an object. Like how can you have sympathy for something that’s not alive? After that, I just wanted to get things to start moving and see what motion could create. Because when I started, I loved seeing signs that spin around on the street; they kind of feel like they’re trying to perform like, “Come here! Come to the store!” Something about the movement just captures your attention.

Movement could be as simple as spinning, or things could be really chaotic or truly destroying themselves in the process of moving. Starting to show that work, I learned that people also felt that identification. Which I thought was really wonderful. And I’ve told myself, “You need to start making not-moving things, because you’re going to be broke because who’s going to buy shit that their cat wants to fight with in their home?” But I never really could go back to inert work. I never intended to be labeled a kinetic artist. And I think there’s a huge spectrum to even that term. But I like when a thing moves because that thing feels alive, like it has a personality.

It’s a little uncanny. Taste, the piece you just made for Art Basel with the little roller skates and everything…it was literally a person. Is that something that you strive for, giving your sculptures personalities?

A year ago I was just like, “This sculpture needs dog Crocs.” And since then I have ordered a weird amount of American Doll shoes and dog shoes because it’s funny how a little touch can make something just feel figurative.

I’m really cautious about giving something what looks like a face. But it’s a real phenomenon people experience, pareidolia—being able to find faces or identifiably human qualities in objects. I actually learned later that this happens to religious people more. Looking for signs or for Jesus in toast or something.

So yeah, they feel like characters. But it’s fun in the process of making them because I don’t always feel like I’m in total control of what that character is. And it’s really interesting to feel like the sculpture has some sort of agency. Obviously I’m the one making it; whatever weird 3:00 AM decisions in the studio are mine. But I’m often surprised by the work, and that keeps things fresh in the studio.

When I did my Berlin show, there were just so many roller skates and then somebody was like, “So why roller skates?” And I was like, “I don’t know. I think they dream of mobility or something.”

When we were on Fishers Island for the Lighthouse Works Residency, you salvaged sculpture parts from the town dump. I know you work with scrapped, used motors for your kinetic sculptures. Does this process of searching and reusing speak to the overall mission or vision of your work?

Getting to Fishers Island, I knew I was going to be limited. Of course, I mix found materials with ordering parts online; I have to. But it really was an extension of a practice I started for Gather. When I started sourcing massagers, I did so locally because I could shop online for massagers, but I can’t figure out how they work until I have the real thing in front of me and have taken it apart with a screwdriver. Then I was just driving around and going to the suburbs because the suburbs are where massager machines, exercise machines, and treadmills go to die.

And it became this fun way to get to talk to people too, those who were willing to. It also helps me to establish this weird knowledge of a place. Because I’ve moved around so much, I’ve never really felt ownership over calling somewhere a “hometown.” So this was my weird speckled visitation way of getting to know a place by just taking the things people didn’t want anymore.

I loved getting to see, even just on this small island that has a really kind of set population of people, the kind of stuff that gets regurgitated through people’s homes, what goes into the dump, what’s brought in, and what gets sent back to the mainland. It’s like digestion. The island is digesting stuff in this weird way.

Your bio says you source materials that have a history of aspiration and failure, which I think is a beautiful way to put it. Would you mind elaborating?

It extends from this basic idea of what you buy is a form of self-expression. I started thinking about that in the domestic space or like when you host people and what you want your home or lawn to virtue signal basically. It also came from my dad. We would go to Hobby Lobby together when I was a kid. I would go run off to the art supplies while he was in home decor. I don’t know what it was, but he just was buying a lot of replicas of famous art like the Venus de Milo, the David, etc. Hobby Lobby manufactures all these small plastic and plaster copies. I think it was his local and economic way to feel worldly, in the way people will travel abroad and bring back some souvenir that feels like an authentic slice of that place. But it was just not possible for us growing up, to travel and to bring back the spoils of those travels.

But they were all these things that were trying to point to higher culture. For me, thinking about my immigrant family, the American Dream, it was like: that’s aspiration. And I don’t necessarily work with that stuff symbolically, but in terms of the machines, the aspiration comes from comfort and from care and intimacy. A massager is a replacement for masseuse, a baby swing is a replacement for a nanny. It’s like there are these distilled functions that are just powered by cheap motors that perform one repetitive task over and over again. You’re just outsourcing that slice of labor to a machine. It’s very middle class.

I remember talking to a faculty member in grad school who pointed that out, where it was like, “Yeah, if you’re really wealthy, you hire the person. If you’re really poor, you do it yourself. And then if you’re in this weird middle-class zone, you find an appliance.” I thought that was so interesting. But the whole ability for me to source this stuff comes from the fact that somebody doesn’t want it anymore. And that’s the failure. It’s supposed to do a job, it somehow doesn’t meet the expectation, or it just falls out of use. A lot of people who sold me massagers say, “This is great. You press this button, it turns on this heating function. It’s really comforting, it’s really good.” And then I’m like, “So why are you getting rid of it?” And they reply, “I haven’t used it in five years.”

It has this promise it’s trying to deliver and it can’t. And I think that’s really sweet and endearing, something a lot of people can relate to. And that’s a part of the sympathy too; the object is not only what it’s expressing physically, but also through its emotional history. And I’m interested in how that connects to people’s relationships.

Your bio also mentions being haunted by your Korean immigrant father’s pursuit of the American Dream. How else does that show up in your work?

It’s being in America and how much of that is driven by commerce and by capitalism. And that’s why a lot of these things are failures, is because they’re also produced as dirt cheap as possible and they’re not fixable. And there’s kind of this distinction maybe, this is super simplistic, but of an America where things are well made and you know how to fix it and it’s very masculine. It’s like, “I’m going to change this, I’m going to fix this. I know how to work on my car.” And then there’s the other side of America, which is like, “Something’s wrong. I’m just going to buy a new one because it’s cheaper to do that or it’s too much effort to learn how something works.”

And I think for my family, they fell on that latter side of this American Dream that is about ease and shelling out the money to just buy a cheap replacement. And I’m having fun in my own scrappy way of figuring out how things work and how those translate to larger processes in engineering or manufacturing. There are so many products driven by motors, and a lot of them have similar mechanisms all across. And it’s so cool to see how even just something as simple as a motor mechanism extends to every part of our lives. But again, that’s really different from the American Dream that the rest of my family has.

Yeah, totally. Your lifestyle is like the opposite of the American Dream. You’re not married, you don’t have kids, you don’t have a chunk of land with a picket fence-

Lay it on me.

I mean, same. Anyway, part of this is that you’re living at residencies while waiting to hear back from others, and it sometimes takes months or even up to a year to know what’s next. How do you deal with all this uncertainty of where you’ll be next, this almost opposite of the American Dream?

It’s funny because I left the supposed promise of that security living in St. Louis. I really thought for a second it was going to be so easy to settle down there. But then while I was working full time, I once took all of my vacation days for the year to go to a one-month residency. And I don’t know, it’s this classic existential question, it’s like, “Is this what life is for? Am I going to work so I can do this?” I mean, of course the way that I’m living now is not super stable. It relies on a lot of generosity of others and vulnerability to ask people to crash with them or for a residency to accept me and be willing to lodge me and give me a studio and food and stuff like that, which is so amazing. Every day at the Lighthouse Works, I was just like, “How the hell did I make this happen for myself?”

This is also different from this kind of American-suburban, “I take care of just myself or my family, my own kind of nuclear family unit and behind my closed doors of my suburban home, this is my world” attitude. Again, I’m simplifying. But I also think that with massagers or just the machines, they’re also meant to replicate the experience of intimacy or the relationship of working with other people, but privately because you don’t have to talk to your machine when you run it or whatever; you don’t have to be touched by another person in a massage or have that kind of brush up with humanity. So living this way and relying on other people is constantly forcing me to work against that I-take-care-of-me-and-only-me mentality.

I’m not totally denouncing suburban life. It’s really not about that. I remember my friend telling me that being an artist is the ultimate form of assimilation. And I had to really think about that one because, to me, assimilation was always something I had a complex relationship to by growing up in America because I was like, “Do I want to blend in or do I not? Do I have to kill parts of my identity or culture to do that?”

But the way he talked about it was that there’s this classic immigrant narrative of: your family comes over, they work really hard, they send you to school and you go be a doctor and a lawyer, a professor, you build up from there. And there’s something about being an artist where it’s not like you’re throwing that sacrifice away, but it’s like you’re living to be free and to not have a plan and to have that privilege, I think, is really cool.

I don’t know if I agree with that necessarily, but it’s just a thought I’ve been chewing on where it’s like because it is such a privilege to be able to move around and experience these places and get to really for, not a long time, but at least a few months, get to know places like Fishers Island and then leave before things become really monotonous…it allows me to exercise being an aimless, American boy or something. But yeah, it’s chaotic as hell. It’s a lot of work to put together. And it will not be forever. But for now it’s been cool. I got to meet you so it’s worth it.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Shy Watson.

Yes.

I was expecting you to say, “No,” and then I was going to ask about your research process. Do you mind talking about the child actor stuff and how it may have inspired this?

No, not at all. I grew up in South Florida. That’s where I was born. And there was and maybe still is quite a bit of film and print, fashion, TV–all kinds of industry stuff. Miami Vice was filming down there in those days. And so, when I was an infant, my mom was told by another mother in a new mom’s group that this business existed and that they were always looking for little models. The woman said, “Not only will they pay you, but your baby can keep the clothes.”

That’s what sold my mom on it. I think I was six months old and they took some headshots or full body shots, I guess. I mean, of a baby. Then when I was a little older, four or five or six, because I was a good reader, I could memorize lines, which was a pretty valuable commodity because a lot of times that’s the hardest part of working with child actors. It petered out as I got older. Beyond a certain point you really had to start developing your craft or at least be a burgeoning teen idol, which, uh, was not in the cards for me. My acting career ended around the time that the character in Reboot starts, when he goes to LA and moves into that weird complex to do pilot season. That was something that was suggested I might do but never did. The last commercial I did, I think I was maybe 14, was for a new roller coaster at Cedar Point theme park. The Mants. At the time it was the fastest or tallest or something. They flew me up there and I rode this thing all day—you can find it on YouTube. But that was the end of the line for me.

Did you puke all day? That seems really intense.

I was terrified of roller coasters. The first couple rides were miserable and then I kind of got in the spirit of it.

So since the character does what you didn’t, goes off and lives in this motel, did you have to do research for that part or did you just talk to some friends or use your own experiences and then extend them?

Some of it was just “What if?”-ing my life. Imagining if I had gotten this or that role, what choices that would have opened up and if I could have really gone the other way, where I went all in on acting. One that comes to mind is this Arnold Schwarzenegger movie called Kindergarten Cop that I was actually cast in. I had the part in the movie then there was an executive note a couple weeks later that they wanted a younger kid and they wanted a Black kid. They thought that would be funnier to have Schwarzenegger with a Black five-year-old or whatever. So that didn’t happen. And that Elijah Wood, Macaulay Culkin movie, The Good Son… I was second or third in line to play the part that Elijah eventually got.

But there was also some actual research. I read a bunch of child celebrity memoirs. There were a few in particular that I found very useful, which I can talk about, but with regard to the weird apartment complex where David and Shayne meet in the book, Rising Star, that came out of a book called Fame Junkies by Jake Halpern. The first chapter is about this place in LA that caters specifically to people coming in from out of town to try make their kids get famous. I can’t remember what it’s called offhand. It has a much more innocuous name than the one I gave it. The writer Anika Levy read a draft of the novel in manuscript (she read a few of them actually, she helped me a lot) and she recognized the place immediately. I think she grew up around there. The child actor memoirs were Corey Feldman’s Coreyography, which is a really interesting book, and Jodie Sweetin, the middle kid from Full House, her memoir, unSweetined.

Clever title. What does your work entail on the day to day? What’s your writing process? Do you have any rules for yourself, or?

I don’t have a lot of rules. I’m not good at patterns and routines, and I’m not particularly disciplined. I work in a lot of different genres. From the outside it might look like there’s a consistency in rigor here, I mean in that I am usually working on something and because a lot of it is journalism I might have a bunch of bylines in a given year, I mean not that anyone but me would notice, but if you did. Anyway my point is that from the inside it doesn’t feel consistent or rigorous. It feels like fucking chaos all the time. But you can get away with some chaos when you’re bouncing between shorter things: a story, an essay, some book review that’s 700 words long and is done in a week. A novel, or any book-length project, demands rigor and discipline. There’s a dailiness to it. It’s like a training regimen or a diet or whatever you have to stick with. Which is not how I prefer to work.

The closest thing I have to a practice is to do something for the writing every day. As long as I’m giving it something, I almost don’t care what that thing is. Writing, revising, research reading, taking a long walk, sitting around doing nothing except for feeling bad until it’s so unbearable that I finally sit down and do in two hours what I’ve been dreading doing for three weeks. It all counts as work. If you’ve got a bunch of things going, hopefully you finish them at different times and publish them at different times and from the outside it looks consistent and sane, or whatever it’s supposed to look like. The one practical thing I am a fanatic about is this: when I am writing, I write everything longhand. Always first draft longhand, type it up, print it out, edit it longhand, type it back in. Over and over.

That cycle is really important to me. I also do a lot of reading out loud. Not to get too woo woo about this, but I want to make writing a somatic and haptic experience, connect the brain to the hand, connect the voice to the breath… That is where a lot of the work gets done. The computer, I don’t know, the computer feels like… I don’t want to say a “cursed space,” but it is such an overdetermined space. You know what I mean? My work is on here. In COVID, my therapy was on here. Right now, we’re doing this interview on here. My text messages forward to here. Movies, social media, breaking news, everything. And it never stops. But your writing is something you need to be alone with. There is no substitute for solitude. For me, the analog page and talking to myself is the best way to achieve it.

The present tense plot in Reboot takes place in less than a week, but the backstory goes on for decades. How do you approach backstory and back flashes? I felt like you did it so seamlessly.

Well, thank you. In the early drafts of this book, the front story spanned a lot more time. I got much more into the attempts to reboot the show. But everything felt really slack. I didn’t think I had enough plot to justify the timeline that I was trying to work in.

And I thought about something that an old teacher of mine used to say. I think it was Jill Ciment. I can hear it in her voice in my head. She used to say that if the plot lacked tension, before you go jamming new plot in, try compressing the timeline of what you have. So I started pushing everything closer together. It makes each thing lean on the next thing. Screenwriters have a saying along the same lines, which is, “Turn ‘and’ into ‘because.’” It took me a long time to learn how to do that, but I think I got there.

I always knew there had to be a lot of backstory because the whole premise of the book is they’re trying to reboot this show, and through that, they’re relitigating their relationships to each other back then and their own legacies and whatever. It was always supposed to be a 20th anniversary reboot, which set a lot of clear parameters. It determined how old they were in the present action of the novel and how old they’d been when they were on the show, which determined when they had to have been born, and therefore what other (real) shows they’d have been airing alongside, whose careers they’re jealous of. Once those structures were in place, I felt a lot of freedom to call up the backstory as needed and I tried to make it pretty seamless.

I know that you teach college students, too. What do you want people to learn from you?

I mostly teach writing workshops, sometimes literature seminars. This summer, I did a grad seminar on the short novel. We read The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Train Dreams, Lucy, Mrs. Caliban, Log of the S.S. the Mrs Unguentine, and Pedro Paramo. I’m trying to teach a love of reading and a certain depth of reading—a form of attention—that maybe students, undergraduates for sure, have never done before. A lot of them don’t even know you can read this deeply; nobody’s ever modeled it for them. What is good attention to a text? How do you get from “I liked this” or “I didn’t like this” to “Why is it what it is? Why did the author want to do it this way rather than any other way they could have done it? How can I steal something from this that I can use?”

Those are the things that I really try to get across, almost irrespective of what I’m teaching.

In a workshop it’s different because the student work drives the conversation. A student turns in a 20 page story and says, “I wrote a story about X.” And ten people read it and hand it back and basically say, “Yeah, it’s actually about Y, not X, but there’s only 7 page of the 20 that are really about Y. Which we loved. The other 13, we don’t know what you were doing.” A student might be bummed by that response but I will tell them that’s really good information to have. At that point you can say, “Fine, my readers liked Y. I’m going to go all in on Y.” Or you can say, “Screw you. It’s a story about X, and I know you liked Y better, but I’m going to cut all that shit out of there and double down on X until it’s doing what I want it to do.”

I think those are the main things. That and the love of sentences. I think aesthetics are the building blocks of thought, of language, of story. I think a story should be about its own sounds and its own energy before it’s about anything else. That’s a very counterintuitive idea to a lot of people, and it’s very hard to learn—both how to do it and why you’d want to. So yeah, we spend a lot of time on that, just being like, “Doesn’t this sound good? Don’t you want to write something that sounds like this?”

So with deep reading, or reading in the way that a writer should, what tips do you give? What are some concrete tips, or what do you tell your students to focus on when they’re reading?

Going slow is a big one. Being willing to reread is another. It’s true that all reading is rereading. At least in a sense. When you’re going through something the first time, you spend a lot of time learning the rules of the game you’re being asked to play. You’re trying to keep track of what’s happening. You’re trying to clock your own reactions to it. Maybe you’re catching every detail, maybe you’re not. You’re deciding whether you’re enjoying yourself, whether you want to keep going. All that’s as it should be.

If it’s good enough, if you liked it enough, or even if you didn’t like it but something about it is still laying claim to your attention, then maybe you flip back to page one and start again. Tomorrow or next year or whenever. This time you know what you’re getting into, you have the big picture, so you can pay more attention to the small stuff. How is this scene constructed? What seeds of the ending can I see in the beginning? I don’t mean foreshadowing. I mean creating the conditions of a conclusion that feels at once shocking (I did not see that coming!) and inevitable (of course it had to be that way!).

It’s so often right there from the very first page, and once you see that you see that most stories aren’t about constantly adding new stuff, they’re about starting with a few very rich elements and then ramifying them as completely as you can.</span> If you’re reading as a writer, you need to be able to see that in any given text, then you need to see the particular way it was done in this particular text, then you want to think about how to translate that knowledge into the thing you’re working on—not to steal the technique itself (though you can) but to come up with a technique of your own that will be just as powerful for whatever it is you’re trying to achieve.

It’s worth remembering that before they are anything else, these things are entertainments. That is the idea. They can be literary works of high moral seriousness that lay bare the mysteries of existence and redeem our suffering and stop wars and all that other shit they do, but still they are commercial products. We went to a store and paid some money in the hope of being shown a good time. Whatever a good time means to each of us. So maybe that’s really what I’m trying to teach: an expanded sense of what constitutes a good time.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Shy Watson.

It’s a lot of making mood boards, like a professional Pinterest-er. And it’s a lot of world-building, so just working with the artists to figure out everything from the color story of the song to any little props or marketing assets you might see.

Your work requires so much collaboration.

I think if you’re working with someone who you enjoy working with, it doesn’t feel like work and it’s really fun. Because a lot of the day-to-day is just honestly being delusional and thinking as big as we can before we narrow it down to what the idea actually is. It’s a lot of silly mood-boarding. When Chappell (Roan) and I work together, we’ll just think of the most crazy ideas, and then we go from there.

So you dream big then narrow your ideas down to be more practical.

Yeah. It’s like imagination with no constraints. I feel like it’s the most important thing. And then figure out what they are as you come to understand the idea.

I was already familiar with your work, but I didn’t know it. I have the CHANI app and had seen your collage work before. Plus, I’m a huge fan of Chappell. I imagine the work of a creative director in general is anonymous. Does it feel freeing to be behind the curtain? Or does it feel like maybe you want to come out more?

Normally it is a very behind-the-scenes role, but Chappell does a great job giving everyone their flowers—she’s always shouting us out. But yeah, I think it takes the pressure off to get to design freely or vision board, or figure out what the concept is freely with her and to just know that she kills it every time. The delivery is always perfect.

Totally. Recently Chappell told CNN that you’re just as much responsible for Chappell Roan as she is. I assume that this statement speaks to the power of the collaboration between you two. Could you speak more on the work that’s required to launch such a star?

I think that it’s funny because we’re also best friends, so it doesn’t feel like work. It feels like, “Oh, my god, I got this crazy idea, FaceTime me,” and then we just giggle about it. But I do think it’s all just having a really cohesive brand visual. That’s really important for a pop star, and I think it’s something that we were able to achieve even though there’s so many different characters in the album. It’s that concept where it’s like, if people can make a Halloween costume out of you and people just instantly know who it is, that’s how you know you have a brand vision.

I’ve seen so many Chappell costumes on my feed over the past week or two, and they’re fabulous. I mean, people do a great job recreating them. I’m like, “Wait, is that Chappell? No, that’s my friend.”

I know. That’s also the fun part of going to the shows. The fans are so creative. They’ll come dressed to the tens with a very niche concept that we did in a music video, or something that we just did last week. I’m like, how did y’all do this so fast?

I know that you and Chappell are up for a Grammy and album packaging. Could you walk us through the design of The Rise and Fall of the Midwest Princess?

Absolutely, yes. We always knew we wanted to do something really intricate, either with embossing or paper-cutting the vinyl. We want it to feel like those old story books that pop out or just vintage Victorian stationery where there’s so much hand detailing, which obviously is hard to do when you’re mass producing something. It’s hard to get the handmade feel. So, we were like, the design really has to speak to it. And we also wanted to create it with room for the design to grow as we released different variants of the vinyl. Or maybe when we do the next album, we can tie it somehow into the first design. So we knew there would be more to come. But we created it together in a coffee shop. When we got all the album artwork back, the photography that Ryan (Clemens) did, we were like, these photos are too beautiful.

The photos are such strong standalones that we didn’t want to design on top of it and write the album lyrics on it or the title track on the back. We didn’t want to write—we wanted the album cover to just be the photo. We were like, it’s perfect. It’s stunning. And it’s also very intricate where there’s not a lot of negative space where we could easily just layer text on it. So, we were like, how do we want to go about still having that really handmade, intricate design, but not taking away from the image? So, we decided to do a little insert that you slide the vinyl into, which is where we created this design together of a theater. Because we’ve always said the world of the album starts on the stage, because her live performances are such an important part of the whole vision, which just speaks to how this past year everything has blown up after all the festivals. Everything started on the stage.

So, we knew we had to do a theater stage as the frame of the vinyl, and we sketched out some ideas together in a coffee shop, and then we came up with the final one, which we wanted to be 3D. We had some cool embossing ideas and stuff like that. And then from there, when we launched that one, we always knew we wanted to make paper dolls that eventually fans could buy, either with the vinyl or separately. We launched a set earlier this month, and it’s all the different pieces in the outfits and little Easter eggs from this past year, because the album’s been out for over a year.

But the world has just grown so much bigger than it was even last September when the record launched, because of the festivals, and the Tiny Desk concert, and all the other things. So, it was a great moment for us to do a little time capsule of one year into the album, like, here are these paper dolls, and to just celebrate everything that’s happened in the past year. But that was our vision for the album. And because we are both very into crafting, giving the fans a little DIY kit so they could make something themselves was fun and special.

I know that you and Chappell are both gen Z, each in your mid-20s. What draws you to these more antiquated, old-timey forms like paper dolls, Victorian stationery, etc.

We both thrift a lot and we love going to estate sales. A lot of times we’ll see things when we’re out together thrifting, and we’ll be like, “We could make that.” It’ll be the most intricate thing that we obviously we cannot make, but we’re like, we could try. I also collect a lot of vintage stationery. And I think it’s super cool how everything is done by hand, the intricate cut-outs and cool layers.

And as a collage artist, too, I love storytelling with old stationery. It’s something that is lost in newer stationery, but also in book designs and other forms. I think things start to look a little more mass produced. So, we wanted to take a step back, take inspiration, and also celebrate old stationery, old movie tickets, old book covers, and bring that into the world of the album.

I imagine more intimate, less mass-produced designs feel more like a gift from the artist to the consumer.

Absolutely. We want it to feel like a work of art. Like the album, even if you don’t ever open it, you can look at it and appreciate all the little details, but then when you open it, there’s glitter that falls out. Also, I love snail mail. I love sending people gifts, and I’ll never send or seal an envelope without sprinkling glitter in just because I think it’s silly and cute and a fun little surprise. We wanted that to translate to the audience when they open it. They unbox and they see the handwritten text, all the little pieces that make someone feel like, “Oh, my gosh, someone packaged this for me.” It feels like I’m opening a little present to myself from the artist.

I’m interested in the interplay of your inspiration. You’re inspired by South Asian art and Arabic typography, but then you also find inspiration from vintage troll dolls, Dolly Parton, and other Americana icons. What is it about these worlds colliding that inspires you or brings about new energy?

I think it’s so fun to pull from different places—it ensures that whatever you’re creating is unique and fresh. If you pull a lot of inspiration from just one place, it’s like you’re just recreating that piece on your own, which is totally fine, but it’s also fun to Frankenstein and take little pieces from different things that you like or that you pull inspiration from. I am always just saving things to a mood board, like, “Oh my gosh, wait, love that color combo or love that font.” I love to work on a project and then remember something that I saved four years ago in a scrapbook then go back and find it, pull from it.

We’ve pulled a lot from different areas. I love to pull things from old toys, like the troll dolls, and ET. But then I also love mixing really Hollywood-like glam stuff with old country or just things that are really handmade. It’s fun to find a mix between manufactured products and handmade objects. It makes for something special.

Is play something that’s important in your work? It seems like it.

Totally. I love just printing out a collage kit and making something random whenever I feel like I’m blocked. That or doodling. I think that play is everything, which is why we did the paper dolls because we were like, “I feel like no one’s crafting anymore, but it’s having a Renaissance.” We just wanted to give people something to play with. Because even if you don’t think you’re an artistic person or you’re like, “I’m not good at making things,” you don’t have to be good at it to have fun with it. I think tactile art is something that people don’t do in adulthood unless they make the effort to keep up the practice. But everyone loved art class in school. It’s fun to just pick up a crayon and see what happens. But I think a lot of people don’t get to do that with their day-to-day jobs or just forget that it’s something you can do.

You’re young and you’ve already had so many big clients. We’ve talked about CHANI and Chappell, but you’ve also worked for Spotify, Coachella, Urban Outfitters, and a lot of other household names. What do you credit for so much success so early on?

I think that it’s all just being in the right place at the right time or meeting the right person, because I think everything leads to something else. Like, if I didn’t go to that one party, I wouldn’t have made that one friend who ended up introducing me to this one person. I got my start though working for Rookie Mag when I was a teenager. It was a magazine by Tavi Gevinson, who’s a genius. She’s only two years older than me, and everybody working there was teenagers. It was really cool to get to surround myself (virtually—it was online) with other creatives and get to look around and be like, “Oh, my gosh, wait. Anything’s possible. We can actually do anything.” Because now we’re all older and it’s fun to look around and see all the different jobs everyone has or the different gigs people get. It’s like, wow, this all started from the portfolios we made when we were 14.

Were you still in Nebraska, where you grew up?

I had just moved to Dallas. I think it was 2013 or ‘14. I had been following Tavi and Rookie online on Tumblr and on Instagram. And then I emailed or DMed them, then I started making collages and illustrations for them. It was such a cool way to get to meet other like-minded teenagers that were also doing design, or writing, or whatever it was they were doing at Rookie. It felt like summer camp.

It sounds like you’re not afraid to reach out to people. Is that something that’s helped with your success?

For sure. I think the phrase “shooting your shot” is so silly, but I feel like every job I’ve ever gotten is somehow credited to Instagram, which is the most gen Z thing ever. That’s my LinkedIn. I’m never afraid to reach out, and I love when people reach out to me via DMs, or email, or whatever. I feel like everyone is just trying to create things together. It’s really fun being an artist online during this time.

Do you have any strict work habits or regimens that you abide by to get your workflow done? Your process sounds like it’s just magic.

Sometimes I need to go into a cave and become a hermit, but then I’ll come out with magic. Because sometimes I’ll find it too hard to think when I’m in a lot of meetings or at a lot of events. Occasionally I’ll just lock myself in my room and work really insane hours. Once I’m going, I have a hard time stopping. So, when I did all the animations for the festivals, I didn’t sleep for a week by choice because I was having a blast. I was like, I can’t stop now because I just got this idea! I work a bit like a troll under a bridge.

Incredible. What’s the most surprising thing you’ve realized along your creative path?

I think it’s that you can make anything and nobody really knows what they’re doing. But what gets the job done is just figuring it out and not being afraid to reach out to a friend who’s done something that you haven’t done and be like, “Wait, how do you do this? Any tips?” You’re living in the mood board. Nothing is out of reach.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Shy Watson.

So both my parents are writers as in the book and my grandmother, and the family, like Jane Austen is my sixth something aunt. So I really didn’t want to do it, as strange as that might sound. I thought it was lame and stupid, like the way you hate your parents, I guess, until I think I must have read maybe a Marie Calloway piece in Vice or a Clancy Martin piece in Vice, and then I just read around from that because that stuff was electrifying, and all the stuff that Giancarlo [DiTrapano] was putting out. And I was like, “Oh, maybe books can be actually cool.” Like they sounded like they were written by my friend’s older siblings. It just felt like it didn’t belong to my parents. And I didn’t really try writing until I was about 24, but something just broke in my brain and I decided I wanted to have a go.

Was Brat your first go of it?

It was the first story I sent anywhere. New York Tyrant published it as a story. I’d been sending Clancy Martin fan mail for ages, so I sent it to him and I was like, “Clancy, I wrote this story.” And then he emailed back being like, “Yeah, I could spend a lot more time with these characters.” And I was like, “Okay, well if Clancy says it, I’ve got to do it.”

Brat is so very strange and atmospheric. On the physical level, there’s the deteriorating house, the shedding skin, the creeping vines, etc., but then there’s the psychological element too: the hallucinations, the shifting of texts. Do you think about atmosphere when you’re writing, or do you have any tricks to make it so effective?

I had horror movies on, on silent, all the time when I was working on Brat, because I think the images are so great. Music was also important—lots of vaporwave, lots of…I think you guys call it dubstep? When I say dubstep to Americans, that means something different than what it means over here, maybe like Burial, lots of post-garage stuff. Very funky but also just haunted. I try to get the rhythm of that in the words while staying as completely on the object as possible. There’s a rule I used where the protagonist is only allowed to have any kind of self-reflection every 50 pages or so. He doesn’t even have memories. The novel was very rule-based.

I love that and I love that you were able to get away with it because I know people with novels on submission, and they keep hearing, “Oh, I wish there was more interiority.”

People don’t think about themselves, do they? That’s not my experience of reality.

I know. I’m like, “What is interiority? How am I supposed to put more of it? Do you mean memories, desires?”

I don’t sit around pondering stuff.

No.

That’s not how I live. I’m like, “Oh, I think I’ll go do this now.”

Mm-hmm.

I think that actually helped with the atmosphere, because in the first half of the book at least, there’s no one else he interacts with basically. Having to be so object-based I think helped with the physical space.

What, to you, makes a good novel?

I don’t like being talked down to. I want to be surprised all the time. It should feel like Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates, I guess. I just don’t want to know what’s coming next. That’s all. Whether that’s to do with voice or character or the words or the sounds they’re making, just do something that engages me and surprises me.

I hear the old adage all the time that if you’re not surprised when you’re writing, then the reader isn’t going to be surprised. Do you believe that? Were you surprised when you were writing?

Only structurally. I had to work really hard on the sentence level stuff. I didn’t think I was a very good sentence writer when I started this, which is probably expected given it’s a debut. So I had to do a lot of going back and making the sentences good. Like you know that great … You must know that great Garielle Lutz lecture?

“The Sentence is a Lonely Place.”

Yeah. There was one edit where I just turned that into a list of rules and I went through every sentence and I was like, “Well, does this do any of those things that it should do?” And if it didn’t, then I cut it. And then making it not feel forced to me after I’d sort of added all this clever, clever stuff, that was hard. So I never felt surprised on a sentence level. Structurally, I was surprised by some stuff that happened. I didn’t really know what the skin image meant going in. Lots of the images, I was just like, “I like that image,” and then it kind of turned, the way things do. It just turned into something.

I reread your story “The Complete” the other day, in which you wrote about trying to affect a nonlinear reading experience. You likened it to dozing then waking up in the back of the car. Were you going for that with Brat?

Definitely. All my favorite art has a drug that it is about. I want to say that in the least cool-guy type way I can, but it’s just true. I wanted Brat to be like a benzo novel, and if your readers have been into those heavy, that you slip in and out and it’s very object focused, so it matched the narration style. You don’t really have short-term memory when you do a lot of those. So that was one aspect with the way the structure works.

I also just didn’t want it to be boring with the way it jumps between passages. I didn’t want scenes to exist when nothing was happening. So that also gives it kind of a dreamlike quality. He’s just snapping between moments. I don’t know if I wanted that half-asleep thing in the same way I wanted it in that story. I think the effect is probably the same because I’m the same guy but, past that, I’m not sure.

I love the idea of a benzo horror novel.

It’s fun, right?

Yeah. Whenever a writer gives a narrator their own name, it risks giving the readers the impression that it’s about them. Were you wanting readers to read Brat as a work of autofiction?

Well, I wrote it in 2019 and, as you’ll remember, it felt very difficult to see a way out of autofiction at that time. And authenticity is so highly valued just by audiences of pop culture generally. You’ve been following the Drake/Kendrick thing?

A little bit.

It’s just about who has the best gossip. That parasocial element was at the time and probably still is super important to audiences. So part of that decision was cynical. I wanted to do something fun and genre-y and haunted house-y, and I didn’t think it would really fly with audiences at all if it didn’t have something else going for it.

Also, because it’s a Russian doll novel, because the structures are nested within each other, I wanted the narrative to be concentric circles inwards, but for that also to move out of the book into reality as well. So the character has my name. The mother’s manuscript is literally just one of my mother’s books, is straight plagiarized. There’s a bunch of stuff there that if people want to go digging, they can go digging down the parasocial path. I think that’s fun and interesting and I’m excited with whatever I do next to take that further.

From what I’ve seen on social media, I’ve gathered that your next manuscript is about MKUltra or something?

Currently, I can’t tell whether I’m joking when I say it, but it’s meant to be a history of fascism over the last 500 or 1,000 years. It’s like a big dreamlike systems novel.

Do you use the name Gabriel there too?

Yeah. There is probably a thread that is my life in that, I think. I’m not sure. The way I’m thinking about it is if Brat is a Gabriel character who reads stuff—because I was constantly having to have him go and then sit down and read this thing—how can I write a novel where it’s not like that, where I can just jump into something that’s completely different? Like, “Hey, we’re in 1990s Russia now,” and you don’t have to have the character be like, “Oh, I’m sitting down and reading this thing.” I want that, but for it to still flow for the reader and feel like one thing. That’s what I’m trying to achieve with the next one.

I’m excited.

Don’t be. It’s trash.

Doubtful. What’s something that you wish someone told you when you began to write? Or, since you grew up around writers, what’s something you wish they hadn’t told you?

I kind of wish they’d told me less. No, not really. The problem is doing this publicity stuff is nice and very exciting and it’s great if more people read the work, but it sucks that I already know that you just don’t make any money. I wish no one had told me that so I could be more excited about the whole thing, but that’s probably for the best as well.

Do you have any writing habits or creative tics that you have to fight against? Do you notice yourself doing the same thing over and over?

Yeah, I had a big problem with the word “but” for a long time. It’s such a cheap way to surprise. Starting a sentence with but and you’re like, “Damn, I’m smart.” But it’s a cheap trick.

How do you fight it? You just hit Control+F and replace?

I tried doing that. Just getting stronger on a sentence level has helped, being able to do that, getting my sonics half decent. Just working more and being able to think of more ways to outmaneuver the reader has helped. But also, the last couple of years I’ve stopped fighting stuff like that. I can’t be bothered. You just sound like how you sound and that’s it.

What does your work entail on the day to day? What’s your process look like?

Straight up in the morning, 500 words because it’s what Graham Greene did. And then stop at 500, knowing the sentence you’re going to start with the next day and not writing it down. You start the next day and are supposed to read it back in the evening. I don’t usually, just because I don’t really want to get in the work zone again. I’m not one of these smash-3,000-words-out-in-the-evening type people. I can’t do that. It makes me tired. It drains me too quickly.

But you get quite a lot down just chugging away, and I like the morning because I feel like my brain fills up with words through the day. By the end of the day, by now, it’s really buzzy in there. In the morning, you’ve just woken up, it’s clean. That’s the thing I’m always trying to carry and get on the page. Lots of white space.

If you don’t read it back every night, do you reread in the morning, or do you just keep going and not read until you have a full draft?

I’m obsessive enough that it is in my head and then, after 15 or 30 days, I won’t remember the voice I was using or whatever from 15-plus days ago and I’ll start making inconsistencies. But over the length of a longer project, it feels like you can iron those out afterwards. I’m much happier editing than writing.

Interesting.

I don’t really like writing. When I edit, I love it.

What’s your editing process?

I print every draft out even if it’s like seven things I want to change and then I type it all back into the computer sentence by sentence so that every single one is good and I’ll mumble them to myself as I’m doing that to make sure they sound okay. But I’ve permanently fucked up my hand. When I was editing Brat, it was twice the size of my other hand. I don’t know what it is, like repetitive strain injury, but it’s just permanently fucked now.

Wow.

I know. It’s turned into a baby hand.

Have you tried a laptop stand?

I’ve tried everything, yeah, but I feel too stupid. I want to be the most ergonomic writer, and I simply cannot.

You live in London. I don’t know much about the UK literary scene, but I’m curious if you’ve noticed any differences between the UK and the US with publishing and/or literary scenes?

Well, New York’s the center of the world obviously. Actually, until today, I’d never had anything in a British magazine, so I guess they’re fucking idiots as far as I’m concerned.

Recently there’s been more of a scene here. Like the one Paul Jonathan throws is pretty good. Soho Reading Series is pretty good. But before that, there was nothing here. It was dead. I know far more New York people than I do London people. So that’s a crucial difference.

And even the publishers here… the subtitle here for the novel is A Ghost Story and in the US it’s A Novel. Americans are just more open to literary fiction generally. I guess you’ve got a better tradition of it. You’ve got a better small magazine tradition than we have here. I don’t know if that’s a function of there just being more readers overall or big college towns, which we only have a couple of. I’ve been much more welcomed by Americans than British readers so far, which is fine. I think a lot more interesting writers are coming up there.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Shy Watson.

The internet part of it, for sure. I don’t feel like the internet’s done a lot of great things for the way we communicate and experience relationships. In the book, being online allows Teddy to withdraw into herself and feed her paranoia.

I was off social media for a really long time and only rejoined to promote the book. I feel my brain changing when I’m more online in that A, I feel so addicted to my phone and B, I am hyper aware of what everyone else is doing all the time.

It’s obviously a mixed bag though. I don’t want to be too moralizing about it.

It’s interesting to know that you yourself have been off social media and now that you’re back in, you’re like “nope.”

It was fine for the first couple months. It’s a very useful tool, in publishing, to connect with other authors and build community, but it’s hard for me to imagine creating new work while being online in this way. It’s just too noisy. Too many voices, too much information. I’m not built for it. I kind of doubt anyone is built for it. I miss not knowing things about people. I miss showing up to an event, and I haven’t talked to that person since the last time I talked to them.

Fair. Rabbit Hole goes deep into true crime, Reddit communities, et cetera. It seemed really well researched. What is your relationship to research while you’re writing?

I’m not huge on research. I tend to not want to get bogged down if the project has a lot of momentum. I did explore Reddit though. I was curious about the site. I was teaching at the time that I wrote Rabbit Hole. All these high school kids were on Reddit, and it felt like a generational shift. I had associated the site with these dark, conspiratorial communities, but then I started using it in earnest. It’s a pretty neutral and kind of retro platform in a lot of ways. It will just connect you to your people. If you’re very into misogyny then you can absolutely find a bunch of people who are like-minded. But I used it for pregnancy related stuff or publishing stuff; it will just give you whatever you want. So it is neutral in the sense that many parts of the internet just amplify your own desires. If you’re uniting a group of people who have very fringe beliefs and desires and amplifying that, there’s potential danger.

The true crime thing, I had been a consumer. It felt for a while everyone was watching true crime and that was sort of the water cooler with The Staircase and The Jinx and whatever.

And then I noticed a drop-off in production. Everything just started to feel a little bit flimsier and more fictional. It felt unlikely to me that all these real life tragedies would take on a very familiar narrative arc, so I wanted to write a book that did the opposite. What if I wrote fiction that was as messy and incoherent as real life tragedy instead of forcing these real life tragedies to fit this very satisfying narrative shape?

What’s the secret to writing suspense?

That was the toughest part. I wrote a book in my MFA that was just like an MFA book, like this really long sort of plotless book, and then I figured, okay, I’ve always been a reader of crime fiction as well as literary fiction and maybe I can use that as a shape for a second book to try to propel the plot forward. But I found it really, really tough. My impulse as a writer is always to slow down and spend time with the characters, to let them wander around a room, but you can’t really do that with crime fiction. So I had to cut a lot.

I found that I needed to be surprised by where the story was going for the reader to feel surprised by it. I needed to feel some sense of discovery while I was writing it. When you’re editing it, obviously you know where it’s going, but if there wasn’t that energy in a scene the first time, I couldn’t engineer it after the fact.

What happened with your MFA book?

I sent it out to agents, it got a lot of really nice nos. They were all along the same lines, “we like the characterization, we like the language, but there’s just no plot. It’s moving too slowly.” The book was very long, and it took place over 30 years. There was nothing “propulsive” about it. I still like it. I wish I didn’t like it, but I do, and I am kind of trying to see if I can take those characters and rework the story, knowing what I know now having written Rabbit Hole. I still don’t know if the problem is that it’s not good or that it’s not saleable.

That reminds me of how Ottessa Moshfegh, after writing McGlue, was like, “Okay, I need to write something marketable,” and then she wrote Eileen, a thriller.

Yeah, that interview was sort of a revelation to me too. I remember reading it and being like, “Oh, okay.” She’s a serious literary writer, but I related to everything she was saying and thought it was what a lot of us think but don’t say. At the time I was writing Rabbit Hole, I was pregnant with my oldest, and I was really worried that if I failed twice, if I wrote two manuscripts and couldn’t find an agent for them, couldn’t get them all the way to publication, I would quit. I wouldn’t keep doing it. I was worried it would start to seem insane to take time away from my kids or money-making activities to write a third book when the market had clearly spoken.

Moshfegh was very explicitly chasing something commercial, but her style is so odd and so specific, and so she couldn’t help but write a book that is still kind of crackling with all this weird energy. You are who you are in whatever form the book takes. So I think that was very permission-giving, especially after coming out of an MFA program where genre fiction was not taken seriously.

How was your MFA experience? You went to NYU, right?

Yeah. It was fine. I went right out of undergrad, which I don’t really recommend. I think I should have maybe taken a couple years, although I don’t know, knowing myself I probably just would’ve never done it at that point. I had a really lovely experience with my undergraduate writing cohort, and I went into MFA doe-eyed, thinking it was going to be the same thing, just all love. I found it a little tough. I was so green and I believed everything everyone said about my writing, but I got to work with some amazing people.

I got full funding, but I couldn’t afford to live in New York so I was working as an assistant all day and then I’d run to my classes at night, take my classes for three hours, and go back to work at nine the next morning. So when people are like, “Oh, the gift of an MFA is time,” it was probably the least time I’ve ever had to write in my whole life.

Now that you’re out of the MFA, what does your work entail on the day-to-day?

I work pretty fast, so I’ve taken the pressure off myself in terms of “you’ve got to be in the chair for this many minutes a day, or you’ve got to get this many words done.” It’s not realistic given that I have a five-year-old and a two-year-old and there are just days that’s not going to happen. But when I get the chance to write, I know I’ll take it. There’s nothing else I want to do. When I was younger I definitely felt like I had to force myself to write. It was like working out. It was like, “Oh, you’ve got to go work out because it’s getting grim.” Now I find if I have an hour, all I want to do is get back into the project.

What’s something that you wish someone would’ve told you when you began writing?

I always struggle with these kinds of questions because on the one hand, there’s a lot of stuff I didn’t know, and on the other hand I wonder if I knew them it would have been too dispiriting. If someone had found me senior year of college when I was writing all these stories and said “it’ll take you 10 years to publish a book,” that would’ve sounded like a crazy amount of time to me.

As far as publishing goes, I don’t know that you need to know it all when you start writing a book, but there is a lot of publishing specific knowledge that feels sort of kept secret. I’ve been lucky to connect with other writers who are really open about their process and the financial side of it, because that can be hard to navigate. There’s a sense in which you have to totally take the reins and make your publishing experience what you want it to be.

How does one do that?

I think even with writers who are getting huge advances (not me), there’s an enormous amount of DIY going into it, an enormous amount of networking and reaching out to people and creating community.

It’s important to be a little pushier than is comfortable. If there’s a sort of out-of-the box idea you want to pursue, you might have to take the lead on that.

Everyone is out there promoting their own books like it’s a second job. I don’t think it’s a good thing, but that is the world, unless you are maybe Ottessa Moshfegh or Emma Cline. You have to put in a good 6-12 months.

What has been your approach to publicity?

If you’re earnestly trying to help other people and build community, that pays dividends in all kinds of ways. In the year leading up to Rabbit Hole’s publication, I interviewed other writers for different publications and did things where I was like, “okay, what will help me understand how the publicity process works and also allow me to be useful to somebody else?” And all of those experiences were really positive. I met writers who became friends and now we’re peers who do events together. Whenever you’re approaching publicity from this mercenary perspective of “I need this number of reviews” or whatever, it just feels awful. There is a lot of really lovely reciprocity within the writing community and plenty of people who are excited to connect with fellow writers whose work resonates with their own.

I learned from your Instagram that pre-order sales go toward first week sales and can affect whether one becomes a bestseller. I didn’t know that until you posted it.

I had to ask Allie Rowbottom the other day, “Does anyone ever tell you how your book is selling?” People keep asking me how it’s selling, and I have no idea. Not only do I have no idea, I don’t know if I’ll ever know. No one has said, “in six months we’re going to tell you.” I find that other writers are happy to talk about their publicity, their advances, their sales, and the information they’ve learned along the way if you ask them because they’ve been in this position too.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Shy Watson.

