My mom actually took singing lessons when she was pregnant with me. I don’t have a scientific basis for how that might’ve affected me, but come on, to live in the sort of resonating chamber of her body… I can only imagine that that left its impression. [Growing up in that kind of household] felt so comforting. There’s something about practicing that I love. Whether my dad was practicing a piece on the piano, and my mom was going through vocal exercises, whatever, I find that one of the most reassuring sounds in the world.

Did you think that you would be a musician? Was that an expectation?

I wanted to maybe go into law, medicine, Russian, or piano, or maybe dance. I was very obsessed with ballet. My mom actually said an interesting thing. She was like, “If you love your art form, don’t do it.” Because when you make it your profession, all the bullshit that comes with professions will be a part of your love of music or love of dance, and you will have to deal with egos, and you will have to deal with favoritism and worries about money and… you’ll have to do things or play games that kind of diminish the pleasure. So I really took that to heart, and went and studied Russian and Russian literature. A very practical degree. [laughs]

Was that her kind of admitting that she felt that way?

Oh, yeah. She told me that even when she would go to a concert, she would just be listening technically, like how is this person shaping their mouth? How are they projecting? And she just said, “I can’t turn that off anymore.”

I’m so interested in what drives someone’s creative practice and what proximity does. Sometimes when you’re too technical, you’re too close. It gets rid of this kind of spaciousness that you need for it to feel really imaginative.

I’ve always wanted to do so many things [but] was always very confused about, what should I actually focus on? Dance, writing, and music…I realized at some point that even though I loved all three an outrageous amount, there was none of them really, but writing most of all, that I liked the unglamorous part of actually doing it. Actually learning it, not just the result. I love music so much that I feel sometimes, “I would die for music,” if that was a thing. But I don’t want to do the exercises. I don’t want to. That’s so boring to me. With audio [production], that’s when I knew I’d found my thing. I love every bloody minutiae of it.

I started to realize a few years ago that, though there are lots of great podcasts in this world, some of them, especially post-podcast-boom, followed a very typical pattern or arc. Whereas in the Paris Review Podcast, you keep elements, like the set-up to an interview or a bird in the background, that in other shows would be removed and considered unnecessary. You’re using the world to score the world. It really transports me. Like in the [“Scenes from Open Marriage” episode, an essay written and read by Jean Garnett], where you hear her taking breaks and the tension between her performative “reading” voice and her sitting-back voice.

In a way, for me, it always feels like love. You might not really pay attention to that when you are around and about in the world and there’s a bird, “Okay, whatever, I’ve heard birds before.” But all of a sudden in this context, where it is carefully edited, and kind of curated, it serves a sort of a purpose. You are there with [Jean] as she drinks her tea and then puts the mug on the table. All of a sudden everything is sort of imbued with a shimmer. It’s elevated in some way. And so to me it’s almost like an ode to banal stuff of the world.

It reminded me of Svetlana Alexievich, [a Belarusian oral historian who documented the Soviet and post-Soviet period], whose work I know you love, and something you’ve said about how “history is in the heart.” I was reading more about her work and it being composed of so many interviews, and it strikes me that there’s a difference between “these are a bunch of facts” and “this is the felt experience of someone in this situation at this time.” And that felt experience is this really particular chemistry each time.

That’s why I love her so much. You don’t hear it. You don’t get to hear the tea mug, but you hear the effects of it. You hear the fact that someone is comfortable at their kitchen table, not speaking from the position of an expert who has studied the thing, but just like someone who’s remembering falling in love or gathering strawberries and their mom slapping them because they did something and their dad being carted off to the Gulag [under Stalin]. And then it’s so different… than when you just read a book written about the Gulag. [In the latter] it always feels like these people had no lives before or after or outside of that.

When did you encounter her work for the first time?

I don’t remember exactly when, but… I think I just saw the book at a bookstore.…Now I’ve read pretty much everything by her. I mean, I get very emotional when I think about her. I don’t know why there are not thousands of people doing what she does. I mean, not that anyone can do it as she does, everyone would do it in their different way, exactly as you’re talking about, this specific alchemy.

But I am so interested in history because history is nothing but life, right? It’s not different from now, it’s just life that happened a little bit ago or a lot ago. And when people are able to capture that life with all of its texture, it’s like an ode… It makes me appreciate actual life more, the one I’m living. I don’t need a big arc. I don’t need to do something important… And meaning is everywhere, if only you care to look or notice, pay attention.

Did reading her inform your approach to interviewing people?

I want to say yes, but I can’t be sure that that’s the correct cause and effect. I never thought about it practically. [Though] in the past few years I’ve been exchanging a lot of voice messages with friends. Some of them just because they don’t live in New York and I can’t see them. And when you have to come up with a time to call like, “Oh my god, no, I’m busy, and actually it’s not a good time anymore,” blah, blah. So we just record voice messages and send them and [they] are routinely like 30, 40 minutes long. And the beautiful thing about these is that you can notice the movements of someone’s mind because you’re not interrupting them, you’re not asking follow-up questions. So they get to just jump from thing to thing. You can hear them free-associate. It’s very moving because you get to know your friends in such a different way than if you would actually be with them and talk and interact. And that reminds me of [Svetlana]. She does ask questions, 100 percent, but I think she is silent a lot. I think she does do that thing where she asks one question and then just listens. And that is something that I’m learning to do. It’s awkward. We don’t like silence. Nobody likes silence, but they will fill it because they don’t like it. So just zip it.

What else have you noticed over time, doing interviews?

The main thing that has changed is I have willed myself to be less afraid to ask really difficult questions. I was so terrified. Aren’t we all? Because an interview is very much not like a normal conversation. You do things you would never do in a normal conversation, that would be considered rude and overstepping. And in an interview that is not out of the bounds of the expected or accepted.

I found it really hard, but I learned by listening to interviews that I’d done because I was transcribing them and editing them and being like, “Man, I left that on the table. Why did I decide for them that they probably wouldn’t want to go there? Why?” And it made me think, how often do people get the gift of being listened to? Especially say, when a loved one died? People are so awkward around death that if your loved one died, people will be like, “Oh, I’m sorry, that’s sad,” for a few months. And then they expect you to get over it, and then they will not ask you about it anymore. To the extent that they ever did.

I remember I interviewed a poet [for Poetry Off The Shelf] whose dad died when she was really young, maybe she was seven or eight… And she has written so many books about the death of her father. So she’s also interviewed about that a lot. And I asked her, “What was your dad like?” And she took a beat and she was like, “Nobody has ever asked me that.” Can you believe it? This is not a very spectacular question. This is not my genius coming up with the smartest thing to say, but people do not ask each other the most basic stuff because they’re afraid.

Now I know that I have to do it, and they want it, and I want it, and the listener wants it. And I tell them every time before the interview, “When I’m about to ask something hard, you are in charge. If you don’t want to answer, you’re good. If you want to… I have other questions.” And I can’t think of a single time where people have been like, “Can you take it out?” Sometimes they’re like, “Can you leave out that one comment that I made about my dad?” But [not] the whole thing, no.

What to you is the purpose of creativity, or maybe your particular questions when it comes to it? It seems like in this case it’s, “What is it like to be this person in this particular moment in time?” And maybe documenting something that would otherwise go unnoticed.

I’m less interested in the record-keeping part of it where it’s like if you don’t write it down, it will be gone forever. That of course is a big part of it. But what I’m interested in or what drives my curiosity is how does the world, the facts of the world, filter through each individual consciousness? What are the things that you specifically notice and get irritated about and get swoony about that [other people] don’t notice and get obsessed about? And how do you metabolize it? That is what I’m interested in.

I am working on a kind of memoir project right now. It’s the first time that I’ve done anything that is focused on me. It’s very uncomfortable. I am so curious about other people, and I cannot do the same thing for me. So I have had friends interview me. I’ve done that so that I can sidestep that problem.

Is this Creation Myth?

Yes.

Are you done with the show?

Oh no. Oh man… It’s going, but it’s very, I don’t want to say laborious. It’s way too fun for that. I don’t think I’ve ever had this much fun in my life.

What has made it so different?

One part of it is, you know how there’s things that you always feel like you should or want to be doing, but for some reason you’re not doing that? Because you don’t feel ready. Because you feel like nobody’s waiting for that or wants that. Because yeah, something about it intimidates you, because you don’t have the time, because any number of things. But it’s the thing that you want to make. It’s the thing that is resting on your heart like a brick and whatever you do and however many cool projects you do, you’re always like, “I’m not doing that thing. And when am I ever going to do it? And can I even? Is this for me? Am I busy because then I have the valid excuse to not do the thing?”

And for me, doing the thing was always having my own project, a project that nobody asked for. Now I’m doing that.

[Something else] that is so much fun is I have an editor. I’ve never worked with an editor so the first meeting where I was supposed to share a thing, I was terrified. Like sweaty hands, racing heart. I felt like, “Now it’s going to come out. Now she will know that all of the stuff that she thinks that I’m good at, I’m not. I’m a fraud.” I was so terrified. And of course it was great. I trust her completely. I know that we both want the same thing, for the show to be good. And having someone who’s not you but likes what you’re doing, help you is such a relief for how my brain works. [She] looks at it and she’s like, “This is great. This part was confusing. I think maybe we can start right there and cut that perfect part.”[Or]“This is great. We can work with it.” Whereas if I would be on my own, I would be like, “This is shit. I feel so ashamed that I did this. Why am I even bothering?” So that’s another really, really, really fun thing that makes me feel more free to play.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Alesandra C. Tejeda.

My mom actually took singing lessons when she was pregnant with me. I don’t have a scientific basis for how that might’ve affected me, but come on, to live in the sort of resonating chamber of her body… I can only imagine that that left its impression. [Growing up in that kind of household] felt so comforting. There’s something about practicing that I love. Whether my dad was practicing a piece on the piano, and my mom was going through vocal exercises, whatever, I find that one of the most reassuring sounds in the world.

Did you think that you would be a musician? Was that an expectation?

I wanted to maybe go into law, medicine, Russian, or piano, or maybe dance. I was very obsessed with ballet. My mom actually said an interesting thing. She was like, “If you love your art form, don’t do it.” Because when you make it your profession, all the bullshit that comes with professions will be a part of your love of music or love of dance, and you will have to deal with egos, and you will have to deal with favoritism and worries about money and… you’ll have to do things or play games that kind of diminish the pleasure. So I really took that to heart, and went and studied Russian and Russian literature. A very practical degree. [laughs]

Was that her kind of admitting that she felt that way?

Oh, yeah. She told me that even when she would go to a concert, she would just be listening technically, like how is this person shaping their mouth? How are they projecting? And she just said, “I can’t turn that off anymore.”

I’m so interested in what drives someone’s creative practice and what proximity does. Sometimes when you’re too technical, you’re too close. It gets rid of this kind of spaciousness that you need for it to feel really imaginative.

I’ve always wanted to do so many things [but] was always very confused about, what should I actually focus on? Dance, writing, and music…I realized at some point that even though I loved all three an outrageous amount, there was none of them really, but writing most of all, that I liked the unglamorous part of actually doing it. Actually learning it, not just the result. I love music so much that I feel sometimes, “I would die for music,” if that was a thing. But I don’t want to do the exercises. I don’t want to. That’s so boring to me. With audio [production], that’s when I knew I’d found my thing. I love every bloody minutiae of it.

I started to realize a few years ago that, though there are lots of great podcasts in this world, some of them, especially post-podcast-boom, followed a very typical pattern or arc. Whereas in the Paris Review Podcast, you keep elements, like the set-up to an interview or a bird in the background, that in other shows would be removed and considered unnecessary. You’re using the world to score the world. It really transports me. Like in the [“Scenes from Open Marriage” episode, an essay written and read by Jean Garnett], where you hear her taking breaks and the tension between her performative “reading” voice and her sitting-back voice.

In a way, for me, it always feels like love. You might not really pay attention to that when you are around and about in the world and there’s a bird, “Okay, whatever, I’ve heard birds before.” But all of a sudden in this context, where it is carefully edited, and kind of curated, it serves a sort of a purpose. You are there with [Jean] as she drinks her tea and then puts the mug on the table. All of a sudden everything is sort of imbued with a shimmer. It’s elevated in some way. And so to me it’s almost like an ode to banal stuff of the world.

It reminded me of Svetlana Alexievich, [a Belarusian oral historian who documented the Soviet and post-Soviet period], whose work I know you love, and something you’ve said about how “history is in the heart.” I was reading more about her work and it being composed of so many interviews, and it strikes me that there’s a difference between “these are a bunch of facts” and “this is the felt experience of someone in this situation at this time.” And that felt experience is this really particular chemistry each time.

That’s why I love her so much. You don’t hear it. You don’t get to hear the tea mug, but you hear the effects of it. You hear the fact that someone is comfortable at their kitchen table, not speaking from the position of an expert who has studied the thing, but just like someone who’s remembering falling in love or gathering strawberries and their mom slapping them because they did something and their dad being carted off to the Gulag [under Stalin]. And then it’s so different… than when you just read a book written about the Gulag. [In the latter] it always feels like these people had no lives before or after or outside of that.