I usually try to get some different instruments or different synths, just to have different palettes to work with from album to album. So with this record, I got into cheap, crappy ’90s synths that nobody wants anymore. I thought it would be interesting to use something that’s very un-hip or whatever. And try to not necessarily do something that’s a pastiche, but something that’s in my own style, but just having those be the sounds that I had to work with. I always try to do something a little bit different from album to album just because it’s boring to do the same thing over and over again.

And you have such a large discography that it kind of necessitates it. I mean, if it was just 15 albums that sound the same—

Yeah. Part of what drives me creatively is this desire to make something new and different, and that kind of journey or exploration is what is exciting to me. That’s also what I look for in other artists. From the beginning it’s like, “Okay, you can do this, but now you have to show the world that you can do something else as well.”

Yeah, not a one trick pony. I know that with Lousy with Sylvianbriar, you hid away in San Francisco and focused really intently on older recording techniques. I was curious if you had some similar but different process when going into Lady on the Cusp.

The only thing that would be kind of comparable to that is just the fact that my partner and I were going up to Vermont pretty much every couple of months for a year. So I feel like those journeys kind of informed the record on some levels as far as there are a lot of references to Vermont and the people that I was meeting and hanging out with. I think of it as this pre-Vermont record in a way, but it was also the last record I made in my studio in Georgia. I really wanted to make just one more record before we moved. And so I had this deadline to meet if I was going to be able to finish it in time. And so that was motivating as well.

I read in your press release that you’ve relocated to Vermont and the lyrics, and this album made me think that maybe you were a little over New York, and of course, I know you’re originally from Athens. How do you compare being a creative in an urban center like New York versus somewhere a little more rural or a little smaller like Brattleboro or Athens?

Well, I’ve never lived in New York, but I spent a lot of time there. I’ve never lived in an urban setting, only visited. And of course, we mostly play in those kinds of environments. But my daughter actually lives in Manhattan now, and she is going to college there. I’ve been going to New York a couple times a month for the last eight months or so. It’s like I’ve been in the New York groove, but as far as a living situation, I’ve always gravitated toward quieter, less congested, less overstimulating environments. It’s easier for me if I don’t have to hustle as much to earn money, if I can just live somewhere less expensive and have more free time to explore different creative ideas.

But then I also really enjoy going into places like New York, San Francisco, LA, and soaking all that in. We live in the forest right now; it takes basically 30 minutes to get even to the closest small little town, so very much in this secluded world. I don’t want to just get all of my inspiration and stimulation from the internet. I try to have it be IRL as much as possible. I love going into bookstores. I love going to theaters that are showing cool movies. And so I love going into New York and going into the Metrograph or going to the Quad Cinema or IFC or wherever. There’s a ton of bookstores that I go to all the time when I’m there and just kind of live the life that I probably would live if I lived there. But then I also get to leave and go to my forest again if I want to.

Speaking of the internet, I noticed that you don’t have much of a social media platform. Is that something that you’ve intentionally avoided? Is it something that you think would hinder your practice? Or have you ever considered getting more online for promotion?

I’ve gone back and forth with it, and more recently I’ve been more internet-phobic and just feeling more suspicious and wary of it. Engaging with the world through these apps that are owned by these evil ghouls, it just doesn’t really feel that great. I’ve gone through phases where I’m like, “Oh, I need to use my platform.” But then I reach this point where I’m like, “So many people are doing that.” And so it’s not really necessary; it’s not like the world’s going to stop because I’m not tweeting about something that everyone’s talking about or thinking about or whatever. So it’s just whenever it pops in my head, I feel like, “Oh, I’ll do that.” But I’m concerned with not allowing too much of the internet world into my brain.

Smart.

And even if I make a post, I try to avoid the comments, so then I realize I’m not really trying to engage with anyone because there’s just so many bad actors and there’s so many bots and everything. It’s so messy. So you don’t even know if you’re fighting with a real person or what the deal is. It’s just a shady world. And so yeah, occasionally I’ll be like, “Oh, I’m going to send this photo just so people know I’m still alive,” or whatever, but don’t really want it to be a daily thing.

I used to be the youngest person of Montreal shows, and now I always feel like I’m among the oldest. You’ve been making music since the ’90s. How do you think that you’ve managed to stay relevant with younger listeners as time has gone on?

I don’t know, I mean, maybe what we represent is something that’s appealing to younger people because we try to create a sort of safe but also a wild environment where people can wear whatever clothes they want, not feel judged. I mean, that’s what I’m hoping for, that every concert feels almost like a holiday like Halloween or New Year’s Eve or some special occasion. This is out of the ordinary. It’s not just a day at the office or whatever. So I think just trying to create that vibe and that kind of atmosphere and hopefully, something universal that’s appealing to people who want to experience something like that.

Yeah, absolutely. I grew up in rural Missouri and was turned onto of Montreal when I was in eighth grade. I mean, you guys have been my favorite band ever since. Growing up somewhere so small where there’s no outward queerness, no people talking about Bataille or whatever, of Montreal was like a little portal for me that eventually got me way the fuck away from home. I imagine you probably have that effect on a lot of your younger listeners who are just learning through you. Like in Lady on the Cusp when you reference Brian Eno, I’m sure some high schooler will listen and be like, “Oh, what’s that?”

That’d be great because I feel like I’m a seeker of things, seeker of new sources of inspiration, and so if I can also be a source of inspiration for other seekers, then that’s a perfect situation.

Your shows are so energetic. I’ve seen you play 15 times and every show has been such a treat, especially when you’ve played with a full band. There’ve been costumes, visuals, theatrics. I’m assuming these performances take a lot of planning and energy. How are you able to replenish yourself while you’re out on tour for so long?

Everybody has a role to play, so no one is really overwhelmed because everyone can kind of just handle their part. I think that helps a lot. And then it is actually energizing to be engaged in a project like that with all your close friends, because everybody that’s in the touring group now, we’re all really close and we have a long history together and we love each other. So the vibes are great just as far as the hang. And then the show itself is really fun. And especially after you get three or four shows behind you on a tour, you kind of just get into that zone, get into that state of mind, and it becomes almost second nature.

There were tours in the past, most notably the Skeletal Lamping and False Priest tours where I was running around doing so many costume changes and having weird substances poured on me. I definitely felt more exhausted at the end of the night back then. But we’ve since created something that’s more sustainable and still fun and dynamic, but isn’t necessarily setting us on fire every night.

I imagine collaboration comes into play a lot for you. I really liked your new music video for “Young Hearts Bleed Free,” how it had this kind of stripped down style. Can you share a little bit about the creative process here and more generally what it’s like for you to collaborate with other artists?

What I understand from the little amount of gig work I’ve done and the gig work that my partner Christina has done is that I should just hire someone whose work I like and then just be like, “Do your thing.” I can just imagine how annoying it’d be like if I were saying, “Oh, can you change this thing or can you change that thing?” Because there’s no point in hiring somebody if you don’t love what they do.

And so if you do love what they do, then just get out of their way and let them do it. With Madeline, she made the “Young Hearts Bleed Free” video and one for a song that’s coming out on Tuesday. Basically she’ll present an idea like, “This is my concept.” And then I’m always just like, “Cool, let’s do it.”

I want the person to be excited about what they’re doing and feel like I’m behind them supporting them, and that’s the case, whether it’s Christina making a video or my brother making a video, or whoever it is that’s making the video. So yeah, it’s not really that collaborative per se. It’s just kind of like, “I made the song and now you’re making the visuals.”

Sounds like you’re nice to work with.

Probably because I’ve been doing this for so long I’m not trying to change the world, or I don’t feel like it’s going to make or break me or whatever. It’s just kind of like, “Yeah, this is cool. Well done.” Not like, “Oh, but I don’t look like David Bowie enough, or I don’t look like Prince enough, or I don’t look like whoever enough.” It doesn’t matter. It’s cool. It is what it is. Awesome, let’s go.

Aside from money, what are some of the rewards that come from creating music? What has it taught you about yourself?

The initial thing that got me into music was the escapist quality of making music when I was 17 and still living at my parents’ house. I got a cassette four track and a pair of headphones and would be in that recording headspace for hours at a time and building up songs one instrument at a time. That escapism aspect of it was something that I just gravitated toward and really got a lot out of. I’m a depressed person. I’ve always dealt with depression, anxiety, mental health issues. Music provides this weird place, almost like a meditative state of mind where I lose track of space and time, my bodily needs, and anything else that’s going on. And it’s very centering but also it feels like an adventure. That’s the primary reward. And I did it for 10 years before I started making any money.

But money has never been the motivating factor. It’s always been just what that process has done for me psychologically. But as far as things that I’ve learned, it’s definitely cool to go back and see, “Wow, I was being really mean in that song.” Or, “I wasn’t being very generous to that person in that song.” Or, “I was too afraid to say what I really felt in that song.” So you can see ways that you have grown. I mean, especially if you can see that you’ve grown, then that means you’ve grown. So I am able to look back and see, “Oh, I was a different person back then. I was more mercenary. I was more of a pirate. I was more mean-spirited. I was more cynical,” or whatever. Or, “I was really optimistic at that time period. I was really sweet. I must have been a nice person then.” So you can see the different phases you go through as a human.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Shy Watson.

It was never my intent to have some kind of exciting innovative narration; I didn’t necessarily go into this being like, “I want to fuck with POV” or anything. I had started writing the book in a close third, and it was that way until about halfway through the process. But I felt as I was developing that draft in close third that there was something missing, some additional element that would gesture to the broader context of the book.

I wanted there to be some way for readers to understand that this isn’t just about two young contemporary queers named Bernie and Leah, but also about the connection to a generation of queer artists that came before. I was working on a substantial revision of the third-person draft, but I was still very open to the process and what could happen. It was woo-woo, and I’m not that woo-woo of a person, but it was magical. I was working on the draft and this first-person voice just started talking, it was talking in an “I” grammar, it wasn’t talking in a “she/they” grammar.

I was like, “What is this?” I was like, “Who are you?” But then I was like, “let me go with this first-person voice and see what happens.” At first I thought maybe it was a beyond-the-grave moment, I thought maybe it was a dead ancestor, queer artist ancestor, and then the more I listened to it I was like, “No, I think she has a body and I think she has her own grief, her own partnership that she’s trying to work out.” I’m really interested in time and generational shifts, and how things have changed for queer folks, particularly queer women trying to be in relationships with each other from 50, 100 years ago to now.

This story also began with a historical inspiration, so maybe that’s why. It just didn’t feel like it did the book justice to stay only in the present, and the first person voice just kept getting more and more. Then when I showed drafts to early trusted readers, they were going, “I’m excited about her, I just want to know more. Why is she here?” So I just kept developing the sense that she was trying to work something out via watching Bernie and Leah. I feel like hopefully that also takes the reader’s attention to the fact that watching them helps her find some, not closure exactly, but insight into why she feels so guilty about her own partnership and how it turned out.

That’s the effect that you had on me as a reader! You talked about having the historical influence, I know at least in part it was inspired by the relationship between photographer Berenice Abbott and writer/art critic Elizabeth McCausland. I’m curious how you came about them, finding them, and what inspired you to write something based on their story?

I saw an exhibit of Berenice Abbott’s photographs in Paris back in 2017, and it had a big impression on me. I found her work to be very modern, very surprising. I am from New York, but in her photographs the city looks so wildly different—so intimate, open and disorganized, like a small village. I was like, “This is not a city that I recognize.” It made me see New York in a new way, and I was like, “Who is this?”

Then this huge biography came out in 2018 by Julia Van Haaften and I learned that Abbott met her longtime partner Elizabeth McCausland because they exchanged fan letters. McCausland was a critic and she wrote Berenice this flirty note basically that was like, “I like your work. Do you ever want to meet up?” Very gay, and I was like, “This is cute.” There was a whole chapter in the book about a road trip that they went on in 1935, and it really changed the trajectories of both of their lives. They both left being single, confused about the kinds of art they wanted to make, and then they came back very much together and with a clear, shared artistic vision.

“What happened on that road trip?” I had to know, but I couldn’t know, it wasn’t really in the biography, though Van Haaften doesn’t hide that their relationship was romantic. Then I started to learn more about their partnership, and it was clear that they were each very important to the other in actualizing their careers. We often have this idea that gay life is always getting more rich and more public, and in the past, things were bad and sad. But it seemed like they actually had a very unique and very fruitful partnership where art was at the center in a way that feels hard now. Or maybe just really different. I was just fascinated by this idea of “how do you figure out how to be a queer woman artist in a relationship with another queer woman artist?” I feel like that’s a question that no time period really solved.

Berenice Abbott’s Changing New York was shot in 1929. The photos for your fictional Changing Pennsylvania were shot in 2019. Do you see a parallel between these time periods? Why this choice?

Abbott took the photos for Changing New York from 1929-1940, before, during, and after the Great Depression, and that sense of being in the middle of things, being on the precipice of change and then documenting the change you’d sensed was coming fascinated me. For Housemates, I was thinking about 2018, 2019, of being right in the Trump years, about how I felt that in my little corner of Philadelphia, some promise of hope had started to open up before 2016 but then been shut down real quick. There was something very “in the middle” about 2018 too, a sense that we were afraid of what was coming but we did not yet know how much worse it was going to get.

I was really interested in the idea of putting Bernie and Leah on the road during this time where things were tough, there were obstacles, but it wasn’t all completely broken, just smashed. In the novel, they experience America or Pennsylvania at this moment where things are in conflict, but alive.

Your descriptions of large format photography are so detailed and so specific. How do you approach research for your writing?

I’m a big believer in putting my body in the thing that’s going to give me insight. I teach a class from time to time called “Reporting for Creative Writers” that tries to bridge this artificial gap between work that we call journalism or nonfiction and work that we call literary or creative. I talk about a few different kinds of research, and I think it’s really important to pull from all of them, but in some ways the most important one is experiential research, because that’s what helps you create scenes and have insight into the characters.

For Housemates I did a fair amount of in-my-chair research, just trying to get the basics of the history of large format and the foundational practitioners in the field, photographers who show up in the novel, but I’m not a technical person. When I hear camera words I’m like, “I don’t understand.” I don’t understand how it works, I don’t know what an f stop is, I don’t know how light interacts with a surface.

So at some point I got frustrated, and I reached out to this really amazing large format photographer named Jade Doskow who was teaching at the International Center of Photography (ICP). She is the photographer in residence at Freshkills, the park in Staten Island that was once a landfill. I basically said, “Can I shadow you?” and offered to pay her to teach me one on one. She wouldn’t take my money, but was like, “Sure, come along.” So she let me follow her a bunch as she worked with her camera. I took a lot of the mechanics of the photography scenes from those trips. Watching Jade helped me answer questions like, “with that much equipment, what do you take out of the car when? Where do you put it? How do you touch it? How does the body interact with a big camera like that?” Without that experiential research, the scenes of Bernie and her professor Daniel Dunn would never have been possible.

You’re also a phenomenal short story writer. How did it feel different to write a whole novel instead of a short story?

It felt so different. I think a short story is like a mood or a question. It has its own momentum, and I’m not an outliner. I don’t outline, I don’t plan, I’m just really a fan of the sentence by sentence. I write the first sentence first and I write the last sentence last. I could do that to some extent with the novel, but there were so many more choices to be made. I feel like with a novel you write until you lose your way, and then you backtrack and go back to the last place where you felt like you knew what you were talking about, or the last place that you felt confident.

So there was a lot of moving forward and then backtracking, and then moving forward and then backtracking. That was a new feeling, I felt very lost and unmoored in many places. In stories, I usually know the voice and what the parameters of the idea are, but this didn’t feel like that. There were a lot of changes. I thought it was going to be Bernie’s story mainly, and then it was really Leah’s.

You explore class with Bernie and Leah. What interests you about this dynamic?

I think you have to talk about class if you’re going to talk about art, because making art is not rewarded under capitalism, so how do you then function and survive and persist in doing that work? It’s something that I’m very interested in as a human, and as a writer. Bernie’s a scrapper and doesn’t have a family to fall back on, and Leah does. I think there’s a fundamental difference in how you’re allowed to live and imagine when you have student debt, and when you don’t have a safety net.

I wanted to show that in any book that’s going to talk about art deeply, which I hope this book does, you have to talk about money because it’s an integral part. If what you make isn’t helping you live, where does that support come from? Where does that ability to imagine yourself as an artist come from?

You need someone to help you imagine that, and then you need someone to pay for it. Bernie’s ability to imagine herself came from this strange wild coincidence of getting to study with this genius who was also a tough force in her life, and that maybe without that encounter with her professor she might not have decided to become a photographer. She was going to study graphic design. I think that, for folks who come from backgrounds where you have to work to survive, being an artist makes no sense. Leah provides Bernie money at a crucial point, and I wanted to say, “It’s not always morally bankrupt to be someone’s patron or to pay for things in a way that feels unequal.” It can create a certain kind of equality. I think it’s important that Leah’s willing to bankroll Bernie’s work in some way.

Bernie’s original desire to be a graphic designer makes perfect sense, because that is what someone with artistic inclinations, who feels like they have to make money, would do. It’s like artistic marketing.

Exactly. I know a lot of people in spaces that I’ve moved in that are like, “Oh, I would have loved to be an artist, but I couldn’t do that. That makes no sense.” Bernie comes from that kind of family.

There’s a moment when the narrator sees Bernie on the porch and is so taken, so struck by her, that Leah disappears, and it’s alluded to throughout the book that this is the effect Bernie has on people, an effect that Leah does not have. What do you think makes Bernie more appealing to these other characters in the world of the novel?

One of the things that I kept coming back to was that someone told me: Bernice Abbott was quiet, but not shy, and Elizabeth McCausland was shy, but not quiet.

There’s something very appealing to many people about someone who doesn’t give it all away up front. Bernie keeps it close to the vest, she’s a little emotionally withholding, at least at the beginning. Maybe that’s her journey, but Leah is someone who tries hard and just wants to connect with people. She gives it all away up front.

As a culture, we value withholding. We want to crack the nut of tough personalities, and Leah doesn’t need to be cracked. I think that’s why a lot of people gravitate towards Bernie more. Bernie has a lot to say, but she doesn’t say it right away. There is a satisfaction to hearing her say it over the course of the book, I hope. But I also have a soft spot in my heart for Leah, because I like to just give it away on my sleeve too.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Shy Watson.

I’m trying to restore my attention span, but you know when you’re a kid and you’re reading and it doesn’t even feel like you’re reading, it’s just like you’re watching a movie? I like it when I forget that I’m even reading. When I black out.

That’s a great standard, to black out. Your prose has a lot of repetition, especially with the first phrases or clauses of any given sentence. It created this really nice rhythm. Do you have a poetry background?

I have a playwriting background, but I feel like I should have the opposite. I shouldn’t be repeating. When I’m writing, I do have a lot of repetition and then I go through and I delete a bunch. I guess there’s still some in there…I read everything aloud, and I just like the way repetition sounds. I’d love to study poetry, but I have not.

Is playwriting what you did at Bennington?

Sort of. I did theater theory playwriting there. In high school I did a lot of playwriting.

Did you ever act?

Yeah, but I’m really bad. Not that I’m naturally good at writing, but I’m naturally okay at writing. Things that I’m actually bad at, like math or skateboarding, I could never do. But with acting I’m so bad that I can have fun with it.

Are you just not convincing? Are you bad at accents? What makes you so bad at acting?

Everything. All of the above.

Oh, no.

But it’s so fun. I love improv and stuff.

Have you done it?

Uh-huh.

That’s so brave.

Have you?

No, I’ve never done improv. I preferred memorizing monologues.

Nice. Like Shakespeare. We did a Shakespeare play in high school. I had so much fun. I was so bad.

Who were you?

I played the villain in Much Ado About Nothing. Don Juan. Something like that.

Did you wear a mustache?

Yes. And then my mustache fell off halfway through the play. I made my friend who was playing my henchman be like, “Oh, master! Thou hath shaven!”

Oh my god.

She was like, “I’m not saying that.” I was like, “You have to because people are going to be wondering.”

Good save.

The acting classes I did were filled with child actors, kids who took it so seriously. Their whole family was riding on it. They had to be good.

Were you a child at the time?

Yeah. But it’s LA. You go to an actual class and kids, they got to make the money for their family, and they’re also passionate about it. It was cool being around professionals.

Were you ever in a movie or a show or anything?

No. Not yet.

TBD.

Yeah, TBD. My big break is coming.

What do you do when you’re creatively stuck?

Adderall, but I’m trying not to do that anymore. That’s what I did. But now, and this feels disingenuous because I’ve only done this three times instead of Adderall, but I put whatever I’m trying to write in ChatGPT. And then I’m like “Rewrite this like it was written by Barthes.” Or, “Rewrite this like Brady Sinellis wrote it.” Or, “Write this like RuPaul said it.” And then it spits out a parody. It’s just the same story, but in a different voice. I don’t know if it works creatively, but it gets me going again.

[My] book keeps being marketed as a Zoomer book or whatever, and I’m like, “I’m not even.” Then I got this Zoomer translator on ChatGPT, and I’m like, “Put in as much Zoomer jargon as possible.” Or “Explain this like you’re explaining it to a Zoomer,” and it’s really fun.

The first story in your collection, “Love Story” was very much like that. When I read the first page, I was like, “Oh, the whole book is going to be like this.” Then it wasn’t.

I feel like that first story is hazing or something. If you can get through that, you can go to the normal stories.

It’s very gripping though. People are going to be like, “Whoa, I’ve never read anything like this.” And that might make them want to keep going.

Yeah. Or not.

Only the real ones. Do you ever use ChatGPT in different ways?

I used to, for poetry. The book was written all before ChatGPT. I wish I’d had it. Would it be a better book then? No, actually no. When you sign contracts, you have to promise that you didn’t use any. And I didn’t. Except I changed verb tenses sometimes just when I was being lazy. Promise. But I used to use OpenAI Playground for poetry. There was this tweet I saw the other day asking the first OpenAI chat thing what its favorite animal was. And it was like, “I like crows with bells on their feet. I like lizards with the big eyes.” And now you ask, and it’s like, “I like dogs because they’re loyal. I like octopi because they are smart.” It’s lost a lot of its magic.

It’s like now it’s a corporate adult, and it used to be a creative child. I haven’t really figured out how to use it for poetry and fun things anymore. But it’s really good at switching verb tenses if you need something to be in past tense instead of present or whatever.

When I noticed that your book was dedicated to [the late editor and publisher] Gian (DiTrapano), I almost cried. He meant a lot to me as well. How did you first get in contact?

I was a Tyrant Magazine fan in college. And I had read Firework in high school. I was at Powell’s Books when I was 14, in Oregon. And I saw this wall. I was like, whoa, what are all these books? And then I read the backs of them. I was like, whoa, these are different. And then I was a fan and I read the magazine online. And then I tweeted. My friend got me a joke book that you could order of someone’s tweets. It had all my tweets in it.

And then I tweeted, “Thank you Tyrant Books for publishing my book.” And Gian was like, “What is this?” He was like, “I didn’t publish this, but what is this?” And then he’s like, “Do you have a real book?” And then I met Kaitlin Phillips in New York, and she was like, “What’s your dream internship?” Because at Bennington you have to have internships. And I was like, “Tyrant Books.” She said, “Damn, that’s crazy. I know the guy.” Then we got connected.

And then in senior year of college, Kate published and Jordan (Castro) edited two stories of mine for the site. And then after that we were like, “Let’s do two books.” I didn’t even want to be a writer or have a book. I wanted to be a playwright. Mad embarrassing, but I just wanted to have a Tyrant book. I wrote a lot of the stories in My First Book when I put something together for Gian. He was great.

How do you explore things? What does your curiosity look like?

I love going down a rabbit hole online and finding myself three hours later on some random website just having clicked and clicked. The best trait I can hope to have is to be curious.

Your book taught me things. You spelled out CAPTCHA and PATRIOT Act, which blew my mind. I just never even thought of them as being acronyms.

Sometimes I’m watching a movie and I’m like, oh, the director learned something they thought was cool. And they’re like, “Yo, let me put that in the movie.” In Donnie Darko, the “cellar door” thing. You just know they were like, “Let me put that in something.” I used to think it was really cringe when I would see that sort of thing, but now I love it. You can just write a story or a book out of a bunch of cool things you learned.

Or when someone has to do a bunch of research into a vocation, like a story about a beekeeper or something. And you’re just like, what? That’s how it works? They do that in their hives?

Then we learn a bunch of really specific facts. Then the metaphors come really easily. I just saw the new Jason Statham movie, The Beekeeper, speaking of beekeepers.

Like one of the speakers in your stories, you’ve definitely been called an edgelord. I found your writing to be surprisingly very sincere. Do you perceive any kind of rift between how people view you and how you view yourself?

You’re the second interviewer to say I’m surprisingly sincere.

Sorry.

I mean, I love surprises. But no, I think online everything’s performance. Even writing, when I’m writing, a lot of the stories that I wrote in college, I wrote them just as an alter ego of my evil self or my most cringe self. You know, when you’re sitting down and you’re writing in first person and you don’t have a super defined character.

For Gian, I would write these fictionalized personal essays. And that’s what I was really interested in writing, fake personal essays filled with fake historical things, with characters very similar to myself. But yeah, I think there is a rift.

Somebody asked me the other day, “So what do you think about the ‘Literary It Girl’?” And I was like, “I have nothing to say.” Online, I’m going to be silly. And then when I’m writing, I’m going to be sincerely silly. Let me think of a better response. That is a good question that I have thought about too, I swear.

I wonder what the reaction is going to be to your book. Are you interested in its reception? Are you worried or excited?

I say “I can take it,” but, at the same time, I can’t. I can’t take the heat. I mean it’s like, if you don’t want to get burned, don’t play with fire. But I played with fire and now I’m like, ow, ow, ow. I think I’m very bad at metabolizing any sort of criticism. People get excited by reactions to their work sometimes. I used to, but now I’m like, oh my god…

I feel like everyone I know who’s read your work loves it. I think it’ll be good.

Thanks. Any publicity is good publicity or whatever, but I don’t want to be hated. I think there’s so much in the book that invites hate or invites anger, and I think it’s a good tactic to sell things. But I don’t know. I’m not a girl boss, so I don’t really care about that.

In a way, you’ve broken through. You got published by a major press, even though you said things that were “not supposed to” say. What advice do you have for writers who are scared of getting canceled?

I don’t know. Don’t be evil. Not me quoting myself but, a hot take won’t keep you warm at night. Also, don’t worry about breaking through the mainstream. Eventually, they can’t stop us all. Mainstream will break through us, bruh. So cringe. Yeah, I think basically the tides are changing. We are the tides. I have no idea what I’m saying.

How do you approach digital spaces? What is your relationship with social media, email, that kind of stuff? Though you seem so internet-adjacent, you don’t actually post much.

I have posting block. I don’t know… the instant nostalgia and adding to the digital mess. I’m having trouble with that. I already feel like it’s so obscene to have a book. I don’t want to be seen this much. I have a lot of trouble posting. And I think there’s less and less that I understand about the internet, but I think it’s basically the same as when I left it.

I used to love to post. It used to be like breathing, I wouldn’t even think about it. But now, I think maybe from editing the book, I think about everything. That sounds really stupid. But yeah, I would love to post, but now everything just feels like a photocopy of a photocopy. Now we have AI and all these crazy neutrals to help us post even crazier memes, but I haven’t made a great meme in a couple of years.

When you said since you left, did you make a conscious decision? Are you like, “I am not going to be online anymore”?

No, it wasn’t a conscious decision. It was slow and accidental, and then I was like, okay, whatever. I should commit to the bit and just not be here as much.

I feel like a lot of people found out about you through your podcast, Wet Brain, and also your blog. How did those outlets help or hinder your creativity?

I don’t know. I think podcasts are really bad for writers and for people to do. And the podcast was very performative. It was like playing a character. They say, “be careful what you parody, because then you just become it.” It was an exercise, a mistake in that.

But it is crazy though. If you have a podcast, you can just interview whoever. Basically, people just want to talk to you. People just want to be heard. But I don’t know. I don’t remember any of it. I’m like Malcolm in the Middle. That guy, he doesn’t remember filming Malcolm in the Middle. Or Stephen King doesn’t remember writing Cujo. It’s sort of like that. It’s cool making something and putting it out, and it teaches you that you can. And maybe that’s good for writing, but for me, I don’t think it was very good.

I was wondering, because you’ve been on a hiatus with both the podcast and your blog for I guess almost three years now.

Wow. That’s crazy. That’s like a whole ass person. That’s like a talking child.

Did you take a break to focus on your writing, or were you just like, “These things have run their course”?

No, I was like, “This is busted. It’s over.”

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Shy Watson.

My favorite essayists are people like Elizabeth Hardwick, Hilton Als, and Renata Adler, those kinds of vibes. Usually I do like there to be a strong first-person narrator, even if they’re not writing memoiristic content. I really like to read something where the writer is willing to indict themselves and deconstruct a problem, social issue, film, or book from the perspective of, “I think I feel this way, but I actually don’t think I necessarily should and I want to know why my first impulse is to read it this way when in fact I think there might be something sharper beneath it.”

I also enjoy reading essays that are diagonal to what’s going on in the larger discourse, as opposed to taking on the hot thing. If there’s an assortment of takes, what can we pull out that’s at an angle to all those takes? There is an essay in VQR that I was obsessed with a few years ago about trichotillomania—I felt like there was a lot of stuff in the media, at the time, about feminized depression and sad girl things, but nothing that was looking at the way that a neurotic woman’s sadness could manifest in a surprising bodily way.

Dead Weight has some memoiristic content. You, as an author, share that you share a history with some of your subjects’ struggles. Do you think this made your subjects more willing to speak to you? Were there ever points where you and a subject disagreed?

People with eating disorders have been manipulated by journalists en masse for most of the history of reporting on eating disorders, both from a medical perspective and from a mainstream media perspective. In one academic study, doctors interviewed people and then put them into an article that called bulimia, “anorexia’s ugly sister.” That was what a doctor was calling it in 2004. Obviously, doctors are not going to be able to fully understand or adequately portray what their subjects were trying to convey.

And then you also have mainstream media outlets writing about the pro-ana internet in a way that makes these teenage girls look like vain illness vectors inducting each other into crazy cults of thinness rather than girls who are trying to help each other survive a society that wants them to self-harm.

All of which is just to say, because of that long history, often when I’d reach out to someone I found in a forum or who I was referred to by somebody from a support group, they would be very reticent at first. I spoke to one person who was like, “I’ve spoken to journalists before who said they were going to do the forums that have given me life-saving support systems justice, and instead they made them look like incubation spaces for disease.”

I feel like there’s sometimes this impulse to maintain journalistic objectivity by not giving the subject that much information on what’s actually going to be in the piece. But with this book, I was really trying to come at it from a perspective of solidarity and to amplify and attend to the stories that do not fit the dominant eating disorder narrative, which is one that I find to be very sickening for most people.

I was very open with subjects if they had any questions about what I was trying to do. So they would often know pretty much when we were starting whether they agreed with me or didn’t. That set a really open discourse in action because they could tell that I wasn’t coming at it from an assholic place. So they were like, “Even if I disagree with you, I am going to be honest and I know you’re not going to make me look like I am selfish or a bad influence on other people just because we disagree.”

When I came across a subject saying something that I strongly felt was counter to a point I was trying to make, I would really try to sit with it and see whether my point had a blind spot, which was often happening, and then I could reorient my angle and widen it or see the ways that what that person was saying actually did fit in the argument, if in an unexpected way.

You got your MFA from Columbia. How was that?

It was an amazing experience. There aren’t so many creative nonfiction MFAs. When I first learned about them, it was radically disorienting to my understanding of genre, which had been preventing me from writing because I felt like the types of things I felt I was capable of writing were neither novels nor the straight journalism or straight review-type criticism I had seen. And then I started reading writers like Kate Zambreno and Leslie Jamison, who taught me there were so many ways to subvert existing genre categories and that often the writing can be more honest and get deeper analytically when you’re not trying to fit within a genre structure that might force you to ape objectivity and pretend not to have positionality, both of which are impossible, if you are, like me, a person living not in a vacuum but in a society.

It was incredible in terms of space, time, deadlines, and also I wish I was the romantic ideal of a writer that I had in my head as a young girl, one who’s just tapping away on the typewriter no matter if any of the pages ever get read. But I write out of a yearning for connection. And so I do need to know someone’s going to read it, not to write anything, but to really do a project at length. And so on top of the deadlines and the time and space, it was amazing to know that the things I was writing were going to be read by people I deeply admired and wanted to connect with, both my peers and my teachers.

Something that I was really fascinated by that I didn’t know before reading Dead Weight, which I’ve since brought up to several of my friends, is what amounts to basically this weight loss industrial complex of dieting apps, treatment centers, venture capitalists. I wasn’t aware of this and I was curious if you could speak a little more to how you came about discovering this and what it is or what implications it has for anyone who hasn’t yet had a chance to read your book.

All of that information was, in its specificity, something I discovered over the course of my research. At first, Dead Weight wasn’t nearly as anti-capitalist, nor did it report heavily on the tentacling hedge funds that are actually funding both the eating disorder and diet industrial complexes. Once I had all the cultural stuff together, I was like, “Okay, something seems to be going on here with the fact that the treatments don’t work and the treatment centers are exploding in number despite the treatments continuing not to work.”

This is the most expensive form of treatment for mental illness besides addiction treatment, which has similar relapse rates, and yet no one’s talking about this. And there’s also a weight loss industry that seems pretty powerful that seems to be causing a lot of eating disorders. And could they perhaps be related? And in fact, they were. And one of the big pieces of connective tissue there is that the concept of obesity as we think of it today is one that has really been promulgated by the medical weight loss industry and the diet industry, especially regarding the specific BMIs that we currently classify obesity as a disease at.

BMI itself is a racist misogynistic measure. It’s not a good way to measure health, but it is the measure that’s mainly being used.

Obesity was only categorized as a chronic disease in 2013 after great amounts of lobbying and millions of dollars spent by drug companies. And that was against the American Medical Association’s own advisory committee’s suggestions. And even within that, it’s only concretely proven that obesity at high grades is actually as dangerous as we are made to believe all fatness is. A lot of what we associate with obesity, the cardiovascular disease, that type of thing, appears in long-term correlational epidemiological studies that are often funded by weight loss companies. So they’re not controlling for factors such as weight cycling, which is when you gain and lose a significant amount of weight throughout your life. And people whose body weights put them in the overweight or obese BMI categories usually have a lot more weight cycling in their lifetimes than people who fall in the normal category because we live in a very fat-phobic society that makes your life easier if you’re thin.

So people are repeatedly going on diets. We know diets don’t work. There’s a scientist I talk about in the book who literally came up with the term “the dieting depression” in the 1950s to express that not only do you gain weight after you do a restrictive diet, but you get extremely depressed. You basically have all the psychological symptoms of an eating disorder, and because you put your body in starvation mode, now you’re craving a binge. It leads to a horrible cycle. In the few studies I found that do control for weight cycling, there’s pretty much no change in mortality between being in the normal category or the overweight or obese grade 1 categories. So we have this entire industry that’s predicated on a belief that is just one possible interpretation of data.

And in reading it one way, we’ve constructed obesity as a disease and then what we’ve constructed as the “cure” for that disease, dieting, is likely actually the initial cause of what we’re now calling the disease. And we have so many corporations profiting off of that problem of mistaken attribution that it’s hard for me to see it as an accident.

You have companies like Weight Watchers where the CEO says in leaked memos that the company makes money because the product doesn’t work and people on average do it four to six times. And you also have a lot of people going on diets, whether they’re caused by fat-phobia or they’re caused by the fact of being a person who can’t healthily embody the beauty standard she’s been fed, pardon the pun, of that emaciated ideal, who then goes on a diet that is coded as healthy in the media, but might in fact lead to weight cycling or an eating disorder or both.

Diets so easily spiral into something extremely restrictive: 35 percent of diets become pathological. If someone becomes ill enough that they qualify for clinical care, which we set far too extreme a benchmark for, a benchmark at which people are often so sick that they’re less likely to recover, then they go into these residential treatment centers where they’re given treatment that often reinforces the logic of their disorder by obsessively tracking their weight and making them eat in these very theatrical and regimented ways, and not teaching them how to eat in the context of their own lives. So when they leave, they often relapse or gain a lot of weight in recovery because their body has been starved for so long, and then they go on a diet. All of these companies are simultaneously benefiting.

It’s not necessarily a grand conspiracy, but the people that are funding these companies have no incentive to make the eating disorder treatment work because they’re making so much money off this cyclical customer. The weight loss companies only have an incentive for dieting to be a lifelong hamster wheel, and then the drug companies have an incentive for people to believe fatness is a disease so they can treat it with drugs. So it’s all this horrible octopus that was very disturbing to discover, but honestly weirdly cathartic and empowering to discover because I was like, “my disease isn’t just my doing.” I feel like there’s a narrative around eating disorders these days that says “We have feminism, so why are women still taking these beauty standards so seriously?”

And it was so liberating to realize, no, there’s actively a web of very powerful corporations who are often being funded by the same few investors and hedge funds who want me to be stuck in this cycle, whether it’s a diet or an eating disorder treatment center or both back to back. Once you see it, you realize that it’s just beneath the surface. So if enough of us see it, while it’s a very powerful machine, it’s not a very smart one. If enough of us notice it, we could be the screws that don’t turn instead of the ones that let it keep going.

I feel like that essay should be on the front cover of The New York Times. It feels like you discovered something huge. I mean, you did. I had never heard anyone else talk about this, so it was–

They’re excerpting it in The Nation [in May].

Yay! Love to hear it. How do you avoid burnout?

It’s sort of a holy trinity of strategies. The first is simply hanging out with friends and making sure to prioritize that, even if that feels like something I should be shaming myself for doing because I have so much work to do or whatever. I find having a conversation with someone smart who I live, laugh, love with is such a source of energy, intellectual inspiration, and emotional succor.

So hanging out is one. Reading things that are completely unrelated to whatever I’m working on is another. And specifically reading things that are not contemporary, which often involves rereading. I have a few books I go back to when I feel like I’m getting disillusioned by feeling like writing’s a hamster wheel or the publishing industry is evil or nobody’s being honest in their writing or whatever I am thinking on a given bad day.

Renata Adler, Walker Percy, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Caroline Blackwood are my go-to’s to inspire the thought, “Oh my god, the prose can be so fabulous.” You can totally gossip. You can wring some genius Semiotic theory out of a fake self-help book. Percy’s book Lost In The Cosmos is a satirical self-help book from the eighties, and it’s truly one of the best books I’ve ever read. I return to it all the time when I have no hope for literature or my mental health, so I highly recommend that.

And then the third thing in that trinity is ultimately going to have to go ahead and be a teen television show. I have rewatched The Vampire Diaries, the OC, Gossip Girl, and One Tree Hill a really disturbing amount of times. I find them deeply soothing.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Shy Watson.

I think two things. Writing was the one thing I would get praise for at school. I was quite shy and a people pleaser and I didn’t get noticed for anything else, so it disproportionately affected me, obviously. I really liked stories, too. I remember being young and most of my cousins, all the kids my age, they would just play. But I always wanted to sit around with my grandparents, my nana especially, and hear her stories. I feel like I was almost being trained to listen, so I could write about them one day and pass them on.

Have you tried writing prose?

When I was a teenager, I did. I’d write a lot of fiction and short stories and novels. I haven’t had a proper attempt at it as an adult writer, but I do really want to. It’s one of my aspirations. I think having so much space and time to really go at a set of ideas would be really satisfying. I am trying, but it’s really effing hard. I’m having to learn things like structure from writer’a TikTok. My brain is wired to write poetry these days. If I write a boring sentence, I immediately become frustrated.

Editing fiction can be especially difficult. How do you edit your poetry?

I actually really love editing poetry. It’s my favorite part. I love how you can change just one word and it suddenly elevates the line or even the whole poem. When I’m writing poetry, I’m looking and reading through and I’m really interrogating each word and trying to figure out: Is this the best word? Is this exactly what I’m trying to say at this moment? And I do a lot of reading aloud because cadence and rhythm are really important to me. I try to feel where the lines are sitting or where the stresses are, where the hits and the rhythm are. I also like to use those read-aloud functions on the computer because I feel like if it can still sound somewhat bearable with this monotone voice reading it, then that’s probably going to be alright—it’s the final test.

Do you have a certain kind of voice or accent that you select with the computer?

I select Australian because it’s the closest to finding a New Zealand read aloud voice. There’s this Australian robot woman called Karen that I use.

When do you decide to pepper te reo Māori in your poetry?

When I use te reo Māori it’s probably more for voice than anything. It’s like, would I say the word in English or would I say it in Māori? I speak a lot of te reo Māori, but I’m not fluent. Lots of people here in Aotearoa, Māori or non-Māori, will incorporate te reo Māori in lieu of certain English words, so it feels natural to use it interchangeably. But then at other times, I might use it for the sound. The marriage of consonant and vowel sounds in te reo Māori is really satisfying for me. So sometimes it’ll be for the sake of rhythm but also meaning as well, because a lot of our language in te reo Māori doesn’t actually have a direct translation to English and there are lots of layers of meaning in our words, each phonetic will have its own meaning.

For example the title, Rangikura, “rangi” means sky or heaven as it is related to Ranginui, our legendary sky father, and “kura” means red or scarlett. Kura also means school or getting an education so, to me, Rangikura means “learning from the red sky,” which Māori would understand as observing tohu, looking and learning from signs in the natural world. “Ikura” is a term we use for a woman’s menses. I like that meaning being in the title because the book has a theme of girlhood. In that way I’ll use te reo also because I find it more layered and poetic.

I’m completely obsessed with your poetic imagery. I’m thinking specifically of the glow-in-the-dark stars in “Can I Still Come Crash at Yours?” How do you choose objects in your poems and what kind of objects resonate with you as a reader?

When I was a kid, I would be attracted to lists of objects or items in books. I remember reading this one Jacqueline Wilson book when I was eight and it had a list of all these different lollies this character was eating and that imprinted on me. It was so satisfying to read all these English lollies I’d never heard of. I think my attraction to objects is almost like a feminine impulse. All the girls I know have always had attachments to certain items and collecting. Have you seen that trend going around? It’s like girl clusters or girls who cluster, that kind of thing. These little clusters of ordinary but talismanic objects.

I really like Sofia Coppola and Petra Collins and Nadia Lee Cohen. I was inspired by these artists who really emphasized femininity, and they always were focused on items and objects. I’m also interested in world-building and world-building my world that’s hybrid te ao Māori, but modern. And that’s why I feel like peppering these physical items and objects is important to me. I love physicality in poems and having a sense of groundedness because some of my poems deal with concepts of colonization and the effects of that, or the spiritual aspect of Te ao Māori. To balance that, it’s important to have some concrete ideas in there as well, some stick-on stars or a broken iPod.

I noticed the world-building, especially in the poems about early girlhood, like listening to Born to Die on a desktop computer without internet and “skulling” 10-dollar Kristov. What interests you about girlhood?

I think of Rangikura as kind of being a coming-of-age narrative. I’m interested in that phase of life because you’re coming into adulthood, but you’re also coming into awareness and your social conscience at the same time. The characters in this book are discovering their positionality in the world as wahine Māori and also their consciousness about why the world is like this and why the world is like that to them, exploitative and predatory. It was the phase of my life where I, and surely other women, felt the most vulnerable. You’re becoming a woman, but you don’t have access to your own money or have your own ideas fully formed. Rangikura is a coming-of-age narrative that’s supposed to be a metaphor for colonization and the climate crisis. I associate the kind of desecration of the earth and what’s happening with the environment to the kind of disrespect and desecration of Indigenous women. And I wanted to put the climate anxiety I was feeling into the anxiety of being a young and vulnerable woman.

Your poems speak to American culture—endless reality TV shows, a stepbrother asking if he should destroy a Beavis and Butthead gift, etc.—but I also read your essay in Newsroom where you talk about the world of Māori influencers, musicians, and stars. I’m curious about this divide between cultural icons while you were coming-of-age, or if you even consider it a divide.

I personally don’t consider it a divide because I’m in both worlds, but I’m also aware that Americans might not know much about our pop culture and music, and the things we have here. Maybe I’m generalizing, but I feel like Americans don’t really know much about anywhere else in the world.

I love American pop culture. The level of celeb worship and enthusiasm is so different from NZ culture. It’s something I’m definitely interested in and I’m passionate about. But at the same time, I do think of American pop culture as the second colonization of Aotearoa New Zealand. I feel like American pop culture has more influence, at least among my generation, than the legacy of Great Britain or anything like that.

It’s funny because I feel like I walk in both worlds pretty easily and confidently, and I feel comfortable existing in sort of the axis point of them. My friends and I use the terms “modern Māori” or “bougie native,” as terms for being a contemporary Indigenous person who enjoys pop culture, music, dressing up, going out for dinners in a way that has an element of reclamation, of taking up space while still being Māori and representing our ancestors and tradition. I do acknowledge that there’s obviously tension there. American pop culture is so predicated on capitalism, colonization, exploitation… I’m trying to think of a gentler word, but I can’t. You know, exploitation and displacement of Indigenous people and the slave labor of Black people in America. Obviously, these things are quite in contrast to our values and the way that we operate in Te Ao Māori. But I do think that the tension that that creates, for me, as a person and as a writer, is really interesting. I use contrast and juxtaposition a lot in my writing. I like a clash.

Your poetry mentions astrology a lot, and I know that you run an astrology column, too. How do you use astrology as a tool, both in your writing and in your life?

In my life, I like it as a shorthand for analysis, but also, it has some sort of esoteric resonance for me as an Indigenous person. We Polynesians are traditional star gazers. We navigate the world through looking at the stars and other elements in the environment. That’s why I think astrology made sense for me, that you would look at the stars and draw meaning from their location in the sky. That was not a far leap from what I already believe in, coming from navigators. And obviously, I like it for the fun, girly pop nature of it, comparing charts and looking at synastry.

In poetry, I’m more attracted to the language of astrology and how that can be used. I just love a lot of the language around astrology, like the planets, the symbolism and even the names of the signs. For example, I have a poem in Rangikura that I could have called ‘I’m determinedly destructive when it comes to my desire’ but instead I called it ‘Mars in Scorpio.’

You went to graduate school for an MA. What’d you learn there?

I definitely learnt to write even though I always thought I was the man. I got in by submitting these really silly, aesthetic poems I was posting on Tumblr. I think I was lucky to get in, but I remember on the first day of class, my teacher asked, “Are you going to take this seriously? Are you going to be serious about this?” I was like, “Yeah, I’m paying all this money and I signed up to do this,” all indignant. But no, I did listen to her and I learnt real quick.

My poems before I went to study were really self-indulgent and didn’t really mean anything when you poked through a certain aesthetic veneer. What I learnt mostly was to be more generous to the readers. That really stuck with me and I take that forward. But also, I hadn’t really written about my Māori identity, or the cultural state of Aotearoa before I went and did that course.

It was about six weeks in and I wrote this lyric essay about Indigenous hair, and I got a really positive response to it and everyone was saying, “This is what you’re supposed to be doing, this is what you should be writing.” And that really changed the trajectory of my studies that year and also for my career, and the things that I’m still writing about. I was really lucky in having a good experience in doing my MA, but I know not everyone does, especially not Indigenous people.

I came at the right time where some native writers had gone before me and made vocal the issues they had with the MA program and the way it was structured. By the time I came through, people were more open to my perspective and prepared to look after me. The MA program has a prize at the end of the year for the best manuscript. It’s pretty evil and I don’t really think they should do it because it makes the year weird and competitive, but I won mine and I was happy to win. It fast-tracked me getting published here in New Zealand. Suddenly all the publishers knew me and were interested. The MA was significant as it gave me a lot of institutional support.

You also teach others. What do you want your students to come away having learned?

I try to press perspective. I think it’s the most important and powerful thing that a writer or artist can have. It’s better than talent or even discipline. If you write from a place where only you can write from, that’s when you’re going to hit the good stuff. Usually, I end up tutoring or teaching Polynesian or brown girls, so I always tell them it’s about honoring your history, your heritage and your whakapapa but whakapapa can be a range of different things.

It can be your actual ancestors and your culture, but it also can be even just the types of art you consume or the music you liked as a kid, things like that. When you believe, trust, and enjoy your influences and let them color your work, you’ll make work that’s really special and impactful.

The course I usually teach or lecture is called “Turangawaewae, A Place to Stand, Ways of Writing about the Land.” It’s about the different ways that Māori address and talk to the land, whether it’s through personification of the natural elements as gods, or the way we introduce ourselves by naming all the rivers and the mountains and the physical landscapes that we come from. I use that to get writers to consider place and their positionality and relationship to the land. Place is really important to me in my writing.

What are you working on now?

The poems I’m writing right now all focus on the ocean. I just finished writing this long lyric essay about the Pacific Ocean being a highway, talking about my times traveling over in the US as well as our pacific voyaging history. It’s called Te-Moana-nui-a-Kiwa: Ocean Memory. That’s going to come out in April with Alta Mag, as a little pull-out book. I’m just really obsessed with the Pacific Ocean at the moment. My first two books have been really focused on Indigenous identity as a Māori, but this next one’s more focused on being Māori in the context of being a Pacific Islander. This one’s very Polynesian.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Shy Watson.

Auto-fiction is such a loaded term these days. Everyone’s doing it, and it has so many forms and boundaries. But yeah, Worry is based on my life. My younger sibling, Jess, came to New York for an internship back in 2016. I was living in the West Village in a little studio. They had student housing, but there was mold in the student housing. And they have chronic hives–with mold, not a good situation–so they came to stay with me. And at first I thought it would be a weekend, a week, and then it wound up being six months that we were living on top of each other. So that’s where the idea for Jules and Poppy cohabitating together came from. I think they really are us.

The situation is different, the setting is different, the constraint of space and time is different. But as far as writing from life and writing whatever your definition of auto-fiction is, I think whenever you’re doing that you’re just sort of transfiguring yourself into a more loaded situation that’s more dramatically interesting. So you’re working to preserve the impulses of a real person and thinking about that person while you’re writing them, or thinking about your own impulses while you’re writing a version of yourself, but just sort of heightening the stakes a little bit.

Auto-fiction can be so hard because life itself isn’t really plotted.

Anytime the book started pulling away too much from life, I would get anxious. Because what’s interesting to me is capturing what a dynamic really is. But then, of course, in order to sustain a story that pulls people along, you kind of have to give life a narrative. There has to be drama, there have to be other people involved. Even though my memory of living with Jess is this really specific insular experience, it had to open up in order for me to tell the bigger story I wanted to tell, to explore the things I was interested in writing about. So dramatizing life is always…You feel like you’re cheating, because life doesn’t have the patterns that fiction has.

Yeah. But you got to.

You got to.

How did you know when Worry was ready?

I still don’t know that it’s ready. I feel like the beginning and the end were sort of easy for me to get into, and so determining when it was ready in the initial drafting was more about getting to a place where I felt that the whole middle had a rhythm and had the right measure of repetition, but also growth and also backsliding. So I don’t know. I had to use my emotions in a way I hadn’t before to gauge when things felt true and solid. So that led me toward pulling away a bunch of artifice, and anything that I was writing because I felt like: there’s a scene that should be in here, so now I have to have a scene about this in here.

There’s still things that I look at in the plot where I’m like: “Oh, I could do that better if I started over right now.” So I don’t know that a book is ever finished, except that it is, because you have a deadline from a publishing company. I think especially when you’re writing from life, it stays with you, and the what ifs follow you a little bit more.

Now that Worry is published, are you able to let go of it and move on to the next project? Or are these potential changes haunting you?

Throughout the editorial process, you still feel that measure of control, like: “Oh, I can still email my editor and say, ‘Oh my gosh, we should do this. What do you think about doing this?’” For a long time, you have the manuscript, you’re doing the copy edits, it feels like it’s alive and it’s with you. And there’s a moment where they tell you, “Okay, it’s done.” And that for me is sort of when I felt haunted. I would wake up in the middle of the night and be like, “Is it right? Can I change this one line still, maybe on this one page that for some reason is coming to me at three in the morning?” I’m haunted but I have no choice but to move on.

At times, Worry almost read like a screenplay. How do you know when dialogue’s working well, and how do you know when it’s failing?

I did a lot of playwriting courses throughout my life, in college and in grad school, a lot of screenwriting as well. And a big thing that they have you do in those classes is like: “We’re going to break for 45 minutes, and you’re going to go to a coffee shop and sit down and listen to someone else’s conversation and try to write it down. And you’re going to realize that when people are telling a story, they don’t fill in all the details for you, and they don’t leave something off in a way that’s easy to pick back up later.”

And once you do that exercise a few times, I think it goes from feeling like those gaps are something that’s frustrating about creating dialogue to something that’s really freeing. I wanted it to feel very natural. So while I was writing the book I would pay that kind of close attention, whenever my sibling and I would talk to each other on the phone or during visits, the way we’d use language specifically with each other. How we’d defend ourselves or pick up on a memory or whatever. I realized it didn’t have to make clear sense. I didn’t have to package it to make sense to the reader. Because if the characters are understanding it and you as a writer are capturing a pair of characters’ intimate understanding of each other in language, the reader’s going to have that understanding too.

It takes a lot to make me laugh out loud. I’ll think something’s funny or whatever, but with Worry I was cackling in my office, worried my boss would hear. How do you use humor in your writing? What effect do you hope it has?

Because this book is so much about the texture of my relationship with my sibling and the texture of our humor with each other, that’s what I was looking to throughout the writing. I wanted to write something that would make this one specific person, who I think is the funniest person in the world, laugh. So what I’ve learned about humor is that the funniest memes you see online, or the funniest videos are the videos that people made for one specific person, the memes that reference one really specific event. I guess the key to humor in writing is specificity. Again, the same thing as with dialogue. It’s about not being afraid someone’s not going to get it, but trusting that if you build in the emotional secret behind it, the thing you want is going to come through.

I read that you were a MacDowell fellow and also a fellow for the Center of Fiction. Have those experiences helped you develop as a writer?

What’s been most important for me about those experiences is that they’ve legitimized me to myself. It’s so easy to feel like, “What’s special about me? What’s special about my work? Is this worth anything?” And I think both of those fellowships came at a time when I was out of grad school wondering, “How serious am I going to be about this? Am I going to have a career?” With those really scary, big questions, getting just a little bit of validation from an institution gave me the ego boost I needed to keep going. So that’s the big thing.

And then once you get to those places and once you’re in community with other writers, you realize that that’s what really helps you grow. When you’re at MacDowell, you’re with amazing people working in all different disciplines, and they feel frustration in their work as well. You come to dinner every night and talk about what went wrong and what went right in the studio. The thing you’re working on, whenever you’re a fellow or in-residence somewhere, the material becomes so secondary to having that experience of being in community and feeling like: “These other people are here and they’re doing this, and I’m here too, so I must be able to do this.”

I agree. Jules is very obsessed with social media, particularly Instagram. Why is she drawn to these Mormon mommies and all their conspiracies?

Jules is really without a center. She’s lonely. She’s both self-obsessed and full of self-hatred. So I think for her, the mommies are a way to feel like she’s constructing some sense of self based on what she’s not, that she’s building herself up in relief against these people. I think she even says it at one point, something like: “I like feeling better than anyone.” They’re a way for her to feel superior about her inner life, which is all she has. And of course, using social media that way, from a really cynical and hateful point of view, it can put a bandaid on whatever you’re feeling in the moment. Watching a crazy ass skit video that someone you hate made can let you be like: “Isn’t this so embarrassing? I can’t imagine being this embarrassing person.” That feels good for a second. But you’re not doing anything to improve yourself in that moment. You’re giving into your lowest self.

I had my own journey of following Mormon mommies, and I still don’t totally know why, but they drove me crazier than anyone else on the internet. So when I wanted to write a really internet-heavy book, I thought that giving them to her as her challenge would rupture something in her brain even more than it was rupturing mine.

Writing something really internet-heavy—was that an intention that you had going into this?

Yeah, I really wanted to try to capture the internet in prose, just because I was noticing I was spending so much time on the internet in 2019, 2020 while I was writing this. And I found myself not being able to remember the reasons why a particular post drove me crazy or what the experience of encountering a piece of content that had a big effect on me had felt like initially, so I started wanting to use the power of narrative description to hold onto that unconscious monologue you have when you’re scrolling. I felt in this book, description would be wasted on a tree or a building, and it would be more interesting to stretch that muscle by using really ornate descriptions in trying to get at what about a post was so uncanny or so funny or so sad.

Jules’ miserability, how she’s so irony-poisoned and judgmental, felt really real to me. How do you approach digital spaces? What’s your relationship like with social media, email, and other online distractions?

I have control over it until I don’t. I’ll often feel really scarily gripped by my phone or really gripped by scrolling, just to encounter other people’s thoughts. And then I’ll have a moment where I’m like, “Okay, but I’m not being present in my own life.” It comes in waves. In times of uncertainty, whether it’s personal, professional, global, you want that chorus of people that you’re looking at, to live inside someone else’s thoughts for a second.

Aside from money, what are the rewards of your creative practice? What do you get out of this work, and what has it taught you about yourself?

I feel most authentically myself when I’m writing. I feel safe and really at peace when I’m writing. And when you’re creating a character, what that gives you is this ability to reflect yourself and the people in your life back to yourself. I feel very, very mesmerized by that challenge, it makes my brain feel really alive. I feel out of time, but also connected to something. The whole ego journey of writing as a career and thinking of yourself as an artist falls away, and it’s just about trying to create something real and interesting.

What is your writing process like?

I want to say I don’t have a process, but I know that I do. And I think it just involves creating a setting that feels boxed off from the rest of the world. I sit, I put on music, I light a candle, all these little creature comforts that just help me feel present in the moment. But I don’t really have a codified structure to my writing time, because I’m very work avoidant. When I have the sense that this is a job or that I have to work within a certain timeframe or certain parameters, I get really freaked out and angry and have authority issues with myself, even though I’m the only one setting those boundaries. But I like to write in bed. I like to write at night. I like to write when I feel really unseen.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Shy Watson.

I’ve written pretty much anywhere. But when it gets serious and it’s editing time, I need complete silence and no other human being or anything to see. I go to my local university library, to the silent study area where it’s completely empty. None of the kids use it at all. It’s literally just me. I’ve got an associate membership. But writing, I’ll write anywhere, on a notebook, laptop, napkin, whatever.

What is your editing process like?

I’m about to start editing my second novel today. It’s rough and gross at the moment, but I just ordered a bound manuscript, which turned up today, thankfully.

So I’m just going to read through it with all my new edits and everything I’m hoping the finished thing is going to be like and just highlight things that I really like that I’m going to use in the second draft.

And then I’ll get rid of anything that isn’t working and figure out what I’m moving around and what needs to be written next. Then, once I’ve gone through the whole manuscript manually, I’ll write a fresh draft with the bits that I really like from the first draft. But it is for more of an overview.

Did you order the bound manuscript on your own or is that something your publisher sent you?

No, I just order on my own.

Oh, that’s cool. Because then it’s like you have an actual book in your hand.

It puts my brain in a different gear. It’s like reading someone else’s work almost when it’s in print. It’s very helpful.

I know Sugar, Baby was your first novel. How did you go about finding its structure?

I needed a lot of help from my agent and then from my editors because when I first wrote it, I was literally just writing. My idea of a plot was, “lots of stuff happens, lots of fun stuff happens.” I had way too much in it, so it had to be cut down. And then we worked quite a lot on structure. I definitely needed to work on a sense of pace. It was way too packed.

Was the word count much longer in the initial drafts?

Yeah, it was a lot longer. We cut out a lot. I think it was still a hundred thousand words or more when it went on submission to publishers.

Wow, that’s impressive. Some writers I know avoid pop culture references in their writing, because they’re afraid it will age the work. But you really leaned into it. Was that a conscious consideration?

I just saw it as really hard to separate the kind of story that I was writing from the world around it. And these kinds of girls, they would be super aware of pop culture. They’re girls who are 21 and there’s no way that they wouldn’t reference what’s going on in celebrities and fashion brands and stuff like that. So it was a deliberate choice. Also, I really wasn’t trying to write a timeless novel at all.

Sugar, Baby is so of-the-moment. This wouldn’t have happened in any other time in history. It is absolutely of-now. If anything, I am more proud if it is very reflective of a certain time. I know some people hate that. I feel like it’s a controversial thing to talk about TikTok and YouTube and stuff. But yeah, it would’ve been a choice not to do it, and I don’t think that would’ve made sense.

It feels almost archival, like if someone picks it up in 50 years they’ll have a full experience of what this time in history was like. It’s cool that you’re not afraid to lean into it and embrace the moment.

I loved your descriptions of Agnes’s photos—the way she composes and what she chooses to capture. I was curious if you work in any other artistic mediums besides writing, or if the photography plotline required a lot of research.

I don’t, but I have been interested in various things. I love to watch documentaries on art history. I like the idea of old portraits of royalty, when they put different objects in the picture. It’s symbolism and it’s telling you something about the person’s life and maybe the artist is sneaking in there.

I’m interested in hidden messages and pictures and composition. Agnes’s interest in photography, especially of women, the Helmut Newton pictures, is all about the presentation of a woman or the image of a woman. She’s looking for something that’s different from the religious image she’s been given while growing up. She’s been looking for something more to identify with and I think that stirs something in her, these kinds of glamorous pictures.

I read your essay in Vogue. In America, I don’t think we have the term “image girl,” we call it party promoter or club promoter or what have you, but I like the word “image girl” because that’s exactly what it is. Did your experience of an image girl impact your story? Did something from it inspire the novel?

Yeah, definitely. I kind of stumbled into that scene and had zero idea that it existed, but then I was like, “Oh, this is so cool.” It’s like being sponsored to go out and have fun. I became interested in all the power dynamics. I remember being in the middle of these parties and feeling like, “This is so fun and amazing that we’re so welcome and everyone wants us here, but how much is that going to change in five years?”

It’s very conditional and it made me think a lot about how fleeting of a currency it is to be young and attractive. You can go out and trade and make the most of it, but you’ve got this kind of panic in the back of your mind at all times that it’s so temporary.

That is definitely at the heart of the novel. I think all the girls feel that. I had lots of friends who were professional models and I was shocked by the insecurity that they felt and the sense of time running out. They were so beautiful to anyone just to look at them, but to them it’s like they’re comparing themselves to someone else.

This reminds me: during the past week or so, I’ve been seeing a lot of articles about how Gen Z is terrified of turning 30. What do you think is causing this panic? Do you think it has to do with social media and filters or do you think this panic has existed for every generation?

I actually have no idea really. I think it’s a mix of things. It is alarming. There’s kids who are skincare influences using Retinol and they’re 12 and 13. It’s crazy.

I think part of it is the beauty industry’s pushing and anti-aging influencers. People are like, “Oh my god, do you have lines? You need to use this!” And people are like, “Oh my god, I look old.”

You hear podcast boys talking about, “Oh, once a girl’s over 25, she’s old,” or whatever. I think it’s lots of things, but I definitely think it’s a hysteria. Also, when you look like your age, people think you look much younger than you are because they have this picture in their mind of 30 as some old hag or something.

I’m 27 now, but a few years ago I was out at a bar and I was talking about birth charts and star signs with someone in the girl’s toilet and she’s like, “Oh, 1996, how old are you?” I was like, “I’m 25.” And she’s like, “Oh my god, you don’t look at it.” What do you think 25 looks like? She was 19, but I think she probably thought in a couple of years she’s going to look like an old woman or something. It’s just a weird perception.

I always assume someone’s the same age as I am, unless they look drastically different. I don’t think other people notice the little things that we notice about ourselves.

No, definitely not. It’s not like you’re going to be 22 one day and then you’re 28 and you look like you’ve aged a hundred years or something.

Exactly. So I know that you have a degree in social anthropology. In what ways has this impacted your writing, if at all?

Lots of ways, really. I wanted to do anthropology because I’m interested in different customs and cultures and what the world looks like for other people, through their belief systems and how things work. And then when I discovered this world of image modeling and sugar babies and sugar daddies, I was sort of looking at it from an anthropological perspective—I was intrigued by how these things happen and who says what and the surrounding expectations.

It’s like a micro society. You suddenly meet all these people and everyone’s got a sugar daddy, or everyone gets paid for this, that, and the other, and they end up forming friendships in this little world. I was taking notes almost like I used to take field notes for anthropology, which is essentially just a diary of what happened, just an observational kind of thing. And anthropology is supposed to be without judgment, you’re literally just an observer. From those sort of notes is where I decided to adapt it into a novel, really. It influenced the book quite a lot.

I liked how that you didn’t write sex work to be some miserable, desperate, dark act. Agnes is genuinely into the sugar daddy she chooses and can have a good time, not regret it the morning after, etc. Was this an intention, the way that you represented sex work?

Yeah. And it’s actually quite controversial because I’ve had messages from lots of girls being like, “Oh, I used to do this,” or “I do this,” or “I have friends who do this, and you did a really, really good job, it’s so true to life, it’s really realistic.” And then I’ve had comments online or reviews from people being like, “How is she fine at the end? And why isn’t she more affected?”

I could have catered more to this kind of cautionary tale where her life is just completely in ruins, but that’s just not realistic. And that’s also not the book that I wanted to write at all. Because for the majority of people who do this kind of thing, it really is a lifestyle choice that, yes, has its disadvantages and, yes, can put you in some dangerous situations, but ultimately it’s usually fine. Otherwise, why would you do it as a young woman? It just doesn’t make sense.

As far as your creative work is concerned, how do you define success and how do you define failure?

I think with writing, you never really feel like it’s successful. There’s always a moving marker. First, you think you’re a success if you get an agent, and then you get a publishing deal. But then it’s always like you want to see the figures and then you’ve got to do it again.

And right now I’m just like, “Oh my god, I’m so stressed out about my second book.” So I don’t know. I mean, But I guess it’s a success if you’re proud of it. That’s the ultimate aim. Then the external stuff doesn’t matter as much. It’s definitely different now that it’s my job. Those markers have changed.

Are you working outside of writing or is that your primary gig now?

It’s my primary thing now, yeah. Which is good because I went traveling for a bit. And London is so expensive, but it’s really good to go elsewhere and just kind of digital nomad for a bit and stuff like that. So for now, it is my primary thing, but we’re not home and dry. I really need to pull an amazing second book out of the bag, for sure.

Are you dedicating a certain amount of hours per day for writing, like you would a day job?

Normally when I’m doing the first draft or something where there’s lots of new writing, it will be just a thousand words because then I start to kind of lose it, but it’s a measurable thing where I’m like, “Okay, I’ve done my word count, so I’m good.”

But now I will probably be working the majority of every day to get to a good stage before I start officially writing my second draft. The editing is always crazy for me because I’m always behind my deadline.

Are you allowed to reveal anything about your next novel? Or do you wish to?

I actually don’t know if I’m allowed to, but no one’s stopped me. It’s a ballet inspired story about love, rage, revenge, and obsession with another person. I’m really excited. It’s like Black Swan meets John Tucker Must Die.

Those are such good comp titles to have, too. What’s the most surprising thing you’ve learned along your creative path?

The most surprising thing is that writer’s block doesn’t exist, but sometimes it takes two weeks to come up with the thing, the paragraph, or the idea that’ll solve it. So there is an answer somewhere, but it might take a really, really long time for it to formulate in my mind. It’s a long process sometimes, and I just have to accept that.

Have you found any tricks for expediting the process?

Just time, thinking time. When I feel like things are really bad and I’m like, “Oh my god, I have all these suggestions of edits and scenes and stuff, and I don’t know what’s working,” I would just not do anything for a week or two and then I’ll think of something good. So, nothing but time.

But I do think that reading books and watching films helps to get back into a storytelling perspective and into someone else’s head or someone else’s words. So yeah, time and inspiration.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Shy Watson.

It’s a quality of aliveness, that the book itself holds a kind of sentience and originality. That I can sense the providence of the book and that it’s only that specific writer who could have written it. Aliveness, originality, and then propulsion is really critical for me. Beauty in reduction. As in life, I would never be drawn to a decorated thing, so I want an undecorated novel.

You mentioned propulsion. I read Daughter in one sitting, except when I got up to feed myself. I found it very propulsive. What makes a propulsive read for you and how do you employ propulsion in your own writing?

I am very aware of the idea that a book is a mechanism and you have to plant something on each page, so that the page will turn. Otherwise, the mechanism is broken. For Daughter, I think the shifting points of view created a lot of momentum. Also, where you begin and end a scene is really critical. Like Didion’s flash cuts or, I talk a lot about this lecture, Celine Sciamma’s BAFTA lecture about the making of Portrait of a Lady on Fire, in which she talked about how every scene has to be a desired scene. There are two kinds of scenes, needed scenes and desired scenes, and she says that to know your desire is to know your project.

You very seamlessly switched from one POV to another, and I found it interesting that Mona’s was the only one written in first person. All the others were written in close third. You say it was a surprise that happened while you were writing, but how did you come about it? How did you decide to stick with it? What did it activate for you in your writing process to make that choice?

I think it gave me breaks from Mona’s mental loops. I could enter other chambers, like I could enter other weather systems. I also strongly dislike a hero/villain narrative. Life does not work like that, and I don’t think fiction should work like that––especially if you want it to feel close to life. It’s a false dramatization. I’m really interested in how a person is built from their experience and their interface with their world. So, for example, a character like Cherry, who we meet as a cold and spiteful stepmother, we come to know granularly by the end of the book. Paul, who presents with such magnetism and confidence, we come to understand in a more compromising, more microscopic way.

It was very seductive to write those other POVs. I think it just made the book more visceral. Actually that’s another qualifier for me. I want a novel that enters my body. I want it to be like a song, like a bodily experience, and the shifts in the POVs did that for me. Everyone was close third while Mona was the one seeing it all, and who knows if those POVs are proper POVs that belong to those characters only or whether it’s Mona’s perceptions and that kind of inescapable question of “How am I perceived by those in my orbit? How do they see me?”

The family dynamics in Daughter fascinated me. The way you capture Cherry’s jealousy and Paul’s self-destruction were spot on. What is it about family dynamics that make you want to write about them?

It’s the crowding of family, the claustrophobia of family. It’s the compulsion of family. That family, like a faith, is such an addictive and defining force in our lives and that family can keep us stunted. The revolutions that take place have to come from within. They won’t be granted. I wanted to look at those kinds of very fundamental personhood questions as they’re posed and answered inside a family dynamic. It’s also mythic, iconic, operatic. Like Succession, like King Lear, I wanted to dramatize those major hurts and those minor hurts that only family can wield.

Now that I have some distance, some altitude, I think of the book in sort of a black box theater setting. A small cast of characters all in relationship with each other, confined to a single space. Those POV shifts are sort of like Paul exiting the melee, breaking the fourth wall and delivering his monologue directly to his audience. What’s happening behind the eyes of Paul? For this book particularly, the beginning was the most uncomfortable I’ve been in terms of writing fiction, because it began with the image of a father and daughter meeting secretly in the back of a darkened restaurant—it looked so much like an affair. I saw that I wanted to examine the shadow side of a conventional relationship—where it turns dangerous and where it blurs codes.

Speaking of black box theater, I read that you also have experience with playwriting. Does that inform your prose or vice versa?

Definitely. I wrote my first play when I was 12, and then after I did my degree in English Literature, I went on to study at the National Theater School, and then I was playwright-in-residence at a theater in downtown Toronto for almost a decade. Eventually I moved into prose. My teachers at the theater school always whispered between them that they thought I was more of a fiction writer than a playwright, because my stage directions were so long and involved. It was as if I just wanted to be inside sentences. There’s such a privacy and an intimacy to a sentence as it is experienced between the writer and the reader.

A more obvious formal choice in Daughter was the lack of quotation marks and separate lines for dialogue. It’s so opposite from playwriting. What effect did you hope it would have on the text?

I was getting tired of how fiction looked. I knew that if I wrote well, it would be totally clear. I am never after any kind of obfuscation; that doesn’t interest me. I want things to be direct to the bloodstream—so that you can read the novel in a day, only to break for a meal. That’s what I’m after, always. So I think I just felt like readers are smart. They’ll figure out what’s spoken and what’s internal. I didn’t want the page to look decorated, engineered… I wrote Daughter in the pandemic—looking back, I was outside of my socially legible, dutiful self, and that psychology entered the book. It was as if all of those conventions that I’ve upheld in my own way seemed utterly beside the point. I went for an end-of-world grammar and punctuation.

Anytime I read work where there’s no quotation marks, it feels more, like you said, “straight to the bloodstream.” It feels like telepathy.

I love that.

Another technique you really mastered is the flashback. It never felt put on. How do you make them so seamless?

I think it’s like how real your boyfriend’s dream was when he woke up this morning, the one you told me about. I wanted to write in that way. There’s no framing around it—while your boyfriend had exited his dream, his dream was real. He relayed it to you as real even though it had passed. I wanted to mirror the way the mind actually works. When we have flashbacks, we experience them as real. We might be outside of time, but fiction needs to convey, as precisely as it can, the way the mind bends and operates, how it engages with or even erases time. Here we are in the present moment; however, our minds are escaping into other incidents or events. They’re like rooms in our minds. We go into them and they feel very real. I wanted the writing to feel like that too.

It does.

No framing. No commenting on it. Again, the quote marks almost feel like commenting on the comments. I didn’t want anything to interrupt the transmission.

How do you start a project?

I was about to answer cheesily, “It starts me,” but it actually does. I search. I put in a lot of time reading, taking notes, writing in that grasping way that feels mostly wrong. Usually it begins with an image and then the voice comes. Once I have the voice, the book presents. Annie Ernaux talked about it as channeling, and I don’t want to over romanticize it, because there’s a lot of bodily discipline that goes into the making. But I do think that, for me, that’s how a first draft feels. It’s like just keeping up with the voice in my head, being true to it, clinically so—like a pact. I love that first draft, because it’s pre-scrutiny, pre-analysis.

How do you know when a project’s done?

I’m a classic Scorpio obsessive, so I know it’s done once I begin to lament. Once there’s lament, I exit the project. I don’t want to tinker. I want to preserve that aliveness. So when I’ve been sitting with it for a week or so, I’ve done all that I can do, I’ve made all those final micro decisions. Then it’s like I have to hold myself back. I definitely entered a very blue state when I finished Daughter.

You learn a lot about yourself as a human being, but also as a writer when you complete a project. I felt like this book really reordered me as a human being, and I was sad to leave it, but also the people were so real for me. They were as real as you are right now. They were in my head for a couple of years, and we were in constant conversation. I knew that I would miss them in a pained romantic way. But it passed. We forget this, because we work so privately and so intensely and outside of civilization for a couple of years, but then books have their own magnetism. You put it out into the world and so much comes back to you.

What happens after you finish the first draft?

I take a break. I need some distance, and then I start getting edits. Generally they’re pretty macro at the beginning. I work with an editor here in Canada and another at FSG. They’re truly brilliant, and they pose the initial questions, again, on a macro scale. They pose, I mull, and then basically re-enter the work and try to… I keep talking about aliveness, but I realize that’s the central point with this book. It’s like I try to preserve the aliveness while engaging with their queries about what can be built out, what might not be as clear to the reader as it is in my head. All of that very subtle, hyper-intelligent work that editors do, the way they inhabit the work and illuminate it for you—it sounds like an act of mercy which on many levels it is.

I also try to write freely, to stay inside the mindset of having created that first draft without any self-consciousness. Just being true to the project. Like, this is the book where I just do whatever the fuck I want. Trying to stay true to that impulse, what feels like a rebellion for and unto yourself. Then I get very micro and precise and fine, and I read a lot aloud to myself to test the material, to make sure that a sentence gets to stay, a scene gets to stay. But mostly, I try to work with a sense of liberty from within.

Your rebellion is really inspiring, especially when “marketability” seems so central. From what you’ve said, you really push against that and are bored by more commercial fiction. Has it been difficult for you to be able to market your work? How are you able to break into the bigger conversation with such experimental and rebellious work?

You have to know what you want to do. You have to be conscious of not getting swayed. You have to know what kind of writer you are and what kind of writing you want to do, what you want to publish. You never want to publish a book and then feel regret at having compromised or forfeited something central to yourself. I do read a ton of commercial fiction. I’m an omnivore. I’m super interested in understanding the circuitry of a book that sells to millions of people. I’ll go see the Barbie movie.

It’s not like I’m a niche artist with cultural snobbery. I’m a curious person, and I like to understand how other people work. We’re a different species, different animals, and I’m like, oh, what’s their habitat like? What are they stalking? Jenna Johnson, who’s my editor at FSG, felt like Daughter was at once my most literary work, but also my most commercial. I thought that was really interesting, and it’s definitely played out that way. So it’s a happy reinforcement for the argument of just doing the thing you most want to do and trusting that’s the thing that will hit. If you do a premeditated thing, anyone can imitate that. You’ve become your own AI monster.

What are you working on now?

I’m working on being an extrovert. The fall has been this prolonged period of extroversion, but I’ve loved it. I’ve loved it so much, so now I’m just reading and taking notes again. I’m back in the lonesome hinterland of being between books, but not being so afraid of that state. In fact, needing it—knowing the notes count, the reading counts, and whatever strange, searching writing I’m doing will end up becoming something real and consuming. It’s like I’m in a confessional, trusting that soon someone on the other side of the heavy curtain will start talking.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Shy Watson.

My husband and I had a band out of Atlanta for over a decade, The Whiskey Gentry. And we felt we had hit this kind of ceiling there, no more growth. Moving to Nashville was the best thing we’ve done for ourselves and our careers. There’s such a strong, supportive community here. We lacked that in Atlanta. In Nashville we’ve found other creative people who’ve helped us form a sound different than Whiskey Gentry’s, different from that country, bluegrass world that we were in. There’s a different creative vibe here.

Have you found permanent members for your band?

We have a rotating cast still, because a lot of players here play with other people, of course. The dream is one day I’ll be able to hire people to be my full-time, like I could put them on salary so they’d be reserved to play with me. But yeah, we’ve just got a good net of people we call on, and if they’re available then they can come on tour. It’s been nice to have so many talented, amazing musicians at our fingertips who can jump in and know our material and play.

You mentioned being in Whiskey Gentry for several years. What changes have you noticed since going under your own name?

Country music isn’t the first genre of music that I’ve loved. I love it, but I grew up listening to a lot of New Wave and Brit Pop and rock and roll and indie rock. The main thing for my music under the name Lauren Morrow is that people can hear a lot more of that influence coming through. And I’m trying to not quite distance myself from country, but show that it’s not the only genre I’m into. I’m more into Depeche Mode than Dolly Parton.

Getting out from underneath that name “Whiskey Gentry,” which was kind of synonymous with a banjo and a fiddle and a mandolin, where every song’s really fast and very country and bluegrass oriented, allows for space to make a new sound. I think switching names and rebranding forces people to look at my project differently and be like, “Oh, this isn’t the same thing as it was.”

Yeah, I feel like Whiskey Gentry is such a country-coded name, but Lauren Morrow, who is she? She could be anyone.

Yeah! Who is she? Well, it’s funny because [the band name] is actually from a Hunter S. Thompson quote about the Kentucky Derby. He called the type of people that go there the whiskey gentry. And when we started our band in 2008, there was a lot of folk revival music happening. Mumford and Sons, The Lumineers, etc. Then all of a sudden there were all these whiskey band names too. So that was the other thing—we kept getting confused with other bands.

The music video for “Only Nice When I’m High” is so goofy and fun. I was wondering if you could tell us a little more about its inception and creation.

Do you remember Mr. Hankey, the Christmas Poo from South Park?

No.

Well, I had this idea that there would be this animated joint that would follow me around and help me through situations where I felt uncomfortable. I told a friend of ours here in Nashville, Adam Kowalski, the concept, and he goes, “Well, I can make you a puppet. I’m a puppeteer and I’m a puppet maker.” I knew he worked for this company called Animex here, where they make all the animatronic stuff for Universal and Disney. If you see a T-Rex that’s moving, they’ve made it here. But I didn’t know he had this puppet past.

So he went home that night and started making the prototype for Jointy. From there we just kept rolling with the idea of the video and the situations in which he shows up. But yeah, Adam puppeteered the whole thing and Jointy became my little sidekick for a day in the life.

The song has surprising lyrics for being so twangy and country in sound. Usually you don’t hear about astrology in country songs. Did you intentionally flirt with subverting the genre in this song by having those unexpected elements in your lyrics?

Lyrics are always such a huge part of music for me. They’re what I hear first. I think a lot of people, like Jason, my husband, hear music first. Sometimes he doesn’t even know some of the words to my songs because he is more music brained and I’m more literary brained. So I’m always really deliberate with lyrics, using metaphors to get a point across.

For that song in particular, it’s just a hundred percent true to the way I think. I do wonder sometimes was I just born this way from my astrology sign? I love to know about people’s charts. I also want to talk freely about the fact that I have anxiety and that weed does help me manage it. I didn’t learn that until I was in my early thirties. If you listen to the lyrics of the song, it’s less about smoking weed and it’s more about using that as a tool to help me navigate my anxiety to unlock myself from myself, if that makes any sense, because I can get so clammed up and anxious.

Is it important to you as a songwriter to include experiences from your lived life?

Yeah, totally. With Whiskey Gentry, I’d include personal anecdotes in songs, but I also used that Appalachian folk murder ballad influence to make up stories about a missing kid or somebody’s cheating on somebody or whatever. And there’s not any of that on this record. Everything on this record has happened to me in some way or still is. That was important to me, this being a debut record as well, to be able to say, “This is how I want to present myself.” And I find that people relate to it.

I found it really relatable, especially your song “Hustle,” which is all about hard work. It made me wonder if you treat your art practice as a business or how you learned to make a living while playing music.

We one hundred percent run this whole operation like a business. I think, especially when you’re a DIY independent artist, you have to be fully committed to yourself and advocate for yourself all of the time. And I find that often, and maybe it’s part of being a type-A weirdo control freak, but I know I can wake up every day and work for myself and advocate for myself better than anybody else can. In terms of the business aspect of it, Jason, my husband, has another business that we call a “side hustle,” but it really is the main hustle, which is a painting business for residential and commercial buildings. But Jason always, ever since I met him, is just such a hustler. He figures out a way to get it done.

When it came time to put this record out, we were shopping around for representation like, This is what people do. They get on a record label. And something just didn’t feel right about it. Jason was like, “We’ll start our own label and we just do it ourselves. We do it ourselves anyway.” So we started Big Kitty Records. It’s all part of that hustle, always trying to think. It’s not just about money, it’s hustling your brand and hustling yourself, really. Through social media, etc. It’s all work. And it’s not easy, but you gotta do it.

I didn’t realize you guys had your own label. That’s awesome. Did you consult with other people who’d done the same thing or did you just figure it out from your own experience in the music industry?

We had lots of experience through years of doing Whiskey Gentry, but then also during the five years of being here in Nashville, we met so many people who we wanted to be on our team regardless of if we were on a major or a smaller label, or if we did it ourselves. We knew the publicist we wanted. We knew the radio people we wanted. We knew the project manager we wanted. So really, when it all came down to it, it was like, if we can form our own team, then all we’re lacking is the funds to pay them. So let’s hustle our other business, make as much money as we can.

And I mean, we’re still paying off record stuff. And it was a lot of money and it was not easy. But it also allowed us to keep everything ourselves. We’re not basically taking a loan from a record label and giving them ownership of our material for the next three years or whatever. Instead, we’re able to keep control.

It’s a huge learning curve. Starting our own label has given us the confidence to be like, “Well, why not?” And what if Big Kitty Records signed other people? And what if this becomes another business for us? It could be cool! People do it all the time, start a record label and it takes off.

I mean, you’ve planted the seed! How do you approach digital spaces like social media and email, both as a marketing tool perhaps and as a distraction? How do you strike that balance?

Man, social media is such a crazy thing for me because it’s kind of biting the hand that feeds you in some way. I know it’s a tool I need to use in terms of marketing and whatnot. But then I’ll find myself just doom scrolling for hours. There’s so much to the digital space. And Spotify’s changing a lot too. I feel like all social media is constantly changing. That it’s something we constantly have to be learning about. I’ve been down the TikTok rabbit hole before and tried to do that, but I feel like a boomer when I’m on it. I try to use it as a way to interact and engage with people, engage with fans, show them insight into my life, and also promote myself, but it’s hard.

I really liked your song “Family Tree” and how it invites its listeners to consider their contributions to the family line. Is this something you consider as a person in the world, as an artist?

I got so into the ancestry.com rabbit hole, and found all this cool stuff about my ancestor marrying Robert the Bruce. And then on my dad’s side, they were the first 200 Norwegians to ever settle in South Africa, where my dad is from. And how crazy that must have felt just to go to, “Sure, we’re going to South Africa.”

I don’t have any plans to have children, and I don’t know what my contribution would be to my tree, but I would hope that it would make people proud if they found me in one hundred years, that they’d be like, “Hey, that’s my ancestor, and she created this music.”

And there’s always this rumor that we were related somehow to Robert Schumann, the composer. I think that’s so badass. It’s hard to not feel arrogant, I guess, to say, “Oh yeah, I’m making my mark on my family tree.” But I would hope that I do.

How do other people or collaborators figure into your work? And what’s the most helpful or unhelpful thing about working with others?

I feel like this record, more than anything I’ve ever done creatively, was a collaboration. And it was between me, Parker, and Jason. And it’s taken me a really long time to feel comfortable songwriting in front of people. And when I moved here, everyone was like, “Well, you need to start writing with people. That’s how you’re going to meet people in this town.” And I’d be like, “Nuh-uh.” It’s always been such a deeply personal thing for me, so songwriting with others felt scary.

But I made myself do it, set up co-write situations and stuff, but really found the confidence in it from working with Parker and having someone who felt like they understood my brain and understood my influences. And some of his influences are very similar. I don’t think it’s been hurtful at all. It’s shown me that you can be vulnerable in a writing situation with people, and no one’s judging you here.

And if nothing comes out of it, then that’s okay, but at least you tried, and you’re kind of getting your creative juices flowing. So I think that’s been a really good lesson to learn. And I am looking forward to being more collaborative, even on the next one, and reaching out to other people I’ve met since we started writing People Talk.

Co-writing is such a thing here. I wouldn’t even write songs with Jason, with Whiskey Gentry. It was hard for me to take advice or criticism. I always felt like I knew best. And that has been the other really good part of co-writing with other people, is that they have ideas. Jason will have ideas, and Parker will have ideas. And just being open to them, you never know what cool stuff could come from it, but you have to let people help you and resist being like, “Well, I do it better.”

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Shy Watson.

No, I don’t have any firsthand experience in the gallery world. I moved to New York in 2017 and started dating this woman who was high up in luxury fashion, and the fine art people were in her orbit. And so I made friends with them.

When I started writing about the art world, it may have appeared like I was satirizing it, but I wasn’t satirizing anything. I was writing about these characters in an honest way, but their lives were absurd, so the work comes out absurd.

Money seemed to be a big factor these artists had in common, especially Danny, with the Maserati and the Ferrari, and just being able to afford all these crazy retreats and vacations and culturally appropriative trainings and whatnot. Was that intentional or just a byproduct of observing these artistic elites?

When I moved to NYC, I witnessed a type of money I’d never seen before. For instance, my ex’s friend was dating the son of a billionaire hedge fund manager. When he went to the Hamptons, he would never think of driving, because he had a helicopter at his disposal.

In the book, Paul’s blind to both the benefits and horrors of Danny’s wealth. Paul’s more interested in his cousin, who he believes has achieved the pinnacle of success, because that’s the guy he compared himself to as a kid. But his cousin is just a manager at a hardware store. Strangely, the cousin is the only character Paul treats poorly, and thinks poorly of, even though all the other characters are doing awful things, while the cousin is actually the sweetest person he knows.

But a big part of the book is simply documenting the absurdity of wealth in a place like New York City, where there are some people who have more money than god, and what that means in terms of how they can get away with whatever the hell they want without consequences.

Where were you before New York?

Directly before New York, I lived in Budapest for a while. But before that, New Mexico and San Diego.

You must have felt like you were jumping into a bath of cold water.

My rent in Budapest was $260/month. I knew New York was expensive, but I didn’t really have a sense of proportion until I got here. So that was pretty brutal.

What you’re saying reminds me of that pawn shop where Paul got a really good deal on the gold chain and the liquor store with the loosies, and how they were replaced by the vegan cheese place and the florist that specialized in lesbian weddings. It felt like you were writing about a very Brooklyn specific form of gentrification there.

Yeah, absolutely. Paul looks at the world differently than everyone else. His rich artist friend, Danny, bought a warehouse and turned it into his studio. Danny was convinced it would be a tremendous investment. And in normal societal terms, it was. The neighborhood went from rundown to totally gentrified, a place where property values skyrocketed. But Paul’s eyes are blind to that. He thinks Danny had it all wrong, that they’ve lost everything of real value in the community. Where did the pawn shop go? he wonders. And he’s not being ironic, it’s just the way he sees the world.

He’s very earnest. Pure Cosmos Club kind of reads like a work of cultural criticism, whether or not it was intentional. It reminded me of Chuck Klosterman’s Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, if you’ve ever read that.

Oh, yeah.

Have you ever considered writing non-fiction or cultural essays?

I published an essay once, and it got me in trouble, so now I write everything under a veil of fiction. Plausible deniability is the key to my success.

Can I ask what the essay was about?

I wrote about the monoculture of the New York City literary scene back in 2017. It was about how the scene only valued diversity with respect to skin color, sexuality, and identity. Diversity of thought, however, was not encouraged. Any ideas that conflicted with progressive orthodoxies weren’t allowed.

I think when Trump first took office in 2016, it was basically all hands on deck, like you had to be fighting the good fight against Trump and everything he stands for, whatever that means. And so you weren’t allowed to be critical of your own side at all, because that meant you were drawing attention away from what you should really be concerned with, which was the big, bad, orange monster. But now I think people have tired of that, and there’s more room to discuss absurdities of all variety. Because absurdities come from both sides of the political spectrum, everywhere, really, and not just politics, but culture, too. And it’s important to think and speak critically of things, and to be honest about the world. Just call bullshit where there’s bullshit, because there’s bullshit everywhere.

I think it’s a little better now. I left New York for a couple years during the pandemic. When I came back, it seemed like the literary scene had changed. There’s a lot of fun to be had in the Forever Mag orbit. They’re very irreverent, and don’t cherish the same ideas as the credentialed folks who run mainstream publishing.

Yeah.

I appreciate their worldview, and I’m glad it exists. Maybe it always existed and I just wasn’t aware.

I think it is newer. At least it’s new that publications like Forever Mag are getting attention. Maybe publications like that existed before, but they weren’t in the spotlight. Drunken Canal is like the first wave to me. As far as your creative work is concerned, how do you define success, and how do you define failure?

I’m confident that Pure Cosmos Club is a first-rate book. I think it’s ambitious and that I executed the vision I set out to achieve. In that way, I already feel like I succeeded. On another level, I would like to get read. But the book was published by an indie press with limited resources for marketing, so I don’t know exactly what kind of potential there is with readership. Will this interview help me become a bestseller?

Definitely not. I was talking to the editor-in-chief at Catapult, and she said there’s only 40,000 serious readers of literary fiction in America, and that if a book sells 4,000 copies, that’s massive, even at a major press.

I wish I had the desire to write a thriller or a horror book, something with more commercial viability. But it’s not where my interests lie.

Same. What’s the most helpful or unhelpful thing about working with other people?

I have a friend, D. Foy, who’s been my primary reader for the last two books. He’s really good at helping me figure out what works and what doesn’t. There was a subplot in Pure Cosmos Club where Paul owes a gambling debt to a bookie, and the bookie has an eight year-old kid who looks like a young Ronald Reagan, and is trying to become an actor. It’s Paul’s job to chaperone this kid to auditions, and then the kid has some success, or whatever. It could be a cool novel in its own right, but it didn’t serve the real book, the book that I was writing, Pure Cosmos Club. So, D’s like, “You gotta cut that.”

I never did an MFA or any workshops. I’m worried that I’d be too easily influenced. I wouldn’t know who to listen to, and who to ignore. It would get confusing. So, for me, it’s nice to have a friend whose sensibilities I trust.

You say he read your last two books. How many have ultimately been published? I know you have a couple others.

Pure Cosmos Club is my third published novel.

So one of them got tossed, but the other three made it through?

Yeah. I kind of wish the first published one would’ve gotten tossed too, but it exists in the world.

There’s always a risk when you’re excited about something, to get it out in the world too early before you have time to establish real perspective.

I write pretty quickly, and I’m convinced that this helps give my books their momentum. If you labor over something for too long, it makes it stale and reek of effort. When I hear people talk about how they’ve been working on a novel for five years, I’m like, you’re not even the same person today as who started writing that book five years ago.