When did you encounter her work for the first time?

I don’t remember exactly when, but… I think I just saw the book at a bookstore.…Now I’ve read pretty much everything by her. I mean, I get very emotional when I think about her. I don’t know why there are not thousands of people doing what she does. I mean, not that anyone can do it as she does, everyone would do it in their different way, exactly as you’re talking about, this specific alchemy.

But I am so interested in history because history is nothing but life, right? It’s not different from now, it’s just life that happened a little bit ago or a lot ago. And when people are able to capture that life with all of its texture, it’s like an ode… It makes me appreciate actual life more, the one I’m living. I don’t need a big arc. I don’t need to do something important… And meaning is everywhere, if only you care to look or notice, pay attention.

Did reading her inform your approach to interviewing people?

I want to say yes, but I can’t be sure that that’s the correct cause and effect. I never thought about it practically. [Though] in the past few years I’ve been exchanging a lot of voice messages with friends. Some of them just because they don’t live in New York and I can’t see them. And when you have to come up with a time to call like, “Oh my god, no, I’m busy, and actually it’s not a good time anymore,” blah, blah. So we just record voice messages and send them and [they] are routinely like 30, 40 minutes long. And the beautiful thing about these is that you can notice the movements of someone’s mind because you’re not interrupting them, you’re not asking follow-up questions. So they get to just jump from thing to thing. You can hear them free-associate. It’s very moving because you get to know your friends in such a different way than if you would actually be with them and talk and interact. And that reminds me of [Svetlana]. She does ask questions, 100 percent, but I think she is silent a lot. I think she does do that thing where she asks one question and then just listens. And that is something that I’m learning to do. It’s awkward. We don’t like silence. Nobody likes silence, but they will fill it because they don’t like it. So just zip it.

What else have you noticed over time, doing interviews?

The main thing that has changed is I have willed myself to be less afraid to ask really difficult questions. I was so terrified. Aren’t we all? Because an interview is very much not like a normal conversation. You do things you would never do in a normal conversation, that would be considered rude and overstepping. And in an interview that is not out of the bounds of the expected or accepted.

I found it really hard, but I learned by listening to interviews that I’d done because I was transcribing them and editing them and being like, “Man, I left that on the table. Why did I decide for them that they probably wouldn’t want to go there? Why?” And it made me think, how often do people get the gift of being listened to? Especially say, when a loved one died? People are so awkward around death that if your loved one died, people will be like, “Oh, I’m sorry, that’s sad,” for a few months. And then they expect you to get over it, and then they will not ask you about it anymore. To the extent that they ever did.

I remember I interviewed a poet [for Poetry Off The Shelf] whose dad died when she was really young, maybe she was seven or eight… And she has written so many books about the death of her father. So she’s also interviewed about that a lot. And I asked her, “What was your dad like?” And she took a beat and she was like, “Nobody has ever asked me that.” Can you believe it? This is not a very spectacular question. This is not my genius coming up with the smartest thing to say, but people do not ask each other the most basic stuff because they’re afraid.

Now I know that I have to do it, and they want it, and I want it, and the listener wants it. And I tell them every time before the interview, “When I’m about to ask something hard, you are in charge. If you don’t want to answer, you’re good. If you want to… I have other questions.” And I can’t think of a single time where people have been like, “Can you take it out?” Sometimes they’re like, “Can you leave out that one comment that I made about my dad?” But [not] the whole thing, no.

What to you is the purpose of creativity, or maybe your particular questions when it comes to it? It seems like in this case it’s, “What is it like to be this person in this particular moment in time?” And maybe documenting something that would otherwise go unnoticed.

I’m less interested in the record-keeping part of it where it’s like if you don’t write it down, it will be gone forever. That of course is a big part of it. But what I’m interested in or what drives my curiosity is how does the world, the facts of the world, filter through each individual consciousness? What are the things that you specifically notice and get irritated about and get swoony about that [other people] don’t notice and get obsessed about? And how do you metabolize it? That is what I’m interested in.

I am working on a kind of memoir project right now. It’s the first time that I’ve done anything that is focused on me. It’s very uncomfortable. I am so curious about other people, and I cannot do the same thing for me. So I have had friends interview me. I’ve done that so that I can sidestep that problem.

Is this Creation Myth?

Yes.

Are you done with the show?

Oh no. Oh man… It’s going, but it’s very, I don’t want to say laborious. It’s way too fun for that. I don’t think I’ve ever had this much fun in my life.

What has made it so different?

One part of it is, you know how there’s things that you always feel like you should or want to be doing, but for some reason you’re not doing that? Because you don’t feel ready. Because you feel like nobody’s waiting for that or wants that. Because yeah, something about it intimidates you, because you don’t have the time, because any number of things. But it’s the thing that you want to make. It’s the thing that is resting on your heart like a brick and whatever you do and however many cool projects you do, you’re always like, “I’m not doing that thing. And when am I ever going to do it? And can I even? Is this for me? Am I busy because then I have the valid excuse to not do the thing?”

And for me, doing the thing was always having my own project, a project that nobody asked for. Now I’m doing that.

[Something else] that is so much fun is I have an editor. I’ve never worked with an editor so the first meeting where I was supposed to share a thing, I was terrified. Like sweaty hands, racing heart. I felt like, “Now it’s going to come out. Now she will know that all of the stuff that she thinks that I’m good at, I’m not. I’m a fraud.” I was so terrified. And of course it was great. I trust her completely. I know that we both want the same thing, for the show to be good. And having someone who’s not you but likes what you’re doing, help you is such a relief for how my brain works. [She] looks at it and she’s like, “This is great. This part was confusing. I think maybe we can start right there and cut that perfect part.”[Or]“This is great. We can work with it.” Whereas if I would be on my own, I would be like, “This is shit. I feel so ashamed that I did this. Why am I even bothering?” So that’s another really, really, really fun thing that makes me feel more free to play.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Alesandra C. Tejeda.

Each book is its own journey, but it’s been an exercise in time and patience. I got the deal in late 2022, and by January 1st, 2023, I had to sit down, roll up my sleeves, and start writing. A year and a half later, I had the full first draft.

I had started thinking about this project ten years ago when I published an initial feature on the Wall of Sound while on staff at Motherboard, Vice’s science and tech vertical. I had spent a year working on it, and it clocked in at around 9,000 words. By sheer coincidence, it ran during a series of shows celebrating the band’s 50th anniversary that generated additional attention. I remember thinking I’d gone so deep, “surely this will be the definitive take.” I quickly realized I had barely scratched the surface. I filed the idea away, but couldn’t stop thinking about it. I kept gathering bits here and there, reading everything I could, staying obsessed. I couldn’t shake it. I was so captivated.

Why do you think?

If you don’t know, the Wall of Sound was a groundbreaking technology consisting of hundreds of speakers, dozens of amplifiers, custom staging, and scaffolding, and stood over three stories tall. It was between 70 and a hundred feet wide and 40 feet deep. It was a custom sound reinforcement system–like a public address or PA system–that The Dead and their circle of roadies, audio engineers, sound consultants, and technicians built over several years, beginning in the mid-sixties through 1974. It revolutionized sound reinforcement. To this day, if you see live music, from a stadium to a small punk club, you’ll see some principles first forged through the Wall of Sound. If you talk to anyone in the sound world–a sound technician, a recording engineer–they will know about the Wall of Sound.

I see why it was so inspiring.

From that first feature in Motherboard to the book’s publication, it’s been almost 10 years to the month. One thing I learned is that a project is going to take the time that it needs. There was a point in 2018, early 2019, when I started putting together an initial proposal. But the agent I was working with saw the book as something different, so nothing came of it, which I learned is a rite of passage.

Can you explain?

The first time you shop around a book proposal, you might not get any bites, and that can sting and be demoralizing. But if you feel strongly, you just have to keep going.

After that initial round of rejections, the final proposal took shape. The real lesson was that you’ll probably get rejected, and that’s just part of it the first time around. But you have to keep going. And if you get a great agent, which I am so grateful for, good things can happen.

That’s a great point.

I feel like I’ve been working on this book my whole life. Being raised by two Deadheads, this music was always in the background. But the TLDR is that it will take years from idea to proposal to landing the book deal and then actually writing it. It’s an ultra marathon, not a sprint. If you’re going to get impatient at all, this might not be the thing for you. But if you’re committed to the vision and in for the long haul, you can totally do it.

You have very specific insight into the Dead through your parents. Was it more complicated that this topic was such a part of your personal narrative?

A funny part of my book journey has been what I call being “an insider-outsider.” I’m not a Dead Instagram hype beast. I’m not even a music journalist, per se. I’ve been an editor for various science, tech, and health verticals at major publications. But at the same time, I’ve listened to this band my entire life and absorbed so much knowledge. I also just appreciate a good yarn, and I always knew this story was entertaining.

I’m not a Grateful Dead fan, but still found myself invested.

It’s a psychedelic romp and ultimately a story about obsession. This group had to put aside any interpersonal drama or tensions in the name of driving toward this greater collective good. But having something of a personal stake helped because I could thread the needle.

There have been dozens of books written about The Dead. It’s this massive cultural institution. For so many on the outside, it can be overwhelming. Many don’t even bother trying to find a way to enter this world and see what it’s about.

Right.

Having that personal angle helped tell a story in a way that folks who might think they have no interest will be able to understand and keep turning the page. St. Martin’s is a big five publisher for a general audience, so I had to keep that in mind. Having absorbed so much information throughout my life crystallized what aspects of Dead history and lore I had to mention and what I could dispense with.

You actually bought a piece of the Wall of Sound.

Yes! I came to own a part of it through a Sotheby’s auction in 2021. Sotheby’s had partnered with the Grateful Dead Organization to auction decommissioned items from the Grateful Dead Warehouse in Northern California. There were around 150 lots, and I didn’t bother looking through until there were 24 hours left until bidding closed. The night before, I started scrolling through, wondering which item had the lowest starting bid. That was this object. Having a piece of the Wall fall into my life got me reconnected with old sources, people I’d first spoken to years ago, and reaching out to entirely new sources. One thing led to another.

Kismet!

To own a part of it, it’s special. Thinking of all of the places this artifact has been, all the miles it clocked–tens, even hundreds of thousands–and all the people who experienced The Grateful Dead partly through this thing that’s sitting in my office, my mind reels. It gave me a unique window into this gigantic story. There’s a part that just feels cosmic, or fate.

Truly.

Another lesson was that you can have something as iconic as The Grateful Dead, where so many books have been written and so much scholarship, but still find unique windows in. I can’t believe nobody has written this book yet, and I’m the one who did it. As a writer, there’s this feeling that nothing is new anymore. Everything has been covered. Everything’s been written about and explored to death. But it’s not true. You can still find fresh and interesting avenues into storytelling. You have to trust the process and know it might take time.

As a journalism professor, you must have students hoping to write books. What advice do you give them?

There is this idea that the book proposal-to-book-to-docuseries pipeline is a surefire thing, and it will happen quickly. But no, the first and foremost thing is that it will take time, and that’s something you’ll have to make peace with early on. In the formative stages of getting your idea together, putting the proposal together, and getting an agent, it might be something you’ll need to chip away at on nights and weekends. Even if it doesn’t feel like you’re getting as much done as you would hope to in the beginning or throughout any stage of the process, it will add up if you keep chipping away. At a certain point, you will look back and think, “holy shit, I’ve come this far.”

One thing I did learn is that working on a book can completely consume you. You get sucked in, so you have to ride that fine line between being totally committed and being totally uncommitted. If you don’t watch out, it will take you. With all of the work that goes into this process, maybe you have the time and the resources to work on it solely, but I know I couldn’t. I had to work on editing while the proposal was coming together.

But a book deal with an advance can free you up to put your head down for that first full draft and focus entirely on that, if you want to. I’m not pretending to know everyone’s exact situation, but in my case, I did a lot of chipping away early on it, got an advance, and the pressure was off a bit.

Just giving you the time and space and the encouragement too.

It felt very validating when I got the book deal. When you’re putting a proposal together that, in your heart of hearts, you know is a good idea and are fully committed, even if it gets rejected. I always knew this was a good idea, but the time it takes to make these sorts of things happen, you go through stretches where it feels like it’s you against the world. It can feel isolating. But if you stick to it, it can happen.

There are various milestones along the way that feel validating. Much of it is just you out on the trail, and then every once in a while, you come to an intersection, and there’s someone holding up a sign that says “keep running” or “good job.” You see people hold up signs during marathons–that’s what it feels like because so much of the work is just getting up every day and chipping away.

In the book, I loved the character of Bear, the band’s original soundman and key architect of what would later become the Wall of Sound. I kept imagining his dogged perfectionism was a stand in for the entire creative process.