The best art is usually a lightning-in-a-bottle type of thing. You capture a moment. It’s better for a work to be inconsistent than labored over to death and flattened.

I was in a specific time and place when I wrote my second book, the one I have regrets about, and I don’t think I would do it justice if I went back and worked on it now, because I’m a totally different person than I was when I wrote it.

Is that why you dropped the first novel you wrote? The disconnection?

Not really. I submitted it everywhere. I even bought a book, How to Submit Queries to Agents, but none of the agents replied. I didn’t know about indie presses back then. I only knew that I was supposed to find an agent. The manuscript isn’t in a drawer waiting to be discovered. It’s on an external hard drive, hopefully never to be seen again.

I once heard about some Iowa professor who said that one’s first manuscript is never their first novel, which is the case for mine, too. I think the first one you write teaches you how to write a novel, and then you’re way better and more efficient with the next.

After every book I write, I feel like I’m washed up. I’m like, that’s it. There’s nothing left. There’s no gas in the tank. I’ll never write again. I finished Pure Cosmos Club well over a year ago, maybe even a year and a half ago. I haven’t written a word of fiction since.

Does that worry you?

I can’t serve two masters at the same time, and I have a pretty serious day job. What I usually do is, I work for three years, save up a bunch of money, and then I quit and take a year off to write a book. And while that was fine when I was younger, now that I’m getting older, I feel like it’s harder to quit my job. For the past decade, I’ve basically worked my way down the corporate ladder, because everyone in the industry knows that I’m only working to save up money so I can fuck off to write the next book. I don’t know how many more times I can manage it.

Before you’re blacklisted.

I’m already a little bit blacklisted.

So Blanche, the narrator Paul’s dog, is ideologically and emotionally fuller than almost all of the novel’s human characters. She has varying musical taste, a biting aversion to optimism, strong opinions on what is and isn’t just. Without tainting your response with my interpretations, what were you going for with Blanche’s character?

There’s a wonderful art dealer in NY named Michael Bargo. He’s a super fancy guy I met through my ex. Michael has a disabled-dog sidekick and together they used to throw parties in their apartment, where all the guests were also super fancy. I used to get high and sit with the dog. And I just thought the dog was so great. But there was never any intention or plan when I sat down to write. There never is. I mainly just write to entertain myself.

Paul has trouble navigating human relations because he’s so disconnected from the way normal, high-functioning people operate. But he can make sense of the world through his relationship with his dog, Blanche. At the end of the day, what people really want is to make sense of things that are insensible. And for Paul, he has this friend who he trusts, at least through most of the book. He trusts her instincts more than his own, and she’s his closest confidant. He sees Blanche as more than a dog. But everyone else just sees a dog. Blanche is just a dog, except in the eyes of Paul.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Shy Watson.

I would say it’s about 70% true in that I used my life as the basis for the structure of the novel. So, a lot of the locations and the plot points are based on reality, but in each scene, I wrote it the way I would write fiction, letting the story go wherever it wanted. So, if something happened within the scene that didn’t happen in my life but maybe captured the spirit of what that time in my life was like, I went with it. So ultimately, yes, it’s based on my life, but loosely.

I’ve struggled with writing from real life, namely making it feel plotted because life is so unlike a novel. There aren’t always through lines, conclusions, etc. Do you have any advice for writers who are trying autofiction?

I returned to some of my favorite novels, especially the ones that I loved when I was a teenager. A big influence was Slaughterhouse Five, which is based on Vonnegut’s service in World War II, but also incorporates time travel and aliens and whatnot. It’s a novel that has a lot of fun with reality as a starting point, while deviating from it significantly. For structure, I got the idea to retell my life through the prism of a young man who’s trying to find the meaning of life. In reality, my motivations were a lot murkier than that, but in many ways, I was a young seeker. By mythologizing my life as the story of a wanderer, I found a framework that really helped me write the novel. I cut scenes that didn’t fit that framework.

The framework was one of coming-of-age and pilgrimage?

Yeah. I originally started to write the novel almost like a divorce book. I’d read Scott McClanahan’s The Sarah Book, which I really love. I was trying to do something similar, but I felt like that wasn’t the only story I wanted to tell. I wanted to tell the story of someone who’s very naïve.

When I was going through a lot of that in real life, I was 25, but a very young 25. I thought it would help the reader to have the background of the protagonist being foolish and a late bloomer and not losing his virginity until he was in his 20s. That sets up the context for him attempting marriage at 25 and failing utterly. Whereas I think if I had plunged the reader right into the marriage, they wouldn’t necessarily have understood why the protagonist was so bad at it.

The structure of the novel is loosely based on Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse, which is about a young man who wants to go on a religious quest, and then decides the only way to do that is to not join the monastery, but instead to go live a regular life and get married and have kids, and that’s where he has to learn the lessons of life. I thought that was an interesting model.

When you do choose to use events or relationships from real life, what considerations do you make or not make for anonymity?

When I write, I just don’t think about that stuff at all because I think it’s so important to write a book that rings true to me. I don’t make rules for myself when I’m writing my early drafts. It wasn’t until the book got closer to publication that I started revisiting it to make sure that at least the protagonist, who’s based on me, is the worst character in the room. I didn’t want to write a book that was inspired by real-life people and make it feel like I was throwing them under the bus. I thought every scene should feel like I was throwing myself under the bus. And not necessarily on purpose, but I fictionalized most around my own divorce, because it unfolded so complicatedly in real life.

So, I simplified the narrative a bit and let myself really fictionalize in that area while still keeping to the spirit of it. I don’t know if my ex-wife will ever read it, but I think if she does, she would be like, “Oh, this is definitely not what happened.” So maybe that’s not as hurtful if there was any hurt to be had.

How did the process of writing The Red-Headed Pilgrim differ from Cult of Loretta?

Cult of Loretta was a happy accident. I was mostly working on short stories, and I had three stories that weren’t getting accepted at different journals. They didn’t have a beginning, middle, and end, but they were all powerful as fragments. And I got the idea to put them together. They were all based around this elusive female character that young men in high school had strong reactions to. And as soon as I put those three stories together, it just exploded. I thought it would become one longer story, but it became a novella. I wrote it in ten days, so it was very fast.

The Red-Headed Pilgrim is more the story I’ve always wanted to tell. It’s much closer to my real life. It’s broader in scope. It’s twice as long. And so, I think whereas Cult of Loretta was a happy accident, I couldn’t just replicate that happy accident. The Red-Headed Pilgrim is where I learned how to write a novel. I made a ton of mistakes. I made choices, then had to throw out entire sections. I learned a lot, whereas my first just popped out in a way that really worked, but not necessarily in a way that I learned from.

How else did you edit The Red-Headed Pilgrim? Did anyone help?

I have a writing group I meet with sometimes, and I would bounce very short parts off of them to see if the tone was working. But primarily, I work in isolation. I always want close to a finished draft before I share it with anyone. I have a real methodical way of editing where I either read what I’ve written into my phone or I use some kind of audio tool that’ll read it out loud, and I go for long walks and listen to it almost like it’s an audiobook. I make notes to myself while I walk around and listen to it. I do that over and over and over, day after day, for months until I feel like it almost works as a told story, which I think helps with pacing. It also helps with humor.

It’s only then when I get a pretty advanced draft that I’ll let my wife read it. She’s a really talented poet and a really talented editor. She gave me some great input. And then some of my friends read longer sections, and then I just sent it to a publisher after that.

How does your writing process differ with short stories?

I’m more likely to try writing a short story and fail, try again and fail, and then boom, it comes out all at once almost perfectly in one sitting. Then I just make small fine-tuning. It’s really fun. It’s where I do a lot of experimentation. I play with present tense versus past tense. It all feels very playful to me, whereas writing a novel feels like showing up to work every day. The play can happen in individual scenes in first drafts, but it’s a lot of small tweaking, advancing things, going back, fixing things. It’s just so much more like being in the weeds.

I wish I could write a novel more like I write short stories. I wish I was better at having that sense of play at all times, writing the first draft of a novel. Because of structure, at a certain point, you can’t just have fun. You have to think about…not necessarily where it’s going, but if it goes off track, you have to back up and try something different. So, I think there’s just more involved. But I hope to get good enough eventually that maybe writing a novel can feel that way, that playfulness that I feel while writing short stories.

Maybe now that this was the one that taught you how to write a novel, it’ll come easier. Consider yourself seasoned now. What, to you, makes a good story? A good novel?

I think for me, what makes a good story is something fast paced. I love a story that’s surprising. I love a story that, when I’m writing it, I surprise myself and make myself laugh, and something happens that I didn’t see coming. My favorite writer is Denis Johnson. He’s so good at endings because it’s almost like he’s written a short story, but the ending is a poem. It lifts you out of the cadence of the story through imagery or something else, like a big, surprising jump in time. As a reader, it gives me the sense that something happened, that there was a transformation. I don’t need my character to grow and learn a lesson, but I do need to feel like there’s some kind of alchemy.

As to what makes a novel, I’m still learning. I’m trying to find that answer for myself.

What does your work entail on the day-to-day? What’s your process look like, just writing?

I’ll go for months not being a daily writer, especially when a book comes out and I’m doing promotion for it or doing the other parts of being a writer. Interviews, things like that. But when I’m getting serious, I try to have a daily relationship. I’m usually brightest first thing in the morning. I work from home for myself. I’m self-employed. So, I can carve out the first three hours in the morning and really just jump into a writing project. And often what I do, like what I’m doing right now, is trying to gear up towards working on another novel.

It’s almost like going to the gym every day and getting those muscles back and just exercising, making it a ritual. I’ve noticed that if I’m writing every day, and I’ve been doing that for three weeks, all of a sudden, the quality of writing jumps for me. I think it was Flannery O’Connor who talked about the habit of art. Sometimes I lose it. And then what I have to do is regain the habit of art. After I’ve been doing it for long enough, I notice that the struggle stops. It becomes fun and exciting.

One of my friends, after a writing hiatus, forced himself to write a different short story every day for two weeks and he said the same thing—that they got much better, that it became more fun.

I did that at one point. I was going to write 2,000 words a day of a different story starting from scratch for 10 days. It started off so bad, but by day four, it was really great. But then after a while, I lost the momentum because, after I produced three really good stories, I wanted to just go back and work on those. I became more excited about working on them than creating new content. So, I think there is a sweet spot somewhere that happens just by showing up every day.

Earlier, you mentioned promotion and other writer things besides writing. What has promoting your novel been like for you? Is it taking a lot of time? Is it taking you places you didn’t quite expect?

Yeah. With Cult of Loretta , there were no advanced copies. We just dropped it on the world, and then whatever happened happened. And that was fun, but it was also haphazard. But Two Dollar Radio has an amazing promotional arm, and they sent out a ton of advanced copies. And that meant I recorded four podcasts in one week. I did a lot of interviews. I felt like COVID had got to a place where I could do an actual book tour. So, with some help from Two Dollar Radio and certain other outlets, I did that.

It was way more fun than I could have expected. It was crazy. It was an adventure. There was a moment when it all felt overwhelming—I’m a writer for a reason—I don’t want to be a musician who goes on tour all the time. But writers put out maybe one book every few years if they’re lucky. And so, I just felt like I had to lean into it and drink in every moment and do it as big as I could. Some of my best friends in the world are writers scattered across the country. Every city I picked to do a reading was also an excuse to see a good friend.

What pushes you to keep writing?

The world feels pretty chaotic and dark to me in general, but when I look at photographs of my favorite artists throughout history, like Frida Kahlo or Richard Brautigan, and I see a picture of them just petting a cat, it fills me with joy. I think about certain people who have lived very unique, creative lives full of art. For me, that’s the only way to get through life in a way that feels meaningful. I come from a family that’s obsessed with sports, and I just never fit in. So, I found my family in artists.

And now I’ve gotten to experience the rush that comes from putting my work into the world and getting a response. There’s the joy of going to these conventions and having people tell me that my book meant something to them. That’s an amazing thing. It fuels my desire to keep writing. But at the end of the day, what I come back to for that deeper reservoir is the sense of art being the thing that makes life feel worth living. That’s where I charge my batteries, I guess.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Shy Watson.

I have read some Garielle and enjoyed it immensely, but I don’t know if I would say she’s a primary inspiration. I feel like for this particular work, well, and for pretty much all of my writing, Amelia Gray is a huge influence. But you’re right, I totally focus on standalone sentences and making every word count and don’t have any superfluous description.

How do you manage to make sure that every word counts? What are your stipulations for whether or not a word remains on the page?

I think more than anything I start out sparse even before I’ve written anything down, and a lot of that probably comes from the fact that I assume knowledge of everyone. I think it’s humility or false humility, I’m not sure which. But I think that if I know something, then somebody else clearly knows it, too. Even if it’s a made-up story. And so it ends up requiring readers to fill in their own details based on the mood of whatever’s happening.

I think you do a good job with the writerly telepathy. I laughed so much while reading your book. I’m sure you get that a lot. The wordplay and puns were constant, and I can’t stop thinking about when the gashed boatman asks Gretchen if that mangled ball python can be cured, and she doesn’t answer because she doesn’t know whether he means made into meat or healed. There are so many similar moments throughout Echo Chamber. Is wordplay important to you? And if so, what effect do you hope it has on your work?

Wordplay is crucial, but that’s really just my style and what I think is important. I have this inner middle-aged dad who loves puns and corny jokes and ’70s music, and he tells me to add those. But I also think when you’re growing up, you hear a lot of trite phrases and clichés and just general aphorisms, and you don’t really parse out what they mean until later. You hear them all the time, almost in a sing-song way. And then when your brain develops and you grow up and you’re on your own, you might remember those or hear those again and think, “Oh, so that’s what that means.” Or a song lyric even. I’ve always done that and I smirk at what lasts, which phrases stick and which don’t. Then I deconstruct them in a sense. Playing with them is really fun for me.

Can you give an example?

I’m trying to think about Echo Chamber specifically. Sometimes I feel like writing is kind of just regurgitating, and then I move on and I don’t always remember everything perfectly unless it’s a recognition versus recall sort of thing. So I can’t think of an example on the spot, but I probably could if I thought about it for a few minutes.

I’ve got one. I listened to Ottessa Moshfegh read “My Life is a Joke” by Sheila Heti the other day on The New Yorker Fiction Podcast. The protagonist is like, “The chicken crossed the road to get to the other side” as into kill itself, like, the other side being death. And the narrator of “My Life is a Joke” asks herself whether everybody already knew this, that that was the meaning behind the punchline of the joke. But I’ve certainly never thought of it that way. I’ve always just thought, well, duh, to get on the other side of the road.

That’s a perfect example.

How do you edit your own work? What happens after you finish a first draft?

I have a notebook filled with bullet points of ideas, and I’m constantly working from that until I feel like I have too many. And then I take that and put them on index cards, move them around, and decide an order and general plot from those. Whether it’s a story or a chapter, that’s how I work. And I might have reminders for myself if it’s a novella or, because I’m working on a novel right now, just to keep everything straight. But I take that and I handwrite a first draft. And as I’m typing it up later, usually the next day, I am editing as I go. If I have to stop writing before I’m finished, sometimes I edit in the handwriting process.

Then I have my first and only reader, my husband, read it. And if it makes sense to him, then I know I’m okay because he is not a literary person. He reads books, but not very often and completely different books than fiction. So I know if he can understand it, then I’m on the right track because I want everyone to understand. Then I might have to make a few edits after that, but that’s basically the process.

So convenient that you have a live-in first reader who’s, like, the perfect demographic for you to test on.

And he feeds me. He used to be a chef.

Incredible. So, I noticed that you experiment with uncommon points of view. In “Let’s See That Again,” the story’s told from the collective we, the two parents who hired investigators on the case of their missing son. And then in “You Can Renew Your Vows at Chuck E. Cheese Anytime You Like,” it’s told from the point of view of a collective where the narrator often writes things like, “One of us did ____.” What motivates you to experiment with these points of view, and how does it affect your writing process?

I’m so glad you asked this question. I think that perspective is indicative of our culture, and that’s one way I really like to experiment.I think the second person perspective was really popular several years ago; I saw it everywhere. And, I might be wrong about this, but this is my theory: it was a response to marketing language, just seeing advertisements everywhere and people trying to make it about “you” and grab your attention in that sense. And so I like the idea of society returning to a collective experience and thinking about more than ourselves. Writing from a collective point of view is one way for me to emphasize that and see what it might look like in real life.

I feel like it was especially effective in the one with the parents because there was this one line that was like, “I didn’t have to ask or something. I knew he was thinking the same thing.” And they’re both involved in this highly emotional situation where of course they’re feeling and experiencing the same thing… their son is missing! And what do we want out of a situation like that but collaboration and comfort in a shared experience, you know?

Right. And just getting outside of ourselves, of the me-mentality.

What does your curiosity look like? How do you explore things?

My curiosity looks like trying to notice everything when I’m traveling, whether it’s looking out the window or people-watching or something like that. It also means if I’m in public, I’m probably eavesdropping on conversations without really even trying to, it just sort of happens. Or if there’s a scrap of paper on the sidewalk, I want to know what’s on it. I’ve always been that way, and it does mean that I have a lot of inspiration to work from. But I think the best way to be inspired and be creative if you’re wanting to write is just to read a bunch, as most people say. I very much agree with that, and giving yourself the space and the time.

Are there other ways that you nourish your creative side when you’re not writing?

I think I’m always actively writing. It’s a compulsion for me. I have tried to quit before and been unsuccessful in the quitting just because it’s a time suck, and I could be doing other things like helping the poor or serving my neighbor somehow. I still try to do those things. Writing doesn’t take up all my time, but it does feel silly at times. I can’t help but think of ideas without trying to, and so I’ve kind of just accepted it as part of my life. But that makes it sound like I don’t enjoy it. I really do enjoy it. I think it’s problematic when people only complain about writing because nobody’s asking that person to do it, you know?

Yeah.

You can stop. You can stop unless you can’t, like me. I do love it, even if it can be frustrating at times.

What do you love most about it?

It’s therapeutic. I think it helps me deal with having way too many emotions, and I just have a sincere love of words, and experimenting with those is always a good time.

Most of your publications are in cool indie lit mags. What has it been like to work with smaller, more boutique editors?

Overall, it’s been a really great experience. I feel like I’m talking to a friend. I have gone with a different publisher each time just to see what I’m missing, see what it’s like, because everybody does it a little bit differently. And I think that speaks to the curiosity we were just talking about. Everyone’s so nice. That’s probably been the best part. I don’t know why I keep getting surprised by that, but whether I’m meeting people at a reading for the first time or talking to an editor, everyone is genuinely kind, and that’s been refreshing.

I love that about writers. I feel like we kind of have a reputation for not being so sweet, but everyone I meet really is. Like New York. I feel like New York as a city has a reputation of being really hostile, but New Yorkers are some of the nicest people. If you’re like, “Hey, how do I get somewhere?” they will stop in their tracks and give you thorough directions.

That was my experience, too. I mean, reading at KGB, it was so much fun. An editor from a journal was there listening, and she gave me branded stickers afterwards. And even in a place like New York where you might brace yourself for something a little bit on the rougher side, reading there was super encouraging.

I can’t find anything online about your educational history. How did you learn to write? Did you teach yourself?

So I went to college, got a Psych degree with an English minor, and then I got my Master’s in Counseling. I was always toggling between doing some kind of counseling or something with English and have always loved to write ever since I learned how to form words on a page. So in that sense, I think books have been the greatest teacher, but then I have had a handful of actual teachers, mostly from grade school and one from high school, that stand out to me as refining some of those tendencies.

What makes the high school teacher stand out to you?

I think maybe the basics, those writing basics that I had never heard before, like to say something old in a new way, avoiding those cliches. I took that really seriously. But I think that’s also part of why I like to play with and deconstruct those cliches, because it’s like, well, I don’t want to use this, I want to kind of blow it up instead.

And it’s impossible to ban them from one’s mind. As a reader, what excites you when you’re reading fiction?

As you might imagine, based on how experimental I get, I like to see something experimental on the page that feels really honest and gets to those core emotions. And art is supposed to make us feel less alone and be relatable, so a lot of that. I can’t exactly describe what I like, but I can tell when it’s happening because I’m reading something and it’s like little fireworks are going off in my brain, and my eyes kind of bug out. And I have to put it somewhere or read it aloud to somebody or do something with it. I can’t even move on because it stunned me in a sense.

I know the feeling. Are there some writers who cause those fireworks more than others?

Definitely. I already mentioned Amelia Gray. Scott McClanahan sticks out. Sam Pink. Kathryn Scanlan. It’s always changing too, based on what I’m reading. I love all the Dorothy Project books. Renee Gladman, I would say she’s probably up there with Amelia as far as influences go. I’m just amazed at what she’s able to do.

Much of your collection reads like a dream. Do your stories operate on some form of internal logic, or do you just let them do as they please?

I totally let them do as they please. I’m constantly surprised by where something goes. It really does feel, and I know other authors have said this before, but it really does feel like something outside of myself. I’m just reaching some kind of touchpoint.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Shy Watson.

I had a newfound sense of freedom after a lot of trying periods. Being on unemployment through COVID finally gave me the chance to be an artist. I really gained a sense of hope. And I was reading a lot about the Madonna Whore Complex and the history of the veil and how veils were used with the Romans to ward off evil spirits. I just really honed in on what the record meant to me. I essentially found myself through a series of transitions. And so that’s why all the hands are pointed up on the album cover. They symbolize reaching up through different phases, seeking a higher self, freedom.

When you say that you finally had a chance to be an artist during COVID and unemployment, do you mean that you finally had the funding necessary to be an artist? That you didn’t have to work?

Yeah, definitely. It was the most money I’ve ever made, and I got to just play music every day and do what I wanted to do. The money also funded my record.

What was your process for writing these songs?

It varies, certainly, but a big rush of them were written through March to July of 2020. A few of them I’d written in 2019, and “Crooked” was one of the first songs I ever wrote—when I was 20—and that was in one sitting. So it varies. Some of them really came out of nowhere. I was trying to play music every day, and then there would be this huge rush and something would just pour out of me. For songs like “444,” I had the chorus written for a year and a half before I finished the verses. And not even the chorus melody, just the chorus structure. And I was like, “This is something, this grooves.” And I kept at it and kept at it. And when it was right, it came to me.

What fosters your creativity and what hinders it?

What fosters it is love and staying connected with my sense of self. I try to be really intentional about what I listen to and who I surround myself with.

Do you mean musically or who you listen to in conversation?

I guess both because it’s who I surround myself with, what people. It matters what they say and how they behave, and music as well. I try to be really intentional about that, so that I always know what my influences are. I know what I like. And what hinders my creativity is my insecurities and fear. I think that’s what hinders anyone in their craft—and those are demons that are always going to be there.

When you mentioned feeling connected to yourself, I thought of how you’ve toured so much within the past year. How do you make space to connect with yourself when you’re so busy?

Well, being on the road is strange and a huge time warp because you’re going somewhere every day, but there’s a lot of time sitting around. I spend a lot of time just staring out the window and thinking, and I have rituals for the shows. After we do load-in and sound check, I always go on a walk by myself and try to digest the city however I can. And I always listen to my recording from the previous night’s set the very next morning. I take notes while I listen, and that prompts me to journal even more. I think that’s pretty much how I stay connected to myself. I really am bad about getting back to people. It’s pretty much just me and my band and mostly me just staring out a window, thinking about everything. So I do feel like I find myself and change a lot when I’m on the road.

I know that you’ve done some solo tours and you’ve also toured with your band. What are some of the major differences between the two?

Sound check and load in are way easier when it’s just me. I pull in, set up, do the guitar, do the mic, and that’s it. There’s no one else to worry about. And there’s also a deeper sense of freedom in this way, because if I go off the rail or try something new, it’s not going to mess anyone up. So that’s really exciting. And I like that my vocals can really be upfront and highlighted during solo shows. With the band, you spend hundreds of hours with these people. I tour with a band of all boys, and that can be different… and a lot. And boys have cooties, so I don’t know. It can also be a really fun being on stage with the band, feeling really tight together. It’s an incredible feeling to play every night together and then really lock in.

What crowds do you prefer to play for and why?

I like playing to bigger, younger crowds because kids are the future, but I also have a deep appreciation for playing smaller towns because you can see and tell from their response how much it means to them that you came through. I think of cities like Fargo or Tallahassee where they’re maybe not as well attended, but I still played a great show. And those are the fans that will stick around for a lifetime, because a band from New York or from a different city came through and played their town.

I know that you’re also from a small town outside of Kansas City. Were there any bands that came through or any musicians who made a big impact on you in that way?

Certainly. I grew up in Independence, Missouri, outside of Kansas City, and I started going to live shows when I was 10. I was really obsessed with UnderOath, which is this scream-hardcore-adjacently-Christian band. My dad took me to see them with some of my church friends. And then one of my first best friends, Jude Cash, was the youngest of six and his siblings were all really involved in the music scene. They would have bands stay over at their house, Showbread and all of these hardcore Christian bands. And then when I was 15 or so, more of my friends started playing music in Kansas City. None particularly from Independence, but there are some bands in Kansas City that started to do cool things. And still it’s been cool to watch their journey, like Dream Girl and Shy Boys and Kevin Morby, who’s from Kansas City, but on the Kansas side.

It seems that no matter your tour schedule, you always make room for a stop in KC. What continues to call you back home?

I moved away from home six years ago, and during the first few years I felt really disconnected. One big reason being that my parents split up and my childhood home was sold. And I really feel like this record was in some ways a search for home and trying to find that for myself. Over the years, and I think since the pandemic, I spent more time going back to KC. I’ve found a deep appreciation and understanding about how my roots shaped me. And it’s been really exciting to go back and notice how the people and the city helps define me and my music. I’m in that mindset right now and its part of my writing process. And I love seeing my friends. They’re so supportive and were so supportive of my move.

That’s rare. A lot of times when someone decides to leave a smaller town for a big city, there’s a lot of resentment toward them.

There’s a mixed bag. There’s some haters for sure. Hater’s gonna hate.

** I know that when you’re in Kansas City, sometimes you’ll bring in family members or long-term friends on stage. I know you played with your long-term ex, and your brother who’s a magician, performed at your album release. Recently your dad came on stage to sing “No Roof, No Floor” with you. How did these collaboration with people from your past enrich your performances?**

It’s empowering and it also shows a deeper history of myself and my inspirations. Having a magician brother growing up really inspired me, and it’s a big part of me being an artist. And I grew up singing with my dad. He was supposed to do my album release, but I got scared because we had no time to rehearse. But we didn’t rehearse before the show in Kansas City, and he nailed it. But of course he did! I learned what I do from him. I love inviting friends on stage, and I love having my family play a role in it. And my cousin too, we talked about doing a collaboration together where he’ll do a score on the short I’m working on. It’s important for me to lift up the people who were there with me from the beginning.

That’s really sweet. What has being an artist taught you about yourself?

It’s taught me everything I know about myself, because I work through a lot of my own personal turmoil and dreams and frustrations through song. And it’s not even a coherent thing. Usually I get into a really meditative state and it comes through me, but it helps me puzzle together how I work and what I’m hoping for, what I’m lacking. I’ve also learned that I’m a really hard worker. I think in this business it’s 99% hard work and 1% genuine talent. I still get imposter syndrome and down on myself, but I am a lot more confident than I used to be. I’ve realized that, above all else, I am an artist. And beyond even just music, I’m a visual artist, a director, etc. It’s all helped with the overall vision.

You mentioned hard work. I know from being your friend that you don’t have financial support outside of yourself. And I know that you’re an absolute hustler. How do you manage to balance work with your creative side?

I started training at a very young age. I started cooking and doing my own laundry at six, five years old and chores, lots of chores. And then I worked with my grandpa for a while painting houses. And then I got my lifeguard job when I was 14. And then by the time I was 15, I bought my car. And then I got my license at 16, and then I got a second job. And then through high school I had two jobs and was involved in multiple extracurricular activities. Now looking back, I see that that was a form of escaping for me.

As I’ve gotten older, I realize I can be a bit of a workaholic and I need to identify that in myself when I’m trying to escape my reality. And because I love the feeling of hustling out and booking a tour and then being like, “Woo!” But I think my ability to balance has come more naturally with age. I don’t party, which gives me a lot of time. My days are usually spent emailing, booking, planning, and then at night I’ll have time for working on music. So I don’t really see too many people. I try to keep my social life really close and intimate.

Let’s talk about your not partying. How long have you been sober now?

Over a year and a half.

And how has that benefited your creative work? Your life in general?

It’s benefitted my life one hundred percent. I feel a lot more clarity. I’m working better. I have to remind myself that I am making my most genuine work. I think for a while when I was starting to write songs, I would rely on drinking to loosen up and to get the emotions flowing, or whatever excuse I made for myself. And I realized it might not feel like I’m cracking open this thing and forcing it to come out and just word vomiting anymore. Now it’s a slower process, something I have to work at. I’m not just ripping something open and forcing it to come out anymore. Because often I would drink a little bit and then just be like, “Oh, I wrote a song.” But now it’s more of a process.

The gesture you’re making is like a massage.

Right, right. Get to the sweet center without forcing it is how it feels. And I’d say with live performing, it was a bit of adjustment at first, and I was really anxious, especially after the shows when talking to people. But it means the world to me to be able to be present with the songs, be present with the crowd, and to not rely on drinking. I’m sleeping better. It’s a nice life.

I’m proud of you. What’s the most surprising thing you’ve realized along your creative path?

I don’t know how much of a surprise this fully is, but maybe I thought things would be different once I got my foot in the door a bit. I’m surprised by the workload at this point in my career as I’m building a team. And I’m also surprised that people like my music. Strangers and random people. That’s cool. That’s a shock.

Of course they do. It’s good.

Well, it’s just surprising. Random people, that’s been cool.

I know that you post a lot on Instagram and that you have a Patreon. How does self-promotion factor into your career as an artist?

It’s a lot of it, and it does help because people see that I’m staying busy. I sell a lot of tickets through promoting shows on Instagram. Sometimes I wish we were living in the pre-digital age because it is a lot of work, and I hate being on social media constantly, but it gets the job done. People see that I’m busy, and when I run into people, they know I’ve been playing shows every day.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Shy Watson.

It depends on the project. I’m working on a novel now, which started by taking a weird interest in something and circling around it. I think in the early stages, I like to do a lot of really rough draft brainstorming, trying to generate a lot of words, even though I know they’re not going to be part of the final draft. I find first drafts challenging and, actually, I prefer the revision stage, because it seems so daunting to create something out of nothing.

My strategy for that is to pour as much content on the page as I can, so that then I have something to work with and transform from there. I’ve been realizing the way I get my ideas is through the writing itself. If I can just start writing anything, then I usually will find my way to something good, eventually, if I keep going, even if it starts in some really mundane place. I can usually arrive at something that’s more interesting than what I started with.

When you say that you have a weird interest in something, are you doing a lot of research whenever you start a project? I was curious about research in general, just because you write so much on technology and biology.

Not really, I probably should do more. For the stories in Out There, I didn’t do much research into the AI stuff, because I felt like if I started to learn more about it, it would open up this whole side of the story where I would really have to get the technical details right. I like to stay in a somewhat ignorant place about it, which I think also worked with the characters for the two blot stories in the book.

Because in [the story] “Out There,” it’s told by a woman who is outside of the tech world and is noticing this technology’s impacts secondhand and then in “Big Sur,” it’s another woman in a similar position and then a blot himself who also has no idea what’s going on, so luckily that seemed to work. I try to do some research along the way, but just enough to feel like I can write it and then go back later and do more research to flesh it out or make certain parts feel more fully realized as I need to. But often, I feel like research can be a way of procrastinating on the actual drafting process, so I prefer to try to write it as well as I can and know that I’ll fill in some of those blanks later.

How do you edit your stories? What happens for you after your first draft?

Well, I’m mostly thinking of the novel now because it’s been a while since I wrote those short stories. But for the novel, I wrote a first draft, like I was saying, that was a brain dump. I was trying to write 1,000 words a day and generating a ton of material. And then once I felt like I had done enough of that, I went back and wrote a draft from beginning to end that had more of an actual story arc and figured things out along the way. Once I had a solid draft that I could actually call a draft, then I put it aside for a few months. Last summer, I workshopped that draft with my writing group, who are some writers that I was in the [Wallace] Stegner program with.

I workshopped that first full draft with them and got some feedback and then I set it aside for three months and deliberately didn’t look at it or think about it at all and then came back to it a month ago. I think it’s really crucial for me to get some distance from my writing so that I can then come back to it with fresh eyes and read it as if someone else wrote it and be able to see, from there, the work that’s needed.

I really love the way George Saunders talks about revision in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, his book about these Russian short stories, which is also a great craft book. He talks about revision as a sentence-by-sentence process. It’s like you’re steering a ship a tiny bit at a time. With each sentence, you’re gradually changing the overall work, proceeding incrementally, sentence by sentence. I think that’s been really helpful, because in the past when students have asked me how to revise, it seems like an impossible question to answer and I guess it’s really personal to each writer, too. But I do like the idea of taking it one sentence at a time and letting the work guide me through the revision.

A lot of your work is futuristic and technologically focused. Is this just a result of living in the Bay Area or is it something you’re particularly interested in exploring?

I think it’s both. I’ve never worked in tech, I guess I had a copywriting job one time at a startup of sorts, but I feel like I’ve been living amidst the tech industry and seeing how it’s changed the city, even in the time I’ve lived here. There is a lot of that vibe in the air here, like we’re the first people who get the new startup scams. There are the self-driving cars now, the fully self-driving ones with no one in the car. Sometimes I see them on the road and they don’t seem to drive that well.

It’s such an uncanny sensation to see a car without anyone in it. It reminds me of the blots, actually. I feel this tenderness toward them, but also fear and also…when I’m driving, I feel competitive with them for some reason. I’m like, “Oh, I’m a better driver than you. You’re just this stupid self-driving car that’s gathering data,” so I feel like I can dominate them or something. But I think I also am, like everyone these days, pretty tethered to my phone and social media and I can feel how it’s warped my brain, but I feel like there’s no way around it at this point. I’ve given up the idea of moderating that in my life, it’s like whatever, it’s how it is now.

I’m definitely interested in that, too, the ways that technology has changed our relationships and how there are so many friends I have who I maybe don’t even see in-person very much or who live in other parts of the country or the world and, in a way, it’s great to be able to keep in touch with people through social media, but I also feel like I’ll have text relationships with people that are distinct from my in-person relationship with them. I’ll be texting with them all the time and then I see them in-person and it’s a little awkward, like we’re both two separate versions of ourselves.

I think I’m interested in all of that because it feels so present in my life at all times. It’s hard to write about the current moment without writing about technology. I think that a lot of people don’t want to write stories that have characters texting or emailing, there’s resistance to that, which I understand, so a lot of people choose to set stories in the past, even if it’s in the early 2000s or the ’90s to get around that. I guess I’m more interested in writing about contemporary existence, even if it’s challenging.

The first and last stories in your collection, “Out There” and “Big Sur,” both take place within the same world: the world of blots. I’ve heard the writing advice that if you find yourself writing a story in the same world as another story, that’s a sign that you need to write a novel. Why did you choose to keep them as two separate stories rather than making something larger out of them, and why did you decide to keep both instead of just one?

That’s interesting advice. I did consider making a linked collection or a story cycle or whatever, or even writing some kind of novel about the blots. At that point, I was interested in a different idea for a novel and I also didn’t really want to be only the blots, my whole-

The blot girl.

Yeah, the blot girl. The two stories happened because I wrote “Out There” and I workshopped that in the Stegner program and one of my professors in the Stegner encouraged me to do a revision of it that was more…He just thought that there was more potential to the idea and I did, too. He thought that we could meet the blots more on their own terms on the page, because in “Out There,” we only really see the blots through the narrator’s memory of meeting one at a dinner party, so it’s filtered through her memory and her description of it, but I really liked “Out There” the way it was, so I just wrote a second story. It was easier to get into this story because I already had that skeleton created for “Out There” of some of the basics of the world and how the blots worked and even the dinner party where they’re being beta tested.

I ended up with “Big Sur,” which I think was a fuller realization of that concept. And then once I had written that, it felt like enough. I didn’t know how to expand it. It felt like it was the length that it was supposed to be. In the past, I’ve tried to take a short story and expand it into a novel and it hasn’t really worked, because for me, it seems like the length or the form of a story is determined from when I start it. Stories become the length that they are supposed to be and it’s hard to fit them into a different length against their will. I guess I could have probably written a novel if I had found a way to expand that world and the scope of it, but I thought it was time to move on at that point.

“Big Sur” is pretty long, too. It’s not novella length, I’m sure, but it feels like it. It feels very full and rich for a short story, so that makes a lot of sense to me.

It was too long to place in any journals or anything. I think it’s 43 pages.

What path led you to where you are today and what’s the most surprising thing you’ve realized along your creative path?

Well, I guess I always wanted to be a writer. I always wrote stories. And then getting to where I am now, I had a lot of self-doubt along the way. I didn’t feel like I could fully commit to trying to write fiction for a long time. I guess once I got an MFA, then that felt like I was making a commitment to it, but in undergrad, I took some writing classes, but I didn’t feel like it was a practical career because it seemed so hard to make it as a writer. It’s still such an uncertain path. I think any creative field, it requires such an investment in, or a belief, in what I’m doing, because there’s always so much rejection and fluctuation and intermittent success and then a lot of nothing or disappointment and all of that.

I guess that’s what I realized through this whole process of finally publishing a book, because it was a long road for that to happen. When I was younger, I thought that once I had published a book, that was it: I had made it and everything would be fine and I would never feel that self-doubt again. But what I’ve discovered is I always feel kind of the same no matter what happens. I think something valuable I’ve learned is that, really, the important thing is the writing itself and that feeling of being curious and invested in what I’m working on. That is really what brings me back to writing. Even the success and good things can feel a little hollow and strange, and it’s really the work itself and feeling like I have time and space to write and be creative, that’s what I’m always searching for, and it’s the most important thing to me.

As far as your creative work is concerned, how do you define success and how do you define failure?

I want to say there is no failure, but I know that’s probably not true. What would I think was a failure? I guess I would feel like I had failed if I had completely tried to play it safe or tried to cater to what I thought people wanted or something, if I felt like I had betrayed my own creative vision. And then if I really wasn’t proud of the result of it, that would feel like failure.

Like I said, I do think the most important thing is that daily work and feeling creatively inspired, even if it’s something that no one will ever see, because I have this anxiety about time passing and about squandering my life or whatever. Writing, or lack of writing, can heighten that anxiety—the constant guilt that I’m not writing enough. But when I am writing regularly and it’s feeling good, then at least I’ve done something worthwhile for the day and I feel more comfortable in my existence. Feeling engaged in that way is what feels like success for me.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Shy Watson.

It depends on the project. I’m working on a novel now, which started by taking a weird interest in something and circling around it. I think in the early stages, I like to do a lot of really rough draft brainstorming, trying to generate a lot of words, even though I know they’re not going to be part of the final draft. I find first drafts challenging and, actually, I prefer the revision stage, because it seems so daunting to create something out of nothing.

My strategy for that is to pour as much content on the page as I can, so that then I have something to work with and transform from there. I’ve been realizing the way I get my ideas is through the writing itself. If I can just start writing anything, then I usually will find my way to something good, eventually, if I keep going, even if it starts in some really mundane place. I can usually arrive at something that’s more interesting than what I started with.

When you say that you have a weird interest in something, are you doing a lot of research whenever you start a project? I was curious about research in general, just because you write so much on technology and biology.

Not really, I probably should do more. For the stories in Out There, I didn’t do much research into the AI stuff, because I felt like if I started to learn more about it, it would open up this whole side of the story where I would really have to get the technical details right. I like to stay in a somewhat ignorant place about it, which I think also worked with the characters for the two blot stories in the book.

Because in [the story] “Out There,” it’s told by a woman who is outside of the tech world and is noticing this technology’s impacts secondhand and then in “Big Sur,” it’s another woman in a similar position and then a blot himself who also has no idea what’s going on, so luckily that seemed to work. I try to do some research along the way, but just enough to feel like I can write it and then go back later and do more research to flesh it out or make certain parts feel more fully realized as I need to. But often, I feel like research can be a way of procrastinating on the actual drafting process, so I prefer to try to write it as well as I can and know that I’ll fill in some of those blanks later.

How do you edit your stories? What happens for you after your first draft?

Well, I’m mostly thinking of the novel now because it’s been a while since I wrote those short stories. But for the novel, I wrote a first draft, like I was saying, that was a brain dump. I was trying to write 1,000 words a day and generating a ton of material. And then once I felt like I had done enough of that, I went back and wrote a draft from beginning to end that had more of an actual story arc and figured things out along the way. Once I had a solid draft that I could actually call a draft, then I put it aside for a few months. Last summer, I workshopped that draft with my writing group, who are some writers that I was in the [Wallace] Stegner program with.

I workshopped that first full draft with them and got some feedback and then I set it aside for three months and deliberately didn’t look at it or think about it at all and then came back to it a month ago. I think it’s really crucial for me to get some distance from my writing so that I can then come back to it with fresh eyes and read it as if someone else wrote it and be able to see, from there, the work that’s needed.

I really love the way George Saunders talks about revision in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, his book about these Russian short stories, which is also a great craft book. He talks about revision as a sentence-by-sentence process. It’s like you’re steering a ship a tiny bit at a time. With each sentence, you’re gradually changing the overall work, proceeding incrementally, sentence by sentence. I think that’s been really helpful, because in the past when students have asked me how to revise, it seems like an impossible question to answer and I guess it’s really personal to each writer, too. But I do like the idea of taking it one sentence at a time and letting the work guide me through the revision.

A lot of your work is futuristic and technologically focused. Is this just a result of living in the Bay Area or is it something you’re particularly interested in exploring?

I think it’s both. I’ve never worked in tech, I guess I had a copywriting job one time at a startup of sorts, but I feel like I’ve been living amidst the tech industry and seeing how it’s changed the city, even in the time I’ve lived here. There is a lot of that vibe in the air here, like we’re the first people who get the new startup scams. There are the self-driving cars now, the fully self-driving ones with no one in the car. Sometimes I see them on the road and they don’t seem to drive that well.

It’s such an uncanny sensation to see a car without anyone in it. It reminds me of the blots, actually. I feel this tenderness toward them, but also fear and also…when I’m driving, I feel competitive with them for some reason. I’m like, “Oh, I’m a better driver than you. You’re just this stupid self-driving car that’s gathering data,” so I feel like I can dominate them or something. But I think I also am, like everyone these days, pretty tethered to my phone and social media and I can feel how it’s warped my brain, but I feel like there’s no way around it at this point. I’ve given up the idea of moderating that in my life, it’s like whatever, it’s how it is now.

I’m definitely interested in that, too, the ways that technology has changed our relationships and how there are so many friends I have who I maybe don’t even see in-person very much or who live in other parts of the country or the world and, in a way, it’s great to be able to keep in touch with people through social media, but I also feel like I’ll have text relationships with people that are distinct from my in-person relationship with them. I’ll be texting with them all the time and then I see them in-person and it’s a little awkward, like we’re both two separate versions of ourselves.

I think I’m interested in all of that because it feels so present in my life at all times. It’s hard to write about the current moment without writing about technology. I think that a lot of people don’t want to write stories that have characters texting or emailing, there’s resistance to that, which I understand, so a lot of people choose to set stories in the past, even if it’s in the early 2000s or the ’90s to get around that. I guess I’m more interested in writing about contemporary existence, even if it’s challenging.

The first and last stories in your collection, “Out There” and “Big Sur,” both take place within the same world: the world of blots. I’ve heard the writing advice that if you find yourself writing a story in the same world as another story, that’s a sign that you need to write a novel. Why did you choose to keep them as two separate stories rather than making something larger out of them, and why did you decide to keep both instead of just one?

That’s interesting advice. I did consider making a linked collection or a story cycle or whatever, or even writing some kind of novel about the blots. At that point, I was interested in a different idea for a novel and I also didn’t really want to be only the blots, my whole-

The blot girl.

Yeah, the blot girl. The two stories happened because I wrote “Out There” and I workshopped that in the Stegner program and one of my professors in the Stegner encouraged me to do a revision of it that was more…He just thought that there was more potential to the idea and I did, too. He thought that we could meet the blots more on their own terms on the page, because in “Out There,” we only really see the blots through the narrator’s memory of meeting one at a dinner party, so it’s filtered through her memory and her description of it, but I really liked “Out There” the way it was, so I just wrote a second story. It was easier to get into this story because I already had that skeleton created for “Out There” of some of the basics of the world and how the blots worked and even the dinner party where they’re being beta tested.

I ended up with “Big Sur,” which I think was a fuller realization of that concept. And then once I had written that, it felt like enough. I didn’t know how to expand it. It felt like it was the length that it was supposed to be. In the past, I’ve tried to take a short story and expand it into a novel and it hasn’t really worked, because for me, it seems like the length or the form of a story is determined from when I start it. Stories become the length that they are supposed to be and it’s hard to fit them into a different length against their will. I guess I could have probably written a novel if I had found a way to expand that world and the scope of it, but I thought it was time to move on at that point.

“Big Sur” is pretty long, too. It’s not novella length, I’m sure, but it feels like it. It feels very full and rich for a short story, so that makes a lot of sense to me.

It was too long to place in any journals or anything. I think it’s 43 pages.

What path led you to where you are today and what’s the most surprising thing you’ve realized along your creative path?

Well, I guess I always wanted to be a writer. I always wrote stories. And then getting to where I am now, I had a lot of self-doubt along the way. I didn’t feel like I could fully commit to trying to write fiction for a long time. I guess once I got an MFA, then that felt like I was making a commitment to it, but in undergrad, I took some writing classes, but I didn’t feel like it was a practical career because it seemed so hard to make it as a writer. It’s still such an uncertain path. I think any creative field, it requires such an investment in, or a belief, in what I’m doing, because there’s always so much rejection and fluctuation and intermittent success and then a lot of nothing or disappointment and all of that.