He was a polymath. He could drive the others in this scene crazy, but he was the original force behind the Wall of Sound. He also needed others to help actualize those ideas — sound engineers, technicians, and classically trained audiophiles. He was brilliant and largely self-taught, and the Wall of Sound couldn’t have existed without him.

It took the crew ten years to realize the Wall of Sound. There were fits and starts and trial and error. Many take credit for the Wall of Sound, and while it was a group creative effort, Bear was highly influential. He was sensitive to “unclean signals” in tech, which fed into his idea of a sound system without distortion. Basically, each player had their own PA. There was no “intermodulation distortion”–the technical term. No two sounds were running through the same speaker. So if you listen to the Wall of Sound recordings, the clarity is unmatched.

Some of the early shows would be delayed by up to five hours because he would freak out over a single amplifier. He claimed to be able to communicate with inanimate objects, such as sound system gear in this case. People would happen upon him hugging a speaker and crying and talking to it, trying to coax signals out of it. He was way out there but also a very brilliant creative person without whom none of this could probably have happened.

What an interesting man.

He was obsessed with audio, but also a ballet dancer. He produced millions of hits of LSD and basically turned on that entire generation. So much of the acid flowing through the Haight-Ashbury in the Summer of Love, and then throughout the rest of the country, was manufactured by Bear and his assistants. He also got obsessed with metallurgy. He would go in deep and bring in everyone.

There’s a great quote from the late Steve Silverman, a New York Times bestselling science writer and an OG Wired writer who wrote the book that changed the conversation around autism and the spectrum, called Neuro Tribes. He noted, “I spent some time with Bear at a Grateful Dead studies conference back in the day, and came away convinced that he was on the spectrum in the best possible way.” Silverman said that the Wall of Sound is, he would consider, the most outstanding achievement of the neurodivergent community. That neurodivergent folks and neurotypicals came together and forged this groundbreaking piece of technology.

It’s interesting how much emotion this system of inanimate objects contained, and how much work went into building it. Obviously there’s a great metaphor in there for completing a book.

Talking about the process and the journey, putting this thing together in terms of the sheer timeline and the community–it takes everyone from your editor to your agents, friends, and acquaintances who often would listen to me, being a little harebrained, working through it. It takes all those people to realize something like this. I didn’t always think this would be something that would happen one day, but like everything else, it’s just a progression and then one day you realize “oh shit.” If you are committed and put in the time, patience, and work, you really can make these things happen.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Laura Feinstein.

You could say, I’m a child of family separation, I’m a child of war. I left my core family at the age of 13 and came here at 14. And what I didn’t know was how growing up in instability and conflict made me uniquely positioned to be in that kind of environment, because I understood what it meant to be a kid in that kind of environment. We always talk about how many people have died. And for me, that was an oversimplified and unsophisticated way of looking at the cost of conflict. I always felt like the true cost of conflict was in how many people lived through the conflict, those people who lost family members, kids, parents, uncles. Whose communities and homes and lives were impacted. That’s the true cost of conflict. And I always felt like if you measure conflict through that lens, the cost of war and the cost of conflict would no longer be justifiable. I think one of the biggest sorts of mistakes is looking at the cost of conflict through the number of people who die, because it underplays the cost.

It wasn’t until I was in my mid-20s that I was like,”I want to tell stories, and I want to do this kind of work.” So 9/11 coincided with me being focused on my career as an artist, allowing myself even the possibility of thinking, “Can I be an artist?” When you’re a kid, surviving and trying to swim, you don’t think, “Oh, let me just go into the arts.” I’d never had that privilege. So it wasn’t until I was in my mid-20s that I was like, “You know what? That’s what I always wanted to be as a kid. I’m going to give it a go.” I started working in installation work and video art in 2008. While I was at the same time trying to make rights and sell Hollywood projects and TV shows. And that’s sort of how it all happened. It was very organic. It was still all driven by two things. One, the need to survive as an artist, but also it needed to be broadly creative, and not limited. And here I am, still doing it.

Your feature directorial debut, Remote, premiered at the New York Film Festival. How did that experience impact your work moving forward?

I’ve been making stuff in one capacity or another for years. And I had directed shorts, documentaries, etc, but I’ve never taken the time to say, “Okay, let’s do my piece.” Then COVID happened, and everything shut down. And in that period in 2020, while we were waiting to see if the studios would open up, Mika Rottenberg, the co-director, and I started talking about something that we’d wanted to do since the first day we met, which was to make a film together.

At least for me, I never thought, “Oh, we’re going to do this thing, and it’s going to be at the New York Film Festival, and it’s going to premiere at the Tate Modern, and you name it.” We just wanted to have an outlet to do art. And 2020 was a bad year for many reasons. We had COVID, everything that was happening with George Floyd, and what was happening on the streets. There was an election that was coming up, which seemed quite consequential at the time. And this conversation that led to Remote was very much the way we were coping with that year.

Of course, it was wonderful to be at the New York Film Festival; it was a dream come true, as a New Yorker. It’s the festival that I always loved, it was where I would go every year to watch the latest Almodovar film. And that was my thing, you know, was, “Okay, what’s he got? It’s going to be at the New York Film Festival. I can’t wait to go see it.” And so that was beautiful. It was a very beautiful, meaningful experience.

You are working now on your project CURA, and one thing that struck me from this project is that it doesn’t rely on a specific narrative format for documentaries, like voice-over, verité, and archival. What is your intention in what you want to communicate with this project? Is there a specific point of view that you want to show, or is it more open to interpretation?

I think it was not an easy choice to make this film. I had to really find both the approach, but also answer the question of why, and why me? Or why us? And that came out of many conversations with the indigenous healers and tribal elders across Colombia, Peru, and Brazil, over the first seven months that we were really thinking about doing this. One of the things I learned is that, for many of the Indigenous people I spoke with, words were a problem. Words were a mechanism of lies, of deception. And some things cannot be expressed through words. So the challenge became, “All right, how do you tell a non-verbal story? How do you tell a story that doesn’t rely on words?” So that’s the initial impetus. And then, from my own experience of being there, I realized that so much of the relationship between these indigenous communities, these guardian communities, and the forest was not expressed through words, or not understood through words. It was very much about frequency and vibration, and this non-verbal relationship that they had with the spirits. And this thing, where they truly believe is a living entity. They believe the forest is alive, the rivers are alive, that the trees are alive, they believe that they are a sentient being and they’re in communication with, and they have a relationship too.

And I think that inherently is this sense of connection that they have to the natural world is what I realized was something that, as a cost of modernity or living in modernity, we have lost. And we get glimpses of it when we go hang out in the wilderness, we’re like, “Oh, my god. I feel so much at peace, and this is so good.” And we return and we forget again. And the reason we feel at home in the wilderness, in nature, it’s because that is who we are, that’s where we come from. Despite where we have arrived and how far we’ve come, we are inherently, as a being, creatures of the forest, creatures of the mountains, of this earth.

One of the things that came out of this process was recognizing that so much about conventional filmmaking made me go away from documentaries specifically, from conflict zones, and from this obsession with data and facts, and information. But we have an eco-anxiety pandemic. People are suffering from deep anxiety around the climate, and rightly so. And I think in part, you can say that this barrage of information and data, and doom and gloom, is what a byproduct of that was, is this eco-anxiety, which is now a big problem. And when you looked at these tribes and the way they existed, even though their conditions are extremely hard, they are still living in joy and hope. And I knew I couldn’t make conventional work. It had to find its own language. That it had to really rely on the modality that I was in the forest itself. And I knew that ultimately the character that had to emerge from this work had to be the forest itself. And I knew I couldn’t do that through conventional narrative means. And that’s why we took a non-verbal approach. And that’s sort of how I ended up where I am.

Since this project is so different from what you have done in the past, what are your hopes when it goes out into the world?

I think we’re living in a period of time where traditional institutions and legacy companies are no longer viable routes. Yes, it’s art, but it’s art that’s created within an economic framework, right? The reason these conventions are built has a lot to do with the economics of storytelling and media and film, and documentary. And they have nothing to do with actual artistic creativity.

And I felt, especially with this work, that I was going to go back to a documentary form that I didn’t want to rely on those things. So I had to take a very entrepreneurial approach to the work. And so that’s the approach that we’re taking. CURA is being made within what I find very valuable in the art world, which is these editions; you’re creating a work of art. There’s a certificate of authenticity; you’re selling additions to collectors and commissioners, etc., in advance. At the time, we’ve sold a couple of those already, and hopefully we’ll sell the rest of them, so that we can keep filming and do all that work.

I think partially what’s exciting about our Kickstarter campaign that we’re doing is that it incorporates some of these ideas. But one of the things that I did that I think is quite novel is that I said, “Okay, normally you have additions of the work. I’m going to take one of these additions and break it into digital editions.” So, several digital additions that I can sell directly to collectors. Now, those collectors are oftentimes inaccessible to so many people. But what if those additions were $500 or $1,000? Then suddenly people can collect a work of art that they own, that it’s always with them, like buying a vinyl, that you can play for your friends and family members, and your community. And your work, and you’re supporting a work, but you’re also getting something that you own in return.

I think this is about being aware of the moment we are in, and saying, “You know what? I can’t rely on these traditional institutions. If they want to come to me, great. But I can’t sit there and wait for gatekeepers to say, ‘Yes, no. It makes sense.’” If artists don’t find their own path to their audiences, then we’re facing what is a cultural extinction of sorts.

I want this to be a work of public art, so hopefully we can be available as installations in various places. In museums and art festivals as well. It’s something that we can take on the road and bring to people who don’t necessarily have access to the work. But also be able to digitally distribute in this way, around ownership and sovereignty, artists’ sovereignty, and impact. That’s going to be quite meaningful. And so we have our own life cycle in that way. And then if the conventional space, if the traditional institutions want to also play along, then we can find within this model a way to interact and also work with that space. But this allows us to maintain ownership and control, as opposed to giving everything away.

Following up on what you mentioned about how traditional institutions and legacy companies might not be the best path for artists, what role do audiences play in the equation?

Right now, artists often assume their audience is a buyer, a commissioner, or an executive, and that’s a problem. Making a film that must pass through conventional channels means assuming the audience lacks a deep or immersive understanding of the story, the issues at hand, or the artistic context, let alone the people behind the work. That assumption leads to self-censorship and manipulation. Even those of us who say, “You say what you need to say to sell it, and then you make what you really want,” eventually realize: if you’ve been through this process, as I have, that’s not how it works in reality.

Once you enter into that mindset of, “I’ll do the song and dance just to get the project commissioned,” you’ve already started down a path that alters the core of the original idea. Now, I’m not saying that this process is always negative, there are great executives out there who truly know how to support and shape an idea. But the reality of the marketplace is harsh: artists are often underpaid, overworked, and desperate. This is not a level playing field. It’s not a space where most artists hold real power. A few might, but most don’t.

Even the best advice comes at a price. Sometimes the baby goes out with the bathwater. Sure, it’s necessary to drain the bathwater, that’s part of the creative process. You shape, chisel, revise. Friction is necessary. We want friction; the best work often comes out of it. But the problem is, that friction has become distorted. Even well-meaning executives are worried about keeping their jobs. Data has become supreme, it’s driving all the decisions. Do you think documentary executives really believe everything should be true crime, cults, controversy, or celebrity-driven stories? No. They’re being told that’s what works, and they’re just collecting their paycheck while prescribing that reality to others.

That’s why, for me, choosing to say, “My audience is my audience,” and proving the value of a project by engaging that audience early on, that’s a form of liberation. I prefer that space of autonomy, of artistic sovereignty. It allows me to be true. I can sleep at night knowing that the conversations I’ve had—even the ones across the metaphorical forest, have been delivered honestly. I might not always arrive at the final destination, but what I make will reflect what was truly said and intended. And I believe that if you stick to that path, you have a real shot, a far greater one than in the system we’re currently trapped in.

What is one piece of advice that you received that helped you in your career?

Having no other choice. If you’re an artist, it’s just because that’s what you have to do, right? And turning that into a creative source as opposed to a source of desperation was the best advice. You don’t have a choice, and the people in this economy, which is called the arts, are well aware of your lack of choice. But if you liberate yourself from that lack of choice and make it a creative force, as opposed to a desperate need to just get forward, then you’re much more likely to actually get to where you wanted to go. So that was great advice. And the best advice I can give artists like myself, who don’t come from a conventional privileged background, whose stories that they care about or grew up around, isn’t what is dominant… It’s don’t shy away from your otherness. Your otherness is your superpower. Embrace it.

I truly believe that artists will survive, not based on this abstract idea of a global audience, but through small communities and small audiences, and local community power, that you build from the ground up. And that’s where artists always belong, and that is sort of the field, the farm that we have to cultivate, to be able to grow our work. And in that environment, your otherness is what helps you grow, not this sort of trying to fit a mold of mainstream conventions.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Miriam Garcia.

Alexis Krauss: Well, she was a mysterious creature. But based on the love that she showed us, especially on tour and all of her many zoomies on the tour bus, I’m going to say she was a pretty big fan.

Derek Miller: We also hear her on the first track on Bitter Rivals. She’s the dog at the beginning, so she’s technically a performing, contributing member of Sleigh Bells.

Alexis: Exactly. She could ask for royalties. “Bunky Pop” was Derek’s effort to make a track that embodied her and her spirit, and I think he really succeeded in that. That song really does make me think of her in so many ways.

Derek: We turned the idea of Riz as a human being into half of the record. The other half would be Roxette, who represents Alexis. I’m definitely a little more Bunky Becky, a little more Riz—like a dog who playfully wanders into a room and starts knocking stuff over. They mean well, they’re just loud. Riz had a seizure in 2022. She was unconscious for two or three minutes, and Alexis called me crying. A week later, I got the idea to try to write an anthem for her. I tried to make a track that felt like her sprinting through a field, basically. Even though it is specific to a dog, it works in a less specific context as well. It’s really just about two friends. Even though there is autobiography in there, it’s really about any friendship that lasts. There’s going to be lots of ups and downs and you see each other through all of it.

You’ve worked together for almost two decades. What keeps your collaboration generative and invigorating?

Alexis: If it felt tired and stale, or if there was animosity that had built up, I don’t think we’d be doing it. Not that we wouldn’t care enough to try and fix things, but at this point, our relationship is so solid and the creative relationship is really pretty fluid. It’s something we both look forward to.

Derek: This is advice that I’ve given to younger artists who have asked me about the creative process: try to make music that you are, at least temporarily, madly in love with. Maybe it’s just a riff, maybe it’s a verse in a chorus, maybe it’s a complete arrangement. I want to get to a place where I record a new idea and I get in bed at night and I listen to it 19 times in a row staring at the ceiling, and on the 20th time I’m like, “This is madness. Go to bed.” So I put my phone down, I turn the lights out, and five minutes later I put my earbuds back in, turn the light on and listen to it three more times.

I feel like I’ve been in that zone since I was a teenager. Since I was 16, I’ve had at least one piece of music that I am absolutely dying for people to hear. Doesn’t mean it’s any good. Sometimes it is, sometimes it’s trash. You never know. But if you’re in that space where you’re madly in love with what you’re working on while you’re working on it, it’s very, very easy to move forward. And that’s the space that we’ve been in really since the beginning.

The first thing we recorded together was Infinity Guitars… We recorded the first rough vocals for Infinity Guitars [for a few hours] before we heard a knock on our door; it was these two kids that lived down the hall. I started to apologize, but they said, “It’s cool, what is that?” And I remember looking at you, Alexis, and looking at them and being like, “I guess that’s our new band.”

The riff on “Wanna Start a Band?” was something you’ve been working on since 2014. When do you know when it’s the right time to revisit old work?

Derek: Anyone who makes records, especially if you’ve been doing it for a while, has a mental Rolodex of existing sessions with moments that are really great. You don’t know what the texture or the tempo or the key should be, but you know that there’s something there. All I had for “Wanna Start a Band?” was the ascending part of the riff. That’s all it was. It was this little pleasurable thorn in my brain that just sits there until I solve it. It took a long time to find the verses and the rest of the riff. It turns out it took almost a decade.

I think I’ll probably make records for the rest of my life. I don’t know who will listen or if they’ll be any good. I don’t mind if I have to wait years. I think it’s just about having patience. Right now I have 30 or 40 sessions, and each of them has something really special, even if it’s just a bar. I don’t mean to make it sound momentous, by the way. There’s just a couple of ideas, but in my life, it’s momentous.

Alexis: Derek is really discriminating about the best ideas. There’s been multiple times where we’ve recorded something and I’ve gotten really excited, and then I’ve gotten almost pissed at him because he starts to doubt it. Then there’s the process of mourning the shape that it had taken. There’s a song that I fucking loved that didn’t make this album. But there’s been very few times, if any, where that patience hasn’t paid off in terms of creating a song that I think was better than what we had initially. I think that patience has really benefited the band.

Do you ever try to purposely disconnect from the creative process?

Alexis: Derek, one thing I’ve noticed is that when you’re in that more contemplative state of brainstorming or developing a direction for one of the new records, you’ll often do this thing where you’ll say, “I’m making tracks for [another] artist. This isn’t Sleigh Bell’s music.” I love that idea. I love the idea of Derek producing for other people. But in the back of my mind, I always know he’s going to switch soon and send me a song that we can work on. I think that’s a way that you maybe step into a more exploratory mindset.

Derek: I love when that switch happens. That happened recently with something I shared three weeks ago. We don’t have any vocals written yet, but in my mind it was for somebody else. It’s just a fun game to play, to trick yourself. Every time I do it, I’m convinced: “This time, it’s not going to be for Sleigh Bells. I’m going to keep it out of that lane. I’m going to keep crash cymbals and cymbal chokes and high-game guitars out of the mix. Blah, blah, blah.” But it usually tends to come back around, if I love it enough.

Something I love about Sleigh Bells is how consistent the vision is. How much is that natural, and how much is it through an intentional shaping of the record?

Derek: I feel like it happens naturally. We’ve gone pretty far outside of what we would consider to be the Sleigh Bell sound. I always use a track from 2017 called “And Saints” as an example. For that song, I literally made a list of everything recognizable as Sleigh Bells and was unable to do any of those things, any of my usual tricks. So we ended up with a really simple Arp synth, some lush pads, Alexis’s vocal, and that’s it.

Alexis: I think one of the reasons why that melody took the shape the way it did is because it came out in one longer melodic take, which doesn’t always happen. A lot of our stuff will go part by part, or verse by verse, and then we’ll work on the bridge. That one all came together at once; I think it was because the track had space for that.

Derek: I have to resist my natural impulse to impact the speaker really intensely. I like cyan; I like things that are bright and shiny and aggressive, but in a pleasurable way. I want it to be joyful and euphoric. Most music that’s sonically aggressive has a very dark, heavy aesthetic. Lyrically, it’s very dark. The artwork is very dark, the merch is very dark—and I love that. That’s great. I just feel like there’s so much more to be explored with music that is sonically intense and aggressive but is more playful. 100 gecs is a great example of that. I was so excited the first time I heard 100 gecs. Bits of Poppy’s record I Disagree as well, are really fun and playful. Just so it’s crystal clear, I’m not shading metal or hardcore. I come from that. I love those records, but there’s really a lot of room to mess around. It’s a big sandbox with not a lot of people in it.

I think it’s fair to argue that many artists who often get classified as hyperpop, like 100 gecs and Poppy, were heavily inspired by Sleigh Bells. How did you feel when you encountered this newer crop of artists who share elements of your sound?

Derek: It was so exciting to hear the next wave of artists who are exciting and inspired and connecting. It’s truly an honor. At first, it can make you feel old, even if you’re in your 30s. And a little scared, which is natural. I’ve exchanged really, really lovely messages with Dylan Brady from gecs. It was great to hear directly from them that they were influenced by us. In turn, they have influenced us: I borrowed from gecs on Texis and a little bit of this record. It’s like the circle’s complete.

It’s not even borrowing a specific thing… It’s just the feeling. There’s just a life and a spark and a spirit and a playfulness that I feel like, at our best, we have. And when you hear it in another artist, it just makes you want to step up and be great as well. Not in a competitive way. I feel like we’re only ever in competition with ourselves.

Alexis: Personally, I’ve never felt particularly compelled to identify with a specific genre, but I do agree that listening to Poppy’s album or listening to 100 gecs, there is that feeling of just wanting to lose your shit. There’s this completely un-self-conscious, rowdy intensity—but then also this saccharine sweetness and playful giddiness. The marriage of these components is so compelling. As Derek’s said, it’s a feeling. It’s a spark. To be considered amongst bands who are really doing that well, it’s a huge privilege and a huge honor.

Derek: We should mention Charli [XCX] as well, who finally reached the masses with that sound. Right after True Romance came out, Charli opened our UK Reign of Terror shows, and within three minutes of the first set, I was like, “Enjoy this moment because she will never be opening for us again.” Even then, as a little kid, she was great. To watch her do her thing has been really incredible and inspiring, especially with Brat.

Why do you feel like that intense, over-the-top sound is speaking so much to this current moment?

Alexis: I spend a lot of time with young people and teenagers. I think young people have access to so much music and so many different ideas and styles. You seldom hear about a young person talk about a guilty pleasure. Kids are so much more exploratory and open to so many different genres. When I was growing up, marrying pop and hardcore wasn’t groundbreaking, necessarily. Bands have been doing it for a long time in different ways. But there was always this feeling, at least for me, that there was almost something shameful about pop, or that hardcore was more authentic. Young people have a disregard for that, and it’s created so much more space for young women and femme people to go to, say, a Turnstile show. That band is so exciting. You look at their fan base, and those shows never would’ve looked like that 20 years ago.

How did the lyrics for the new record come about?

Derek: A lot of times the instrumental will inform the lyric, or I’ll have something kicking around. I’ll send an instrumental and then a lyric file to Alexis and say, “Go nuts. Do whatever you want, move things around, change it.” Once she gets her hands on it, she definitely colors it in the best way.

Alexis: I think of melody first. When I’m listening to a track, I’ll usually just start with some mumbles or syllables. Once I have a melody that I think is worthy, I’ll try and add the lyric into that… A lot of times it’s a piecemeal assembly. But there have been multiple times where Derek is like, “No, this is really what I think should be said here.” I love that this record has a narrative it’s telling. You’re going through a relationship with the characters, a storyline, especially with regards to Riz. It’s almost like a word scramble: How do I put this together in a way with a melody that’s going to do the track justice?

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Arielle Gordon.

Is that a bit embarrassing? It’s something I started in the pandemic when I was really not sure if I was ever going to make another record again, and I was like, “I need to make this little wall of things I have done to remind me that I’ve done them and I’m doing it,” and I call it my little affirmation wall.

I Got Too Sad for My Friends is your first album in six years, and it has a very different sound than your previous two. I know you wrote at least one of the songs at home on acoustic guitar during lockdown. To what extent has embracing less synth in your production since then been an intentional artistic direction, a product of your circumstances, or just some other creative motivation?

It’s a real mix. What I became known for with the first record, synth pop, was actually new for me. I had always written on acoustic guitar. My songs, before I released them, had an electronic flavor because I would produce them at home, use loops, and produce beats, but they were always built around acoustic guitar. I’m not a proficient keys player, and I certainly had never encountered a synthesizer in the flesh before. It wasn’t until I met my collaborator for the first two records, Joel Pott, that I really met [the Roland] Juno-106, which was the synth that became so much of the sound of my first record and a big part of the second record.

In some ways, embracing less synth is a return to my songwriting origins. It’s also a product of circumstance, having moved to New York, not having had the time to move my entire studio—or the money, to be quite frank—because it’s a lot of gear. I didn’t even have a guitar to begin with. I had to ask Torres to borrow her guitar, so she ran around in the middle of the lockdowns, and we did a distanced exchange. I say exchange, but I gave Torres nothing in return. I was just like, “Thank you. I finally have an instrument.”

In terms of textures, which are very different on this record, it was just where I needed to live, the space I needed to occupy. I needed things that felt natural, warm, tactile. The natural world was really calling me. And it was certainly the kind of textures I was listening to at that time. I’ve talked a lot about how Cassandra Jenkins’ record [An Overview on Phenomenal Nature] massively influenced the world I was in at that time.

Hearing you talk about going back to your roots makes me wonder if you’ve been doing any songwriting in the time since. If you have, has it veered more toward the sound you have on I Got Too Sad for My Friends or on Forevher and Nothing’s Real?

This stuff I’ve been writing, it’s still in the world of this third album, but also, everything starts off in that world because of how I write.

Every time I get to this stage in the album process, I’m like, “I’m never going to make an album ever again. I don’t want to do it. This is a completely mad endeavor. Why am I doing this when no one is asking me to? It is not like I have millions of people clamoring for a Shura record, and yet here I am putting myself through this process.” But it’s been interesting because I’ve been listening to a lot of pop music in the last couple of months, maybe as a kind of antidote to the world that I’m in right now and I’m like, “Oh, maybe I need to make some pop music again.” And then I’m like, “No. No more albums. Stop it.” But I’ve never really known where I’m going next until I’m already halfway there.

I’m interested in the idea that you’re always like, “No, I don’t want to do another album.” How do you reignite your creative spark?

The difference between the creative spark reigniting and what happened [in the years before I Got Too Sad For My Friends] was that this was the first time I experienced what people would call writer’s block, the inability to write. There was nothing going on in that way in my brain. Whereas in the past when I’d finished Nothing’s Real, I was like, “Oh, I never want to do that again,” it wasn’t so much that I didn’t have stuff to say or I wasn’t writing. It was just the experience of touring a record for two years and everything that happened was exhausting, and I was like, “Wow, I am just tired and I need to sleep.” In that moment of peak exhaustion, the idea of doing it again is horrifying.