I guess that’s what I realized through this whole process of finally publishing a book, because it was a long road for that to happen. When I was younger, I thought that once I had published a book, that was it: I had made it and everything would be fine and I would never feel that self-doubt again. But what I’ve discovered is I always feel kind of the same no matter what happens. I think something valuable I’ve learned is that, really, the important thing is the writing itself and that feeling of being curious and invested in what I’m working on. That is really what brings me back to writing. Even the success and good things can feel a little hollow and strange, and it’s really the work itself and feeling like I have time and space to write and be creative, that’s what I’m always searching for, and it’s the most important thing to me.

As far as your creative work is concerned, how do you define success and how do you define failure?

I want to say there is no failure, but I know that’s probably not true. What would I think was a failure? I guess I would feel like I had failed if I had completely tried to play it safe or tried to cater to what I thought people wanted or something, if I felt like I had betrayed my own creative vision. And then if I really wasn’t proud of the result of it, that would feel like failure.

Like I said, I do think the most important thing is that daily work and feeling creatively inspired, even if it’s something that no one will ever see, because I have this anxiety about time passing and about squandering my life or whatever. Writing, or lack of writing, can heighten that anxiety—the constant guilt that I’m not writing enough. But when I am writing regularly and it’s feeling good, then at least I’ve done something worthwhile for the day and I feel more comfortable in my existence. Feeling engaged in that way is what feels like success for me.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Shy Watson.

When I was young I would spray this jasmine perfume on my pillow in order to sleep and kind of tune everything else out. Perfume was very comforting, a way to escape and also a way to ground myself, so I began collecting it and had amassed a collection by the time I was a teenager. However, I didn’t know about the career of a perfumer until I was older. I wound up apprenticing with a master perfumer, Olivier Gillotin, at an international fragrance house for a couple of years. It was there that I learned all of the raw materials and really began my journey into perfumery. But I think learning perfumery is a lifelong process; there are always new raw materials coming onto the market, synthetics and naturals, and you really have to stay on top of the game because what’s trending olfactively tends to be the newer molecules. So, like nearly everything, it really is a lifelong learning process.

How did you get your apprenticeship?

I started off as a temp receptionist at Givaudan, and I was doing my master’s in anthropology at the time. And then right when my master’s program ended, there just happened to be an opening to work in the lab as an apprentice to Olivier, and we had sort of developed this rapport throughout my time working at the front desk, and he knew that I was interested in perfumery and he really encouraged me to apply. And so I applied and I got it and the whole thing was very kind of kismet.

What excites you about a new project?

I would say if it’s something I’ve never done before, or even if it’s something that I initially feel some type of resistance to, I’m more excited because I’ve noticed that the projects I tend to feel the most resistance to wind up being the projects that ultimately push me the most and I’ve been the most proud of in the end. It’s kind of like smells, often the ones I’m most resistant to or turned off by at first wind up being my favorites.

What do you consider when you create a new fragrance?

It really depends. If it’s for a client, I’ll ask them many questions initially over the course of two hours. We’ll schedule a time and I’ll ask them everything from their favorite colors, textures, their scent memories from childhood, their favorite foods, flavors, sometimes even their favorite movies. Just really kind of obscure things because there’s a lot that’s lost in translation when people talk about smell. So, you can get a client, for example, who says they want something really green, but at the same time hates the smell of grass or something. So you have to ask all of these questions because they’re not necessarily going to think of the exceptions themselves, and I need to know all these exceptions when I’m creating something for them.

It’s very thorough. If I’m just creating something for myself, then I can do whatever I want, but also if I’m doing something for my own personal collection, it’s good for me to have outside input around my work because sometimes I become anosmic to my own scents. And I think it’s actually a little bit similar to writing. Like sometimes when you’re writing something and you’re just working on it constantly—let’s say you’re sitting at your computer—it can be really helpful to close your computer, take a break for an hour, go to a coffee shop, open it on your phone, and start editing it or working on it on there. There’s just something about the different perspectives.

So, having a different perspective. Clearing your head, clearing your nose. Talking to people you trust. That’s why I like to have other people smell my work, not necessarily for their personal opinions, but for their perspectives, and also why I need to take extended breaks and go smell my perfume in the park, or in the bath, instead of my lab.

Where do you get your inspiration for fragrances that you’re making for yourself?

Everywhere. That’s actually part of my issue right now as far as making a more cohesive brand, is that my inspiration is pretty sporadic, as all inspiration is, but it’s hard for me to make a streamlined collection, which is why I have two collections and collaborations and random projects like that. I had this idea for a perfume last month, but I was like, it would be so random just on my site. At the same time, maybe who cares?

What was the idea, if you don’t mind sharing?

I want to make a perfume just called, “Maggie The Cat is Alive, She’s Alive!” which is a line from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. And the way Elizabeth Taylor says it, she’s screaming, “Maggie, the cat is alive! She’s alive!” It’s so amazing. She’s so upset and there’s this vibrato in her voice. And I just thought, “Oh my God, I need to make a perfume called ‘Maggie The Cat is Alive, She’s Alive.’” Maybe it would be in all caps. I can’t stop saying it, even now, I’m obsessed with saying it. Really animalic, sweltering… I just imagine Elizabeth Taylor sweating or something. But I’m not sure how that would fit into any of my collections. Maybe I’ll do it.

What are some of your favorite notes?

I love natural musks, like cumin and ambrette seed. I would say lately I’ve been falling in love with eucalyptus absolute, which is very different than eucalyptus oil. The absolute version is really rich and almost has this gourmand feeling. It’s sweet and super dark. And then I would say as far as synthetics, I really love coumarin, which is basically synthetic tonka. There’s nothing like it. And if I could use it in everything, I would, and I always try and use it. It’s just really beautiful, and also gives a certain diffusion to scents and prolongs longevity. So in a technical way, it helps a lot with the projection of the scent, but it also brings something olfactively that I think is really beautiful.

What challenges arise when you’re blending?

Working in the lab that I’m currently working in is a challenge because it’s so small. For now, I’m making do, but I think in the next couple of years, it will be really nice to move into a much larger and more well-equipped lab.

How do you explore things? What does your curiosity look like?

I’m incredibly impatient by nature, and at the same time I’ve always had a really strong sense of curiosity, but it’s kind of an interesting combination because I’ll get intensely curious about something and then become impatient with it. And with perfumery, it was almost as if I knew from the start that it was too important to lose steam with.

So, I think my sense of curiosity with my work and with perfume is much more patient than my sense of curiosity around other aspects of my life. For example, I just don’t have the patience to cook. I will say, I’ve been in psychoanalysis for 13 years and that has required a great deal of patience. In a way, that experience of having to be patient—with perfumery and psychoanalysis—both journeys have been parallel in certain ways—has impacted my curiosity in other aspects of my life. My sense of curiosity, it’s recovering from being a little defensive. Because curiosity requires a sense of not knowing. I’m trying to be more at ease in that place of not knowing.

What effect do you hope to have on your clients, both clients that you make a perfume for and also clients who just buy something that you’ve already made?

I don’t really think about that, maybe I should. But at the end of the day, I really just want to bring people small moments of joy and maybe some solace. It’s rough out there. To know that you made something that someone looks forward to interacting with every morning is actually a pretty profound feeling. And if I can do that, and also pay my bills and have some nice clothes or whatever, that’s enough for me.

How do collaborators figure into your work? What’s helpful and/or unhelpful about working with others?

I would say it’s helpful for me to be given an idea for a fragrance. Most of my friends are artists or creatives, so the idea of collaborating with them can be very seductive. But also collaborating with friends can be dangerous, like becoming roommates with your best friend.

How did you figure out how to make a living through perfumery and to treat your art like a business?

I’m definitely still figuring it out. I think having multiple streams of revenue is important. I do freelance work for brands and individuals as well as sell my own perfume collection. It’s hard though. I’ll let you know once I nail it.

How do you know when a project is finished?

I think it’s similar to writing a poem, in a way. It’s almost like, when there’s nothing left to remove from the formula, it’s done. Or honestly just when I get tired of working on it, that’s real.

How did you manage to carve a path for yourself outside of the established system?

I’m still carving it, and every day is a challenge. The fact that I don’t have access to the resources that the commercial fragrance world has is difficult at times, but I also think the challenges it presents ultimately make me better at my craft and give me a richer understanding of the entire process of creating a fragrance. Because I don’t just create the formula, I navigate production, design, stability testing, client interactions, and more. There’s also a certain level of shamelessness, especially when it comes to promoting my work or myself on social media, that still after years of doing it makes me feel physically ill. I’ve sort of normalized the nausea for myself that comes with logging on.

So I’m guessing that social media is a big part of how you get the word out about your fragrances, right?

I rely on it very heavily. It’s where I think 90% of my sales come from. And I don’t even have that large of a following, but yeah, I know if I post there will be sales. I would delete it in a heartbeat if I didn’t need it. But it’s terrifying to think what would happen to my income if Instagram was suddenly gone.

But now your perfumes are available at Lucky Scent?

Yes. And Scentbar, which is their storefront, and my website.

Do they do some promotion work for you, too?

They do a little bit, yeah. And they’re really great to work with.

You mentioned writing poetry. I know that’s another practice of yours. Does your work with perfumery ever spill over into your writing or vice versa?

Yeah, it does. I actually think somehow now more than ever. I’m writing something at the moment and I’m also working on a fragrance, almost just psychologically for myself. And I don’t know if I’ll do anything with the fragrance, but it helps to mark the feeling that I’m working around and immediately transports me to a certain headspace. Basically, I went on this date that was four days long…it was pretty amazing. Afterwards, I felt inspired to write for the first time after having severe writer’s block for over a year. And so, I just started writing nonstop and began working on this perfume as well. Sometimes all you need is a really good date to start writing again. Who knew? Truly, now I know how to break writer’s block…

I know that olfactory senses can trigger memories or take you back to a place. Does smelling the same scent help you get back into the creative flow of your project?

Definitely, it’s somatic. It helps me connect to what I’m writing about, like music. An instant brain to heart cord.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Shy Watson.

Witchy, creepy, strange things turn me on. I’m a Halloween baby. My grandmother always called me the good witch of the East. I got my first tarot when I was 12. I ran home from the mall, tore the cellophane wrapper off the cards, so excited to read them. But flipping through the 78 cards was disheartening. I didn’t know what I was looking at or how to read them. The experience became the impetus of my first book, Tarot Diva. I didn’t want anyone to feel overwhelmed or intimidated by the process of reading tarot.

I really appreciated that you made it so accessible. You took away the intimidation. I feel like a lot of times you go into the metaphysical store and everyone seems to be safeguarding their secrets and staring you down and you feel like an idiot, like a child at a tattoo shop.

Exactly! You know, back in the ’80s, I’d visit occult shops like The Magickal Childe in NYC. They went out of their way to make you feel like an outsider. How ironic that witchcraft could be as standoffish and snobby as Catholicism and other other organized religion. But that’s the nature of organized anything, from PTA moms to Pagan covens. The power of tarot and witchcraft is its solitary element. You don’t need anyone else. You can be a solitary witch. Nature will teach you everything you need to know. A tarot practice is a sacred intimate relationship between you and the cards. Count yourself lucky if the right teacher appears. But to unlock true magic, you have to give yourself permission to step into the unknown.

What does tarot have to offer the average person?

Is there an average person? Is there such a thing? Tarot can be as simple and fun as getting a reading at a Halloween party. But tarot can be applied to anything. That’s why authors, artists, fashion houses, and filmmakers are constantly sourcing the cards for themes and inspiration. Everyone under the age of 30 seems to now have at least one tarot deck. If you are an intimacy junkie, tarot is a great way to get to communicate. The minute you put the cards in front of someone, all of their defenses tend to come down. You can get intimate really quickly.

It’s like when you go to therapy. You want to be honest with your therapist because you want the right answers. You have to be open in that kind of situation.

But it’s challenging because even when we want to be open, we’re so attached to our stories, our “stuff,” things we carry and grind on for years and years. It is hard to be clear and open. Lighting a candle and shuffling a deck of tarot clears you. It’s ritualistic, it’s sensual. Your body and mind perk up. That’s why sacred ceremony—from Catholicism to yoga to Judaism—all use the same elements: costume, incense, music… it opens the secret architecture of the soul. It seduces the senses into becoming vulnerable in a way that we can receive something, a message, a teaching. Once that space opens up inside of you, there’s a bit of room for possibility. You can see, hear, or discover something you hadn’t or couldn’t have seen five minutes ago.

In The Magic of Tarot, you call yourself a storyteller. How does storytelling contribute to tarot and magic at large?

Storytelling and tarot are inseparable. And tarot is the story of you. When you read tarot for yourself, you flip a card, the story is about you, your potentials and possibilities. You are the master storyteller narrating what is seen in the cards. And when you sit down in front of a tarot reader or an intuitive or a psychic or a medium, they’re telling you a story and you apply yourself to that story. And it’s the same way that astrology columns work. There’s only 12 star signs, but millions of people read their monthly scope and are like, “Oh my god, yes, that’s so me,” because we all bring our own experience to whatever story is told for us.

Storytelling and magic occurs when we expand the understanding of who we are, of what’s possible, by retelling our stories in deeper, profound, and complex ways. Tarot is super helpful for that because it’s a mirror of our psyche. It’s a reflection of who we are. It’s taking everything out of our brain and spreading it out on the table in front of us. So we’re not stuck with it all inside our head.

You’ve traveled a lot for readings. In your book you mentioned the highest meditation cave in the world in the Himalayas–which I was very intrigued by—the Dead Sea, and Chinese tea houses. How did you make a career for yourself in magic, and how did these opportunities become viable?

I cast a travel spell. I had already published a ton of books and tarot decks. I craved travel and adventure. But I had a young daughter and finances didn’t really allow for it. But I have to practice what I preach. I decided to cast a spell. I decided, okay, I’m going to for 15 minutes every day, put myself in the space of a traveler, of an adventurer. And so when I was in the city, I would spend 15 minutes walking around like a tourist.

But when I was up at our farmhouse in the Catskills, I traveled via nature. I found snow drifts that looked like the sands of the Serengeti. Or I gazed into puddles and found rivulets and it looked like I was flying over the great plains and looking down at rivers. I made a point to be in the traveler’s mindset. And within a year and a half, my foreign rights started selling. I developed relationships with my foreign publishers. They started bringing me over to teach in their respective countries.

I had the incredible opportunity, it was actually four years ago this month, to visit Mount Everest base camp—the highest point on Earth—and the Dead Sea, all in the same span of four weeks. So, from the highest point on earth to the lowest point on earth. Or to put it in magical terms, from the earth’s crown chakra to its root chakra. I’m going to tear up. I don’t know that I have yet integrated the experience. It was extraordinary and it was just proof of magic, of the power that we have, and it was amazing.

Wow, the full scope.

It was wild. And to go from Tibet, a Buddhist country, which is heartbreakingly subjugated by the Chinese government, to move under prayer flags whipping in thin air, glacial lakes and ancient monasteries and meet stunning, peaceful people and then to be thrust into the thunderous clash inside the walls of Old Jerusalem and floating in the Dead Sea. There had been a flare-up on the Gaza Strip and it was one of those teetering points where they were on the edge of war again. And to go from such a high altitude where the entire religion is based on losing the ego and then to dive into the heart of the desert where religion and culture fight each other in the midst of religious Disneyland-style tourist culture…It was beautiful, wild, and absurd.

You explain much of tarot by use of archetypes. I was curious if you’ve studied Jung or if you bring psychoanalysis into your interpretation of the tarot.

Archetypal understanding helps you break tarot’s visual code. I am not a formally trained Jungian but have read so many of Jung’s books. He’s fascinating. And I’m schooled in the Rider-Waite-Smith cards, that’s my specialty. The RWS came out of a secret society that organized at the turn of the century in London, The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was not just a bunch of Dungeons and Dragons-like people meeting covertly in basements and backrooms. It was a collection of middle class and upper middle class artists and intellectuals that included novelist Bram Stoker and poet and playwright WB Yeats, actress Florence Farr and all of these interesting characters. And what’s fascinating was the way that magic was developing at the turn of the century. It was unfolding at the very same time that Freud and Jung were developing psychology. So it was this big explosion. You had modernism and organized magic and psychology. It feels like it was all part of that same intelligence that was coming through at that period of time. So it aligns really well.

Your Dark Wood Tarot deck is super beautiful, an entire world onto itself. What was it like to work with illustrator Abigail Larson? And other artists in general?

Abigail is amazing. It took the publisher and I over a year to find the right artist for Dark Wood. But the minute I clicked on the link to Abigail’s site and saw her images, I knew she was the one because Dark Wood is a shadow deck. I needed to seduce the reader into looking at the not-so-nice sides of their personality. Visually, I wanted to make it impossible to look away from their own shadow side. And Abigail’s art style is cozy, dark, sexy, yet safe. It was just everything.

And, as far as working and collaborating with artists, it’s interesting. When I make a tarot deck, I write the script for the entire deck first. It is like writing a film with 78 scenes and a guidebook. Once we find an artist, I take on the role also as a project manager as the deck springs to life. In an ideal world, the artist takes what you give them and turns it into something so much more beautiful than you could have ever imagined.

Tell us about one of the wildest readings you’ve ever given.

For some reason when I first started reading professionally, I had a lot of crazy, high stakes tarot readings. Talk about jumping into the deep end of the pool. These weren’t 20-somethings looking for love. And in the midst of that period, I wound up reading tarot for an environmental activist who had been part of a group who had destroyed property in Seattle. The government had just passed new domestic terrorism laws because of September 11th. He came to me for a tarot reading because he was standing trial and on his way to jail. He wanted to know what the journey would be for him.

Now, the cards don’t lie. And it was fascinating. I knew there were a lot of things he wasn’t telling me. And he seemed like a really nice guy, but he was heading off to prison. I was scared I’d say the wrong thing, use the wrong words, and he’d head off to the “big house” with bad advice from me. Plus, you are sharing space and energy with the person you read for and I was completely unprepared for the intensity of the subject matter.

The job of a tarot reader is not to pass judgment on the person sitting across from you. You are there to read their cards. One time, this guy wanted to know if he could get away with cheating on his wife. The cards said thumbs up and I told him as much.

It is wild when you are super attracted and have insane chemistry with a person you are reading for. Years ago, I did a Fashion’s Night Out event at Chrisian Louboutin in Soho. I read for a super sexy-on-every-level NFL star who was the bright young thing of that season. He’d just signed all these endorsement deals and we were up in the VIP lounge flipping cards.

And to be in an energetic alignment with someone who’s also in an energetic alignment with what they’re doing…it was like being on heroin. And he was gorgeous and it was just so fun. Readings can be hot and exciting and flirty and fun. They can also be terrifying because you’re talking about really grave moments in people’s lives and oftentimes the stakes couldn’t be higher.

You teach classes. How’s that been?

I never set out to teach. Public speaking and lecturing made me uncomfortable. In the ’90s, I was a B-movie horror actress. I can memorize lines, become a character, and pretend to be someone else all day long. But it took me years to learn how to stand up and be my unscripted self.

My absolute favorite thing in the world to teach is shadow work. I am obsessed with shadow work for a million different reasons. Shadow work goes to the core of all of our issues. It is the most evolutionary examination that you can do, on every level. I lie awake at night and I am like, “Why, why, why does history repeat itself?” “Why would someone who is abused as a child grow up and abuse their own children knowing first hand how painful it is?” “Why does a culture or country that has suffered the ravages of war, wage war?” “Why do the amazing friends we had as teenagers grow up and morph into cranky versions of their parents 20 and 30 years later?”

All of this, personally and collectively, has to do with the shadow. All the things we know but hide from ourselves. Shadow work is about being honest with yourself, taking responsibility for yourself and your emotions, rather than projecting onto the people around you. And shadow work, when done, well, will set you free.

It feels like tarot, shadow work, and the magic I teach makes a difference. Makes the world a better place. Plus, I have to be that much more on point with all of my bullshit, because I would be a hypocrite if I was standing up there and preaching this stuff and not applying it to myself. So I love it. And that’s sorcery of darkness, all potential. That’s me. That’s you, too. You are filled with magic and infinity. The question is, are you brave enough to unleash it?

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Shy Watson.

I either try to power through or pray.

So by powering through you keep writing even if everything’s coming out poorly, then edit it later?

Exactly. Most of the time if I just keep writing, even if it’s stressful and feels bad, because my feelings aren’t always trustworthy in relation to what’s happening on the page.

The Novelist is a full-length novel that takes place over the span of a few hours. How did you manage the time dilation, and why did you make the choice to do so?

I read Nicholson Baker and Thomas Bernhard, and their books took place over the course of a short period of time. I realized if I did that, I could go anywhere I wanted and include a bunch of different rants and so on. I think in terms of making it fun to read or making it readable, I realized that his thwarted desire to write was a good plot device to keep the momentum going. Like, he kept wanting to write and was unable to write and he kept getting distracted. So that’s always lingering in the background, sort of propelling the narrative forward. And in terms of the time dilation, I think I was trying to pay really close attention to what actually happened when I was using the computer and getting distracted. And so it made sense to get into the minutia of the various activities that take place in the morning.

I also think when I was focusing on the concrete actions and concrete sentences, even things like navigating the internet, scrolling and clicking and stuff like this, it helped. Because I thought since there’s not really that much of a plot, there would be a risk of it feeling stagnant or too abstract. A lot of the concrete actions and the active sentences help to still make the book feel…I keep using the word active, but active.

Speaking of the online distractions, your protagonist spends a good deal of time on social media. How would you define his relationship with it? How would you define your own?

I think for him, he has these ideas of himself as some kind of writer, or he oscillates between positioning himself, in his head at least, above the lit world or other writers. But then when he logs into social media and is actually confronted with other people in the form of tweets or Facebook posts or whatever, he shrinks into himself and either feels bad about himself or starts shitting on other people. And so I think it serves the role, especially since the whole book takes place where he’s basically just in front of the computer, of him being confronted with other people and having an uncomfortable experience with that.

I definitely get distracted by it, too. And I think part of the impetus for the novel was just me trying to find a way to make that feel productive, where it was almost like, okay, well, I’m not going to be able to overcome this compulsive clicking and scrolling because I’ve tried different ways and I can’t really do it. And so maybe instead I can try and incorporate that into the work itself so it’s at least sort of generative. But now that I’m not working on a novel that takes place mostly on the internet, it feels much more egregious and difficult, because I’m still just clicking all the time. Now it’s harder to justify.

It felt very real to the experience of just automatically opening an app and being like, wait, what?

That’s almost totally my experience. It was fun to try and watch myself and pay attention to what’s actually going on when I get sucked in. Because it really does feel like getting sucked in; it doesn’t feel like I’m choosing to do it.

What’s the most surprising thing you’ve learned from writing and/or being around other writers?

I think one of the most surprising things that I’ve learned from writing is how full of shit that I am a lot of the time. I think a lot of the impetus to write for me comes from a sort of reactionary place. The first thing I wrote in The Novelist was the rant against his friend, Eric. And at the time I really thought I was just sort of owning this person and self-righteously proving a point or something. And then when I went back to read it, I was like, oh, wow, this is really ugly and kind of frantic and pathetic almost. And it always feels surprising.

I know that I have blind spots and I know that there are dark crevices of my consciousness, but it’s always surprising to see it on the page and be like, Oh, wow. I was totally coping here, or like, Oh, wow. I was totally just indulging the kind of ugly impulse, which happens. It happened with the novel I’m working on now, too.

And then the most surprising thing I’ve learned about being around other writers is maybe that a lot of them don’t seem to actually write much and are more concerned with things like social dynamics or politics or other things other than writing.

I’ve always hated that.

When I was younger, I always bristled when people would describe themselves as writers. And that’s partly why the title, I think, is so tongue in cheek. It’s like, “I’m a novelist,” or like, “I’m working on my novel.” I’ve always felt like there was something kind of cringe about parading that around as some kind of identity or a way in which you unironically perceive yourself. Even though, of course, I am a writer and I did write a novel, so it’s not inaccurate. But I hate the social game of it. It’s always shocking when I hear other writers talk and they’re totally abreast of everything that’s going on in literature and what this person said in this interview, and can you believe this person got this much money for this? It always just sounds so pathetic.

The Novelist celebrates change and is critical of those who are unwilling to put in the work. In what ways can we change positively?

I think on the one hand it’s tempting to say things like, “We can become more loving. We can become more tolerant. We can become more generous,” or whatever. And that’s all true, but I think that the way change happens is through concrete decisions that are embodied in one’s own life. I think a lot of the time people have the temptation to try and change the world or change something in politics or something like that. And it’s very easy for emotions like envy or resentment or hatred to sneak in because you’re not holding yourself accountable and you’re not having to manifest these things in your own life. And for me, a lot of the positive change that has happened in my life or in people’s lives around me starts with adopting a sense of personal responsibility, where it’s like, it’s not other people’s job to change, it’s my job to change.

And I think that’s simultaneously empowering but also realistic because change spreads. Good change spreads out from the individual as opposed to this top-down imposition. And I think there’s momentum involved in that. It’s like, if I choose to accept responsibility for something and I want the world to be a more loving place, I take it upon myself to become more loving. Then that can spread out to my friends and my family and so on, in an authentic and dynamic, living way. It’s also an endless pursuit. I can always be working on something like that, because it’s not like I’m going to fully eradicate these things within myself.

But the moment I start pointing fingers and blaming others or absolving myself of responsibility, I can immediately start scapegoating other people or becoming hateful or envious or resentful. And I can use a kind of metanarrative to self-justify terrible interpersonal relations. And so I think for me, it starts with responsibility and then it snowballs from there. And you see these people that for decades just become increasingly sour and bitter, and they have all the “right opinions,” but they don’t actually help anyone. Change occurs gradually over time through concrete actions.

Your choice to include a character named Jordan Castro in the novel interested me, especially because the narrator never meets him. What do you think of their relationship, and does it remind you of any real life dynamics?

That character sort of emerged; I didn’t plan it. In some ways, the Jordan Castro character is just a model for the narrator. He’s someone who’s a successful novelist, whereas the narrator is not. He’s someone who has a life-affirming worldview, whereas the narrator’s sort of struggling back and forth between attempting to have one, but not really having one.

The Jordan Castro character is so far away from the narrator that he can use him as a model without all the personal baggage he has with his friends on social media. I’ve noticed for myself that when I’m learning something new, especially something that is foreign to my current understanding of the world, or even the current way that I perceive myself, I almost have to take on this perspective like I’m imitating it in order to really understand it.

The narrator finds himself imitating Jordan Castro’s language, even. I mean, it’s common to read something or listen to someone talk then find yourself imitating their speech patterns. A lot of the way we learn is acquisitive in this way where it’s like we’re not only learning what someone thinks but also almost adopting who they are in some sense. It’s imitative, you know? And so the book deals with imitation and I think that’s just another way in which positive change can occur, through the process of learning from another person.

And for me, there was definitely a period of time in 2016 to maybe 2018 where I was encountering these shitstorms on Twitter, or I would see a person’s name constantly associated with someone who you should hate or whatever, and I would engage directly with the people’s work. I started reading and watching stuff from other corners of culture that I was previously unfamiliar with. And so there was also that anxiety where it’s like, I know I’m not supposed to be liking this person’s thing, but also finding myself attracted to it and seeing that some of it made a lot of sense.

There’s something frantic and false about the way people in online crowds try to enforce a kind of brutally incurious attitude toward people they perceive as their ideological enemies. I’ve always been interested in thinking things through and reading widely and coming to my own conclusions. It occurred to me a long time ago that when I was a kid, I was really, really involved in radical left-wing politics, but I knew absolutely nothing of what other people thought. So I was like, I’ll just spend some time reading this stuff. And come to find out, they’re not these boogeyman monsters! And I think that process, which is really the process of actually learning, is important.

Your novel made many salient points on cancel culture. What’s your take?

My take is that it’s bad. On the one hand you hear people say it doesn’t exist, but then those same people will say it’s good. I care a lot about literature, art, free expression, and the ability of art to exist in this space that isn’t clean or clear. I think ideology often, whether it’s right-wing or left-wing, sort of wants to map the world in this really clean, binary, easily understandable way, as if graphed.

My favorite art honors the complexity and the beauty, but also the darkness, of human experience, as cringe as that sounds. And I think this sick attempt by ideologues to censor art creates a culture of uniformity, and it also assumes art can be boiled down into bullet points. They read with a red pen and say, “Well, does this check off these boxes?” I’m not interested in that at all.

But I would never use the term “cancel culture.” There’s the normy conservative pundit way of talking about it where they’re just like, “Cancel culture’s out of control.” And I don’t exactly feel that way either.

If you get stuck on that, you can just become an evil twin of your enemy, where you just complain, feel resentful, and so on. I’ve seen so many people be like, “As a white man, you can’t get published.” And it’s like, I’ve seen rejection letters from major houses to friends of mine, who’ve won awards and who have been published in major presses that say things like, “We don’t need another book by a white man right now.” I’ve literally seen that. And I’ve heard people talk like that behind closed doors, too. So I know it’s real. But instead of complaining or becoming resentful, I wrote the best novel I could and hoped it’d work out. And it is working out, so maybe I defeated cancel culture.

What advice would you give to writers who are just starting out?

Read a lot. Keep writing. A lot of people only write for a little while and then quit, but just keep doing it. Find a few writers that you really, really like and figure out why you like them. Look at their sentences, look at what they’re doing, and imitate them.

When I was younger, I liked Bret Easton Ellis a lot, and I remember watching an interview with him where he talked about how he basically just copied Joan Didion. He was like, “You only need one or two writers that you really, really like in order to become a writer.” And then when I read Joan Didion, especially Play It as It Lays, I was like, oh my god, Bret Easton Ellis totally took this from Joan Didion! I’ve had that experience so many times where I’ve read someone then read who they’re influenced by and it makes so much sense. It’s a great way to learn.

I was at an event with this writer, Sam Riviere. He’s an academic who studies imitation. He was talking about the common advice in workshops of: find your voice. He said, “I don’t even know what that would mean.” I don’t either.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Shy Watson.

Well, I don’t know about most prolific. I can’t figure out how people write a book a year no matter the size. Nothing feels like a race to me. I’m not rushing. There’s no secret to making art. It’s just, if you want to make some art, make some art, humans have evolved towards art. Avoid things that drain and do things that feel fulfilling, put those fulfilling life experiences into a small piece of art, and perhaps, even the most common type of life (my own) adds up to something grander, because I was paying attention, documenting, trying to learn from it. If I had children, I’d be teaching them these experiences. I don’t. I put it in a poem, a story, a novel. To be more productive, just to do a little bit of your art, when you feel like you can. Don’t beat yourself up. Make your goals tiny. And I really am saying, write three hundred words a day. Fill up ONE index card a day with chicken scratch. That’s all it takes. Retype the things that pile up. All of a sudden you have something. Have no hierarchy of importance when it comes to your work. Make whatever. Be at play, always. Get comfortable doing sloppy work, malformed, phoned in, wonky work—believe you can fix it later. Because you can. And then when it does pile up, actually fix it later, as if harvesting a crop you get to correct once more, twice more, impossibly, luckily, till you’re happy with the harvest. Limit distractions. Just today, I re-approached things fresh, yet again, gave my phone to my wife, Rae, and said, “Why don’t you put in a parental control password for me, write it down. Don’t tell me.” I’ve gotten too depressed with social media. So now I only have Twitter and Instagram on my phone for 15 minutes per day and then it disappears. Poof. I don’t have the internet on my phone at all anymore, zero minutes. I can’t browse … anything.

I remember when you were giving me advice about writing a novel a few years ago, you said to start at the part you’re most excited about. Did you do that with Teenager?

For sure. That’s what I mostly do. Write about things I’m really excited about. In the beginning I don’t have a plan, maybe just one or two scenes but I write them, and bumble towards creating things around them that thrill me in some way. Then for the next draft I make a little punch list/index card of new scenes to create to properly finish ‘the thing.’ The cards become a vague map I can leaf through when I get stuck. Working through that punch list often happens out of linear order, too. Just jumping to which new scene I feel most like working on. Later, I have to fix everything. Tie it all up, make it gel. Connect the dots even further, which is just a way of saying ‘reverse engineering.’ I have a clerical mess to rearrange, but while I’m rearranging all of it logistically, I get a chance to enhance the language so it matches the characters and the place, which I had to discover through writing it all anyway. So I’m never too worried, early on, if I get lots of things wrong along the way, if it seems idiotic. Repairing my errors has always led to the actual interesting places in the work, slowly emerging out of some fog, to surprise me.

How does your writing process differ between your short stories and novels?

My shortest short stories are like little dreams I’m having—I forgive myself for not totally knowing the place, not totally knowing the people, and not even totally knowing their exact problems or the exact problem of the place. Did I convey the feeling I wanted? Great. We out.

But with the novel, I want to know more about the people, the place, the problems. I want the reader to feel like I just didn’t fling a bunch of shit at them. If the novel is a long dream, I have time to understand the dream somewhat while it’s happening, learn its illogical rules. But my short stories are closer to dream logic, closer to this thing happened and we’re not explaining.

Your wife and collaborator, Rae Buleri’s illustrations added so much to my experience of reading Teenager. They created an entire atmosphere. I know that you two worked together in a similar capacity when she illustrated Dust Bunny City. What was it like to collaborate with a visual artist as a writer?

Well, first of all, Rae’s art is amazing. She seems to like my work too, so it’s easy to work together. She’s got no ego, and I try not to have any either. So it’s real easy to give each other little critiques, little challenges. She’ll say, Ah you can do that better, and she’s right, and so I go back and do better. And I can give critique, she says, “Hmm.” And then she redraws, carves the block print out again, whatever. But as those things go, maybe her re-work is not in the direction of the critiques I give, just towards what she chooses to do, deeper.

If somebody gives you a really good critique or a really bad critique, all they’re doing is diagnosing something off in the energy of the art. If the critiquer has taste you agree with, maybe you should try to “fix it.” But only you will know the true answer to finish your art, no matter what they prescribe. Every once in a while they happen to say it is a great diagnosis, and miraculously, the medicine to cure the illness too.

Rae and I got better at offering each other critique, after I began teaching creative writing classes in our apartment and she heard how students gave each other feedback, positive and negative. So when she became the illustrator of Teenager, she asked me to read her 20 pages of the novel each night. And she’d say, “Okay. So here’s what I liked.” And she gave her list and then, “Here are the things that weren’t very good.” And then she started to rip the novel apart.

Rae’s never looking for a shortcut. And I think that’s one of the things that we have to remember with our art. It can feel like it’s taking forever to make it, and there’s no time, and there’s always a rush to publish. But Rae feel like there is always time to redraw the thing, redraw everything (if you’re not sure it’s your best work), and I’m the same way, I want to retype my novel again and just go wilder, truer with it.

You can retype your whole novel in three weeks or whatever it is. Or you can just settle and say, “This thing is as good as I can make it.” Sometimes, hey, you’re out of time, you do have to surrender. Obviously you have to at some point. Anyway, the mistakes, the crudeness, the unfinished, sometimes that is the soul of the work, you’ll know. Just don’t let anyone rush you. And don’t take critiques from someone who wouldn’t work as hard on their art as they are telling you to work on yours, they have no frame of reference, they have no foot in reality. Rae works as hard as I do, who better to take advice from?

That’s wise. Has your experience teaching workshops changed you as a writer or editor?

Yeah, it’s actually made me much more anarchistic with form and style because I’ve just seen that anything works if you fully commit to it. It doesn’t matter what your personal style is, what matters is that you fully commit to that personal style, and just go all the way in. However you present your work, slick, or raw and ragged, ultimately, it has to touch the person reading, or why bother doing it.

Something that I’ve noticed in your work is that you’ll depart a bit from reality as we know it to render people and experiences in more magical ways that often feel more emotionally true. How do you tune into the emotion of what you’re writing, and how do you go about getting that emotion across?

Abstraction swiftly transforms a basic story into a grand tale. A bending of space and time, conveying a feeling that is specific to a character in that moment, that place. We as humans do this every time we tell a joke, how we exaggerate a common thing that happens to us, and reform it into a tall tale, a bullshit story, blown out of proportion, because the logic, the rules of physics, holds us back. I’m telling you a story, I want you to forget your problems, here are mine, maybe they’ll help. Perhaps if I make my problems even bigger, the solution gets even bigger, and somehow it will be more obvious, easier to help you. Transcendence, breaking away–it’s the point of expression–I’m going to take you away. And if I am going to take you away, I want to take you farther away than you’d at first be willing to go, or hopefully, farther than you know we can go.

The narrative situation of Teenager—two kids running from the law—was naturally propulsive, but your short stories carry that same propulsive feeling. How do you manage to keep your reader at the edge of their seats the whole time?

Find a hook and get yourself on it. The reader will get on the same hook too and they’ll be with you. I usually write in small vignettes. I know in a couple hours I’m going to sit down and I’m going to try to write this one little tiny scene. I know it’s like 300 words, and I know I’m just going to try to sketch it out on an index card. With *Teenager, *I was purposefully trying to write a thriller, a page turner. But sometimes when I read a typical thriller, I feel like the author is not really taking care of me with language. They’re not taking care of me with all kinds of other stuff. It’s just a bunch of plot design, plot elements. So with *Teenager *I spent a lot of time making sure I was doing better than the books that piss me off. Most badly written books have short scenes, short chapters. Great ones can do the same thing, it’s all about style, and substance. And no fluff.

I think of you as proof that writers don’t need to go to MFA programs.What other avenues have you found useful in helping hone your craft?

Volunteer to read for online lit mags/zines. See what people are submitting, because that is the leading edge of underground art as far as literature is concerned. They are your contemporaries and their work is more important than anyone’s. The dead are dead, and the people making art today have learned, whether they know it or not, from dead legends, an osmosis of cultural influence. Get involved in selecting and curating that underground work for publication anywhere that will let you. Learn to edit others for publication. That will be the most vital thing you can do for your own writing. You can’t edit yourself effectively until you can edit others masterfully.

Starting my own small press was a big thing. Anything DIY that you can do. People all the time start a band, put out their own record, put out another record, go out and they play shows for it. And eventually, somebody decides that there’s something there, and then there’s a little bit more money, a little bit more whatever behind the artist. But they had to gain that experience, become road tested, put in the hours. It can be the same with writers. Put in the hours.

But some of the communities won’t have you. So what do you do? Make your own place off to the side. However small. It’s what I did. If you feel like you don’t have a place in an established scene, then you’re right, you don’t have a place, but you can always make your own spot—apart—you should. And eventually you’ll have put in your hours and you’ll have become a road tested creator. What I mean at its most basic level, if you are studying and working at something because it adds value to your life just by doing, then you’re doing it the best way. The most valuable way. Study what you love. Always expect you can do better. Because you can. That’s what experience offers you the chance to do, simply, better. Only you will know what “better” means, the community, whatever the community is, they won’t know it till you show it to them.

Another thing I tell people is to jst to read lit journals and websites of whoever is doing underground writing these days. Read bestsellers, and classics, but it’s vital to read books from small presses. When I read something I legitimately like, from an author, especially an underground writer, I reach out to them and let them know. It isn’t just like, “Here’s a chance to network so I can gain their favor.” It’s a way to find the most interesting living artists working today and be in communication with them the way I wish I could talk to Tolstoy, because, listen, some underground artists are operating at that level of genius, but the dead are dead and we need to seek out our living geniuses, and at the very least say hello.

And every once in a while somebody would write back, “Oh, wow. So good to hear from you! After I read your note, I read your story in blah, blah, blah. And I really like your stuff too.” And eventually I would find people who would want to exchange work, and maybe they were just bullshitting me, but you can quickly find out if they actually respect your work when they start to give you edits, and you edit them (and this is how you become a “better” editor of others and then yourself) (By doing.)

Get rid of imposter syndrome as soon as possible. Thoughts like, “I don’t have the degree” or whatever. I learned the most about literature by teaching literature to others. That came about by deciding one day that I would explain what I knew about it to people who wanted to come to my apartment and study it with me. Does that make me a teacher? Everybody is a teacher, I’m saying, if you pay attention.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Shy Watson.

I guess as a reporter, you always go in with an expectation of what the story is going to be and main themes that you want to hit, and a successful reporting project probably involves having all of those expectations be really mutated, and different surprising themes emerging from the interviews, or having interviews where the person really challenges what you were thinking about the subject. The most exciting reporting is when there’s twists and turns.

I feel I learned a lot when I was writing this book, especially about some of the topics that I had already reported on. When I was at The Verge or at The Atlantic, there were things in fandom and specifically in One Direction fandom that I thought I already really understood, and then I learned so much more about them when I was really digging through the deep dark pits of Tumblr.

How do you start a project?

I have a problem with my day job where when I’m nervous about a story because it seems really substantial, I do true high school nerd behavior. I really regress, and I’m like, “I need to read 15 books about this before I end up writing the first thing.” Sometimes I really shoot myself in the foot with that because then I just end up on weird tangents and falling into research rabbit holes that are not fruitful.

But in the case of this book, before I wrote the proposal I read basically everything I could find and realistically read about fan studies going back to the ’80s and tried to understand the history of academic research because it felt like it would be a useful foundation to have. I also wanted to make sure I wasn’t going to swoop in and be like, “I came up with this amazing revelation,” only to learn somebody had said the same thing in 1994. I did a lot of that.

Then for the internet side of things, I just spent however long it took to try to remember what my Tumblr password was when I was 19, and then went back into that account and poked around to see which pages were still up or what links I could find that I would be able to reconstitute through the Wayback Machine, which is by the way, just the most important website ever created.

I guess I have a hard time outlining. I do a ton of research, and I have a very hard time stopping. That sounds like I’m doing a humble brag, but I’m actually not. I really procrastinate starting the work of outlining or of thinking through the writing process by just being like, “Well, I’ll just read one more thing or I’ll just find a few more memes before I get started,” so I definitely pushed it off for a long time and was just continuing to, I don’t know, waste an entire day reading Pew Research surveys about cell phone use or whatever.

There was a lot in your book about the Beatles fandom. Is that when fan research began?

There was definitely writing about fandoms that are older than the Beatles fandom. In the book, I also talked to Allison McCracken who wrote about maybe the earliest pop music fandom that resembles what we think of as pop music fandom now, which was Rudy Vallee and Bing Crosby.

There’s also been a lot of discussion within the field of fandom about how at first, because most of the people who went into that branch of academia were also fans themselves, there was a little too much focus on redeeming fandom or showing fandom in a positive light, so it’s gone through these existential crises of recalibrating like, “We need to be more critical” or, “Okay, now we’re being too critical.” I emailed some of the authors, and they were so helpful. One of the embarrassing perks of being a journalist is that someone else spends their whole career focusing on one topic, and then you can get curious about it for two days, and call them, and be like, “Can you explain this to me?” Everyone was very generous.

I feel like that really benefits someone like you who writes about technology and social media, because those people are still alive, versus if you were writing articles about some really antiquated shit, and you couldn’t contact anyone because they’ve died or retired.

I’m going to say something tacky. I feel like sometimes as a reporter you’ll look someone up, and they’ll have just died two years before and it’s like, “Man, that really stings more than if they were long dead. I wish I’d had this idea sooner.”

That makes sense. [laughs] You mentioned the Wayback Machine. Do you have any other online tools or tips for sourcing good material?

The other thing that ended up being really valuable for me was just connecting with people who had been in the fandom for a really long time and either remembered things or were publicly maintaining a little bit of an amateur archive. I think that’s probably something that exists in a lot of fandoms or in a lot of internet subcultures in general. These experts emerge who you can go to and say, “Do you remember this zany meme from however long ago?” And they will be able to find it or, if they can’t, they’ll at least affirm your memory to you.

It seems like people were super willing to talk. Despite having never listened to One Direction, I became very invested in the gossip, the lore. Especially the Larries [fans who believe in the conspiracy theory that Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson are secretly in love] and Babygate [the conspiracy theory that Louis Tomlinson’s and Briana Jungwirth’s child is not his or, more radically, that the baby isn’t even real]. Your interviews with these fans were so fascinating.

Well, people definitely weren’t as excited to talk about those topics. The Larry community on Tumblr has become pretty isolated and skittish. I had written about Babygate a couple of times before, so there was definitely a pretty strong reaction from most of them of, “You’re a grifter and a scam artist, and you were just here to profit off of telling everybody that we’re freaks or something,” which was not my intention, but I can see why they felt that. I mean, some people who were Larries did eventually agree to talk to me, which I really appreciated, and I hope that they think my portrayal is at least fair. I wasn’t interested in holding up this weird story and being like, “Can you believe these women? They believe they spent all this time talking about this thing that’s obviously not true. It’s so wild,” but about how these theories affected relationships within the fandom, as well as certain factions of the fandom’s willingness to completely reject reality and create their own information environment in a way that I think is similar to other little pockets on the internet.

I think it was definitely hard to balance because people who really hated the Larries and thought of them as a malignant force within the fandom were much more willing to talk about Babygate than Larries themselves, so it was like, “I want to make sure I’m not getting too carried away listening to the people who really despise Larries just because they’re the ones who are willing to be open with me. How do I give a fair shake to this other group that’s not willing to talk?” Those chapters took a really long time.

Fans seem like they can be scary. They wield a lot of online power. Do you have any fears about the potential reception of your book now that it’s out in the world?

I don’t know. The book was announced almost three years ago, so there were fans who reacted in a hostile way from day one. I wasn’t surprised by that even at the time, because I know as a fan myself I’m pretty defensive while reading anything about fandom, especially if it’s not by somebody whose writing I already know or whose perspective I’m already familiar with. It’s just been written about in such an obnoxious and patronizing way for such a long time. It makes sense for people to be a little defensive.

Fandom is such a broad category and such a broad prompt, and there’s so many different lived experiences within it that there’s no way at all for me to possibly cover every perspective. I wouldn’t have been able to say anything in the book if I hadn’t over generalized a bit. It would’ve been totally abstract, or I would’ve just been rattling off all the different versions of each thing, and that’s boring to read. I’m sure there’s places where I make a statement in the book that doesn’t seem true to somebody’s experience as a fan, where they’re like, “I don’t know where she’s getting this. This isn’t what it is for me.” I think I just had to accept that and try my best not to fill the book up with caveats that are like, “I know this might not be true for everyone, blah, blah, blah.” I think that is a scourge in modern writing, especially on the internet. It’s just boring.

It’s too careful and pandering.

There were several moments of crisis where I was worried that I might be saying what I personally think a little bit too forcefully and laying out what I think is good, and bad, and right, and wrong, and maybe moralizing. I didn’t want to do that, but also I had to pick a perspective. I couldn’t just be mealy mouthed.