What was different here with this album was that I was midway through a tour, so I was excited about playing these songs, about playing the record, and that sort of stopped. And I knew that meant I probably should use this time, this break, to write, because it’s not often that you get that break. You’re either recording, touring, or doing promo.

I said, “It’d be really useful now to write a lot.” And I just couldn’t. I had nothing to say. The only way I describe it to people is, I felt like my brain was a brick. The brain itself had calcified, and the particles weren’t moving, and the synapses weren’t firing. Anytime I tried, anything I began to say or tried to say just seemed awful, and I hated everything that I attempted to do and gave up, and then wondered if that was it. I was like, “Maybe the particles will never uncalcify,” which is, if that’s the first time it’s happened to you, quite discombobulating, and probably will be the second time it happens to me. I’ll probably be like, “Okay, no, this time for real, it’s calcified and it’s never coming back.”

Can you say more about how you transformed your mind from “it feels calcified” to “I have something to say again”?

It was a long process with several prongs. Relying heavily on my small group of peers and talking to them about feeling this way, and having them tell me they had felt this way and had come through the other side was really helpful to me. Ladyhawke, who I became very good friends with in the [lockdowns], was like, “I’ve been there. You will absolutely write another song again. Don’t panic.”

I had to let go of the panic. To this day, I still do it walking and leaving the house. Whenever I feel stuck—I got this book by Brenda Ueland called If You Want to Write, and she mentions the importance of walking and having that time to just observe and think. Observation and feeding my brain that way is something Katie Gavin would talk to me about, the idea of objective observations and writing them down.

One of the things I struggle with, which is also in Brenda Ueland’s book, is editing before you’ve even written it down. You have the thought, you go to write it down, and you’re like, “No, that’s a terrible thought. Don’t even bother writing it down.” [I learned] to quiet that voice and be like, “No, just write everything down.” Right now, that may not feel or sound interesting or feel like a lyric, but with time, you’ll go back and be like, “Actually, there’s this one tiny fragment that has nothing to do with this song that I’m writing. But for some reason there’s an image there or something that really fits.”

Maybe that’s also why nature and the textures of this record are the way they are, because I would go on these walks and sit down on a park bench, write down everything that I could hear, see, and smell, and just sit. If I think of “Richardson,” just feeling the air move across my face as a lyric would’ve been something that I wrote down in my notepad. When I wrote that, I probably was like, “Oh, why am I talking about the wind? God.”

As I’m hearing you talk about this, I want to ask, how do you edit?

I’m working on lyrics right until I record the final—I will have a draft, an early draft, and sometimes, there will be space for a second verse that I don’t have yet, and I’ll either leave a gap or copy the first verse twice. Sometimes, you’ll write a song and the whole thing will come out. And yes, you’ll tweak certain words and go, “Am I trying to force a rhyme here where there doesn’t need to be? Is there a more interesting word that doesn’t rhyme?” Those kinds of things. Sometimes, I’ll be like, “Why is verse two not coming?” How I’ve learned to deal with that is that, “Okay, verse two isn’t coming for me. I can’t force verse two,” so I have to let it arrive at me.

Sometimes, there will be songs [for which] I finish the lyrics years later. I try not to listen to my own music until time has passed. It’s like, “Maybe I should have put that word in there.” But I think it’s because I studied English literature, for me, the most important part, the bit I get the most out of as a consumer of music, as an enjoyer of music, is the lyrics. So for me, I really care. I try things out, I try different versions, I will sing different versions, and it’s a sort of long process [that] feels like I’m excavating dinosaur bones with a little toothbrush.

Why did you move back to the U.K., and how has doing so affected your creativity? How has it affected your relationships with the friends you’ve mentioned, none of whom live in the U.K.?

Coming back here is primarily a financial decision, to be honest. I was spending a lot of money on an apartment in New York, which is a city I love, and I couldn’t enjoy all that New York has to offer, including my friends who were there. We couldn’t hang out. It made sense to come back here.

It’s been interesting making a record where place, the idea of place, is a big character. So many of those places are on the other side of the world. I have friends who are creative, but I don’t think I’ve ever had a clique or a crew in music. I was really excited about moving to New York because there are so many incredible musicians there. I was signed to a label that started in America, and I was excited to tap into the creative sphere there. I definitely did make friends, and my life sort of revolved around The Lot Radio just because of the timing of when I got there and it being [lockdown]. It felt like I never got the opportunity to really explore what a full life as a creative person would be in New York. I feel like I have unfinished business that I’m not remotely interested in finishing for at least four years.

Do you have an overarching principle or philosophy for navigating change as an artist?

It’s funny because I’m thinking about a lyric in “Ringpull,” which is like, “I’m scared of change. What if you arrive and all I do is change?” I think, not being neurotypical, change is a challenge in some ways, in terms of my routine, my environment, which is why I sometimes push myself to do the thing I know I’m not comfortable with.

To rewind a bit, for this album, it was really important to me to not do the same thing again. I didn’t want to make a third album and make it with the same writers, the same producers, and tour it in the same places. By the time I’d gotten to the point where I knew I was able to make a third album, I had this voice in my head going, “What if you never make another one?” At the end of it all, I don’t want to say, “I did the same thing three times.” I wanted to do things I’d never done before, and I wanted to experience creative discomfort.

Even though I was signed to a major label on the first record, which sounds terrifying, I had a very fortunate experience. I had put out a song, it went viral. I was more or less left to do what I wanted because [the label’s mentality was], “Clearly, she has an idea of what she wants to do, so let her finish it.”

I wanted to experience what it might be like to push myself. I had experienced this discomfort. It sounds weird. I spent a year or two being sad in New York, and I was like, “You know what? More pain.” But it wasn’t painful. The change brought me so much joy, and maybe that’s the lesson. I am absolutely terrified of change, but when it happens, it’s quite joyful.

I cried in the studio the first day we all played together and we were recording live together, because it was something I’d never done before. I remember going back into the control room and listening to a take, and I’m singing live even with everyone playing. I was like, “Is this us? We sound so good.” I’d never experienced that before, and I just wanted to make sure I did it just in case.

Any motivation to keep going is still a motivation to keep going.

Yeah, and also to do it in a way that—to really just go for it. Tomorrow is not guaranteed for any person, so it’s like, what do you want to make sure you’ve done? I want to hear Hammond. I want to hear clarinets. I want to dress up in armor and walk up a Welsh mountain in the freezing cold. I think a lot of it is also bringing joy to the inner child, the kid in you who wanted to be a musician, who wanted to do this—what did they want to do? Because actually, they’re not traumatized yet. They haven’t experienced a pandemic. They haven’t been dropped in the middle of a tour.

If you’ve done The Artist’s Way or anything like that, it’s that pure version of you, that hasn’t had all that creative baggage, that makes you the editor of your own thoughts. It’s like, what does Shura who’s seven years old want to make? A lot of it was tapping into my inner child and the joy, because I think for any musician who’s been in the industry for a while, you discover it’s not always fun and it’s a difficult job, and we are blessed to be able to do it.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Max Freedman.

I think even the story itself predisposed me to have this kind of masochistic relationship to putting the story together. I had been interviewed and interrogated by police a lot as a young person, and I had been a really willing participant in that. Because I felt like, well, if I submit to this process—if I just fully submit to all of these questions and all of these things they’re asking me to do—maybe they will figure out who committed this crime. And this person will be put away, and I will at least not be worrying anymore that they’re still on the street and could be harming other people.

It’s tricky because, it’s like, that was great training in being extremely thorough and trying to nail down what had happened, and how I felt about it and what exactly I remembered. And so I think I went into it with that mindset, submitting myself to that process of just endless self-interrogation and endless… like, just being extremely rigorous and thorough with myself. And not having a great sense, at least at first, of what boundaries I needed.

And then, of course, the way that I moved toward prioritizing those boundaries was actually very productivity-motivated. If I was reading police documents or the autopsy report in the middle of the night, and I had been working for hours and hours and hours, and I went beyond my capacity, I wouldn’t be able to write anything for a week or two weeks. And I felt like, if I’m going to actually get this done, if I’m going to keep going forward, I need to be more mindful of what my capacity is at various times.

There are a few things I implemented eventually, and even more things that I advise students to do, that maybe I thought about doing but never actually did. I think embodied practices can be really useful. Like, people often talk about yoga, etc. But back in the days of writing After the Eclipse, I was still a pretty active roller derby player. I would have this immediate sense of belonging and also get to do this physically aggressive thing that was empowering. It was something that would help me get out my anger and my frustration, but among friends.

And a lot it is also just staying mindful of the fact that writing memoir can be such a process of time travel. I found myself really traveling back to times in my life that were a lot more difficult and mental states that were really challenging.

A great example of that is that one month in 2012, I wrote a check and I wrote the date—but 1994.

Oh my god.

Sometimes you don’t realize how transported you are. So I would resolve to write two hours, and then, even if I had more writing time afterward, I would stop and entrust the part of myself that was less under the trance of memory and of investigating these things to have a good sense of what my capacity for that day was, and I’d put it aside.

How do you hold yourself to it, though? Do you set timers for yourself?

Yeah, definitely setting a timer. I’m a big fan of tracking and logging things. I have a lot of my own spreadsheets and systems. If I am actively working, I’m usually working more than I feel like I am. So watching hours add up over a week really helps me assure myself that I am showing up for my work.

I’ve heard a lot of writers who write memoir about their trauma say that they’re not sure they’ll ever write about anything else. Do you identify with that at all?

I do. And I have to say, my current orientation to that is frustration.

Then I was working on this memoir that’s a lot about sexuality and love in the wake of trauma. And a lot about thinking through all of that via my mother’s example and experiences, and trying to interrogate some of the sex-negativity that surrounded the trial. So you can imagine, that one was a good time, too, to write. [laughs]

I was working on that, and it was 2020, and I was just like, “I can’t do this work right now.” I have the world’s biggest sweet tooth, I like to say, and my partner had long been suggesting to me, “Why don’t you write about candy?” And I had said, “I’m sorry, I’m a serious writer. I’m not going to do that. What are you talking about? That’s not a book.”

But I finally broke down and gave it a shot. I said, “I’m going to get up every morning for 100 mornings and write about a different candy every day, just as writing exercises.” I just wanted to enjoy making sentences again and get into that sort of pleasure of language. And then I would go on and do my “serious” writing for the rest of the day.

Now, Sweet Nothings has become this book that I hope gives people some lightness and joy in a continually really difficult time. Of course, it still does have this frame of—I like how you put it earlier—not only Mom and the murder, but this telling of that story in Eclipse. So it’s very much still folding back in onto the same subjects. The funny version is, “Why won’t my mom leave me alone already?”

And I feel like—a lot of people, especially those who have one big traumatic event—they get to feeling like, “Am I a good enough writer to make meaning without using this thing? Is this the only thing I can make the gravitational center of something?” Because so often, I’ll be writing a piece, and I’ll be trying to do another thing. I wrote this piece about a fried cherry pie in Oklahoma, and that turned into a mom-mourning piece. And I thought, is this just the same shortcut that I keep taking here? And then the New England part of me, who is embarrassed about having feelings, comes in with, “Am I so wounded that I can’t stop talking about this? Can I put it aside for a second and make something else already?”

How do you respond when you notice other writers writing about their trauma from different angles, taking a prismatic approach to that one event in their life? Do you have a similar reaction to their work as the frustration you’re describing you feel with your own?

I totally don’t. It’s definitely one of those things where it’s like, I would never say that to my best friend. My friends and colleagues can write about the same thing forever. But it was like, didn’t I write Sweet Nothings to get away from this?

I want to backpedal a bit and ask about that 100-day writing challenge you mentioned, which kicked off Sweet Nothings. What did you learn about yourself from doing that, and do you ever think you’ll try that kind of challenge again?

I actually openly welcome any idea from anyone about something I could do 100 times again. It was really fun, and very fun to accidentally have a draft of a book after 100 days.

What I learned was that I surprised myself a lot. It’s a lot weirder and funnier than I realized I could be on the page. I think that’s not only because After the Eclipse is obviously so serious, but also because I had this conception of myself as this very sedate writer of lovely, conventional sentences. This almost old-fashioned, little New Englander thing. I read too much Thoreau as a kid or something.

Whereas the work I love? I’ve always been such a big Maggie Nelson fan. I love Heather Christle’s poetry. I love weird little things. But I just never thought I could make that myself. I am long-winded, but to make all these short little things that are sometimes quite snappy and unplanned was really thrilling to me. I don’t think I could’ve done them well without the process. They are what they are because of how I wrote them: first thing in the morning, usually before my “editor brain” was on, as I say. I would just instinctively go to these weird places, and there was absolutely no pressure. If I were to do this again, the trick would be pretending I wasn’t taking it seriously. I don’t know if you can do that twice.

You were nominated for a James Beard Award for an essay you wrote about gas station pie.

Crazy.

Now you have this new book about candy. It’s so clear that food is a creative doorway for you. How did you discover that about your writing process?

Honestly, totally by accident. I started writing about candy just because I love it, and other people had to point out to me that I had an unusual level of focus. And then honestly, I ate that fucking pie, man! And I was like, “The world has to know about this pie. Oh my god.”

I also felt like it was an opportunity to do some class work around food. Class consciousness. Class critique. Thinking about who gets to eat what and how we judge those choices.

It’s funny, too, because one of the gigs that got me through writing After the Eclipse was working as a fact-checker for WSJ Magazine. They cover a lot of high-class food. That job gave me major poor-kid class anxiety. There was a lot of French I couldn’t pronounce. I remember thinking, “God, I’ve lived in New York for six years, and I still feel like a bumpkin in this job.” So to be at the James Beard Awards was surreal.

I want to ask about the art of writing micro-essays, since there are 100 of them in your newest book. How does your approach to writing a micro-essay differ from your approach to writing a longer essay?

I really believe that every time you sit down to write, it’s like you’ve never written anything before. You have to totally relearn it. But now that I have experience in writing a pretty long memoir and in writing micro-essays, I just don’t feel like I know how to write a conventional-length essay yet. It’s the length I teach, but I haven’t really nailed it yet.

We always talk about how the essay is flexible, capacious: insert whatever quote about the essay here. And I think those especially apply to that 3,000 to 5,000 word range. Each one really feels like its own form. I just haven’t aligned form with content at that length yet. I haven’t found the thing I want to say that wants that length.

With micro-essays, sometimes, maybe half the time, I’d start with something like, “Today is about Reese’s Pieces.” I’d start typing, maybe pull in a quick bit of history from Google, and then I’d write this paragraph. I’d hit the last sentence and I’d almost hear it click in my head. I’d know: that’s the end. And I’d put it down. And I’d walk away.

Wow. Did that happen 100 times?

Not 100 times, but maybe 30 or so. Sometimes, I’d get this feeling, like, “Okay, this paragraph sounds like the first one. There’s a shape here.” That’s the challenge with micro-pieces, you’re trying to signal to the reader that you’ve come to the end much earlier than in a length we’re more used to reading. You don’t want to give it unearned gravity. You can’t ring the bell of completion too loudly.</span< And since I knew there would be 100 of them, I was always asking the reader to reset their attention again and again. So each one had to feel complete but also open enough that you could step forward into the next one.

But as for how I did it? I don’t know. I just felt around.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Hurley Winkler.

In a yoga training I just did, they asked that exact question. I feel like in the space of teaching [yoga], it’s literally to give people the mental space from their everyday lives. To give them a container to be in—to reflect, sit, be quiet, separate from the outside world, and see what comes up. With tattooing, I feel like it’s about making people feel more beautiful. Every time I get a tattoo, I feel like I look more like myself—it’s about making people look more like how they feel on the inside. Also giving people a space to lay, be quiet, listen to music, and not engage in anything other than the act of receiving.

How do you see the relationship between teaching yoga and tattooing?

I love teaching because it’s much less of a high stakes environment. A one-on-one interaction is so different from leading a collective. I love the balance of both because they feel equally life-giving, exciting, and embodying. For me, yoga is very internal—moving, burning, cleansing—while tattooing is very external. Tattooing feels like, “This is who I am externally.” Yoga feels like, “This is who I’m trying to be inwardly.” I think they complement each other extremely well. I also tattoo a lot of young people, and I teach a lot of older people. There’s been this funny crossover where I’ve had tattoo clients start to take my yoga classes because they vibe with me, and then I’ve had older people want to get tattoos because they feel safe, and trust my energy or my intention. It’s been cool to mix those communities and introduce them to each other. I like as much diversity in age as I can be around—both sides can teach you a lot about life.

Why do you get tattoos?

I think it’s genuinely so beautiful to be able to decorate yourself—with clothing, color, the way we can do our hair. Something about being able to adorn and decorate skin feels so cool and freeing.

I’m curious how giving and receiving tattoos has informed your perception of permanence, and the passage of time?

When I receive tattoos, the feeling of permanence is so comforting—to think that I’ll be 87 years old, hopefully, with everything I have on my body. Then I get to look back at things I got—I have a tattoo I got in India 5 to 8 years ago—and remember that I’m still that person. I’m still in that body. You know when you see a picture of yourself at five years old and you’re like, “Whoah, I’m still that person”? That’s how it feels. Whether I got it at a good or bad time, there’s something really grounding and comforting about knowing that person is within me. It makes you reflect on everything you’ve been through. For me, tattoos are a timestamp.

For other people, I feel like I watch them really practice surrender. They give up control to the artist to a certain extent. Obviously, they choose the placement and confirm they want the design, but then there’s a level of letting go. You’re fully giving me your body, and you’re trusting me while you lay there and hope that it turns out how you wanted. I’ve had a lot of past clients tell me they feel like they can take on way more risk and trust other people, all from the act of getting tattooed. I think the permanence of it all loosens people up, and makes them practice surrender. It makes them take their bodies less seriously. We’re so body centered and body focused. It reminds people that this is just a vessel to decorate.

Outside of all external definitions, how would you define artwork?

For me, it’s simply the inner world made visual. Someone trying to represent what’s happening inside of them. There’s so many mediums that are possible through that, which is where artwork is interesting to me.

Have you always felt drawn to bodywork?

I feel like massage came up first and foremost when I was a kid. I used to massage people’s feet under the table at Thanksgiving. I also loved giving face massages.

How did tattooing come into your life?

I think when I started practicing [tattooing], I recognized a similar feeling that I would get when I would teach [yoga]. There is an overlapping sense of embodiment—a coming into yourself more than you did before you arrived. Teaching came first, and then tattooing started a year or two after I did my [yoga teacher] training. Tattooing is way more personal. You’re working with one-on-one relationships rather than teaching a group of 20 or 30, but you’re still making people feel embodied and relaxed, creating that container for reflection. Tattooing is also more physical because people are leaving with something very permanent, which is scary.

How did you find the confidence to tattoo for the first time?

I practiced on myself for a while… But there was no confidence. It kind of just happened. I had a few moments of messing up at the very beginning, where it would hit me like a wall—the idea that you’re doing something extremely permanent—and I had to be checked a few times to realize it really was high stakes. I think the ignorant optimism you have as a young person, to just kind of do something and not really care about the outcome, actually served me pretty well in terms of getting into it, and doing it consistently without fear.

Why did you choose hand poke tattooing as your medium?

I started that way because it felt more accessible and less scary. Machines were really expensive, and I didn’t know much about them. Then I fell in love with the process of it, the quiet of it. I love slow art. I love things that take a long time. In an increasingly fast-paced, fast fashion kind of world, it’s so much harder to find things made slowly, and to find people who want things made slowly. To slow down in general is just more of a commodity. The slowness is what tethers me to it. Also, knowing that it’s pre-electricity. It’s funny that it’s coming back into trend. Hand poke is the original form of tattooing; it’s how people did it for thousands of years. Connecting with the original form of the practice is really cool to me.

How would you describe your style?

The technical tattoo term would be micro realism: small things that have a realistic quality to them. I wouldn’t say I do a lot of abstract work. I do a lot of realistic and natural forms through dot work, through pointillism—plants, animals, and shells. I would say my style is soft, and compliments the body well. It’s usually specific to what people find sacred, which happens to be natural life forms that you find outside.

Do you have a favorite piece you’ve ever done?

Yeah. In January I gave this girl a really big bird on her back that went from shoulder to shoulder. It took two days. I had never done a tattoo that took multiple days before. That was really awesome—not to rush and just be with one person for two days. The bird is a native Hawaiian bird and the client is from the island, so it meant a lot to her to wear that animal on her back. It was such a crazy honor to be the person to give it to her. Since then, I want to take on bigger pieces.

How has social media influenced your professional growth while being based in Hawaii?

I really like living rurally because a lot of the work I do comes through word-of-mouth. Everyone is talking and showing each other their tattoos. I would much rather work in that way, through organic ways of sharing and spreading my art. But social media is awesome. I’m able to reach people in cities and then I can afford to go to those cities and bring my art to other places. Before I moved [to Kauai], a few tattoo artists told me I had to be in New York or LA if I wanted to make it. I didn’t really want to do that, or believe that it was true. Social media has allowed me to be where I want to be and still reach people in more urban environments.

What are the challenges that come with owning your own shop?

Self-management, in general. There’s not a lot of challenges with owning and managing the specific space because I feel like I know how to do it really well. I know what I need. It’s literally just me. I don’t have any employees or people to oversee. I would say the challenges are the logistics of starting it alone and doing everything alone—business stuff, financial stuff, tax stuff. But I’m still in my first six years of tattooing… So I think time will help.

What do you gain from guest spotting at other shops and being around other creatives?

It’s so nice to just ask questions. To figure out what materials people are using, techniques, what kind of printers or online platforms people use to enhance their work… It’s really nice to be around other people who’ve also made this their career. It can be so up and down. Sometimes you make a lot of money, sometimes you make no money. It’s dependent upon the economy—how much disposable income people have. It’s just so nice to be around people that are down for that challenge, even though it can be really hard to have such an unpredictable and taxing job, physically and mentally. It’s such a cool community to be in.

Do you remember the best piece of advice another tattooer has given you?

Don’t rush. Oh, and quality over quantity. Yes, you can make more money by taking four or five appointments in a day, but the quality of your work is going to go down. It’s obviously nice to make more money, especially as a freelance artist, but what we’re making is forever. Prioritize the quality of the work over the money that could be made by rushing.

How do you ground and care for yourself after the intense physical and energetic exchange of tattooing? Do you turn to yoga or any other self-soothing practices?

I love that people feel so extremely comfortable with me, and speak to me about really personal things going on in their lives. I know a lot of tattooers who have their headphones on while doing their job, and their client is on their phone or listening to music. Personally, that’s not the kind of tattooer I want to be. To be able to hold as much space as I do, I think I need to take less people, eventually. I’m holding too much space for too many people right now.

The practice that keeps me from carrying too much—which I’m still trying to practice—is to visualize a barrier around myself while I’m tattooing, like a thin film of light protecting me, so I don’t take it home as much. Burning something after really helps. Right now, it feels important for me to allow people to let their minds run and say whatever they’re feeling. I don’t want to stop people from doing that, but I don’t think I’ve quite mastered how to not let it overwhelm me. The answer is not to close myself off. I think I am still seeking those tools. But I’m also going to be doing this my whole life, so I have a lot of time to figure it out.

Do you have advice for a freelance creative starting out?

Make art for yourself, not for the audience. When you authentically make what you think is cool, and what you find incredible, you’ll attract people that want to support you. If you’re trying to make art for an audience, you’re not going to build a sustainable audience that will follow your journey. Instead of catering to what people already want, show them something they didn’t even know they wanted by making it for yourself first.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Sammy Steiner.

I started doing graffiti as a kid, hopping on the side of the freeway and doing pieces or just tagging on the Muni. That was my introduction to wanting to paint publicly. But around 2007, 2008, we put up the Edward Said mural at SF State. I was in the General Union of Palestine Students at SF State, and I was on the mural committee. The process of the mural had started before I had ever got to State, but it got interrupted by zionists who didn’t want us to put up a mural, so it was on hold for a while.

The administration tried to bring us in and say, “Hey, there are some images on your mural that we don’t approve of.” It was an image of Handala, who’s the cartoon character created by Naji al-Ali, a Palestinian artist who was assassinated in England. Naji al-Ali was a child refugee, and he created this character out of the story of a Palestinian refugee child with no shoes, always turning his back to the world because he felt abandoned. And the whole thing is that he’d never turn back around until Palestine is free. The name Handala means bitter. It’s like a type of bitterness that’s very bitter. That’s where the name came from. Handala is very representative of Palestinian culture, Palestinian refugees. We can’t talk about freedom or justice without talking about the refugees.

Eventually I helped paint a little bit of that mural, and it was at that time that I said “All right, you know what? This is really what I want to do. I want to pursue my art and I want to make the focus Palestine.”

The first wall I ever painted in public that was legal, was a wall given to me by an artist named Cuba, who was part of a bunch of crews… the Ex Vandals, and the TMC crew as well. He was one of the first graffiti writers in San Francisco, but he was from Baltimore. He was doing pieces in the ’80s. Some of my friends who are some of the most OG graffiti writers from San Francisco said in their own words that Cuba did the first piece in San Francisco. So I was very honored to know him. Rest in peace, Cuba.

For him to give me my first wall meant a lot. He cared a lot about Palestine. He saw me drawing one day in Muddy Waters on 16th and Valencia, and he hadn’t seen my art. He’s like, “This is what you do? Man, come with me” He made me get up and follow him, and he took me to Clarion Alley, and he’s like, “Here, man. You take this wall. Use this wall, man, but don’t fuck it up, just keep it going. You have to upkeep it if I’m going to give it to you.” I said, “Of course, man. I’ll never give this wall up.” So I’ve been working on painting on that wall for years. He catapulted me into taking muralism more seriously. He saw my vision and he appreciated it. He was a dope dude.