When you took that trip to LA and set out to find Harry Styles’ vomit, it reminded me of method acting. Do you generally submerge yourself into the world of your subjects?

I mean, I think I always want an excuse to travel for stories. When you’re a child dreaming of being a journalist, you don’t really think about just sitting at a computer all day long and calling people on your iPhone. You think about it as being something you do out in the world. I was like, “This book is getting away from me in the sense that it’s just too much in my head. It’s just too much looking at a computer in my apartment. I feel really frustrated by the things I’m not able to find online, and I think it would feel good to try to do something really fan-ish and weird.”

It was a really fun trip. I only did things that Harry Styles had done, so I went from the airport straight to Randy’s Donuts, because Harry styles has a Randy’s Donuts sweatshirt that he jogs in sometimes, and I got donuts. Then, I drove to Malibu and hung out around this restaurant that Cindy Crawford invested in, that Harry Styles has been seen at. It was a ridiculous day, but it was also so fun. Then I looked for the vomit shrine. I obviously couldn’t really find it because it was just a nondescript patch of highway. I just drove up and down the 101 a couple of times and was like, “Okay, well I’ve covered it. I’ve covered the territory.”

You for sure saw it. You just didn’t know you were seeing it.

Yeah, exactly. Actually, that was the first time I’d ever really explored Los Angeles. It felt very dreamy to have the exhilarating freedom of being an adult with some amount of discretionary income where I could go do something really ridiculous, without being so grown up that I would pause over doing something totally pointless.

Some of my favorite moments in the book were the stories from your own life or your own experiences with fandom. How do you balance personal anecdotes with reporting in general?

I’ve scaled back a little bit on personal disclosure in my work at The Atlantic. It was something that I did a lot when I first started in journalism because I was blogging, and that was what I was reading. I liked reading stuff where people would put funny little personal stories into everything they wrote. Also, I found myself wildly entertaining, so I wanted to talk about my life all the time. It was an exciting time of life too, when you’re in your early twenties. Things are happening to you all the time that feel really interesting, worth sharing. Then when I started writing the book, I wanted to include some personal stuff because the subject felt so personal to me, but I also felt that some of the points I wanted to make would be a little bit abstract for the reader if I didn’t ground them in a specific personal experience.

At the beginning of the book, when I’m talking about how I became a fan of One Direction, at first, I was just like, “Oh well, I saw that documentary with my sisters, and I just thought they were very charming, and then I was a fan.” Then I was reading it back after the first draft of the book, and I was like, “This doesn’t feel very useful or honest to me. I need to be a little bit more frank about what was going on,” which was that I was extremely lonely and feeling like a real freak being at college and not really having any friends. I had zero romantic experience to speak of, and I was having these weird fears about whether I would ever be part of a community or a circle again that felt good, comfortable, and safe the way that my high school experience did.

I’m used to writing about myself a lot, but in a way that’s very funny, flippant, and not necessarily totally honest, at least not in a way that’s embarrassing or difficult. I had to put in the more vulnerable stuff later, but I felt like it was necessary to illustrate how people often find fandom during challenging times in their life.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Shy Watson.

I guess as a reporter, you always go in with an expectation of what the story is going to be and main themes that you want to hit, and a successful reporting project probably involves having all of those expectations be really mutated, and different surprising themes emerging from the interviews, or having interviews where the person really challenges what you were thinking about the subject. The most exciting reporting is when there’s twists and turns.

I feel I learned a lot when I was writing this book, especially about some of the topics that I had already reported on. When I was at The Verge or at The Atlantic, there were things in fandom and specifically in One Direction fandom that I thought I already really understood, and then I learned so much more about them when I was really digging through the deep dark pits of Tumblr.

How do you start a project?

I have a problem with my day job where when I’m nervous about a story because it seems really substantial, I do true high school nerd behavior. I really regress, and I’m like, “I need to read 15 books about this before I end up writing the first thing.” Sometimes I really shoot myself in the foot with that because then I just end up on weird tangents and falling into research rabbit holes that are not fruitful.

But in the case of this book, before I wrote the proposal I read basically everything I could find and realistically read about fan studies going back to the ’80s and tried to understand the history of academic research because it felt like it would be a useful foundation to have. I also wanted to make sure I wasn’t going to swoop in and be like, “I came up with this amazing revelation,” only to learn somebody had said the same thing in 1994. I did a lot of that.

Then for the internet side of things, I just spent however long it took to try to remember what my Tumblr password was when I was 19, and then went back into that account and poked around to see which pages were still up or what links I could find that I would be able to reconstitute through the Wayback Machine, which is by the way, just the most important website ever created.

I guess I have a hard time outlining. I do a ton of research, and I have a very hard time stopping. That sounds like I’m doing a humble brag, but I’m actually not. I really procrastinate starting the work of outlining or of thinking through the writing process by just being like, “Well, I’ll just read one more thing or I’ll just find a few more memes before I get started,” so I definitely pushed it off for a long time and was just continuing to, I don’t know, waste an entire day reading Pew Research surveys about cell phone use or whatever.

There was a lot in your book about the Beatles fandom. Is that when fan research began?

There was definitely writing about fandoms that are older than the Beatles fandom. In the book, I also talked to Allison McCracken who wrote about maybe the earliest pop music fandom that resembles what we think of as pop music fandom now, which was Rudy Vallee and Bing Crosby.

There’s also been a lot of discussion within the field of fandom about how at first, because most of the people who went into that branch of academia were also fans themselves, there was a little too much focus on redeeming fandom or showing fandom in a positive light, so it’s gone through these existential crises of recalibrating like, “We need to be more critical” or, “Okay, now we’re being too critical.” I emailed some of the authors, and they were so helpful. One of the embarrassing perks of being a journalist is that someone else spends their whole career focusing on one topic, and then you can get curious about it for two days, and call them, and be like, “Can you explain this to me?” Everyone was very generous.

I feel like that really benefits someone like you who writes about technology and social media, because those people are still alive, versus if you were writing articles about some really antiquated shit, and you couldn’t contact anyone because they’ve died or retired.

I’m going to say something tacky. I feel like sometimes as a reporter you’ll look someone up, and they’ll have just died two years before and it’s like, “Man, that really stings more than if they were long dead. I wish I’d had this idea sooner.”

That makes sense. [laughs] You mentioned the Wayback Machine. Do you have any other online tools or tips for sourcing good material?

The other thing that ended up being really valuable for me was just connecting with people who had been in the fandom for a really long time and either remembered things or were publicly maintaining a little bit of an amateur archive. I think that’s probably something that exists in a lot of fandoms or in a lot of internet subcultures in general. These experts emerge who you can go to and say, “Do you remember this zany meme from however long ago?” And they will be able to find it or, if they can’t, they’ll at least affirm your memory to you.

It seems like people were super willing to talk. Despite having never listened to One Direction, I became very invested in the gossip, the lore. Especially the Larries [fans who believe in the conspiracy theory that Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson are secretly in love] and Babygate [the conspiracy theory that Louis Tomlinson’s and Briana Jungwirth’s child is not his or, more radically, that the baby isn’t even real]. Your interviews with these fans were so fascinating.

Well, people definitely weren’t as excited to talk about those topics. The Larry community on Tumblr has become pretty isolated and skittish. I had written about Babygate a couple of times before, so there was definitely a pretty strong reaction from most of them of, “You’re a grifter and a scam artist, and you were just here to profit off of telling everybody that we’re freaks or something,” which was not my intention, but I can see why they felt that. I mean, some people who were Larries did eventually agree to talk to me, which I really appreciated, and I hope that they think my portrayal is at least fair. I wasn’t interested in holding up this weird story and being like, “Can you believe these women? They believe they spent all this time talking about this thing that’s obviously not true. It’s so wild,” but about how these theories affected relationships within the fandom, as well as certain factions of the fandom’s willingness to completely reject reality and create their own information environment in a way that I think is similar to other little pockets on the internet.

I think it was definitely hard to balance because people who really hated the Larries and thought of them as a malignant force within the fandom were much more willing to talk about Babygate than Larries themselves, so it was like, “I want to make sure I’m not getting too carried away listening to the people who really despise Larries just because they’re the ones who are willing to be open with me. How do I give a fair shake to this other group that’s not willing to talk?” Those chapters took a really long time.

Fans seem like they can be scary. They wield a lot of online power. Do you have any fears about the potential reception of your book now that it’s out in the world?

I don’t know. The book was announced almost three years ago, so there were fans who reacted in a hostile way from day one. I wasn’t surprised by that even at the time, because I know as a fan myself I’m pretty defensive while reading anything about fandom, especially if it’s not by somebody whose writing I already know or whose perspective I’m already familiar with. It’s just been written about in such an obnoxious and patronizing way for such a long time. It makes sense for people to be a little defensive.

Fandom is such a broad category and such a broad prompt, and there’s so many different lived experiences within it that there’s no way at all for me to possibly cover every perspective. I wouldn’t have been able to say anything in the book if I hadn’t over generalized a bit. It would’ve been totally abstract, or I would’ve just been rattling off all the different versions of each thing, and that’s boring to read. I’m sure there’s places where I make a statement in the book that doesn’t seem true to somebody’s experience as a fan, where they’re like, “I don’t know where she’s getting this. This isn’t what it is for me.” I think I just had to accept that and try my best not to fill the book up with caveats that are like, “I know this might not be true for everyone, blah, blah, blah.” I think that is a scourge in modern writing, especially on the internet. It’s just boring.

It’s too careful and pandering.

There were several moments of crisis where I was worried that I might be saying what I personally think a little bit too forcefully and laying out what I think is good, and bad, and right, and wrong, and maybe moralizing. I didn’t want to do that, but also I had to pick a perspective. I couldn’t just be mealy mouthed.

When you took that trip to LA and set out to find Harry Styles’ vomit, it reminded me of method acting. Do you generally submerge yourself into the world of your subjects?

I mean, I think I always want an excuse to travel for stories. When you’re a child dreaming of being a journalist, you don’t really think about just sitting at a computer all day long and calling people on your iPhone. You think about it as being something you do out in the world. I was like, “This book is getting away from me in the sense that it’s just too much in my head. It’s just too much looking at a computer in my apartment. I feel really frustrated by the things I’m not able to find online, and I think it would feel good to try to do something really fan-ish and weird.”

It was a really fun trip. I only did things that Harry Styles had done, so I went from the airport straight to Randy’s Donuts, because Harry styles has a Randy’s Donuts sweatshirt that he jogs in sometimes, and I got donuts. Then, I drove to Malibu and hung out around this restaurant that Cindy Crawford invested in, that Harry Styles has been seen at. It was a ridiculous day, but it was also so fun. Then I looked for the vomit shrine. I obviously couldn’t really find it because it was just a nondescript patch of highway. I just drove up and down the 101 a couple of times and was like, “Okay, well I’ve covered it. I’ve covered the territory.”

You for sure saw it. You just didn’t know you were seeing it.

Yeah, exactly. Actually, that was the first time I’d ever really explored Los Angeles. It felt very dreamy to have the exhilarating freedom of being an adult with some amount of discretionary income where I could go do something really ridiculous, without being so grown up that I would pause over doing something totally pointless.

Some of my favorite moments in the book were the stories from your own life or your own experiences with fandom. How do you balance personal anecdotes with reporting in general?

I’ve scaled back a little bit on personal disclosure in my work at The Atlantic. It was something that I did a lot when I first started in journalism because I was blogging, and that was what I was reading. I liked reading stuff where people would put funny little personal stories into everything they wrote. Also, I found myself wildly entertaining, so I wanted to talk about my life all the time. It was an exciting time of life too, when you’re in your early twenties. Things are happening to you all the time that feel really interesting, worth sharing. Then when I started writing the book, I wanted to include some personal stuff because the subject felt so personal to me, but I also felt that some of the points I wanted to make would be a little bit abstract for the reader if I didn’t ground them in a specific personal experience.

At the beginning of the book, when I’m talking about how I became a fan of One Direction, at first, I was just like, “Oh well, I saw that documentary with my sisters, and I just thought they were very charming, and then I was a fan.” Then I was reading it back after the first draft of the book, and I was like, “This doesn’t feel very useful or honest to me. I need to be a little bit more frank about what was going on,” which was that I was extremely lonely and feeling like a real freak being at college and not really having any friends. I had zero romantic experience to speak of, and I was having these weird fears about whether I would ever be part of a community or a circle again that felt good, comfortable, and safe the way that my high school experience did.

I’m used to writing about myself a lot, but in a way that’s very funny, flippant, and not necessarily totally honest, at least not in a way that’s embarrassing or difficult. I had to put in the more vulnerable stuff later, but I felt like it was necessary to illustrate how people often find fandom during challenging times in their life.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Shy Watson.

My first encounter with spirituality was watching Oprah as a kid and learning about teachers like Deepak Chopra and Gary Zukav and thinking, I’m going to hell I guess, because I was raised Catholic and it was very taboo to engage with those ideas; which, of course, only added to the appeal. I’ve always been drawn to esoteric and new age-y beliefs, because they offer a richer way to experience reality. LA is really the ideal place to observe and interact with new age practices and groups; there are fringe cults who offer free tours of their churches, breathwork classes where strangers scream and cry together, and body healers who channel the dead (I’ve been to all of them.) Even if I don’t believe in a lot of it, I’m interested in the kinds of people who do and why.

I think it also just comes from making art. Whenever you’re creating something, you’re engaging with the mystery, whatever that means for you, and that inevitably leads you to bigger questions about where ideas come from and what it is that you’re tapping into. As an artist, I just want to stay open and curious to all possibilities. Even the absurd ones, because everything is absurd if you zoom out far enough. We’re communicating through screens right now on a rock in space and no one knows why.

I feel like in some of your stories you poke fun at spirituality. I’m thinking specifically of “Earth to Lydia”, in which a Lowe’s employee starts an anti-mindfulness cult. Is there a bit of a sardonic attitude towards these things too? Or am I projecting?

I think what I’m poking fun at is spiritual materialism. A lot of spirituality and mysticism is rooted in non-attachment and oneness, but it’s been co-opted and repackaged by wellness culture and religious groups that range from harmless and cheesy to exploitative and predatory. I believe there are people who really are tapping into a higher consciousness, but I also believe I can access those states myself without paying for a special rock or an online course. I’m also poking fun at the idea that you could ever be fully “healed” in a dysfunctional society. “Earth to Lydia” is about people who become too enlightened to the point where it ruins their lives and alienates them from their loved ones. If enlightenment and capitalism are inherently incompatible, what’s the point? I’ve often thought about that, like experiencing ego death is doing nothing for my career! If I reach a state of total equanimity, I’ll never make it in America!

Amen. I don’t laugh out loud easily, but in every single one of your stories, there was at least one point where I would just start cackling and my boyfriend would look at me all bewildered. So, how do you incorporate humor, and what effect do you want it to have on your work?

Whenever I read anyone talking about incorporating humor into their work, it always sounds so pretentious, like, “As a humorist…” even though I know I’ve done it before, but for the record, I think talking about being funny is a SIN and no one should do it. But since you mentioned it, yes, all I wanted to do with this book was make people laugh. I really honed my “alleged” humor over years of texting my best friend little jokes, which was better than any writing program I could’ve done. I recognize that my work will be immediately classified as unserious because it has a satirical tone, and I’m ok with that. Comedies never get the acclaim that dramas do. I would so much rather have people enjoy my work than attempt to impress a handful of intellectuals who would probably be boring to talk to at a party anyway. I do think there are more well-respected humorists in the literary world now though, look at writers like Alissa Nutting, Patricia Lockwood and Melissa Broder. They’re all super funny-smart and mega successful.

I really loved your book trailers and your unaffiliated video, The Trick. What have you learned from the transformation of your writing into video in other mediums?

I always knew I wanted to make book trailers because I wanted an excuse to work with my friends. Writing is lonely! I’d spent years creating this universe and I wanted to see how it could be visually interpreted on film. Working with my friends made the process less intimidating to me. I was like, ok this is how you post on a casting website, this is how you get a permit, this is what a gaffer does. So much of it is proving to myself that I can do something in the absence of having any models or structure to support me. When I started writing, there was no material evidence to suggest that I could or should write a book; I didn’t get an MFA, I didn’t know any other authors, I had a day job. I had to show myself that I could do it. The same thing applies to film. I finally feel like I’ve earned the confidence to write films. I wasn’t born with innate hubris; for me it’s more like learning a new language as an adult, it’s slow and I’m mostly bad at it but I’m not afraid to embarrass myself. It’s the only way to learn.

How do you approach digital spaces? What’s your relationship with social media?

Oh, you mean my primary reality? I was talking about this with my husband the other day, the question of, oh, you made a conscious choice to include technology and social media in your book. I know some writers try to avoid it, but it’s such a big part of how we live now. Like anything else, it’s neither wholly good nor evil. The evil aspects of the internet and social media are obvious and well-documented, while the good parts of it are so good that they’re often dismissed or taken for granted. The internet is a miracle and it has sustained all of my friendships, given me jobs, educated me, and allowed me to live as an artist. I have less contempt and hostility towards it than most people for those reasons.

I both admire and am confused by artists who are totally offline. It’s of course a very cool thing to be like, I’m above it, which is usually code for I’m successful. A lot of these artists are already a known quantity, but if I chose not to be online and intentionally promote my book in 2022, no one would hear about it. We wouldn’t be having this conversation right now. I’ve noticed how trendy it is to write op-eds and Substack essays about the dangers of tech. It’s like, but you’re on here with us while you’re..?

You’re using the medium that you’re shitting on! Yeah!

I get it, the internet is hell in many ways. It’s neurologically damaging and addictive and my muscles have atrophied from sitting all day, but I do wonder how much of it is a resistance to the future happening. I think we’re still learning how to coexist with it, we’re still in the early days and we need to exhaust ourselves with it before we can recalibrate. I used to only eat junk food as a kid until I learned it was making me physically ill, so I stopped doing that. If you were a kid in the 90s, you were actively poisoning yourself everyday with convenience store food, and now you probably take turmeric supplements and only eat McDonalds once a year ironically. I already feel myself becoming less enchanted by the infinite scroll.

Fair. How or when did you realize you’d become a writer?

For years, I wrote stories on the weekends and made zines with my friend Andrea Nakhla, who is a painter. I knew that if I really wanted to write a book, I would need to get serious about it and figure out how to quit my job to write full time. I saved up for a year before I quit at the end of 2018 so I could have a few months to cover my rent and bills to just focus on writing. I’d never not had a job before and as an immigrant, I was terrified, but I also felt this weird sense of calm that I could figure it out. Doing it in such an extreme way was my only option, but I don’t know if I would recommend it. It puts a lot of pressure on the writing, and it took me a year to learn how to work alone without any structure to my days. A lot of my friends are musicians, filmmakers and visual artists who are way more successful than me, so while they were so supportive, I think they forgot what those growing pains were like in the early days when you have absolutely no idea if things will work out. I felt very alone in it.

I remember I would go to these parties in LA and people would ask me what I did and even though I was writing every day, I felt like I couldn’t even talk about it, because it wasn’t real yet. Meanwhile, I met so many men who were like, oh I’m a producer or, I’m a writer, and you later find out they did none of those things. That is the level of confidence I aspire to! Just saying things! After almost three years of writing, freelancing and mentally unraveling, I got a two-book deal with Knopf in early 2021. That was such a paradigm shift for me, I was like, I’m a writer now. I’ve done it, I’m doing it.

Aside from money, what are the rewards of your creative practice? What do you get out of this work and what has it taught you about yourself?

For starters, internet clout, obviously. Really though, writing has changed my life. I feel so privileged and I can’t believe I get to do it. For me, writing is like a spiritual barometer. The degree to which I’m able to write is the degree to which I’m able to have a healthy and positive relationship with myself. Whenever I have writer’s block or I’m procrastinating, it’s because I’m unwilling to sit with myself. Just the process of writing and sucking for so long is a kind of endurance test. The fact that I no longer feel totally identified with some of the stories in the book is an indication that I’ve grown.

Another thing writing has given me is access to a world of artists; especially women. When I first started writing, I didn’t have a lot of friends and I wanted to connect with likeminded people, I wanted to connect with cool girls like you! My goal is to continue to write and occasionally get invited to cool dinner parties where I can meet other artists and no one is taking photos and there’s an ornate tablescape and one famous person but no one is talking about it, and the host will introduce me to everyone as an author, and that famous person’s ears will perk up but I will purposely ignore them out of respect but we will somehow later become lifelong friends. Is that relatable?

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Shy Watson.

There’s a lot to say about the difference between short stories and novels, but the criteria for quality seems fundamentally the same: a good story, whatever its length, is an experiment. You assemble an array of reactive substances, and then you watch what happens. A good storyteller, in my mind, never knows the results of that experiment in advance. That may sound self-evident, but I think it’s crucial. The writer who doesn’t put herself in suspense will never hold the reader’s attention either.

I’m not the kind of reader or writer who needs everything to combust for the experiment to be deemed a success. I watch for small flares, subtle transformations. I do think change, above all, is essential in a story, but sometimes the most talented alchemists are the ones who are most attuned to the least obvious shifts in their material.

So you definitely don’t start with an ending in mind.

Never.

I noticed that your stories rarely have a dramatic ending. Instead, they resolve quietly.

In fiction, as in life, I think we have a pretty narrow definition of what it means for something to happen. We tend to look for discrete events— the high point, the low point, the before, the after, the beginning, the end. The elements of plot that, for better or for worse, we’ve been trained to look for.

In my experience, so much of the drama of being alive takes place in between all those moments. I believe that turning points exist, and I often find myself gravitating toward them as a writer, but I imagine those pivotal moments as gradual rotations, not as sudden about-faces.

Your stories reminded me of Mumblecore films, just kind of day-to-day snapshots of people’s lives.

I know nothing about film! It’s mortifying. I’ll spend an evening watching trailers and never get around to picking an actual movie. When I do go to see something in theaters, what’s most thrilling, but also most daunting, for me is that, even during the previews, you’re instantly immersed. A sudden plunge into someone else’s universe! Films, at least for me, make you cede control in a way that books don’t quite. If you’re a controlling person—and, shamefully, I am—books are the more comfortable technology. As a reader, you’re beholden to an author’s pacing and yet you get to retain a fair amount of agency. You get to skim, you get to stop. You can put a book down and pick it back up days, months, years later. And of course, blissfully, you can reread. We often say that we read to be transported, but I actually think it’s a little more complicated than that. We read for the strange sensation of being here and there, in fantasy and in reality, all at once.

How do you start a project?

I start with the first sentence. A maddening answer, and, for my own sake, I wish I had a better one. But it’s the only way I know how: one sentence on top of the other, one foot in front of the other. In that way, writing does feel exploratory to me. I never start with a map in my head or even a destination. All I have is a sense that I’m heading in an interesting direction.

How do you decide when a story is done?

When I’m revising a story, I almost never change the first sentence, and I almost always change the last one. I tend to write past my endings. It’ll turn out that the third to last sentence is really the very last sentence, or maybe the final paragraph gets lopped off completely.

My great fear is that the ending of a story will feel predetermined or over explained. Earlier I was using the analogy of exploration. Well, imagine you’re off in some unknown terrain, no map, no plan, and when you finally arrive at a breathtaking view, someone’s there waiting, pointing everything out, handing you binoculars— playing tour guide instead of just letting you enjoy the landscape.

So one answer is that I want my endings to feel like that breathtaking view. I aspire to stop people in their tracks. At the same time, I want readers to see it, to enjoy it, for themselves.

I think that you have perfect endings—they don’t feel forced at all, they just resonate. Each time I was just kind of stunned and very pleased.

You don’t always have to kill your darlings, but with my own endings, less is usually more.

How does the rest of your drafting process look?

As I say, it really is one sentence, one step at a time. And crucially, at least for me, I retrace my steps every day. I read from the top. That results in a lot of little fussing and fixing along the way, and occasionally some big new leaps.

Then I get to the end and I invariably think, congratulations, this is brilliant! And if I’m being stupid, at that point I will go ahead and show it to someone right away, so they can see how brilliant I am. But I think I’ve learned by now that the surge of triumph that you get when you finish a story is actually just relief that you’re done. So, if I’m being smart, I will leave a draft aside for a while and then I’ll read it again and think, *congratulations, you’re terrible. *And then I’ll leave it a bit more, or maybe someone else will read it, and then I come back and think, okay, some of it’s brilliant and some of it’s terrible. There’s a lot of oscillation between extremes. I have gradually learned to discipline those swings, or at the very least not to trust them.

I know that you are also an editor. Has your editorial work changed your writing and/or revision. And if so, how?

Absolutely. I think that everyone should have to do both. Writing is solitary and mysterious, but only up to a point. Then you need someone to ask you what you’re trying to say—and to make you say it. Editing other people has helped me ask that question for myself as I’m writing, but the truth is that it’s a difficult question, and we’re really good at avoiding difficult things. As an editor, being a writer has helped me understand that writing is extremely hard. As a writer, being an editor has helped me understand that it should actually probably be even harder.

Do you have any rituals for your writing? Any preference on the environment in which you write, things you have to have around you, anything like that?

I used to write in the early morning before my day job started. My schedule is much more on my own now, but I’ve kept the habit. Those early hours can feel like stolen hours, where there’s a sense of pressure to make the most of the day, but there’s also this sense of freedom. If you don’t get a single word out, well, fine, nobody else has either. They’re probably still asleep.

I have to work in silence. I’m the insufferable person who’s wearing earplugs in the library. I’ve worn earplugs when I’m home alone. A few years ago I encountered some predictably super doomful research about phones, the main takeaway of which was that even just having your phone in sight, even if you’re not using it, causes productivity and concentration to plummet. So now I’m a fanatic. I’m always hiding my phone from myself. I don’t even want to see it turned over on the chair next to me.

A lot of your stories seem to have an interest in the alternate paths a life could take. Could you speak more to this?

Every story in its most essential form is a response to the question, what if? And most people experience their lives as stories; we’re narrative creatures, whether we’re writers or not. I’m drawn to characters who do their own what if-ing, in part because asking myself what characters would ask themselves feels necessary to give them agency, even dignity. I believe that it’s only by imagining alternate lives that anyone is able to fully possess their real life Or, to put it slightly differently, I don’t think you know who you are until you’ve considered who you might have been.

Your characters’ self-perception often shifts depending on who or what they’re around. Is this something that you consider in your life or writing?

Yeah, all the time! Right now! I think fiction is uniquely equipped to render the texture of subjectivity, and how that texture’s always changing. It’s dumb to generalize, but I’ll do it anyway: I do think that Americans are especially enthralled to the cult of authenticity. I’ve definitely felt its constraints in my own life. We’re familiar, as readers of fiction, with asking the question, is this character believable? Which usually means, *is this character consistent? *Meanwhile, it’s easy to overlook the fact that we ask the same thing about each other and about ourselves all the time. We’re always trying to find our “true selves”; we talk about seeing “the real you.” At its best, fiction draws our attention to questions about continuity and consistency of character, and then dismantles the idea that we should have the answers to those questions, or should even be looking for the answers in the first place.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately. If a character is only supposed to do what that character would do, how can change happen without compromising that?

I think we spend a lot of life wanting people to surprise us—that is, wanting them to act out of character. That probably ought to tell us something about just what a complicated, fragile idea character is to begin with. Those complications can be maddening in your friends, of course, but they’re a boon for fiction. Making sense of that mess of contradiction is what stories can do best.

I noticed that your characters often speak past each other. Or one of them will be saying something, and the other just isn’t responding. They’re just saying their own thing. I thought that was really true to life. What interests you in dialogue? What do you strive to reveal in speech?

There’s a certain kind of conversation that’s like a tennis match, where people are just volleying questions and answers and mutual affirmation back and forth, but I basically think that kind of conversation is rare. We spend so much time ignoring each other and interrupting each other. We’re really good at turning something that should be a monologue into something that sounds like a dialogue. I think everyone has had the experience of telling somebody what they want to hear, yet we long for other people to tell us what they really believe. I want to capture, if I can, all that in fiction, not because I’m so committed to realism—I am and I’m not—but because I want to capture how much miscommunication is involved in communication. And, in my view, there’s nothing harder than saying what you really mean.

What advice, if any, would you give to writers who are just starting out?

My main advice, demoralizing though it will sound, is to abandon things. It’s not the same as giving up! It’s just the first step to starting again.

I threw out a novel when I was getting an MFA, and I’ve thrown out so many pages since. If you told me right now that I had to erase everything I wrote yesterday, it would feel like grief. But if you tell me to throw out that page in three months, I’ll probably think, good idea.

It’s of course important to feel an investment in your work, but I think there’s a tendency to fetishize the tortured artists for whom creativity is a kind of painful single-mindedness. It leads people to believe that nothing short of totalizing (possibly debilitating) passion can justify a project. There’s value, too, in cultivating a certain detachment from your work, in being able to pull yourself out of things, redirect yourself, try something new. Everyone has more than one story. Less torture, more art!

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Shy Watson.

I met Brad interviewing him for a magazine and that’s actually a whole story in itself that I can maybe tell the spark notes of…I suggested that we go to a museum and see some art because I was supposed to talk to him about his book and about his art practice. But somehow I ended up in an Airbnb with him watching him and helping him smoke DMT. DMT helped him quit smoking. Then we ended up talking for many hours and we just hit it off.

In short, we became friends. I don’t remember exactly how the idea came about for the serial novella, but I think we wanted to collaborate. True collaboration is underratedly difficult. I think for me and Brad, maybe impossible, just because we’re pretty particular about our work.

This was a way of doing something together that felt collaborative, but still allowed us to go off into our own corners. I really didn’t read what Brad was writing until it was posted on the site. It was a really goofy project. I say goofy because I think we really didn’t take it very seriously in a way that we were both very grateful for. It was extremely light and we weren’t really sure who was following along and we were just doing it for each other.

**I know you also worked with Lexie Smith on Landing Pages, your short story project for LaGuardia passengers. Considering this, Murder-Suey, and also your past as a child actor, I’m wondering how you feel about collaboration in general?**

I’m a writer who definitely is not well suited for the writer’s life. As in, I don’t think I actually do great in isolation. I don’t think I thrive in isolation. I think I go a little fucking nuts.

I think writing and reading by their nature require a certain amount of quiet and solitude. With acting, that’s a part of my life that I have trouble making meaning of, as it really does feel like another person. Maybe everybody feels that way about their childhoods, but it’s just hard to figure out how it’s affected me as an adult, and by no fault of trying with several therapists, trying to understand what walking into thousands of auditions as a child did to my brain.

What I always talk to my actor friends about is that I think it’s awful that they can’t really do what they want to do without being asked to do it.

Actors can’t really act without an audience. It’s a very social medium. I just feel lucky that I’ve transitioned into something that I can do whenever I want to do it. Writing fulfills that desire to perform I had as a kid, but does it in a much safer, more reliable way.

I think I would be a terrible actor at this point in my life. I think I’d be too self conscious, too self reflective, and self reflexive. So I think collaborating is a way of scratching the social itch of wanting to make work with others. I’ve definitely done that a lot. Also, it’s just a helpful way of making myself actually do stuff. Being accountable to someone else, and injecting the social element into the creative equation.

Brad and I wrote Murder-Suey pretty quickly. We did it over a year, but it was really easy because it was social. It was an easy project, and if had sat down to write that without Brad, it would’ve taken longer, been more laborious, and I probably would’ve taken it too seriously.

I really liked the articles you wrote about Instagram. I was wondering what the most surprising result of your fake Instagram road trip was.

It was a long time ago now, but I think I had just been broken up with or something, and the ex-girlfriend went on a trip and I saw these photos and I was like, “Fuck, she’s having so much fun without me.” Then she got back and we ended up meeting up and she was like, “Yeah, that trip was awful. It was the worst.” It was this nice reminder that images always lie, and that images, especially in the performative context of social media, really lie.

I guess, I was trying to play with that, and I was really interested in how flimsy and impossible Truth is, just how insanely fragile our assumptions on the internet are. That was definitely apparent throughout that month-long project where people would glance at it and just be like, “Oh, my god! I have a cousin in Kansas, you should visit them.”

The project was a joke. I was alluding to the fact that the whole thing was fake throughout the whole thing. It was a much more tongue-in-cheek moment of my life where I was trying to be a bit more of a troll than I ever am these days.

Given that it was so long ago, how has your relationship with social media changed? Or what is your relationship with social media now?

The short answer is that I try to think of social media as exclusively a means to end. This may sound crazy, but I think of all the platforms I use as LinkedIn. I’m exclusively there because I’m trying to work, to write and have opportunities to write. I don’t want to use them socially. I don’t want to post photos of my life or my food. I just see them as distribution platforms and necessary evils of being a person who makes stuff in 2022.

I had a lot of fun reading “A Bedtime Story,” your piece in Joyland, more so than with any other short fiction I’ve ever read. Being able to watch the real celebrity cameos your fictional insomniac character made was so great. I was also taken by “Hot as Heaven,” your short story on Forever Mag about a man who falls in love with his Alexa by way of watching movies about AI together. Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems like you’re interested in the relationships, sometimes intimate ones, that people form with technology. Is that something that you purposely explore in your work or think about a lot in your day-to-day?

I think technology and our relationship to it is accidentally informing everything I write these days. I just feel like the fundamental question of humankind is whether we have been slowly progressing towards our demise, towards some kind of great existential cliff, or whether the alarmists of today are the same as the alarmists of 50 years ago, who are the same as the alarmists of 500 years ago.

Clearly the planet is warming and we’re in big trouble. And clearly the internet is a crazy leap in terms of technology, but there have been crazy leaps before. I go back and forth between thinking “today is different” and the internet is different and social media and phones have introduced very disruptive new elements to the equation, and simultaneously trying to remember that every old man ever has just been like, “Young people!” shakes fist at sky This motion, old men lamenting young people and their technologies, is as old as technology. I guess we won’t know whether history’s luddites were prophetic sages or whiney babies until it’s too late.

There’s so many advances to technology that we can’t even fathom yet. We might look back on this and be like, “Oh, yeah. Remember when we just had like, Zoom and iPhones? Remember how simple that was?”

Yeah, exactly. We’re doing this over Zoom, and I’m very interested in whether something is lost by not doing this in-person. A question I always ask myself: Is this better, worse, or just different?

I just wrote a story about sexting that explores that question. I feel like the cameo story explores that question. I’m really curious about, as we shift away into a more simulated realm, whether the simulation is going to be convincing enough to fulfill us. And if it does fulfill us, is that all that matters? If we have relationships that are entirely digital, but we’re emotionally fulfilled by them, will it matter at all that we’ve left the tangible world behind?

I just read an article about two people who got married without ever meeting in person after FaceTime dating for months or years , and they had proxies at their wedding.

Proxies? Where you get a stand-in for you?

You get a stand-in, yeah. I think the other thing that I’m interested in is, although they felt fulfilled enough and love each other enough over FaceTime to get married, it’s going to be different to hang out in real life than it is to hang out over FaceTime.

What do you do when you’re creatively stuck?

Recently? I just painted two paintings. It’s the first time since I was in preschool that I’ve held a paintbrush. I’ve never painted anything in my life. I actually posted them on Instagram and my friend told me, “You don’t have to, but most people gesso their canvases.” I put paint directly on the canvas, and he explained to me that most people don’t do that. It was so fun to not know that.

It’s fun to be a novice. I guess, trying something that my ego isn’t attached to helps, because I feel okay at writing, and strangely enough, that can make writing really hard. It’s also in my bio on the internet; I’m a “writer.” I think that can make writing hard too. So doing stuff that I don’t feel any sense of identification with, I think is what I do when I’m stuck.

Yeah, and there are no expectations for what you produce.

Totally.

I feel like painting can induce this meditative state where you’re just doing this thing physically and then ideas just arrive. Writing is like, “I am using my consciousness.” Painting isn’t very social though. If you need a social element, you’d have to do live paintings.

Tangible work, I think, is probably better for accessing the unconscious, maybe a little more than writing.

**I found your Confessions hotline project fascinating. Is that still going on? **

No, the line isn’t live anymore. Greg Hochmuth and I came up with the idea over lunch. It just took on a life of its own in this really weird way, which was really encouraging and cool.

We decided that in order for confession to provide actual catharsis, someone else needs to be there, but also to be able to do it, you need to feel the safety of anonymity to some degree, which is I think why Catholic confessionals are built the way they are. The way the line worked was the speaker could only speak as long as someone was listening. The listener was muted, but if they hung up, the line went dead. Basically, you knew someone was there, but you were facing silence in the same way you do sometimes with a therapist. Sometimes a therapist will just let you keep talking. I think that is sometimes when the best stuff comes out.

I’ve been reading about psychics hired by the CIA lately, and most of them were Catholic or Scientologists, because they found that when you clear your consciousness by doing confessions through auditing or confession booths, more can emerge. It clears space. I was curious if you thought about that at all or found anything like that with the Confessions project?

I think the Scientologists and Catholics are onto something, for sure. I think analysis is a somewhat similar space of clearing the mind and allowing what is in the unconscious to come up. Both my parents are therapists, and at this point I’m pretty done with therapy. I feel very over it, because I don’t think it’s very helpful for me, but I’ve gotten pretty deep into Vipassana meditation in the last five or six years.

Although with Vipassana you’re not talking. You’re completely silent for 10 days at a time and meditating. I feel like that’s a process for me of allowing the noise to settle. There’s a metaphor that I’ve heard used before: if you have a dirty bucket of water, the way to be able to see through it is not by reaching in and trying to scoop out the sediment. That just makes the water murkier. You have to let it sit silent and still to let all the sediment drift to the bottom. Then it’s transparent. Then you can see through it. I feel like, for me, rather than vomiting up everything, it’s a process of getting quiet and still. Eventually, I begin to feel like I have a little more access to truth and reality as it is. Sure, one way to do that is via confession or analysis or something else in the verbal realm. But I think there’s other ways as well.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Shy Watson.

Every chapter was initially written in the month that the chapter was set in, but one year after. So I’d dwell on one chapter for a whole month. Walk around, get in touch with the feeling of that time of year.

What else was part of your writing process?

I held off on writing each chapter for the longest time until I felt my idea of what the narrator was going through was complicated enough, had become complicated enough to be interesting. And then initially ripping it in Uni-Ball on unlined printer paper and then entering it into Notes and then cycling it through emails to myself every day.

Did you edit it at each stage?

When I first sent it to [my editor] Gian [DiTrapano], it was through December, one year. And then I wrote a 93K-word version in January. Gian was like, “Dude, this isn’t it.” He was like, “Make it a book length and then send it.” And then April of 2020 was when it became 67K words, which was the whole book except for the last chapter. And then obviously once I started working with Gian, with the hard copy, making it totally coherent was another thing.

How did you meet Gian?

It was October of 2019. I’d just started my [MFA] program. I’d been aware of Atticus Lish, and had been reading a lotta Scott McClanahan. I’d been aware of [his press] Tyrant, and someone said “You’ve got to send it to Gian.” And it was just a cold send on…it was October 25th. I remember because it was right before the workshop. I was like, “I need Gian to see this too.” And then he got back to me that same day. It was wild.

And then that Halloween of 2019, he was like, “I’m going to be out there in December.” He wanted to meet up and that was when we first met, that December at the Lutz reading, The Complete Gary Lutz by Garielle Lutz.

I could hear your voice the entire time I was reading Fuccboi. How did you manage to write just how you speak?

I think texts, DMs, emails. I just started communicating more and more like that. And then, especially with a couple of close friends, developed certain lexicons and stuff. And then just simplifying the story as I would be able to, conceivably, via text to a friend. But then obviously, as it went on, getting in my literary bag a little more to expand each individual piece.

But I think that was a big thing. I mean, even with Gian, the way we would WhatsApp and message. And probably the pod helped too, just doing the pod, having conversations and getting comfortable using different types of language in a literary context.

Did you transcribe the pods yourself?

I wouldn’t. But you know what? In a previous project, The Walk Book, for the first 50 days I just had a voice recorder and I would talk. I would just say everything that happened in the past 24 hours.

And then after 50 days I got so tired of talking. So then I stopped doing that and I just started writing. I actually transcribed the first part, which was spoken, through the Eastern time zone. Central time was written and I was trying to do essays. And then the last part of the book, Mountain Time, was letters. Because I stopped walking in Mountain Time.

But now that I think about it, I think transcribing those things and listening to those podcast recordings made me aware of how I talk and the rhythms of it.

Thinking about The Walk Book, Is it okay to abandon a project?

I don’t think a project’s ever abandoned until you can’t work on it anymore. I don’t know if The Walk Book has been abandoned. But it’s hard. I mean, it’s just so…I don’t know. It’s self-aware but not self aware enough, you know? Like “Okay, bro. I’m out here.”

“I’m walking. I’m writing my book.”

Fucking discovering America.

[laughs] So how do you know when a project is done?

Someone wrenches it out of your hands! Nah. I think you’ve got to feel that everything in it has at least one other connection. Everything in it has at least one other part, at least for a novel, that justifies it being there. I would think about that a lot. Repetition and doubles. Or a similar thing but saying something different about it. Whether that’s characters, characters repeating at least one other time, or certain ideas. And then feeling there’s a reason for every concept and every line in there.

But there is a little bit of that I think, someone wrenching it out of your hands.

What is something that you wish someone told you when you began writing?

I was reading this book about I-novels and they had this one line about how a book gets rewritten every time someone reads it, because they just impose their idea on it based on their upbringing and whatever sociological factors orient their reading of it, which I do all the time, too.

You read a book and you remember two or three main things that hit you, and when you remember back on that book, you just think of those few things. But, especially with a book like this, there’s no telling how much people can just interpret it however they want. I mean, it’s an obvious point. But then how I justify that is I think it’s like a Rorschach test for how people talk about it. They might be feeling really self-righteous about it, but how they then speak on it shows how they think about things, which is always the point.

Yeah. It says way more about the person than it does the work, how they interpret it. The Rorschach test is a perfect comparison. Have any of the interpretations been particularly surprising to you?

Someone once said about it, “This is so good because it makes poor people sound smart.” I was just like, “Oh, damn.” Or not looking up certain slang words and having bad faith misreadings of them in flagrant ways. But it’s 2022. We have the internet. I feel if you don’t understand a slang word, you should look it up like you would some big ass word from old English you don’t understand. Strange that even the most educated person would not do that.

I thought all the Nietzsche epigraphs in Fuccboi were interesting. What influence, if any, has philosophy had on your writing?

For me, at root, a philosophical question or an investigation needs to be really clear before I can feel like writing. And then every detail that I write, even descriptions of the fictional world, has to be somehow playing or prodding at that. All the epigraphs are from The Gay Science. In that book, I feel like Nietzsche was writing himself back to health. It goes through the seasons. When it’s spring finally, he’s convalescing. And I felt that’s conceptually tied to what Fuccboi is.

And also an outlook of writing. A lot of dudes are just fucked up about some shit and they could spaz out on people or they could try to write themselves into being okay.

I really liked the part of Fuccboi where it went into how Knausgård compared himself to Hitler and talking about how if people aren’t allowed to express their terrible thoughts, thoughts they might be ashamed of even having, they become more and more repressed until something has to give, basically.

Well, an interesting thing that people seem to be sleeping on is that the book is called Fuccboi, and it’s not like a pro-fuccboi book. You know what I mean?

But, at the same time, the narrator’s getting caught in loops. And I think the main thing is being able to acknowledge that we can change. Everyone is changing constantly. That goes against the Western sense of individualism, where the self is so fixed. All of the enlightenment is about the sovereign fucking individual. But I definitely, probably from my upbringing too, moving all the time and having to constantly adapt in new places, have a pretty split, poorer sense of self.

So oftentimes, at least when the book was being written, I’d be on an intense one about something that was making me spaz. And then when something would shift in how I’d feel about the world, and I stepped back and laughed at myself or looked at myself, then I would start to try to write it and just straddle the lines. But if it’s too fixed and you have a moral point you’re trying to make or you’re angry, you’re writing is just not going to be good.

I’m continually trying to get to that point of stepping back a little bit, which I think is the point of what reading does. It helps you step back a little bit and look at what you’re doing and allow yourself to reevaluate.

But I don’t know. That could just be me. A lot of people have really clear ideas about who they are and they go back to their hometown and they’re with their childhood friends and they’re fine. You know what I mean? Maybe that’s just indicative of me being a little schizophrenic.

When you were saying that I just thought “writing on the precipice of change.” I don’t know. That seems like such a good point from which to write.

I like that. I agree.

And also a really good rule to have for yourself. Until you’re starting to turn the idea over and see it in a different way, you don’t know it. You don’t know something until you see multiple angles.

And it’s way more fun when everything is turned. Syntactically, tonally, politically. And obviously the core point of it is just the larger gang mentality of the culture. It’s way easier to be on one side and fucking rage out on the other side. That’s just a way more calmer existential state to be in, because you don’t have to straddle anything. And the protagonist of Fuccboi is raging out against that, but not in a clearly defined way. Or else it’s not interesting, I feel.

A lot of the time, as soon as you start articulating something, it kills the nuance of what you’re feeling. One of literature’s faculties is being able to straddle things in that silent way. And that’s also something I need to keep reminding myself. It’s easy to fucking wanna fight, but it’s just that you want to be angry. You’ve got to replace that anger. It’s no good.

Do you have a philosophical question that Fuccboi was answering or exploring?

For sure. I mean, it’s a title. It’s like The Sarah Book in that it’s like a breakup. Let’s look clearly at a bunch of fucking fuckery you’re on, but then looking at bigger questions. It speaks to the bigger question of a dude who has no sense of economic belonging, no financial safety net, health issues. And for whatever reason, self-imposed or not, he feels like he has no use for himself in the world. Like, looking at that, you know? So that’s the philosophical question. Is it all him or is it the world?

And then if I ever get too far into one direction, fucking straddling it—bringing it back and trying to stay in that curious mode of only looking at different sides of things instead of trying to moralize or tamp one thing down. And that became the organizing principle of Fuccboi.

I called the narrator of Fuccboi by my name. As soon as you say the author has your name, people are going, “Oh, you’re just writing about your life.” It’s like, “No.” If you just wrote a book like, “Hey, here are things that happen to me,” it wouldn’t be good. But it’s also exciting, for me as a reader, books that have the narrator have the name of the author, because then you’re trying to navigate what the author’s doing with where he or she is drawing the lines.

Even if we were, to our knowledge, telling a first person story about our experiences, it would also be fiction in a different way too, just because memory is flawed.