So your first wall was in Clarion Alley?

Yeah, my first space where I started painting consistently and on a legal wall. It was a good little space. It didn’t feel like a gentrifier space. Muralism in San Francisco can be tainted by gentrification. The gentrifiers, they like murals because it keeps graffiti away. But you can’t really separate muralism from graffiti. It’s like hip-hop and rap. It’s part of the same culture.

Sometimes it’s even the same painters. From what I can tell, skate culture in the city has been a source of inspiration for you, too.

Skateboarding was a big part of my early childhood. When I was about 12 years old, I started skateboarding and I just jumped into the culture. My older brother started skating a few years before me, and I fell in love with it because it was just a form of freedom. It was a form of expressing myself creatively. I was not into normative sports and stuff. I was not into sports, I was not into competitive sports. I didn’t like the culture at a young age.

I never felt included in anything that was typical American. I felt connected with skateboarding because it was kids who came from similar backgrounds to me. Even until this day, I still gravitate towards that culture.

A lot of the people who do graffiti are also skaters, so it all mixes together. When I was in Palestine in 2019 and 2022, I had the opportunity to paint at skate spots and the skateparks out there, which was something I always wanted to do as a Palestinian and as a skateboarder.

Tell me more about that experience. When were you there and what was that like?

When I went to Falastin in 2022, I was doing projects in Jerusalem and all over. I ended up hooking up with my friend Aram Sabag. He’s from Nablus, but he’s one of the skateboard movement leaders in Falastin. And he was like, “Yeah, come paint here, come paint there.” So I just hopped around with him and we brought paint and I would just paint walls that needed some love.

There were a lot of white kids from England who were all part of the Skate Pal thing. And even though they’re sweet kids… I shouldn’t even complain that they’re there because it’s dope, but it’s still kind of… bittersweet? Because we don’t get to go back. So it’s just tough when you see Europeans there. Like all my cousins who’ve never even been to Palestine, I’m like, “Man, I wish they were here.” It shouldn’t be a big deal, but I’m old school in this way. I wish I could see more of my people going there.

The first mural that I was introduced to of yours was the one in Oakland at the Solidarity Wall on 26th. Since then, you’ve done these really epic murals throughout San Francisco. What has that journey been like for you?

It’s taught me a lot about myself. It’s taught me a lot about the community here in San Francisco. You learn a lot when you put something out there that has to do with what’s happening in Palestine. The reaction tells you a lot. My first piece I ever painted in Clarion Alley was completely defaced. I thought it was this person I knew who was a tweaker, but it wasn’t them who messed up my piece. It was an actual zionist. It may seem like there’s a lot of people out there who feel like that, but the reality is, no, there’s not. But the few people who do have that strong anti-Palestinian sentiment, they have the audacity to destroy my work.

In 2020 during the pandemic era, it was like my work was getting messed with daily. These people were probably home all day and they had nothing else to do, so they’d just come out and try to destroy my work. I didn’t really get much support at that time from my community. People weren’t really checking in and I just didn’t really ask for it either.

During this genocide, my Instagram account was banned and I lost all my followers, and that was a big part of my platform. It allowed me to have enough traction to maybe sell a couple prints every week, or just have enough money to sustain. I was struggling then too, but it was nice to have that many followers because I had access to more folks.

Can you share a little bit more about that tension for you around not having community support for so long? What has it meant for you to struggle as an artist in the Palestinian diaspora?

I am a Palestinian. I’m born and raised here on this land, and my parents as well. Both my parents were the first kids to be born in the United States. I grew up knowing my culture to an extent, but my perspective was different because I also identified with other struggles. As an artist, I had a vision to educate through art. That’s why I started doing murals. I think a lot of other people who are involved in the struggle are thinking intellectually. I’d always get frustrated with that, because I believe intellectualism is only going to get us so far. When it comes to being in the streets, art connects us more. Poetry, music, visual art, all these things are so important for us. Which is why I get annoyed when they become tokenized and exploited.

There seems to be some thread around integrity, but also resources. Maybe it’s also coming from graffiti culture as well?

It’s just being part of underground cultures that are very, very opinionated. I’m definitely very opinionated about a lot of stuff, and I don’t want to come off as arrogant or being a hater, but I just think that it’s important for people who want to be involved in the arts to understand that you can’t just get into the arts without being an artist first. Don’t try to make art or try to make money off of art if you’re not a freakin’ artist. Then you’re just a curator, then you’re just a gallery owner. It’s exploitative in a way, because it takes away the space of artists. It takes away space from artists, to give us an opportunity to do stuff.

How have you been able to sustain yourself as an artist? Because you’ve been doing this for two decades?

In my 20s when I was doing mostly hip-hop performances, I would just do shows and I would never get paid. I’d just do shit for free. We were the early artists before social media, so we got taken advantage of a lot. In my late 20s, early 30s, I started getting more into my visual art. I didn’t start actually getting money for that basically until the Palestine Oakland mural. And we all got paid $700, but it was over a month-long project. That was the first time I got paid. That showed me that I need to keep getting paid because, if this is what I’m going to do, I have to sustain myself.

When I started to take my art more seriously I started making and selling prints and T-shirts, and now I’m making hats. It helps, but it’s been a struggle, especially during this high-intensity genocide. I don’t really feel fully comfortable promoting my work, selling my work, online if I’m not giving a lot of the money to my people. At the same time, it’s kind of ridiculous to feel like that because I got to survive, dude. No one’s going to take care of me.

Can you say more about that? Because that does feel like a real tension for a lot of people right now, specifically for Palestinian artists.

For me, it was a waste of my resources to focus on raising money when I know that’s not my strong point, and I know it’s not going to be easy for me to do. It’ll take me hella more resources.

I don’t have a lot of rich people following me. It’s mostly working-class people who follow my work and people who are not balling by all means. I don’t want to sound insensitive because it’s such a critical time… But they’re not even letting the trucks into Gaza. There’s hundreds of thousands, tons, of food, tons of resources just sitting there that are not getting in. And this is the result of probably a couple billion dollars that people donated.

I’m not going to lie, though. If there was a freaking donation box for M16s, then shit, I would fucking hit that. I would definitely, but then I would be on a fucking watch list.

It doesn’t sound insensitive to me. It seems like you’re very clear on what your role is.

Even saying all that with my chest, I still feel bad. I still feel bad that I’m not sending money to Palestine or to families. Because how can I not feel bad? We’re in a place of plenty. We have everything we need. But the reason they don’t have anything is by design. It’s not like it can’t get there. It can, but they won’t let it.

This is why our job here is to just keep the pressure [on] and keep Palestine in people’s minds and keep that name coming out of people’s mouths 24/7. Our solidarity is picking up. More and more people are waking up.

Do you feel that’s the role of your work? Keeping Palestine in people’s vision?

I always tell people I’m in this shit for the long haul. I’m not here for the moment. I’m here for the movement. I would say my role is a cultural role to help inspire my people who are artists to pursue their art or any creative means to tell their story. To educate others. To be unapologetically Palestinian.

Could you share a little more about your mural process? What does conceptualizing it versus actually getting it up on a wall look like?

It depends on the wall. Some murals I paint I’ll sketch out the idea. When I painted my mural on Cortland and Mission, it’s the one that’s been defaced multiple times, it says, “Resistance is justified when people are occupied.” That piece, I just freestyled it.

I kind of have these go-to images that I like to paint. I love painting cities. Cityscapes. I love painting trees. I love painting people. And when I want to make it strong and bold, I will add elements of the military occupation. Negative elements. Tanks and bombs and stuff like that. That’s when I just want to make things clear.

I’m using that piece as an example because it’s one of my favorite pieces creatively, I just did whatever I wanted to. That’s usually when my art comes out the best, when there’s no limitations.

I just wanted to draw the image of a kid with a rock slinging it toward tanks and helicopters and bombs dropping. I wanted to show that this is what the fight for Palestine is about. Just being an artist who paints what I paint, my work is going to be a counter message to, say, AIPAC. It’s counter propaganda. Because of the imagery I’m painting, it’s counter to all that.

How different were the choices you were making around what you painted in Palestine then? Because those are scenes they live daily, so I imagine you don’t need to remind people of the reality of the occupation.

That’s a good question. I thought about that a lot, especially in 2019, when I was painting in Balata Refugee Camp, which is the biggest refugee camp in the West Bank. They see a lot of violence.

I painted a mural with an elder man playing the oud and then a woman holding a tray in her hand. On top of the tray, instead of food or olives, was Jerusalem. Then I did a cityscape, and then I did some mountains, but I put words inside the mountains. Words like friendship. Solidarity. A bunch of positive words. It’s mostly for the kids because it was right on the UN school that was really dilapidated and run down. Those are the images I painted for them.

But some other kids were like, “Come here. Come here. I want you to paint my store.” And they would just grab me by the wrist and just pull me toward their house or their store. And they’re like, “Paint something hana.” And I’m like, “What do you want me to paint?” “Hatt sittash, hatt sittash.” They want me to paint an M16. So I would paint a character, with a Hatta, a Keffiyeh, and then I’ll paint some cactus, and he’ll be holding the M16.

That was for them because that’s what they wanted. And I couldn’t say no. So fuck, yeah, I painted it. Then another person took me to paint on their house and I painted a handala. That’s what they wanted to see. And then I painted two martyrs. Everybody was pulling me left and right, man. Because I was the only Palestinian painter. There was this girl from Brazil and this dude from Peru, but they’re in la-la land, painting elephants and shit. It was pretty funny, man. It was like this guy painted this psychedelic ass elephant and everybody was just staring at it. They had no idea what it was supposed to mean. They painted over it when he left.

I just painted what they wanted to see. I felt like it was more for them to tell me what they wanted to see, because I’m leaving in a month. I’m not going to be there. They’re going to be there. But I heard all of my art that I painted is still up and still riding, so they liked me. It made me feel good to have that respect from them, because I know that they’ve been through hell. Life is tough in the camp. They made me paint a couple martyrs and I learned a lot about the society back home.

I painted a guy who was killed by the Palestinian authority, Hasham. This mural was on the main street. So I felt a little bit shifty too. I was like, am I going to get in trouble for this shit? Somebody going to ride up on me? But the people really appreciated it. I was painting the guy’s leg, it was really funny, and some guy came up and said, “It doesn’t look like him at all, man. Who is that? It doesn’t look like anything like him.” And I was like, “Look, bro, I’m working with six spray cans. I don’t even have the right colors. I don’t have the right tips. I’m just doing this with very minimal resources. I’m sorry, man, if this is not exactly like him.”

He came up and he’s like, “Mish M’bayan Mish M’bayan.” I’m like, “Man,” I was like, “Bro, get the fuck out of here. I’ve been here for three hours, bro.” There’s no more light and I’m over here painting this freaking portrait and there’s like ten people crowded behind me. I couldn’t even back up to look at the painting, because everybody was on my ass. So they were really excited and they loved that I was doing it, but they were also just right up in it.

That’s hilarious. That honestly just feels so Arab.

Oh my god, so Arab man. It was hella funny, because I’d be on the wall painting and this one white dude, he was painting that big ass elephant, like I said. And the kids didn’t really like him, because he wasn’t being very nice to them. I caught him yelling at them one time, and I was like, “Don’t be yelling at the kids here, man. You’re here for them, bro. You’re not here for your elephant shit. You’re here for these kids.”

So the kids started stealing his cans. Maybe he noticed one or two, but they were taking a good amount. So the kids came up when I was painting and they thought they were going to be slick, and they took a few of my cans too, and they ran off. I chased them. It was so funny. And then some of the kids who were with me, hanging out with me all day, started chasing them with me. So I chase these kids all through the camp, from one side of the camp, literally all the way to the other main street.

And I kind of gave up at one point and I was like, all right, I’m just going to go back. I was with these other kids and they walked back with me and they were talking shit about the kids who stole the cans. They’re like, “Don’t worry, don’t worry. We’re going to get them back for you.” It was so funny, 20 minutes later, I’m sitting there and these kids come up and they have hella cans from those guys that stole them. They brought me back like cans and more cans, it was so funny. I’m like, “Good job, man, good job.” They were the best man, they’re so damn sweet. And just full of life, full of love.

What advice would you give to younger artists?

I’m going to use a System Of A Down song: Follow your inner vision. Follow whatever inspired you in the beginning. Never forget that and always stick with that feeling, because it’s like the feeling that you get when you’re a kid, that motivation or something you get excited about, that should never leave you as an artist. You should always have that.

I don’t know if there has been any other time in history that’s been this challenging to stay mentally, physically, and emotionally healthy, stable… It’s been tough. It’s almost unfathomable to imagine, to witness what we’re witnessing. This is not normal at all. We’ve been numb to it, but it is scary. It can be really draining to our creative senses. It kind of makes me feel like I want to isolate myself more. So it’s important to stay around good folks. Just stay around as much positivity as you can, and I hope that you are also taking care as much as you can.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Sarah O'Neal.