The minute you start writing, you’re lying.

I was curious, having attended an MFA program, do you recommend?

As patricidal as the narrator is, and maybe I am in some ways towards anything institutional, ultimately, literature is a community that everyone participating in it literally upholds. If no one’s reading and digging up old books and talking about them and making them important, they’re not important. So I think that if you find yourself in a circumstance where you’re able to attend—it’s obviously not something that everyone can do—and you feel you have something important to share and you have an opportunity to work with writers you respect and learn from them and partake in that conversation, then definitely. You know?

Participating in communities besides your solipsistic self is something that it took me a long time to get to, but is something that I think, ultimately, helped me. It was good for me. I was the solitary, lone, “I’m-fucking-more-real-than-everybody”-guy for 10 years. And that didn’t lead me to a good place. At the same time, writing is, will always be, a solitary thing. No MFA program, no matter how good the teachers, is going to tell you how to do it.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Shy Watson.

I think it’s important for a personal essay to have an honest viewpoint. I feel like a lot of bad personal essays that I read tend to make the speaker out to be especially virtuous, or more victimized than is necessary. There’s a lot of personal essays where the whole story is, “I was victimized by something completely out of my control. Here is what happened to me.” And there’s really not even that much of the narrator in it. It’s almost like a report, where something terrible happens to someone who didn’t deserve it. And that’s an important thing to write for yourself maybe, but it doesn’t make for good reading.

I was surprised by how tender and sincere your essays were. Someone left a comment on your Patreon which read, “You always get to the underlying core, and it’s brilliant every time.” I agree. How do you succeed in this?

I wish I knew. I guess I just spend a lot of time in my own head. Pretty much everything I write for Patreon is roughly the same form; it’s like first-person critical, but still personal-type writing. And so, I just have to spend a whole lot of time in my own head deciding what I really think about something. Because I feel like the danger with that kind of writing is, you end up with a silly, haughty op-ed.

What I really want is to find something that I’m interested in, obviously, and then to decide what the real story is in there. Because even when I’m writing about something like the history of Home-EC, I don’t want to just write a straightforward history, and I don’t want to opine too much. I want to try and find the core of what that history was, why it’s meaningful to me, and ideally meaningful to other people, and write from there.

Do you think of humor as a literary device?

Yeah, definitely. And I think it’s a really hard one to use successfully. It’s so hard to even be funny in person, in a conversation, when the other person has a chance to understand that you’re joking in real time. In a lot of literature, there are these unsuccessful attempts to be witty and quippy and Oscar Wilde-like, in a way that just completely flattens on the page. It’s unfunny in an uncomfortable way. And I wish I knew the secret to avoiding that. I really don’t, but I try.

How do you edit your own work? What happens after you finish the first draft?

The first draft is always just word vomit. It’s an excavation project, more than anything else. I teach classes for Catapult on the craft of the personal essay. And one big note I always have when we talk about drafting is, don’t try to do a good job. Don’t be precious about it. Do your best not to edit in real time. I’m always catching myself; I’ll type a sentence, and then I’ll think of a better word for that sentence, and I’ll go back and fix it. And then, it just takes hours and hours, and I’m not really getting anywhere.

In order to end up with anything you can use, you have to excavate a whole bunch of stuff you can’t use, and get it all out of your system, and then go back later and chip away at all the terrible stuff that you’ve uncovered, and find the things that go together, ideas that go together, and motifs that feel like they keep coming up; and then, reassemble a piece of writing that way. That’s also what I do for my own stuff.

And that’s, I think, partly why all the essays in my book are kind of a hodgepodge. Nothing is straightforward cultural criticism, and nothing is a straightforward personal essay, either. It’s all pretty blended together. And I think that is probably a function of how, in the course of writing every one of those essays, I had to start out with 7,000 words of drivel, and then go back and find things that stuck with me, and put those together.

I like how the structure of your essays, there’s usually two or three threads that seem to interweave throughout. How do you manage to structure that flow so well?

I don’t know how I manage to do it well. I definitely have a lot of failed projects that do the same thing. Tons of times, I’ll end up with three or four threads that feel at first like they go together; and then if I follow them to their natural ending points, it all splits apart and becomes unusable to me. It’s back to the drawing board from there. What you see in Tacky is the end product of a whole shitload of essays that did not work, and then a dozen that felt like they did.

So you’re willing to let go of a project if it isn’t working?

I let go of stuff a lot. I do come back to stuff a lot, as well. I have kind of a chaotic workflow in that way, where if a piece of writing feels like it’s not working in the moment, I just have to jettison it for a while. And they always say that the secret ingredient is time; that’s the secret ingredient in editing, and in thinking through your own ideas. It takes time, and it takes space. You have to take some space away from a project, to come back to it later and read it with fresh eyes. That’s really common advice, but it’s still true. And I will sometimes go years without touching a draft of something that I was really excited about at first.

People say you should write every day; and I think the idea too, is that you should work on the same project every day for a while, and ideally chip away at it until you have something you can use. But I don’t really work that way. I do try and write every day, but it is chaotic like that; I’ll work on something for a week, and then put it in a drawer. And I’ll work on something else for a week, and then it goes in the drawer. And so I always have a backlog of stuff that I’m enthusiastic about, but just not ready to tackle yet.

I think you were a part of Weird Facebook and that you’re big into Twitter. What do online communities or platforms offer you?

It’s a double-edged sword, because I think there’s a sweet spot with online communities—you don’t want to have too many eyes on you, because then people start just shitting on you for no reason. And the benefits do not outweigh the detriments at that point; it just becomes really miserable.

But there was a stretch of about a year on Facebook and on Twitter as well, where I had just enough people in my various social circles. I had enough community reach that I was meeting some really cool people that I wouldn’t have met under other circumstances, probably. And I was forming real friendships, lasting friendships, and lasting relationships. And I met my boyfriend on Twitter. It is good for finding those kindred spirit types who you probably wouldn’t encounter otherwise.

It’s also really bad for just about everything else. It’s so corrosive and unpleasant. And I’m really making an honest effort to use social media less after my book stuff is done; because right now, I kind of don’t have a choice. I feel like at a certain point you’ve met all the people that you’re going to meet on Twitter; all the people you’re going to get along with. And at that point you need to take a long step back, and come back later when it doesn’t make you so miserable.

You’re such a hustler, and I respect it. How did you figure out how to make a living through your creative work?

I have stripper instincts, first and foremost. I have no shame about just straight up asking strangers for money when I need it. That impulse sticks with you. When I started my Patreon, I was really struggling financially; and I also had a day job at the time that radically underpaid me, that I hated. And my idea was I was going to start this Patreon. I would build it up slowly, do good work first and then start asking for money, because I knew that it takes a long time; and at a certain point, I would quit my job.

And then I got doxed in June of last year, 2020. Some stranger doxed me to my boss, and sent her a bunch of tweets that I’d done kind of mildly making fun of my job, and also a bunch of tweets that were slutty pictures of me. And so she forwarded this email to me, and was like, “What the hell is this?”

And I had to do a little series of calculations in my head. I thought, “Well, I work for a tiny family business. There are like 10 people in this office. And most of them are my boss’s relatives. So if I stay here after this, I’m just going to be the target of gossip for forever.” And all of those people also happened to be very religious, so it was going to be that kind of gossip.

And I quit. And then I posted on Twitter what had happened, and why I had quit. And I got a real surge in Patreon patrons, thank god. And that’s been my bread and butter ever since. And I feel conflicted about that sometimes. I feel like maybe I shouldn’t have these subscribers, and they’re only here because they feel sorry for me. But I also do good work every week, and people have the chance to jump ship if they want, and they mostly don’t. So I feel good about where I’m at with it right now; but it was a really horrible journey.

I’m glad you got here!

Me too. It could have gone a lot of other ways.

Does writing for your Patreon help you to become a better writer?

Yes. If nothing else, it’s forced me to develop better work habits as a writer, because no matter what, I’m on the hook for one piece of writing a week for hundreds of subscribers. And if I don’t produce, then probably I’m going to lose a lot of subscribers really quickly. And so, it’s not so loosey goosey for me anymore.

And that does have its downsides. There are weeks when I just don’t feel like putting my ass in the chair, opening my laptop, and doing the work. And it would be nice to be able to give into that impulse once in a while. But I also know myself; and I know that if I give into the “keep your ass out of the chair” impulse once, I’m going to do it every day for like six months. I’m always fighting, as a writer, against my own impulse to just never do anything.

And on the craft level too, I think writing one piece of critical, personal writing per week has made me much better at doing so quickly and getting to the point quickly. Before I started my Patreon, it would be years that I would be chipping away at the same essay. And I still do that sometimes, but it’s also nice to know that I have the ability to write something quickly that still passes my own quality checks.

I often think about and admire how you sold tit pics for Bernie donations. Do you feel that public figures such as yourself have a political responsibility?

I will say I wouldn’t do that again for the purpose of electoral politics. I have really given up on thinking that whoever’s president is going to change things meaningfully in this country. So I wouldn’t do it for Bernie Sanders again. But I also did a few of those fundraisers for Mutual Aid Funds and things like that.

And I do think that people who are prominent should put their money where their mouth is and make a statement one way or the other as to where their loyalties lie. And whether they want to do that by selling nude photos or some other way, that’s immaterial. But that was something that I happened to have that I knew people wanted at the time. And I thought, “Fuck it. I will set a price for these things that is worthwhile to me. And if people donate, then that’s what they get.” I raised a lot of money that way.

Really?

It was really shocking. People want to throw their money around. That’s the other thing; there are a lot of people out there with money to throw around, who kind of don’t know where to throw it. I feel like I see on Twitter, especially, a lot of paralysis, and a lot of people saying, “I want to donate to more GoFundMes or whatever. But I also know that there are some scammers out there, and I want to donate to Mutual Aid Funds, but I don’t know which ones are legit, and which ones are doing the best work or whatever.”

And that internal struggle ends up with people who have money to burn just holding onto it until something legitimate presents itself. And so, I think that really the best thing I was able to do with that platform was promote stuff that I believed to be good, and put that stuff in people’s face, so that they were presented with a much more stark choice. It wasn’t just a million GoFundMes floating around in the internet ether, and you have to pick one. A selection was being curated for them. And I think that’s something really important that people should be doing, is take the time to learn who’s doing that work, and throw your weight behind them. Don’t try to be a hero yourself. A lot of good-hearted people feel this urge to cram the good works of decades into about a week once they learn about some injustice for the first time — they want to start a relief fund on their own, or operate their own community fridge or whatever — but they’re too new, they don’t know what they’re doing, and they make a lot of wasted efforts before giving up and going home. Don’t do that. Find the people who have been doing the work and support them.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Shy Watson.

I thought that I had made what I was available for explicit—being very literal and clear—but a lot of people still approached me with ambiguity and hesitation. I felt like I had a lot of interactions where people’s desires would go by unsaid and unmet. It was surprising to me how hesitant people were to say what they really wanted, even while given every opportunity.

It made me think that impediments to asserting what you want are so strong and also deeply internalized. I feel there are a lot of barriers in place to prevent people from speaking openly about their desires if they feel ashamed or haven’t been given the opportunity. I thought I was being clear about what people could say, like “ I want this specific thing from you,” or, “I want to fuck you,” or “I want you to answer these questions for me.” “And this is what I can offer you in return,” whether it’s money or trade or whatever. And it just seemed really hard for people to do that. Maybe I wasn’t making it as clear as I thought.

I read that you changed the monetary terms after someone who didn’t want to pay you attempted to see you for free. You set the boundary: “This is work. And if this is a space of work, I am going to charge.” After realizing what you just shared, are you thinking about changing anything with how people ask for what they want or giving them any specific guidelines?

For the next version of this piece, which I’m staging at Duplex this winter, I want to create a much more specific choreography. Partly because I think that will also help the piece be more legible as performance in art spaces if it takes after a more traditional, instructional model, like having a physicalization of what’s happening, a card that says, “Here’s the rules of engagement: Number one, enter the space. Number two, pay X amount of money Number three, state three things that you want.” Or something like that. I’m still working on it.

I’d like to prevent exchanges where the guidelines aren’t clear and people are reticent to say what they want. Another thing that still surprises me is realizing I’m not good at setting boundaries in the moment. I’m sort of like, “Okay, I’ll just get through whatever’s happening and go with it.” And then after the fact I’m like, why didn’t I just say, “If you’re not going to pay me, you can’t talk to me about that,” or something?

A lot of that was happening at Recess [the gallery where “Untitled (Incall)” took place]. I didn’t assert certain structures or boundaries in person and then people went with that and felt they could ask invasive questions or expect certain things, certain types of intimacy, even emotional.

I want to put up a physical paywall to begin this sort of “process of engagement” and then have everything thereafter be bespoke in terms of cost, but have there be specific steps that people engage in that are even just, “You have to answer these certain questions,” and force the interaction more than just letting it play out. I also want to put in places for me to decide, to think about it beforehand. If somebody wants to ask me about something that I don’t want to talk about, these are the conditions under which I would talk about it. And these are the conditions under which I wouldn’t. Or, if someone wants to do X, then these are the conditions under which I would, or wouldn’t. I want it to be less free form. I’m most interested in enacting the reality that what a lot of people want from artists is not to collect their work, necessarily, but their self, particularly their erotic self.

Because I was doing this for the first time at Recess, I had this feeling of not wanting to alienate people and wanting to just see what would happen. Now that I’ve had that experience, I don’t need to have it again. If I put certain structures in place and people don’t want to engage with those structures, that’s fine with me. That would be just as interesting as if they did engage.

Half of the gallery was a library, the Erotic Labor Reading Room, that you curated. What titles did you choose for it and what were their significance?

I chose a a lot of my favorite writing around erotic labor and sex work. Much of it is not in book form, or is more online. The website Tits and Sass has an amazing trove of sex worker writing. So I also printed out some of that stuff. I had a copy of Playing the Whore, the Melissa Gira Grant book. It’s a primer on what she calls the “prostitute imaginary,” which is a genius way of framing what people think about when they think about sex work and criminalization. I had all of Charlotte Shane’s books. I had Samuel Delaney’s Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, which is more about public sex and gentrification. The Black Body in Ecstasy by Jennifer C. Nash. Close to the Knives by David Wojnarowicz.

I had one of my favorite pieces that I’ve read in the last few years on sex work, which is by the Clandestine Whores Network from the first issue of Pinko. It’s sort of a manifesto called “Beneath Everything.” It’s about this beautiful crime utopia taking place in five years. It’s basically about hookers not relinquishing their criminal potential, and being and forming bonds with other criminals. I had a lot more, too.

The concept behind “Beneath Everything” brings to mind the harm reduction workshops that you facilitated during your duration at Recess and the kits you provided for drug-using sex workers, which leads me to wonder, what does community mean for you?

Thanks for asking that. I feel like a huge problem today is that people constantly invoke the word “community” and don’t think or talk about what it means. It’s so interesting to me when people will be like, “Oh, because you’re part of the sex worker community.” Like, I don’t even know what community they’re talking about. I don’t think of myself as part of any particular community other than just the people that I love and are close to and spend time with. Those people don’t necessarily have any particular labor position or identity signifiers in common other than maybe a certain politics.

But I do feel allegiance to people in New York who sell sex and do drugs. And, if you want to talk about that as a certain community, just for the sake of conversation, I definitely feel an allegiance to those people and a desire to help keep certain people safe or make certain people feel welcome in different spaces.

At Recess and just in general, that’s been really important for me, for people to feel comfortable coming there who aren’t even sex workers, but also maybe aren’t super professionalized sex workers, or don’t even have a particular feeling around selling sex but maybe have some other kind of material need, like for narcan, condoms, lube, or self defense stuff, or whatever. I just really didn’t want there to be any prerequisite for coming to the reading room. I think a lot that comes from me often feeling disillusioned and alienated when expecting to find community in certain spaces and then being like, “Oh yeah, just because me and this person maybe do the same job or have been at the same event or whatever doesn’t mean we have really anything common in terms of what we actually think or feel.” That’s fine, but then another way to bring people together is to offer materials that they need.

Aside from money, what are the rewards of your creative practice?

Most of the creative work I do is the result of stuff I just think about about all the time on my own. So, making, doing, and then sharing that creative work is a way to push my thinking around it and to open up new ways of thinking. I’ll think a whole thing around what transaction means or around people’s desire for transactional intimacy or whatever. And then actually putting that into practice and people being willing to engage with it in different contexts is really surprising. It can be disturbing, intriguing, hot, boring, whatever. It keeps ideas regenerating and it keeps things from getting boring or stagnant or on a loop in my head. I think a lot of creative work to me just feels like externalizing stuff that is caught in a web in my brain. And then making room for more spiders to crawl.

As far as your creative work is concerned, how do you define success and how do you define failure?

Institutional success and failure is definitely important to me in that it affects me emotionally and financially. I’m not going to say that’s not important. But, in a deeper way, something feels successful to me when it continues to feel alive and interesting and generative, intellectually stimulating. I’m still grappling with whether or not it’s important to me how other people engage with my work or if that’s just kind of none of my business. But with failure, the deeper I go into the art world, certain stakes feel higher in terms of certain successes that can feel like failures by being sublimated into various mainstream platforms that are always absorbing things on the margins, being kind of aligned with those things or accepted and then used by them. I feel afraid that ultimately that would feel like a certain type of failure, failing myself or failing someone whose opinion I respect. If I did something and then was like, “Wow, I really don’t like that I did that.”

You’re finalizing your book, Working Girl. It’s out on Verso in 2023. What aspect of it are you most excited about?

I’m excited to see how it changes. It’s still in the editorial process for sure, so I think it will change a lot. I also just feel really lucky and excited to share something that I think about. Like, “Wow, the thing that I probably spent most of my adult life thinking about is sex, art, and work. So it’s cool that I get to write about this and write in a long form way.” The book engages with contradictory things and feelings in a way that maybe a shorter form essay couldn’t. It’s the first time I’ve written something so long like that.

I feel really excited about being able to share that. I feel excited to see how people will respond to it, particularly the anarchist/anti-work sentiment that it’s coming from. I’m curious if that will resonate with people or not. I’m honestly also curious if by the time it comes out,I’ll think totally differently about it. It feels a distillation of a certain moment in time around my thinking, which is cool.

I was curious how you arrived at the title for you short film, “In Heaven: An Alternate Reality Game.”

It came out of thinking and research that I was doing for the book around artists who have engaged with various forms of sex work or who made really sexualized art. I was reading about Jeff Koons’ and Illona Staller’s “Made in Heaven” series and thinking about how I read a lot of interviews that he gave at the time about this pornographic work he made with his wife, and then all the reviews and stuff were like “Is this art or is this pornography?” It was scandalous. And then ultimately he divorced her and destroyed a lot of the work. In their divorce’s custody battle, he was nasty to her and showed her porn in court and claimed she was an unfit mother. It was sketchy.

That was all looming in my mind. They were going to make a film together. One of the most recognizable pieces from the series is a poster for a forthcoming pornographic short film. And then they never made it. I thought it was interesting that he was hyped at the time about making it and then a few years later was just like, “She’s a hooker. Can you believe how horrible her porn is?” Also, I don’t really like him as a person, but I think that work is beautiful and I love how she looks in it. I love that kind of aesthetic. And so I think I borrowed a bit from the aesthetic to style me and Tourmaline.

Our film isn’t pornographic, but it is suggesting the opportunity for sex in a certain way. I called it an alternate reality game because I think that’s an interesting way to think about escorting, that you’re calling up this alternate reality. When someone contacts you and follows the steps of the game, it calls these alternate realities into being. You’re this other person for a little bit of time, because somebody’s watched your video and contacted you and booked the hotel. I wanted it feel like both an invitation to participate in a game and also to be a bit referential to work that had come before. Also, I just love heaven and angel aesthetics, so that’s a part of it, too.

I can’t stop thinking of the stanza “as below, so above” that shows up in the film. I was curious what those lines mean to you.

I was playing around with the high, low, exalted, desecrated type stuff. And obviously the more traditional version of that is “as above, so below.” I wanted be like, “No, what’s happening here, on Earth, in this room, is hotter and better and as good as anything you could ever imagine,” basically, to give primacy to the material.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Shy Watson.

Honestly, it’s something that I do all the time, and I think that’s partly because I’m such an anxious person. I’m constantly imagining terrible things that could happen, even if they defy the laws of our known reality. I think it interacts with my OCD, which has been much worse over the pandemic.

Same.

Every night, I would be looking at my oven to make sure it was off, and as I was staring at the knobs, I would be doubting my ability to perceive that they were really off. I felt like anything could change at any time. My experience of reality is often like that. It’s a short jump from not trusting that my oven is off to not knowing if there’s a monster in my shower head.

That actually does make sense to me, and I wasn’t expecting you to say that it was OCD, but I have the same thing where I’m constantly doubting everything to the point where I can be looking at tangible evidence of having done something and I’m like, “But did I?”

Totally.

What element from the realistic beginning of A Touch of Jen made it possible for such a fantastical end? At what point did we slip into the possibility of the otherwise impossible?

On a brass tacks level there’s a moment in the Hamptons where Remy sees something in the bushes and he doesn’t really know what it is. It’s the first hint of something beyond social comedy, or beyond the stakes of the world as we’ve known it before. There’s also Alicia’s sleepwalking before this, which is unsettling but totally explicable in realistic terms. I thought a lot about about how much to plant at what time, and ultimately I didn’t want the supernatural stuff to feel overly integrated into the universe of the first part of the book. I wanted to give little hints of the supernatural to prime the readers a bit and then suddenly immerse them in this scary new reality.

What do you do when you’re creatively stuck?

Well, with this book, I took mushrooms. I was struggling with some logistical issues towards the end and needed to think about the plot in a new way. It wasn’t necessarily about the mushrooms per se, as much as it was about trying to disrupt my old patterns of thinking. I think that being in an MFA program was also helpful in this way. I was reading so many other people’s writing and thinking about it on a craft level, that I wasn’t getting stuck in my own ruts so much, because I was thinking about how to solve other people’s problems. So I think that everything that I do to keep myself creatively activated, or to prevent myself from getting in ruts, is just trying to disrupt my patterns.

Yeah. New age philosophies of magical thinking are big themes in A Touch of Jen. Is this something you partake in or are you wary of it?

As someone who’s had bad experiences with OCD at different times in my life, I definitely engage in magical thinking all the time. I also come from a religious background. My father’s a pastor, so I’ve been around a lot of magical thinking around prayer, which you can think about in terms of the universe looking back at you.

I don’t necessarily engage in the type of new age mysticism that’s in A Touch of Jen, though I definitely see its allure. If anything, I was trying to explore some of the narcissism of new age thinking—the way it’s so often focused on individual self-actualization, which is seen as the ultimate good, rather than ideals or goals that are more collective.

Do you think that following a sense of personal destiny ultimately leads to some kind of destruction?

There are degrees of everything obviously, and I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with trying to find a sense of purpose and stability, which is what so many of the characters in the book are longing for. But I do think that when you’re following a sense of personal destiny, there’s this danger that you might start to see anyone who gets in the way of that as a means to an end or a monster to be vanquished.

Good point. You thanked MetaFilter in your acknowledgements. I was wondering what MetaFilter is and how it helped you write your book?

It’s like Quora, but it’s older and it’s higher quality because in order to participate in the forums and ask questions and answer questions, you have to pay a one-time fee of $5. So just that tiny fee, even though it’s not recurring, really changes the quality of the conversation. People are so excited to be helpful. There’s so many people out there with really specific knowledge. And I only asked a few questions on MetaFilter, but you could just get lost on there forever because people love to weigh in.

What questions did you ask?

I asked a question about the kinds of chaotic experiences people have working in hospitals. Hospitals are such a trope in books and TV and I didn’t want the hospital scene in the book to feel cliché.

You did a really good job with that scene by the way, I was like, “This is hell on earth.” It was just like a maze from hell. It seemed very real to life, unfortunately.

Oh good, I’m glad.

So what does your curiosity look like when you’re moving through a creative project? Like how do you explore different things?

I’m just doing everything I can to not be bored. If I can feel that I’m dreading writing a section, I’ll sometimes ask myself if it’s something that’s really necessary to the story. If I’m not feeling a ton of interest, is there maybe something that would be better?

How does the lens of social media confirm or distort our preconceptions of other people?

It mostly has to do with the perception of intimacy that we have, even with people who might just be acquaintances. I think that there’s a real sense, illusory or not, that you know people who you maybe see maybe once a year. There are people who I’ve met maybe five times in my life who I know what their job is, what they’re doing, what they had to eat today. And I feel like they are my friends, because so often we’ll just, like, message, but we haven’t seen each other in real life in years sometimes, even if we live in the same neighborhood. So, I think that social media can just alter your sense of access to people, especially because sometimes people use social media to be more vulnerable than they might be in a real life conversation. Or they might talk about their needs more, ask for things on social media that they might not elsewhere. So I do think that there’s a specific type of intimacy that has changed the way that we interact that is specifically a product of social media.

How did you manage to make your characters so unlikable yet simultaneously instill so much empathy within your readers?

I’m glad that you felt empathy for them, because that’s what I’m always hoping for. Whenever I’m writing a character, I’m trying to think about what’s going to interest me as a reader and as a writer, and what’s going to interest me is something that feels really real, which is often a moment that shows their vulnerability. Accessing characters’ vulnerability in this way can sometimes make them unlikable and it can sometimes make them really, really sympathetic.

You did a good job balancing the two.

I’m never really writing in a spirit of contempt. I mean, not never, occasionally maybe, but most of the time, I’m just trying to figure out what feels authentic and what is going to jog a sense of recognition in someone else.

How do other people or collaborators figure into your work?

My partner is a big part of my process. He’s my first reader. He’s someone who I talk to a lot and I think it’s a constant struggle between figuring out when to share and when to keep it private. At what point do I need to talk through something with another person? And when do I still just need to let it sit inside me and work on it in a very interior way? But for the most part, I try not to give him anything until it’s as far as I can get on my own. Even if I am talking about it sometimes in an abstract way beforehand. And when I do share it, it’s very involved because we talk about it a lot.

With A Touch of Jen, for example, we read it out loud, the whole thing, twice, over the whole course of the editing process. You can always read your own work out loud, but you’re only going to pick up on the things that you specifically are going to pick up on. Whereas another person is going to pick up on things that are totally invisible to you, because you’re just so used to looking at it that you can’t see straight anymore.

Why is it that you wait until something is as worked out in your mind as it can be before sharing it?

I’ll think about things a lot before I even start writing them. There are novels that I’ve been thinking about for years, that I still haven’t started writing in earnest, even if I’ve taken a lot of notes on them. But when I sit down to write something, I mostly have a rough picture of the whole thing in my mind. That doesn’t mean there aren’t moments of discovery along the way. But I have that as my guide and it’s only when it’s on paper that I have to get outside help to figure out if I’ve faithfully actualized my vision.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Shy Watson.

I like a sentence that is propulsive. In Nightbitch, I was reveling in long sentences. I like a sentence that takes you into it, and then won’t let you out. But then I also think there’s something really beautiful about the deeply controlled, crystalline, finely distilled sentence that kind of has a ping at the end of it. I just read a book called Chouette and every sentence has a like, ping, ping, at the end of it because they’re just all utterly balanced and refined.

I loved the long sentences in Nightbitch, because they made me feel way more rushed and anxious. Propulsive is a great word for it.

I’m really interested in a sentence that feels sung and I think long sentences, the way I write myself through them, they’re closer to music and singing than they are necessarily to prose.

Do you play music?

I was raised in a very musical family. I played the piano from an early age and I sing. I’ve moved away from music, but I still really crave it. I think I bring that into my writing and musicality very much informs my writing. I usually feel my writing and hear my sentences before I process them intellectually.

The more Nightbitch’s narrator transforms into a dog, the better she is at being a mother. I was curious about that.

Having a kid showed me how much of an animal I really am and how much biology can short circuit your higher intellectual brain and take over your entire life. How caring for your young is this innate animal urge. For Nightbitch, giving into those animalistic qualities allows her to mother the way she wants to mother. When a child’s that young, they’re such a little animal and they’re so embodied, right? They’re so in touch with their instincts and their base wants. And so for the mother to go there with her child, she’s able to be present as an animal, to be in the moment, and that’s a beautiful experience to have with your offspring.

I loved it. The narrator also seems to fear expression, whether it be asking the book mommies if they are dogs, updating the husband on her canine developments, or even asking the husband to do bed times. How do you explore the unsaid in your work?

The whole experience of writing Nightbitch was an interaction with the unsaid. It was bringing into language all of the sensations and tensions and questions and struggles of motherhood that were swirling around inside of me, and which I had never heard articulated, and which I also wasn’t yet able to articulate for myself. Working with these tensions in fictional space felt like the safest way to explore this unsaid rather than diving into it, headlong in my own life.

I would describe the book as brave, because I feel like it’s a faux pas in polite society to admit to the frustration of motherhood, even though it’s natural and, really, innate.

Thanks. I feel like there’s all of these rules about politeness and niceness that get applied, especially to mothers. Mothers are supposed to be caretakers and sweet and endlessly giving and endlessly self-sacrificing and it just all seemed like bullshit to me. You don’t stop being a person when you become a mom. You’re still this full complicated person, so why can’t we see that in our literature, too?

For sure. Nightbitch speaks a lot to art being an inherent result of simply living. Can you talk about how this does or does not prove true in your own life experience?

I think especially with writing Nightbitch, it became very apparent to me how there really isn’t any separation between the life I’m living and the art that I’m making. It’s all of a piece and perhaps for some other people it doesn’t come from such a personal place. My writing has always originated out of a deep, personal need that I have or some problem or question that I need to work out in a safe creative space. That’s what Nightbitch was for me, and everything I do sort of informs what I’m working on or what I’m thinking about. I really do think that living an artful life, for me, just means wanting to be very awake and very conscious to what I’m experiencing.

Do you have any particular methods that you use to stay more awake or present?

I’ve been getting into routines this past year. I bought this line-a-day diary and every morning I sit down and I have a beginning task. “Okay, this is how I start.” Right? I write one line about what’s going on. I sit in my sunroom, and I look out the window at the plants. I light a candle. I touch a piece of rose quartz I keep on the table. Coming up with a routine and having these items that I can touch each day I think has also been a function of the pandemic, too. How to ground yourself in the pandemic. How to keep going despite circumstances which challenge the process, which tell you that it doesn’t matter.

I also usually read a little bit from a book about art or process or psychology. There’s a wonderful book called Art and Fear, which I read through during the pandemic, just like a morning meditation, and have now finished and am starting again. Also just trying to be off my phone more and be present in the world has been really transformative for me, too.

I was wondering if you would say that.

I’ve become so addicted to it, and it’s such a way to check out. I’m trying to be really conscious of coming back into my body. I have to come back into the actual space that I’m living in. I can’t just always be in this imaginary ether space of people I don’t know and their words. So for me, it’s just been these very kind of basic quiet ritualized things of returning to a paper and pen, returning to a book. Sitting in the heat and feeling my body sweat in an actual environment. Stuff like that.

I know that you’re the founding editor of draft journal and that you’ve played a big role in organizing Mission Creek Festival as well as assisting with other literary events and organizations in Iowa. How do you balance these projects with your own creative work. How do they help or hinder each other?

They have been really great. These other projects definitely take time away from my writing time, which is the drawback. But there are so many benefits from them. For instance, with draft, I’m talking with other authors about their processes and going really deep into a single piece, talking about sentences, talking about craft, something that I haven’t done since I got my MFA. It’s this wonderful re-engagement on a deep level with writing and the creative process, and with craft, that you just don’t get every day. It’s hard to find that if you’re not in an MFA program. I use those conversations with authors to then return to my own work and start examining it that same way.

The same thing with Mission Creek. It takes a huge amount of time to plan all that. The benefit is, whenever I go to a reading and hear an author not only read, but talk about their work, I start thinking about my own work, and it gets me excited to return to my own work because I’m just so inspired by what they’ve said or what they’ve read or they’ve given me an amazing idea I want to explore. It’s this constant process of donating some of your creative time to making these cool things happen. But in return, you get this great inspiration and you get a framework for returning to your own work in a more engaged way. In a more excited way.

Your narrator is a visual artist. Have you worked as a visual artist before?

I have dabbled in the arts, but I’m not an artist by any means, like a studio artist. I did take screenwriting classes and considered going to film school and have always really loved the film medium. That’s really as far as that goes. In terms of all the arts stuff, I was an Iowa Arts Fellow, which is this grant that’s given out by the state of Iowa, back in 2017. I toured the state with four artists: a sculptor and a filmmaker and a musician and a painter. We went around Iowa, presented our work, and I was moved not only by their work, but by how they talked about it. I was like, “Wow, why are writers and studio artists and filmmakers and musicians not all in school together?” Because it seems like there’s such amazing synergy that happens when you get all those different kinds of brains, disciplines, and ideas in the room.

Nightbitch has this project she made in grad school with the bones and carving the bones and the gold and that is completely stolen from one of those artists. Her name is Lee Running; she’s an amazing sculptor who would find roadkill, clean all the bones, and carve them. That thing is real. The sculpture of the recreated deer is a real thing that Lee made. And I became obsessed with this sculpture to the point that I said to myself, this is going in the book, even if I don’t know how, it has to be there.

I didn’t for a second think that was real. That’s such a wild project to take on, picking up the roadkill, everything. Another example of art that is very brave.

She is a badass. Her work is absolutely incredible. We still have a relationship; she just emailed me the other day. We’re on the same wavelength, but we’re operating in different disciplines. It’s really interesting to be in conversation and be like, “Oh, what are you working on? How can my brain sort of use that for writing?”

Aside from money, what are the rewards of your creative practice? What do you get out of your work and what has it taught you about yourself?

I know that I am the most myself and the most at peace with myself and the happiest when I am regularly and consistently writing and making space in my life for creative play and fantasy and hopefulness, because I do think writing is an inherently hopeful act. Especially in these times of global climate crisis and pandemics, why would I still keep writing? What is it going to do to help these seemingly insurmountable problems? For me, it is an act of hope. It is also an act of self-love and supporting my own mental health.

Writing is almost a religious act. It’s taken the place of religion for me in that it’s something I have faith in, that I know isn’t going to fail me. It’s something I return to daily. It’s a ritual. It’s something that puts me in touch with not only myself and my own dreams, but it also feels like it puts me in touch with something much larger that I’m tapping into, a sort of larger mystery that I get to interact with via writing. It’s fulfilling a lot of different things for me, a spiritual need, a personal introspective need, even my need for community, because it connects me to other writers via this contemplative endeavor we’ve all committed to.

How long did it take you to write Nightbitch, and what the process was like?

It took me about three years. I wrote it after two years of not writing, which for me was an epically long time to not write. I was very panicked that I was never going to write again and maybe I wasn’t a writer, which is my worst nightmare. Then I just kind of got this little gem of an idea and it seemed really bonkers and like it’d be super fun. I could be totally free on the page, and it poured out of me. It took me three years, but I wasn’t writing every day.

Jami Attenberg started this thing on Twitter where she said, “I’m going to write for the next two weeks, a thousand words every day. If anyone wants to join me, let’s do it.” It has the hashtag #thousandwordsofsummer. That has not ever been the way that I write, word count for a number of weeks, but I was like, “Okay, well, I don’t have a lot of time, so I’m going to do it this way.”

I would write a thousand words for 14 days, have 14,000 new words, and I wouldn’t write for a couple months. Then I would do it again, and that’s how the book got written. It was written in these chunks, over a number of years. I was really, really determined to write a book because I was almost 40, I had a little boy, and I had two MFA’s, and I didn’t have a book. And I was like, “Rachel, you are writing a book now!” So I was focused on putting enough words together for it to be a book and absolutely determined. The determination was a physical sensation, of pushing this huge pile of words forward, no matter what. Some days were exhausting, because I didn’t want to write and didn’t have anything to say, but you write something anyway. You keep going no matter what. To have this work to do is a great gift.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Shy Watson.

Oh.

What is there left to write into? What fuels your poetry?

What do you mean by apocalyptic?

I felt like there were a lot of poems about the world ending. Are there not? I mean, there was like global warming and societal collapse…

Yeah, no, there’s the Anthropocene poem and the nuclear war one…

Yeah, yeah. All that.

Well, like a lot of people having Anthropocene guilt or climate despair, I think it takes on different psychological valances. So, for me, I think it’s very helpful as a coping mechanism to build out almost like a fantasy structure about what that could look like and these sort of small, controllable moments of it. So in “Nukemap.com,” there’s this point where I’m trying to convince my roommate at the time that if the bomb goes off above 39th street, because I live on 8th street, that maybe we’ll both survive, which of course is not true and would definitely not happen. But it’s a way to explore wishful thinking within a doomed state.

It’s also a way to play with fatalism. Like how much fatalism can I bear? Where can I find humor within fatalism? Where can I find survival within fatalism? What would that look like? And I think humor is a big part of that. I remember taking this quiz that was like, “How long would you last in an apocalypse?” And my friends took it and they got two weeks because they could name their closest fresh drinking resource or something, and mine was like less than 24 hours. Like, I’m the first bitch to die in the apocalypse. And because I’m the first bitch to die in the apocalypse, part of me is like, “I feel like I could really write a good exit letter,” because it would be the first exit letter.

What was it like to release a book of poetry on such a highly acclaimed press at the beginning of 2020? Right before lockdown?

It sucked. It was great for three weeks. For three weeks, it was like a dream. I got to six cities, at least: San Francisco and LA and Montreal and I got to see people I really loved, but like everybody else, the early pandemic was sort of at the brink of the unimaginable. And when I look back on it, I really worry about my book launch, which was in February. New York City shut down three weeks later. And I worried about that, it was like 80 people. And I’m like, “Was that a super spreader event?” All of a sudden you’re anxiously doing this calculus backwards while also trying to juxtapose these ugly feelings that you have about the shit luck of having a book come out during a global death event. And these two things can both be true at once. You can feel shitty about it and then on the other hand understand that obviously there are much more important things happening.

But in a way, it was really good for me to rethink my understanding of what a meritocracy is, because the reality is, who gives a shit about poetry if people don’t have health insurance? It made me think a lot about the basics, like food insecurity, accessibility. It made me think more deeply about the way I move in this city, the way I glamorize this city to a point where a lot of the basics disappear and how that’s problematic.

I think it changed my poetics and my relationship to speed in terms of my writing—2020 did—because instead of seeing the city as this playground of adrenaline, which is how I saw the city previous to the pandemic, I think it made me slow down. It made me think about the constraints of the city (and I mean that formally). It made me think about what a street is, like I mention streets in my poems all the time because I love New York School poetry. But then when you actually have to rethink what makes up a street and what makes up its ability to sustain itself, you’re also coming to terms with this idea of what it means to have a drink at a bar, when on the same street, somebody else can’t fucking eat.

In other interviews, you talk about messiness in poetry, but is this your writing process?

I gave this talk last year at Tin House with a friend of mine, where we talked a lot about the wasted line and the idea of improvisational lines. So lines that kind of feel like, “Where the fuck is this poem going?” Or like, “Why would this person keep this line in a poem?” I’m sort of against economy in a poem and maybe that’s really different from the genteel tradition. Certain poets are like, “Every syllable counts, every period counts.” Everything is so tight and precise. For me, that feels outside the realm of the improvisational arts that have kind of helped produce my own aesthetic.

I grew up listening to a lot of nineties hip hop. I loved poetry that was much more oral and invested in spoken word cultures. And it’s really easy to shit on that because there’s this elitist understanding that, in order for something to be good, it has to have the look of precision as opposed to the feel of improvisation. And that’s never been an interest of mine. Sometimes I have a line in a poem that’s just there to give me the syllabic space to get to the next epiphany in the poem, but without that breath there, the epiphany can’t arrive.

So there is prophetic movement, not just in my work, but in the work of a lot of poets that I really like, where the poet is trying to understand something about flow in real time. And they want flow to feel, even if it’s not actually messy, even if it’s heavily curated, like you don’t know what’s going to come next, like there’s something you can’t anticipate about where the poem is going. And I think a lot of that also has to do with point of view. Sometimes I think a poem can feel especially messy when the reader is walking alongside the speaker of the poem, as opposed to a speaker who is omniscient and in this controlled, aerial position.

That’s just not how I write most of my poetry. I write it with the reader close next to me. I write it with a sense that the flow is going to be a little bit unruly. And I believe in unruly. Philosophically, I believe in it because it’s anti-colonial, and it feels really global south to me, it feels informal and inconvenient and cognitively disruptive. So for me, that’s very crafted. Improvisational flow is a craft because you need to know how much you can get away with. And what you are trying to get away with is time. Digression. Clearing your throat. Clearing the air. Being against efficiency… which is also a way of being against capitalism.

Why is messiness looked down upon in academic spaces? Why are they so sterile?

Girl, how much time you got? Well, let’s just say it like this: what is privileged and protected in academia is a certain way of self-presentation, a certain way of performing expertise. The easy answer is because of racialized and gendered understandings of what authority looks like, authority has to look a certain way. But as anyone who’s ever had a messy and angelic friend knows (that friend who lives in slightly a different dimension than maybe the rest of the world), they know that some of the wisest, most thrilling insight and takes come from that person. And to be honest, yes, academia is my livelihood. And I like to read critical theory, I find it interesting. But I think the space of it and the institutionalization of it is deeply violent. And part of that violence is the way that it reproduces a sense of order and a sense of hierarchy.

Because the good thing about messiness is that you can’t hierarchize it, you can’t taxonomize it. So how do you actually evaluate something that is not something you can put into a word? You can’t name it. If you can’t name it, you can’t govern it.

So, maybe it’s not messy, maybe it just looks messy. Or it feels messy, but maybe that says more about how the reader organizes their interiority, not necessarily how the line is organized, if that makes sense. That also might be why some of the identity politics stuff happening right now feels a bit off to me. There is a violence in being too legible.

There’s an urge in your poetry to share specific details and memories with the reader. I’m thinking of the diagrams of the residency that the speaker of the “The Edward Albee Barn” drew to show someone important to them. Does the fulfillment of this urge help you to feel more understood?

Yeah. I really like infrastructure. I love a room. I think things that can happen in a basement can’t happen in a kitchen, can’t happen in a bathroom, can’t happen in an attic. Those are spaces that produce different kinds of intimacies. And similarly in New York, there are things that can happen at one intersection that couldn’t happen on another intersection. On the Upper East Side, I always just feel fucking poor up there. And someone’s always mistaking me for a nanny or something. So I’m a different subject up there than I am when I’m below 14th Street. And I’m a different subject below 14th Street in Manhattan than I am, let’s say, when I’m hanging out at my friend’s house in Crown Heights.

There’s a great freedom there to figure out the space between two personhoods. And I think being a woman, being a person of color, that’s sometimes really fluid. How I was read in Echo Park in LA is really different than how I’m read in Montreal, how I’m read somewhere in France, how I’m read when I go see my family in India, you know what I mean? That kind of mutability. I think the only way to kind of tether yourself to the earth is sometimes to say, “I’m in the kitchen. It’s cold outside. There’s a tennis racket here, there’s a dried lavender, I planted thyme.”

Also, when kids are in a psychotherapist’s office or whatever, the therapist will put a bunch of objects in front of them and try to tell what the kid is doing or storytelling based on how they put objects together. It’s a way of building associations. Poets do that, too.

So there’s a poem in Good Boys called “Bad Habit.” And it’s like, “Let me put this dead deer in the fog and The Kinks together in one space and within a few lines of each other.” What am I building through this association? Is it about California? It kind of is about California, but it’s also about how you can be multiple persons within a few lines, even if you’re here in the same geographical space. So maybe it’s also about not being fully tethered. There’s also a lot of vaporous, amorphous imagery in the book. There’s a lot of fog and attention to dissipation or feeling like you’re coming undone a little bit, which maybe goes back to that messiness. What is it like not to be a condensed subject?

To not have the same container at all times.

Yes, exactly.

As far as your creative work is concerned, how do you define success? How do you define failure?

No.

No?

Well, I think this is like the pre and post pandemic feeling. I’m not going to say that I don’t believe in certain kinds of merit, because I do. I believe in certain kinds of wealth, and those things have changed. I believe deeply in my friendships. I believe friendship is one of the most radical ways of loving somebody with a real selfless commitment to another human that allows them the gentleness and room to grow. So, I’m thinking more about the wealth of those intimacies as a way to feel successful as a person, as opposed to what’s on my CV.

And that’s been a relatively recent pivot. I mean, I’ve always cared about my friendships, but I also spent my entire twenties in graduate school. I got my PhD and my MFA at the same time— I’m fucking tired. And at the end of the day, does all that matter? Maybe, I don’t know. It was good when it was stimulating for my brain, but it’s just not a way to measure yourself. It’s not a good barometer of humanness. I’m trying to figure out what are the barometers of humanness that matter. And I think: Do you have a community? Do you take care of your community? Do you love the people that you love? Well, how can you love them better? How can you do work on yourself that makes you better able to be with the people you love in the world? And keeping that as a sense of achievement on the daily, as opposed to some career mile marker.

I was up for something in the spring and it was devastating when I didn’t get it. And I was with my friend, who’s a boxer. And he was like, “Dude, even if you got it, that’s not going to solve your thirst.” He was like, “You would have been happy for three days and three days later you would have been like, ‘What’s next?’” And he’s right. I would’ve just been like, “What’s next?” Nothing will be enough. So, you gotta kind of curb that thirst in a way by sort of just saying, like “No, I’m not going to look at it too closely or attend to it.” It’s impossible under capitalism, but I’m trying to just figure out other ways to have dignity in this very merciless system. If that makes sense. But it’s a struggle. It’s really hard to do. And it’s disingenuous to be like, “I don’t give a shit about that.” Of course you do.

Of course you care about that. But there’s also a part of me that’s like, “Look at how many other people are living different kinds of lives, not just here but all over the world.” This is not the only way to live, but it’s also not even a good way to live, where a few people get some things and other people don’t even have health insurance. Sorry to go back to talking about basics. It’s just kind of wrong. It’s not kind of wrong. It is actually wrong.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Shy Watson.

I don’t know. I always liked making shit up. When I was a kid, my dad used to get his shirts back from the dry cleaners with these thin pieces of cardboard, and I would use them to make books, as the covers. Before I could read and write, I would dictate stories about mermaids and fairies and whatever to various unsuspecting babysitters and have them write it down. I was always corralling other children into making movies with me and using my dad’s video camera. My dad is really ending up like a main character in this. I think I started taking writing really seriously probably around the time I was 14.

You were a poet first, right?

Yeah, I think so. I don’t know. I don’t remember exactly. I think I wanted to be a poet, and then when I got to college, the overwhelming feedback from my professors was that I was just much better at writing fiction, and I don’t think I really wrote any good poems until I graduated college, for whatever reason.

Does your background in poetry inform your prose at all?

I like to think so. I like to think that it makes it better. I think that poetry really leaves zero room for error, and that having a background in poetry, and reading a lot of poetry, I try to read at least three or four poems every day, which is fairly easy to do given the internet. Three or four poems I’ve never read before probably just show up on Instagram for me without me even really trying to seek them out. Just having that in my head, having a sense of the things that make a poem work, just makes prose easier. But I guess it’s hard to say for sure.

Do you have a set amount of prose books that you try to read?

No, because I tend to either read a book all at once, or not finish it at all. It’s very rare for me to plod through a book. If I don’t finish a book within 48 hours of starting it, I usually won’t finish it at all. I don’t know what counts. If I start one and I don’t finish, does it count as having read it? I don’t like to push myself to finish a book if I don’t want to finish it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that’s a good attitude. I think too many people force themselves to get to the end when it isn’t working for them.

What’s the point? There’s so many books in the world. That, just to me, seems a terrible waste of time.

Much of your work centers around infidelity and the violence of men. Are we doomed?

You’re not the first person to ask me that question, actually. I don’t know. I hope not.

I felt so doomed after reading Other Women. I was like damn.

I felt very doomed when I was writing Other Women. I mean, I guess I can say that the person I had in mind when I was writing Other Women, I didn’t think I was ever going to stop loving that person, or stop being sad that that person didn’t love me. And I did eventually stop being sad that that person didn’t love me. So I guess that’s something.

There’s hope.

Yeah.

How have educational institutions helped or hampered you creatively?

I don’t know. I mean, I really hated college. Really, really hated it.

Undergrad?

Yeah. But I had some really wonderful professors. I got to study with Anne Carson, which is just the most incredible thing that could happen. Both in undergrad and in grad school, there were professors who truly took me under their wing, both in terms of my work and in terms of my personal life and have given me an idea of what a life as a writer might look like, and that’s been really powerful. I don’t really know what I would do, or where I would be without that.

In terms of actual classes, I don’t know how much I’ve gotten out of workshops. Especially in grad school, I think, mostly workshops are useful in that I often felt my classmates just didn’t get what I was doing at all. That just helped clarify what I did want to do. I was like, “Oh, that’s not what I wanted the book to be at all. That’s completely wrong.” Sort of like a process of elimination in terms of purpose.

I have mixed feelings about MFA’s in general. I know it sounds totally unhinged, but I do think that it’s important to know the CIA’s role in the creation of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, and the way every other creative writing workshop program in America is modeled after that. And how that affects what American literature is, and even our most basic ideas of what good literature is. And I do wonder if spending too much time in those institutions can hamper a person’s ability to write things that are genuinely transgressive.

What was the CIA’s goal? How did they want to shape writing?

They wanted to make sure that American writers weren’t writing things that were too explicitly political. It was part of the Cold War efforts to kneecap American counterculture. Which worked.

Like abstract art?

Yeah. The championing of certain writers like John Cheever, and the pushing aside writers like Dos Passos or whatever, more explicitly political writers. I can send you some of the articles I read, because I don’t want to fuck up any of the information about this, because it’s important. They gave examples of certain writers and styles of writing that they wanted to encourage versus discourage. So I don’t know.

Something to be wary of.

Yeah. I mean, I don’t really know what the state of American counterculture is right now. I don’t know how much it even exists. I don’t know where you would go to find it, but you certainly wouldn’t go to an MFA program.

I guess you’d go to the internet… What’s your work entail on the day-to-day? What’s your process?

I wish I had a more disciplined lifestyle. I’m working on it. I’m a terrible insomniac, and I think my brain really only operates between 4:00 AM and 7:00 AM. I do a lot of my writing on the notes app in my phone, and then put it together later on my laptop. I also write in a journal, several pages almost every day, and some of that gets recycled into fiction, but not all of it.

Journal entries, or do you do creative writing in your journal?

It’s a mix of both. I write it as a journal and then sometimes I’ll pull out pieces of it and use it as fiction. But I also journal in the notes app as well. So there is not a clean delineation. I often write while watching television. Before COVID I used to do a lot of writing, in a notebook, by myself at a movie theater. I like deadlines a lot. They keep me on track. Without deadlines, I tend to get a little bit lost. I’m very interested in the daily routines of other writers, so I can try to copy them, but I’m yet to find one that I can really stick to.

Do you give yourself deadlines, or are they the deadlines imposed by your agent or editors?

They have to be imposed by someone else. If I try imposing them on myself, I don’t listen.

In your acknowledgements, you thank your agent Julia Masnik for believing in the book before it was actually any good. What was bad about it? What did she believe in?

It was just a very early draft at that point—the chapter or the short story or whatever you want to call it, that ended up being cut and then published in Joyland.

It was the short story or chapter or whatever titled “The Virgin” that ended up being cut from the actual book, but then published in Joyland separately that I think of as being kind of a hidden track to the novel that readers could seek out if they felt like it, but that wouldn’t be key or necessary to understanding.

So the hidden track was the original or just something that was cut from the novel?

It was the first part of the novel that I wrote. And so it did end up being cut because my editor felt that altogether the book was too violent, and that chapter maybe pushed it into the realm of the gratuitous. So, I felt ultimately that was a good compromise, that it sort of exists in the world and one can read it if you feel like you need to, but you also don’t have to.

Has anyone compared Nothing Can Hurt You to Twin Peaks?

Not that I know of. I was definitely thinking about Twin Peaks when I came up with Sara Morgan’s name. I wanted to have the same number of syllables as Laura Palmer. For some reason that was important to me. And I love Twin Peaks. Everyone loves Twin Peaks. It was definitely an influence. Twin Peaks was such a huge deal for me when I first saw it and remains a huge deal for me.

Much of your dialogue is so brilliant. Lines like “Nothing in nature blooms all year,” and “The only thing more fragile than the body is the mind.” I was wondering if you keep a notepad of quotes or how you collect or create so much gold?

Someone I dated in college said that I seem like I’m not paying attention, but I actually always am, which is true. I’m really good at remembering conversations. And I think that I often seem more spaced out than I really am, so people will sometimes say things around me that they don’t realize I’m listening to or absorbing. If someone says something weird, it’ll just stay with me until I write, and I’ll often feel like I have to write it into something to get rid of it otherwise it’ll just stay in my head forever.

Like when a song’s stuck in your head you’re supposed to play it.

Yeah, yeah, that’s often how it feels with people talking.

What does your curiosity look like? How do you explore things?

Pretty obsessively. I spend a lot of time reading Wikipedia articles, and I can get sort of hyper-focused on really anything, especially when information is missing. That drives me nuts. And so I’ll circle around the missing information for as long as I can, basically until I’m exhausted. And that’s often sort of the start of something, of some kind of fiction, is a piece of missing information that I can’t get out of my head.

I thought that your choice to not include a chapter from Blake’s perspective was really interesting in that way, because I felt like that was the one perspective of the crime, him being the murderer, that people would really want to hear, and it felt like this gulf of absence to me. We just didn’t get…It’s like you don’t get to hear it as the reader.

I felt like I couldn’t write it. I felt like in order to write that I would have to answer questions that I didn’t know the answers to. I also didn’t know if I could empathize enough with him to write it well. I think there are certain writers like Mary Gaitskill and Rachel Kushner who are really good at empathizing with pretty monstrous characters, and I really admire that. I find it an almost superhuman skill. And there were quite a few characters in the book that I really had to consciously push myself to be able to write from their perspective. But I just didn’t feel like I could do that with Blake.

The book said it was based on a true story. How much of it is?

So in the ’90s at Bard there was a student who killed his girlfriend and was found not guilty by reason of temporary insanity.

Was he really on acid?

According to rumor. I mean, there isn’t a ton of information about it available that I could find. The bare bones of it is just that he had a history of schizophrenia. He was found not guilty by reason of temporary insanity. And the prosecutor who accepted the plea deal was the same prosecutor to whom a serial killer had confessed I think a couple of weeks before. And the weirdness of that coincidence was kind of the beginning of the book for me. It was sort of being obsessed with how strange and creepy that was. As well as the proximity to the crime. Though at the same time, if you Google the name of any college in America plus “murder,” you’ll find a similar story. So it’s based on a true story, but it’s also based on a bunch of true stories. The novel’s connection to this particular murder is not that important. This was the murder that I happened to become interested in because that’s the college I happened to go to, but if I had gone to a different college I might’ve ben interested in another. College girls get murdered by their boyfriends a lot it seems.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Shy Watson.

I don’t know. I always liked making shit up. When I was a kid, my dad used to get his shirts back from the dry cleaners with these thin pieces of cardboard, and I would use them to make books, as the covers. Before I could read and write, I would dictate stories about mermaids and fairies and whatever to various unsuspecting babysitters and have them write it down. I was always corralling other children into making movies with me and using my dad’s video camera. My dad is really ending up like a main character in this. I think I started taking writing really seriously probably around the time I was 14.

You were a poet first, right?

Yeah, I think so. I don’t know. I don’t remember exactly. I think I wanted to be a poet, and then when I got to college, the overwhelming feedback from my professors was that I was just much better at writing fiction, and I don’t think I really wrote any good poems until I graduated college, for whatever reason.

Does your background in poetry inform your prose at all?

I like to think so. I like to think that it makes it better. I think that poetry really leaves zero room for error, and that having a background in poetry, and reading a lot of poetry, I try to read at least three or four poems every day, which is fairly easy to do given the internet. Three or four poems I’ve never read before probably just show up on Instagram for me without me even really trying to seek them out. Just having that in my head, having a sense of the things that make a poem work, just makes prose easier. But I guess it’s hard to say for sure.

Do you have a set amount of prose books that you try to read?

No, because I tend to either read a book all at once, or not finish it at all. It’s very rare for me to plod through a book. If I don’t finish a book within 48 hours of starting it, I usually won’t finish it at all. I don’t know what counts. If I start one and I don’t finish, does it count as having read it? I don’t like to push myself to finish a book if I don’t want to finish it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that’s a good attitude. I think too many people force themselves to get to the end when it isn’t working for them.

What’s the point? There’s so many books in the world. That, just to me, seems a terrible waste of time.

Much of your work centers around infidelity and the violence of men. Are we doomed?

You’re not the first person to ask me that question, actually. I don’t know. I hope not.

I felt so doomed after reading Other Women. I was like damn.

I felt very doomed when I was writing Other Women. I mean, I guess I can say that the person I had in mind when I was writing Other Women, I didn’t think I was ever going to stop loving that person, or stop being sad that that person didn’t love me. And I did eventually stop being sad that that person didn’t love me. So I guess that’s something.

There’s hope.

Yeah.

How have educational institutions helped or hampered you creatively?

I don’t know. I mean, I really hated college. Really, really hated it.

Undergrad?

Yeah. But I had some really wonderful professors. I got to study with Anne Carson, which is just the most incredible thing that could happen. Both in undergrad and in grad school, there were professors who truly took me under their wing, both in terms of my work and in terms of my personal life and have given me an idea of what a life as a writer might look like, and that’s been really powerful. I don’t really know what I would do, or where I would be without that.

In terms of actual classes, I don’t know how much I’ve gotten out of workshops. Especially in grad school, I think, mostly workshops are useful in that I often felt my classmates just didn’t get what I was doing at all. That just helped clarify what I did want to do. I was like, “Oh, that’s not what I wanted the book to be at all. That’s completely wrong.” Sort of like a process of elimination in terms of purpose.

I have mixed feelings about MFA’s in general. I know it sounds totally unhinged, but I do think that it’s important to know the CIA’s role in the creation of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, and the way every other creative writing workshop program in America is modeled after that. And how that affects what American literature is, and even our most basic ideas of what good literature is. And I do wonder if spending too much time in those institutions can hamper a person’s ability to write things that are genuinely transgressive.

What was the CIA’s goal? How did they want to shape writing?

They wanted to make sure that American writers weren’t writing things that were too explicitly political. It was part of the Cold War efforts to kneecap American counterculture. Which worked.

Like abstract art?

Yeah. The championing of certain writers like John Cheever, and the pushing aside writers like Dos Passos or whatever, more explicitly political writers. I can send you some of the articles I read, because I don’t want to fuck up any of the information about this, because it’s important. They gave examples of certain writers and styles of writing that they wanted to encourage versus discourage. So I don’t know.

Something to be wary of.

Yeah. I mean, I don’t really know what the state of American counterculture is right now. I don’t know how much it even exists. I don’t know where you would go to find it, but you certainly wouldn’t go to an MFA program.

I guess you’d go to the internet… What’s your work entail on the day-to-day? What’s your process?

I wish I had a more disciplined lifestyle. I’m working on it. I’m a terrible insomniac, and I think my brain really only operates between 4:00 AM and 7:00 AM. I do a lot of my writing on the notes app in my phone, and then put it together later on my laptop. I also write in a journal, several pages almost every day, and some of that gets recycled into fiction, but not all of it.

Journal entries, or do you do creative writing in your journal?

It’s a mix of both. I write it as a journal and then sometimes I’ll pull out pieces of it and use it as fiction. But I also journal in the notes app as well. So there is not a clean delineation. I often write while watching television. Before COVID I used to do a lot of writing, in a notebook, by myself at a movie theater. I like deadlines a lot. They keep me on track. Without deadlines, I tend to get a little bit lost. I’m very interested in the daily routines of other writers, so I can try to copy them, but I’m yet to find one that I can really stick to.

Do you give yourself deadlines, or are they the deadlines imposed by your agent or editors?

They have to be imposed by someone else. If I try imposing them on myself, I don’t listen.

In your acknowledgements, you thank your agent Julia Masnik for believing in the book before it was actually any good. What was bad about it? What did she believe in?

It was just a very early draft at that point—the chapter or the short story or whatever you want to call it, that ended up being cut and then published in Joyland.

It was the short story or chapter or whatever titled “The Virgin” that ended up being cut from the actual book, but then published in Joyland separately that I think of as being kind of a hidden track to the novel that readers could seek out if they felt like it, but that wouldn’t be key or necessary to understanding.

So the hidden track was the original or just something that was cut from the novel?

It was the first part of the novel that I wrote. And so it did end up being cut because my editor felt that altogether the book was too violent, and that chapter maybe pushed it into the realm of the gratuitous. So, I felt ultimately that was a good compromise, that it sort of exists in the world and one can read it if you feel like you need to, but you also don’t have to.

Has anyone compared Nothing Can Hurt You to Twin Peaks?

Not that I know of. I was definitely thinking about Twin Peaks when I came up with Sara Morgan’s name. I wanted to have the same number of syllables as Laura Palmer. For some reason that was important to me. And I love Twin Peaks. Everyone loves Twin Peaks. It was definitely an influence. Twin Peaks was such a huge deal for me when I first saw it and remains a huge deal for me.

Much of your dialogue is so brilliant. Lines like “Nothing in nature blooms all year,” and “The only thing more fragile than the body is the mind.” I was wondering if you keep a notepad of quotes or how you collect or create so much gold?

Someone I dated in college said that I seem like I’m not paying attention, but I actually always am, which is true. I’m really good at remembering conversations. And I think that I often seem more spaced out than I really am, so people will sometimes say things around me that they don’t realize I’m listening to or absorbing. If someone says something weird, it’ll just stay with me until I write, and I’ll often feel like I have to write it into something to get rid of it otherwise it’ll just stay in my head forever.

Like when a song’s stuck in your head you’re supposed to play it.

Yeah, yeah, that’s often how it feels with people talking.

What does your curiosity look like? How do you explore things?

Pretty obsessively. I spend a lot of time reading Wikipedia articles, and I can get sort of hyper-focused on really anything, especially when information is missing. That drives me nuts. And so I’ll circle around the missing information for as long as I can, basically until I’m exhausted. And that’s often sort of the start of something, of some kind of fiction, is a piece of missing information that I can’t get out of my head.

I thought that your choice to not include a chapter from Blake’s perspective was really interesting in that way, because I felt like that was the one perspective of the crime, him being the murderer, that people would really want to hear, and it felt like this gulf of absence to me. We just didn’t get…It’s like you don’t get to hear it as the reader.

I felt like I couldn’t write it. I felt like in order to write that I would have to answer questions that I didn’t know the answers to. I also didn’t know if I could empathize enough with him to write it well. I think there are certain writers like Mary Gaitskill and Rachel Kushner who are really good at empathizing with pretty monstrous characters, and I really admire that. I find it an almost superhuman skill. And there were quite a few characters in the book that I really had to consciously push myself to be able to write from their perspective. But I just didn’t feel like I could do that with Blake.

The book said it was based on a true story. How much of it is?

So in the ’90s at Bard there was a student who killed his girlfriend and was found not guilty by reason of temporary insanity.

Was he really on acid?

According to rumor. I mean, there isn’t a ton of information about it available that I could find. The bare bones of it is just that he had a history of schizophrenia. He was found not guilty by reason of temporary insanity. And the prosecutor who accepted the plea deal was the same prosecutor to whom a serial killer had confessed I think a couple of weeks before. And the weirdness of that coincidence was kind of the beginning of the book for me. It was sort of being obsessed with how strange and creepy that was. As well as the proximity to the crime. Though at the same time, if you Google the name of any college in America plus “murder,” you’ll find a similar story. So it’s based on a true story, but it’s also based on a bunch of true stories. The novel’s connection to this particular murder is not that important. This was the murder that I happened to become interested in because that’s the college I happened to go to, but if I had gone to a different college I might’ve ben interested in another. College girls get murdered by their boyfriends a lot it seems.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Shy Watson.

I don’t know. I always liked making shit up. When I was a kid, my dad used to get his shirts back from the dry cleaners with these thin pieces of cardboard, and I would use them to make books, as the covers. Before I could read and write, I would dictate stories about mermaids and fairies and whatever to various unsuspecting babysitters and have them write it down. I was always corralling other children into making movies with me and using my dad’s video camera. My dad is really ending up like a main character in this. I think I started taking writing really seriously probably around the time I was 14.

You were a poet first, right?

Yeah, I think so. I don’t know. I don’t remember exactly. I think I wanted to be a poet, and then when I got to college, the overwhelming feedback from my professors was that I was just much better at writing fiction, and I don’t think I really wrote any good poems until I graduated college, for whatever reason.

Does your background in poetry inform your prose at all?

I like to think so. I like to think that it makes it better. I think that poetry really leaves zero room for error, and that having a background in poetry, and reading a lot of poetry, I try to read at least three or four poems every day, which is fairly easy to do given the internet. Three or four poems I’ve never read before probably just show up on Instagram for me without me even really trying to seek them out. Just having that in my head, having a sense of the things that make a poem work, just makes prose easier. But I guess it’s hard to say for sure.

Do you have a set amount of prose books that you try to read?

No, because I tend to either read a book all at once, or not finish it at all. It’s very rare for me to plod through a book. If I don’t finish a book within 48 hours of starting it, I usually won’t finish it at all. I don’t know what counts. If I start one and I don’t finish, does it count as having read it? I don’t like to push myself to finish a book if I don’t want to finish it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that’s a good attitude. I think too many people force themselves to get to the end when it isn’t working for them.

What’s the point? There’s so many books in the world. That, just to me, seems a terrible waste of time.

Much of your work centers around infidelity and the violence of men. Are we doomed?

You’re not the first person to ask me that question, actually. I don’t know. I hope not.

I felt so doomed after reading Other Women. I was like damn.

I felt very doomed when I was writing Other Women. I mean, I guess I can say that the person I had in mind when I was writing Other Women, I didn’t think I was ever going to stop loving that person, or stop being sad that that person didn’t love me. And I did eventually stop being sad that that person didn’t love me. So I guess that’s something.

There’s hope.

Yeah.

How have educational institutions helped or hampered you creatively?

I don’t know. I mean, I really hated college. Really, really hated it.

Undergrad?

Yeah. But I had some really wonderful professors. I got to study with Anne Carson, which is just the most incredible thing that could happen. Both in undergrad and in grad school, there were professors who truly took me under their wing, both in terms of my work and in terms of my personal life and have given me an idea of what a life as a writer might look like, and that’s been really powerful. I don’t really know what I would do, or where I would be without that.

In terms of actual classes, I don’t know how much I’ve gotten out of workshops. Especially in grad school, I think, mostly workshops are useful in that I often felt my classmates just didn’t get what I was doing at all. That just helped clarify what I did want to do. I was like, “Oh, that’s not what I wanted the book to be at all. That’s completely wrong.” Sort of like a process of elimination in terms of purpose.

I have mixed feelings about MFA’s in general. I know it sounds totally unhinged, but I do think that it’s important to know the CIA’s role in the creation of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, and the way every other creative writing workshop program in America is modeled after that. And how that affects what American literature is, and even our most basic ideas of what good literature is. And I do wonder if spending too much time in those institutions can hamper a person’s ability to write things that are genuinely transgressive.

What was the CIA’s goal? How did they want to shape writing?

They wanted to make sure that American writers weren’t writing things that were too explicitly political. It was part of the Cold War efforts to kneecap American counterculture. Which worked.

Like abstract art?

Yeah. The championing of certain writers like John Cheever, and the pushing aside writers like Dos Passos or whatever, more explicitly political writers. I can send you some of the articles I read, because I don’t want to fuck up any of the information about this, because it’s important. They gave examples of certain writers and styles of writing that they wanted to encourage versus discourage. So I don’t know.

Something to be wary of.

Yeah. I mean, I don’t really know what the state of American counterculture is right now. I don’t know how much it even exists. I don’t know where you would go to find it, but you certainly wouldn’t go to an MFA program.

I guess you’d go to the internet… What’s your work entail on the day-to-day? What’s your process?

I wish I had a more disciplined lifestyle. I’m working on it. I’m a terrible insomniac, and I think my brain really only operates between 4:00 AM and 7:00 AM. I do a lot of my writing on the notes app in my phone, and then put it together later on my laptop. I also write in a journal, several pages almost every day, and some of that gets recycled into fiction, but not all of it.

Journal entries, or do you do creative writing in your journal?

It’s a mix of both. I write it as a journal and then sometimes I’ll pull out pieces of it and use it as fiction. But I also journal in the notes app as well. So there is not a clean delineation. I often write while watching television. Before COVID I used to do a lot of writing, in a notebook, by myself at a movie theater. I like deadlines a lot. They keep me on track. Without deadlines, I tend to get a little bit lost. I’m very interested in the daily routines of other writers, so I can try to copy them, but I’m yet to find one that I can really stick to.

Do you give yourself deadlines, or are they the deadlines imposed by your agent or editors?

They have to be imposed by someone else. If I try imposing them on myself, I don’t listen.

In your acknowledgements, you thank your agent Julia Masnik for believing in the book before it was actually any good. What was bad about it? What did she believe in?

It was just a very early draft at that point—the chapter or the short story or whatever you want to call it, that ended up being cut and then published in Joyland.

It was the short story or chapter or whatever titled “The Virgin” that ended up being cut from the actual book, but then published in Joyland separately that I think of as being kind of a hidden track to the novel that readers could seek out if they felt like it, but that wouldn’t be key or necessary to understanding.

So the hidden track was the original or just something that was cut from the novel?

It was the first part of the novel that I wrote. And so it did end up being cut because my editor felt that altogether the book was too violent, and that chapter maybe pushed it into the realm of the gratuitous. So, I felt ultimately that was a good compromise, that it sort of exists in the world and one can read it if you feel like you need to, but you also don’t have to.

Has anyone compared Nothing Can Hurt You to Twin Peaks?

Not that I know of. I was definitely thinking about Twin Peaks when I came up with Sara Morgan’s name. I wanted to have the same number of syllables as Laura Palmer. For some reason that was important to me. And I love Twin Peaks. Everyone loves Twin Peaks. It was definitely an influence. Twin Peaks was such a huge deal for me when I first saw it and remains a huge deal for me.

Much of your dialogue is so brilliant. Lines like “Nothing in nature blooms all year,” and “The only thing more fragile than the body is the mind.” I was wondering if you keep a notepad of quotes or how you collect or create so much gold?

Someone I dated in college said that I seem like I’m not paying attention, but I actually always am, which is true. I’m really good at remembering conversations. And I think that I often seem more spaced out than I really am, so people will sometimes say things around me that they don’t realize I’m listening to or absorbing. If someone says something weird, it’ll just stay with me until I write, and I’ll often feel like I have to write it into something to get rid of it otherwise it’ll just stay in my head forever.

Like when a song’s stuck in your head you’re supposed to play it.

Yeah, yeah, that’s often how it feels with people talking.

What does your curiosity look like? How do you explore things?

Pretty obsessively. I spend a lot of time reading Wikipedia articles, and I can get sort of hyper-focused on really anything, especially when information is missing. That drives me nuts. And so I’ll circle around the missing information for as long as I can, basically until I’m exhausted. And that’s often sort of the start of something, of some kind of fiction, is a piece of missing information that I can’t get out of my head.

I thought that your choice to not include a chapter from Blake’s perspective was really interesting in that way, because I felt like that was the one perspective of the crime, him being the murderer, that people would really want to hear, and it felt like this gulf of absence to me. We just didn’t get…It’s like you don’t get to hear it as the reader.

I felt like I couldn’t write it. I felt like in order to write that I would have to answer questions that I didn’t know the answers to. I also didn’t know if I could empathize enough with him to write it well. I think there are certain writers like Mary Gaitskill and Rachel Kushner who are really good at empathizing with pretty monstrous characters, and I really admire that. I find it an almost superhuman skill. And there were quite a few characters in the book that I really had to consciously push myself to be able to write from their perspective. But I just didn’t feel like I could do that with Blake.

The book said it was based on a true story. How much of it is?

So in the ’90s at Bard there was a student who killed his girlfriend and was found not guilty by reason of temporary insanity.

Was he really on acid?

According to rumor. I mean, there isn’t a ton of information about it available that I could find. The bare bones of it is just that he had a history of schizophrenia. He was found not guilty by reason of temporary insanity. And the prosecutor who accepted the plea deal was the same prosecutor to whom a serial killer had confessed I think a couple of weeks before. And the weirdness of that coincidence was kind of the beginning of the book for me. It was sort of being obsessed with how strange and creepy that was. As well as the proximity to the crime. Though at the same time, if you Google the name of any college in America plus “murder,” you’ll find a similar story. So it’s based on a true story, but it’s also based on a bunch of true stories. The novel’s connection to this particular murder is not that important. This was the murder that I happened to become interested in because that’s the college I happened to go to, but if I had gone to a different college I might’ve ben interested in another. College girls get murdered by their boyfriends a lot it seems.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Shy Watson.

I think as I was getting older and started writing, humor naturally kind of fit into things I was doing, because the way I was able to figure out my own brain was quite often through jokes. Also coming out, and being self deprecating about my queerness in myself, it’s like it’s way easier to make a joke about something than it is to deal with an actual feeling.

It’s something I think many of us do, too, it’s just a way to kind of compartmentalize, and it’s just instead of having to deal with it, I can make a joke about it. And in my work, I think it’s done a lot of the same kind of stuff. Because I think about jokes as, like, how many different ways can I tell the same kind of joke and still derive some kind of pleasure from it. So on Twitter or something, I did raviolis for a while, and I did pet names that were kind of puns.

I loved those.

I was like, how many different ways can I tell this? Because it feels workshoppy almost for me. How many ways can I say something and finally figure out, this way is the way, or this is the thing that really works? Kind of hone a story down. The ways in which I think about humor are very similar to the ways I think about writing fiction in general.

I think sometimes it’s also a way in for my brain. Thinking about how a joke could work is a way for me to actually get into narrative and character development, and the actual thing that’s lying underneath that surface level joke. Maybe it’s because I’ve actually been personally trained to, I can’t deal with an emotion so I had to make a joke about it. Now I have to write fiction that way.

Very relatable. Speaking of your characters, sometimes, their qualities were so complex they almost seemed to contradict each other. Like how Monika’s thought of as “the bitch,” but she’s also the sentimental mom who will put Samson’s work up on the fridge. I think that this kind of characterization is a lot more real to life. I was wondering how you managed to find such range within your characters. How do you build them?

I think a lot of it is, as I’m writing, I feel like I’m discovering who those people are. It’s like getting to know anybody, you get stuck upfront when you first meet people. Like here’s how they’re presenting themselves to you, or here’s how I present myself to people I haven’t met before. But then through the course of actually getting to know a person, there’s these layers that are underneath, that you discover about people. That’s how I feel quite often, especially in novel work. It’s like peeling back the layers on an onion. Just like, oftentimes not beautiful.

Makes you cry.

Right? You cry, it can smell, there’s just a lot going on. But I also think of myself as a person—I feel I contradict myself daily in what I think about things. Every time I feel like I’ve figured out something about myself, then I will definitely change my mind or unlearn it, or unknow it, because I have to learn something new. That, to me, feels very human. People are not static; we’re all constantly changing and growing, maybe in a good direction and maybe not in a great direction. Then we shift again.

When you’ve been in relationships with people, and it doesn’t have to be romantic, your brain has made decisions on who that person is, based on previous behavior or interactions. In With Teeth, Sammie has a lot of thoughts about herself as a person, she thinks she’s certain ways, then you see that she contradicts those things but then justifies those things.

I think truth, and especially in telling the timeline of events, is very subjective. Almost everybody has main character syndrome. In reality, even if you and someone else are both telling the same kind of story, it touches sometimes, but then quite often it veers.

True. I found the time jump in With Teeth really intriguing. I was wondering if you wrote the last bit first, then did the background? Or what your writing process was like, and how you draft a novel.

Well I never outline anything, which is maybe a good thing, or maybe terrible. Just as a person, I get bored with things and I’ll be like, “Okay I’m done with that now.” It’s probably my Sagittarius brain, it’s just like, “No.” I want to be surprised, because I feel if I’m not surprised with what’s going to happen, then my reader will be really bored. This book actually started off about Sammie, whose adult son, Samson, moves home because he’s had some kind of thing happen in his life. They’re living together in a house that has two adults. I was like, “What is this relationship like and how are they unpacking the stuff that’s informed their relationship with each other?”

But, like every other page I was going back into a memory. I was like, you know when you’re writing, you’re asking a reader to trust you and go in with you, and like, “Here’s a story I’m trying to tell you. Sit with me and experience it with me.” And on top of that, to have every other page go into a memory, it’s asking a reader to do too much. It usually means it’s not starting where it’s supposed to start. I was going into memory, so often. Into childhood, into when he was a teenager. I just scrapped it. It was like 40,000 words and I just chucked it.

I let myself think about it for a couple days. Then I was like, “What I need is to open on something that is going to be very active, and it’s going to tell me a lot about not just Samson, but about Sammie, and who she is as a mom.” So I was like, “Okay, I’m going to open on this attempt at child abduction. I’m going to open that way, and it’ll be pretty fast pace, and happen within the span of a few minutes, and is going to tell me who she is and how her relationship with her son functions in the grand scheme of the world.” As I was writing that, he thwarts this abduction, which is amazing because it’s like, “Oh God, something awful could’ve happened.” Something very, very bad could’ve happened.

Her reaction in that moment isn’t, Oh, thank God. It’s, Why did you try and get away from me? Why were you trying to leave me? What’s wrong with you? What’s wrong with me? What’s happening here? So I wrote from that opening. and then into the section of him being a fourth grader. And then reached a point where I needed to jump forward in time. Because fI wanted Samson to have more perspective. Because teenagers aren’t little kids. They’re starting to develop into who they are. Like, “Here’s who I’m going to be as an adult. I have my own mind, and I’m developing who I am as a person outside of my family. Maybe that’s not what you want me to be, but I’m vocal about it, and I’m becoming who I am.”

Once I scratched that first idea, I wrote the whole thing pretty quick. Like the draft of it happened, I was writing 2,000, 3,000 words a day minimum, and I was like, okay, I’m going to get this draft out.

It felt like every time I was there writing with Sammie, it was very uncomfortable but also I felt like I had to really stay and see it, and be present there. Because I was like, when I’m jumping out, I’m not letting myself sit with the discomfort. It happened very quickly, after I had finally figured out how I needed to start it. Maybe that’s what takes work a lot of the time, is really actually figuring out where a story starts. That can help propel it into what it’s supposed to be. What I was writing previously was not where I needed to start it, so it didn’t have any kind of propulsion.

I totally understand what you’re saying. Well, to my knowledge, you don’t have any children, and to my knowledge, you’re not a taxidermist. So I was wondering what role research plays in your writing practice? Or if you just use imagination and feel it?

Being a librarian has been a blessing and a curse when it comes to working on fiction. Because I love to do research. Then I’ll do research instead of actually working. Like when I was doing Mostly Dead Things, I spent a lot of time upfront thinking about taxidermy. I had documents, and because I was working in a library, I inter-library loaned a million taxidermy guides, from specific times, for different kinds of things. I bought a bunch of books. I spent a lot of time in web forums.

Eventually, I was like, “Okay, I actually need to write now.” Because I realized I was using research to put off writing, because the writing was scarier.

There was not the same kind of hardcore, very specific kind of research that went into With Teeth. I did much more research about how I think about unreliable narrators. Then the other thing was more thoughtful research about how queerness functions in Central Florida specifically and what that looks like. A lot of that was just being thoughtful and also talking with some other people about perspective, of how queerness functions in spaces that are more conservative. Florida’s a red state. So it was like, “What does queerness look like? What are queer spaces? Define queer spaces*.*” We have gay IHOP in Orlando. It’s not actually like a gay establishment, but a couple management people came on that were queer, and then they started hiring queer staff, and it began to feel like a very queer friendly space. So more queers were going there. So it’s a queer space in Orlando, but it’s not like an actual queer-sanctioned space. It could change at any time, right? Like if management changed. Or at any kind of moment, it’s not defined. But it’s like, queer spaces that are like, We’ll make this queer. Like DIY gay, I guess.

Precarious!

I was thinking a lot about how that runs through the book, and also the idea about thinking a lot about queer community, or lack, especially if you’re a queer person who had found family, or created a community on your own, and what would that look like if it’s suddenly taken away from youbecause your queerness doesn’t fit into the queer spaces that are available, and how that would be detrimental to a person’s mental health. Where it’s like, I’ve been estranged from my family, I’ve worked really hard to build up who I am and understand who I am through these friends and family I’ve made and created around myself. And because I don’t fit into these queer spaces, I feel like I’m losing that, too, and it makes me feel like I’m losing my identity. It was a lot of more introspective stuff. As a queer person who’s from Orlando, and it’s asking a lot of me, personally. Whereas working through the scope of Mostly Dead Things allowed me to use the taxidermy as a framework, With Teeth made me have to think about my own queer experience coming from Orlando.

Anyway, I didn’t have the reprieve of doing a ton of research with this kind of book. I’ll tell you this, the next book I’m working on, I’m almost just like, “What can I write where I definitely get to do some kind of research, so I don’t have to stay with a person and really unpack.” I felt like I was Sammie’s therapist.

I know you have a live-in partner who’s also a creative. What does that look like for your creative process? Do you co-write and edit with her, or are you both in your own heads doing your own work separately?

Yeah. I mean, I’ll be completely honest with you, I never thought I would ever date another writer. I really did not. You always hear people be like, “Oh my God, don’t date another writer.” Or something like that. I don’t know. I usually feel excited if people around me are doing well with their writing, even if mine’s not. I don’t usually have a feeling of jealousy of other people’s success, knock on wood. I’m saying that now, watch it become something horrible that starts happening. I feel good about stuff in that way, I have a lot of writer friends, I’m always excited when their work is going well. But I didn’t know what that would look like to be with another writer. I’m like, “Is that weird? Is that going to be strange?”

Quite often, we’ll discuss parts of our work with each other. I’ll share things with her, and she’ll share things with me, we’ll kind of talk around problems that we’re maybe having. I definitely don’t shove a whole manuscript at her and be like, “Read this, can I have some edits?” Usually I’m like, “I was thinking about this.” It’s kind of just like a sounding board for me. She has such a good perspective, too, because she’s been doing different kinds of writing for so long. She’s a TV critic, and she’s done food criticism, and different kinds of writing about queer perspectives for a long time. It’s been really helpful, exciting.

Especially, I’ll say this, the past year and a half when everybody’s been trapped in their home, it’s been nice to talk about different books we’re reading, and what works in books, and what doesn’t. Or listen to a reading and then unpack it afterwards. Like, “What did you think about this?” Or “Here’s my takeaway.” I love being able to talk about books and work. And the ways in which I feel like my work is fucking up, and then feel like I can be vulnerable about that in a way. I’ve been able to celebrate good stuff that happens with work, then also be like, “This sucks, I feel like my brain’s broken. My writing’s shitty right now, and I just want to talk about the fact that I kind of hate it,” which is also nice.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Shy Watson.

I really like essays where I can feel someone thinking. Where I can feel someone working through an idea, or working through an image, or an event, and its implications. And I can feel them reasoning, and I can see an evolution. I don’t love reading something that has a point to make. I’m like, “Okay, well then you can just tell me that.” But when you see someone evolving, and when you see their logic changing in response to information that they’re also uncovering, that is very exciting to me.

I think you did a really good job at that [in your essay collection, Pop Song]. I could feel your own growth through each essay, and as more information became illuminated you moved through it.

I was thinking a lot about ways of showing that progression. Although it does make me a little worried. I don’t want someone to get halfway through something like “Body of Work” and be like, “Oh, that’s where she is still.” Like, “This is what is good.” It’s like, “No. You have to finish it so that you get to the end point.” Because I do worry about things getting taken out of context.

How do you outline or otherwise prepare before writing an essay?

I like to have images. I think it depends on whether it’s a narrative essay or a more critical or responsive essay. But in any case, I like to have my touchstones, whether they’re visual, like scenes from life or a memory, or a work of art. For example, say I’m writing about silence and I’m like, “Okay, well I’m going to use this piece and I’m going to use this piece and I’m going to use this piece.” Then I can work through the relationships of those things. But the very first thing, I think, is always a feeling. It’s always a sense of wanting to say something, and to speak, and then comes finding, gathering the evidence, etc.

How do you know when an essay is complete?

I feel like it tells you. It’s hard to know, but usually there’s also an image or a feeling that I’m writing toward. And a lot of the work is just trying to get there. And sometimes by the time I get there, I realize I need to go somewhere else. And there’s always this moment when you’re writing where you feel the rudder of the essay steering you. And you’re like, “Oh, I was trying to figure out what you were about, and now you’re going to tell me what is actually happening here.”

You’re doing an MFA in fiction. How’s that going?

It’s going okay. I’m in my second term right now and I’m feeling a bit of sophomore slump. Because my first term, I was like, “Vroom vroom! Let’s just write a bunch of pages!” And now I’m in a position where I’m working with an instructor who wants to look at what I’ve written so far. And I’m looking at it and I’m like, “Oh, these pages are not amazing.” So I’m in this place of revision. And I think I’m feeling a little stuck. But I’m also just trying to trust in the process and in my own brain. And I think it’s interesting to be writing both with revision and quality in mind, but also knowing that so much of this is going to be a first draft.

And I have to be forgiving of that. I have to be like, “Okay, I’m going to make this as good as I can, but I know that it will be revised, and I’m so far out from something that will be publishable.” And I just have to let that go. That anxiety of writing the perfect first 30 pages, I have to just let it go. Because otherwise it’s just going to consume me. And I’ve already lost weeks agonizing over an opening sentence. In a way that I don’t agonize with nonfiction. I feel like there’s something about creating a world, you really have to believe in that world and set it up.

Have you tried any writing tricks to prevent yourself from looking back?

Nothing yet. I’ve been reading a lot and that helps. Whenever I don’t read, I feel my brain turning off. It’s kind of like when you have a hot pan and there’s nothing in the pan and the pan’s just burning. That’s how I feel when I don’t read. So that’s important. But you know, when I was feeling really stuck, I was like, “Oh, should I try one of those apps that threatens to delete everything if you stop typing?”

I didn’t even know those existed.

Oh, have you heard… I don’t know what they’re called. It’s like, it’s always something really scary, you know, like Write or Die. Or like The Horror Typewriter, something like that. But yeah, they have these apps that you set a limit of like, “Oh, I want to write for 30 minutes.” And then it’ll auto-delete everything if you stop typing. It seems really scary, but maybe kind of good.

What world are you building right now? What are you working on?

I am working ostensibly on one project, but there’s another project that I keep threatening to do. But I will talk about the first project because it’s the one that I’ve been speaking about. I’m working on a historical novel based on my family. Based loosely, very loosely, on my family and events that have happened within my family. It starts in Vietnam in 1954, which is around the end of French colonialism. And then it just spans through the Vietnam War, the American war, and into more or less present day. I was thinking of maybe ending it in 2014. So it’s a couple of decades. And it follows three generations of women. I’m interested in inherited trauma. Also the changing language around mental illness and depression or anxiety, and what those things would have looked like for someone like my grandmother. And then what they look like moving through a family, ending in my own knowledge and vocabulary of that. And then how the events of the past affect the process.

I feel like you mentioned something like The Body Keeps the Score, or something about corporeal trauma storing in Pop Song. Right?

Yeah, definitely the way that trauma is lodged in the body, and just the body’s response to it. It’s something I’m really interested in. It’s something that I’ve had knowledge of, or worked with, in a couple of different contexts now. And I think exploring it in a literary sense is going to be really interesting. I was really happy that some people picked up on the sense of like, epigenetic trauma that informs part of Pop Song, but I want to be even more exploratory of what it looks like and how it feels in a fictional sense, which I think, you know, I’m constructing as I’m architecting it. So, it’s just going to look different.

There’s this section in Pop Song about your time on Tumblr, which I was very familiar with. I was wondering if that has influenced your writing at all?

I think stylistically, a confessional quality came from writing there. The sense of writing for a very intimate audience is something that I was able to experience writing there. And having a really close-knit, at times parasocial, but also just social, community of writers and readers. That felt very special to me.

There are people who my work has really resonated with and who have been reading me ever since I was basically 17. And that is so special, and I feel really, really grateful for that. Because I know that if I do something, my readers will find me and I’m not really interested in trying to adapt myself to a market or try to fit a certain kind of niche or way of being. I feel comfortable being like, “Well, I’ve just been me for so long, and people have been okay with that, so I can just keep being me.” So I think that’s been the biggest thing that I’ve learned from that experience. I was never really trying to write to sell. I feel fortunate for that.

It’s important to get a lot of validation for your own voice, especially early on, as one starts to become a writer. I feel like it would make someone less malleable, especially in an MFA program or something, where people fear that their voice is going to change, or they’re going to adjust to what other people want from them. That’s really great that you have that.

I think something that is important about just creative writing in general is, I don’t think that anyone has to have a particularly interesting life, or a particularly crazy story in order to write an essay. It’s just like, “Well, you’re the person who can tell your story best.”

You’re pretty active on Twitter. I saw recently you tweeted about wanting to deactivate for a bit to finish your novel. And it made me wonder how you balance time between social media and writing.

The fact that you were like, “You’re pretty active,” I was like, “Oh no, that means I need to tweet less.”

No, I love your Twitter. You have a great Twitter.

Aw, thank you. So, I left Twitter to write Pop Song, which I think was an important decision. Because there’s no way I could have written the book while being online. I think there just would’ve been too much input. And it would have caused me to focus on the wrong thing. So I had to go offline for that. And then I’ve been back on, sort of to be a shill, but also to shitpost.

Important.

Yeah. But also, I don’t think that social media is good for me. I think that there was a time that I really enjoyed social media and I was really good at it. And I was making fairly good use of it back in the day. And it is how I got work, and how I became part of a known quantity, or like kind of a known quantity. But now I don’t know if it’s so useful for me. So I really have been trying to step back. I’m not really on Instagram anymore. I’m on Twitter, but every day I’m like, “I will be on it less.” And I think the thing that’s really keeping me on is, I do want to promote the book.

But I think I do work best when I’m not on it. And I think that’s because when you’re online, on social media, unless you’re in some very specific spaces that you’ve created for yourself and protected, a lot of the conversation that’s happening is critique of things that are already made. And when you’re making something, that’s such a vulnerable place to be.

Because it’s fresh, it’s raw. It’s not polished. It’s still forming. It’s still discovering what it is. And I think if you’re like on Twitter and everyone’s slagging on the new Sally Rooney novel and you’re just like, “I wish I could just finish this thing,” it’s not helpful, I think, to be in a space of criticism. And not artistic criticism, but just regular criticism, about things that are already existing. I’m not one of those people who stops reading when I write. Like I said before, I really need to read. I think engaging with made things that you think are good is very healthy when one is in a space of making. But engaging too much with the chatter is not always conducive to going into your little cave and making something beautiful.

I’m jealous of Ottessa Moshfegh and Mitski. I feel like the goal is to get to that point where you don’t have to self-promote and use the platforms yourself—the zeitgeist just does it for you.

Yeah, totally. If I could get off Twitter tomorrow, I would. I feel like I shouldn’t. I should wait maybe a couple more weeks. And I mean, I don’t think that social media is completely useless. I just think that also, especially if you’re a writer, it can trick you into thinking you’re getting stuff done. Because you know, you write something funny, it pops off, everyone’s in your mentions. You’re like, “Wow, so much dopamine.”

But in your other tab, what have you written? Nothing. That’s distracting, you know? Because, I don’t know, writers are really good at Twitter because we’re word people.

How long were you offline for Pop Song?

I think I was off from about January to through the summer.

Wow. So what’s next for you?

Well, if I ever get my shit together, hopefully I’ll have a draft of this novel in a couple of years. But I think what’s immediately next is hopefully putting together some short stories. I would like to start maybe publishing some short fiction. I’m still very new to it. And I want to write some essays again. I’m almost ready to come back. It’s funny because I wrote Pop Song last year, and I’ve loved talking about it because everyone has so generously read it and has engaged very deeply with it. So that’s very meaningful to me. But the work, for me, has kind of cooled. So I’m excited to get back in that space of coming up with ideas. I would love to have an idea.

Yeah, wouldn’t we all.

Maybe that should be the answer. “What’s next for you?” “I would love to have an idea.”

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Shy Watson.