I definitely get up early, but it’s never a solid, particularly hardcore regime. I do get up early and usually write stuff every day, but it can vary. If I’m home, I’ll do something around the house, and then maybe go play golf and then be back around noon, then work on some guitar stuff. And usually if I’m playing guitar, I’m writing songs. I’m not just practicing playing guitar. So, that’s usually how that ends up happening, and I really can’t do it any other way. I just have to write a whole bunch of crap to find stuff that’s actually any good. It’s not like I sit down and only write good stuff. Most of it’s not good. That’s how it works—you force your way through it.

Do you know right away if something’s not working, or is it more of a feeling of, “This isn’t great right now, but maybe it could be something”?

Yeah, that’s more like it. And then stuff will sit there for a long time without being finished. I’ve said this before, but when you put a new album out and people think it’s new stuff, well, it’s actually not new. Some of it’s new—all of it’s new to you—but I actually wrote this a long time ago. Or at least the first half of it, and could never figure out what to do with it until later.

How close to finished does a song need to be before you get together with Dale to work on it?

I’ll make demos first, but I make fairly primitive demos. I don’t like spending a lot of time on demos. I’d rather put that effort towards when we actually record it. And plus, you don’t want to spend too much time on a demo and then have it be something that you fall in love with and then you want to replicate the demo. You don’t want to get too used to something that sounds too good, then blindsides you into what it’s going to sound like with the band. Most of my demos don’t have drums on them or anything. [Melvins drummer] Dale [Crover] will have some idea about what I want to do for drums, and then we’ll take it from there.

Do you play guitar every day, or do you make a point of taking breaks?

I don’t really take breaks. At my house, I’m pretty much ready to play anytime. I’ll just pick it up and go. I’ve got a lot of guitars I use in the studio or at home, but those aren’t ones I would play live because I need a specific thing for live. But I use all kinds of different guitars in the studio. On the Bad Mood Rising record, I kept track of every guitar and every effect and everything I used on every song. I’ll have to put that out sometime. I don’t think people would believe it.

So many guitar players tend to be gearheads and very particular about certain amps, guitars, or strings. It seems like you’re more open to experimentation, though.

I can make almost anything work. We’re at the point now, after all these albums, I could probably go in the studio and just use whatever gear they had there and still make a record without too much trouble. But live, I like to play a Les Paul style with the switch in the top, because I use it during the whole show. I use the three-position switch for three different sounds on the guitar without having to stomp on a lot of pedals for that. I’m really used to playing that way live, so I need it in that situation. But for the studio or writing songs, it doesn’t really matter. I like a variety of different guitars. I’ll have three or four guitars at any given time set up, ready to go, and then each of them will play different. And I’ll write a different kind of song on a certain guitar than I would on another guitar. I think each guitar has its own stories in it, and you’ll play different on it. I heard that somewhere, and I really liked that idea. Every guitar has its own stories.

You’ve made a ton of Melvins albums, you’ve done solo records, you’ve played in other bands, and you’re a photographer. Do you have a creative philosophy that you bring to all of those things?

Yeah, I guess so. It’s like Andy Warhol said: “While they’re figuring out the last thing you did, do more work.” I’m not very precious with that kind of thing. Do you want to be a photographer? Take pictures, and it doesn’t matter what kind. People get so caught up in this digital versus analog thing. I think it’s a mistake. My photography only got better with digital. I can see exactly what I just took. I don’t have to wait two weeks. I’m not building a fucking darkroom in my house, just like I’m not buying a two-inch Studer tape machine to use at home. I’m not going to do it. People have to get over that. “Well, it’s not real photography.” What is real photography? Just by using a film camera, you’re taking great pictures? What the fuck are you talking about?

They get so caught up, but that whole thing has nothing to do with creativity. My wife is a graphic designer, and she said she doesn’t give a shit how you do it if it’s good. If you just care about the medium, then you’re worrying about something that is not about art.

Have you always felt that way, or did you arrive at that conclusion through experience?

I’ve always loved photography, but I could never afford it. You have to buy film all the time and get it processed. And when you shoot a roll of film, you get one good picture or maybe nothing, because you can’t see. Once digital came along, I could see exactly what I was doing. So, what I do when I take pictures is I delete as I go. I don’t take 50 pictures and then try to decide. No, I decide right then. I want this one; delete the rest. I want that one; delete the rest. I don’t want to look through 100 pictures.

I spend a lot of time talking about what makes a good image because I’ve lived with a graphic designer for the last 30-plus years. We’ve spent a lot of time talking about why certain art or photography or movies are good. Even billboards: Why does this billboard work and that one doesn’t work? And, of course, album covers and so on. It’s really helped me as far as my perception of what a good picture is. But I was always pretty good at taking pictures for some reason. I don’t know why. But you can take a good picture with any camera. It’s not how you do it; it’s what you’re doing. I firmly believe that I can make a good recording with any kind of medium. We always laugh: Digital versus analog? I can make a recording with either.

You’ve worked in several musical collaborations over the years. The Melvins have had many lineups, you’ve played in Fantômas and Venomous Concept, and you’ve made guest appearances on other people’s records. But you’ve also made solo albums. What do you see as the pros and cons of collaborating versus working by yourself?

Well, Fantômas was not a collaboration. I just did whatever Mike [Patton] wanted me to do. I would’ve happily collaborated with him, but he had no interest in that. I added nothing to that stuff. His deal is, he’s very precious about the maestro type of situation: “I wrote all this, I did this.” And it’s like, “Okay, great.” It was nice to not write anything, but if it had been a collaboration, I think it would’ve only benefited. But I wasn’t asked what my opinion was on anything, so I didn’t bother offering. I wouldn’t have felt comfortable doing that. He invited me into this situation. I knew exactly what it was from the beginning, and I just left it that way.

But we did a new thing with Napalm Death, and I brought in songs, those guys brought in songs, and it was a true collaboration. I played guitar, bass—I played a bunch of different things on a wide variety of songs, as do they. I don’t even remember who played what, because a lot of it was done about a year ago. But that was a true collaboration where we really wrote songs together. So that was cool.

With the Melvins, I’m always happy to hear what they’re doing. I’ll make a suggestion, like, “I think maybe this bass part should be like this,” and then let Steven [McDonald] elaborate on it. That’s fine with me. He can make it better. I heard Bowie said something to Adrian Belew when Belew joined Bowie’s band: “Play the songs like this or make them better.” I agree.

I’m very much an accidentalist, too. I might think I know what I want, but then when I hear it a certain way, I go, “No, that’s better.” You have to be smart enough to know when to change things. You also have to be smart enough to know when a song is done. Because you can overcook it to where you’ve flung the life out of it completely. And it will sound like that on the recording.

How long did it take you to figure that out?

When we did our first few records, all we ever did was rehearse because there was nothing else to do. But I think that if we redid those songs now, we would do a much better job because it wouldn’t be over-thought. There’re songs on our records that we’ve rehearsed and songs we haven’t rehearsed. I dare you to try to figure out what’s what. There’re songs that we learned the same day we recorded them, as well as ones that we rehearsed a lot. And you can’t tell the difference.

The Melvins have had many lineup changes over the years. Some have been out of necessity, and some have been in the spirit of doing something different. In fact, a lot of what you do seems to be in the spirit of trying things a different way. Why is that important to you rather than, say, the Ramones or AC/DC approach of finding your thing and sticking with it?

It’s more like I behave in a way that I would appreciate other bands behaving. A lot of people hate it, but I really appreciated when Metallica did that album with Lou Reed. To me, it might be their best record. I think it’s really good. I’d heard so many bad things about it, I thought it was going to be terrible. When I heard it, I was like, “This actually doesn’t sound bad at all. I kind of like this.” I mean, do I need another straight Metallica record? Probably not.

But I can handle a lot of weird stuff. It doesn’t bother me. Pink Floyd doing Atom Heart Mother or Obscured by Clouds, those records don’t bother me at all. Or Meddle: “Echoes” takes up one whole side of the album. Is that a bad thing? Well, it’s different, but is it bad? No. It might be one of the best things they ever did—if not the best thing they ever did. Is it a hit single? No, but for some reason hit singles are a certain way, and I don’t understand that, either. None of it makes any sense to me.

When you say that you’re doing what you’d like to hear other bands do, do you also mean challenging yourself?

Well, it’s what I do. I make music for a living. I’m a professional musician, and so I feel like that’s what I should do. If you compare me to everybody else, then yeah, I look like I’m an incredible workaholic. But it might just be because they don’t do much at all. Most of them are sitting around doing nothing or taking decades between records. Even with five years between records, it’s like, “What were you doing that whole time? Isn’t this what you do?” I write songs and play guitar and sing and record albums and play live. I don’t find it to be that overbearing and that difficult. I’m not sure what the problem is most of the time. I think a lot of it has to do with laziness, lifestyle—things like that, I would guess.

You mentioned Metallica earlier. They started two years before the Melvins did. They’ve got 11 studio albums and you guys have 32. There’re clearly two different mentalities at work here.

I’m only prolific in comparison to them. I don’t feel like it’s way over the top, personally. I think I could probably do more if I pushed myself. I think I could do two albums a year without any trouble at all. I don’t see why not. People are like, “You should work harder on the records.” Well, you should shut up. Why don’t you let me do the driving? I don’t remember asking you what you thought, anyway. If you don’t like our records, don’t buy them. You’ll be one of millions and millions of people in the world who don’t buy our records. So what?

On this new Melvins 1983 record, Thunderball, you’re working with Mike Dillard, the original Melvins drummer. The one before that was with Steven McDonald, Roy Mayorga and Dale Crover. Years before that, you had the guys from Big Business in the band. I imagine the lineup shifts are creatively stimulating, but does it ever feel like you’re starting over again with each new arrangement?

Maybe a little, but not too bad. I’m not afraid of that, either. If I’m going to make a Melvins 1983 record, I’m going to write songs specifically for that. I’ll figure out or look at songs that I have that would work in that scenario. With Melvins 1983, I can’t quite do the exact same thing I can with the regular Melvins. It’s not possible because he’s not physically capable of playing that stuff. I have to come up with things that he can do. But they’re still good. Difficult doesn’t mean it’s better. Some of our best songs, like “Night Goat,” aren’t particularly hard to play. It doesn’t mean one thing or another.

Have you ever experienced writer’s block?

No. Not ever. What you do is, you just play through it. You just keep doing it. I think writer’s block comes from people wanting to do something specific. “I have to do this.” No, you don’t. Do something else. If you can’t come up with songs, come up with some other idea. Just think of something. What do you want to do? Look back through your demos; figure it out. And that all falls into place eventually.

So, you prefer to push through and make something happen rather than walking away for a while and coming back to it?

Well, it’s both. I record stuff on my phone, just sound memos, and I think I have about 700 on there right now. And those are just little riffs and ideas. I could probably not ever write anything again and have enough to keep putting out albums, but new ideas keep coming. I’ve just got to go back through them. A lot of it, I don’t even remember doing. And that’s just on my phone. I have my little recording devices that are filled with stuff, too. If I lost my phone or I lost all those recording devices? Oh, well—just move on. It’s part of the process.

Last but not least: To what do you attribute the longevity of the Melvins?

They asked Bob Dylan this question: “Why do you do what you do at this age? Why do you keep doing it?” He said, “That’s a deal I made. All I ever wanted to be was a musician. I never went to college. I never did any of those kinds of things. I wanted to play music. Now I get to do that. I work very hard at it, and I don’t take it lightly. And I have a ton of respect for the idea that I get to do that. So, I’m going to honor it by working as hard as I can.”

That’s it, really. It’s what I do. Would people ask a plumber or an architect, ”Why are you doing this?” It’s what I do. They design buildings or work on pipes. It’s all engineering and science, and the good ones understand that—and you can tell by their work. So, that’s the way I look at it. I heard this from a professional skateboarder, and I totally agree: You retire because you don’t want to do it anymore, or no one cares if you do it anymore.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by J. Bennett.

Julia Cumming: I think it’s a very complex thing. I think we reached an impasse. It’s like, you’re trying to get the car started, you have the key in there, you’re trying to get all the sparks going. We just couldn’t light them up in a way that felt authentic to any of us. It wasn’t this huge, huge blowout, thank god. I think it also spoke to how much we cared about the music and the process—that we couldn’t force something that wasn’t happening in that way. Once we realized we couldn’t force it, we just had to stop.

You never know where you are in the story. I say that to myself and I say that to my friends a lot. That was a moment where we were feeling very afraid about our creative collaboration. We didn’t know where it was going. Now, we’re a few days from this record being out, and I’m reading people say how the songs made them feel. Seeing everything that we were able to accomplish when we did come together, with that serendipity, I’m just grateful for all the different parts of the experience.

Because art adjacent stuff is fun, a lot of people think that the process of making the art should also be fun. Sometimes it’s really exciting and cool and sometimes it is fun. [But low points] just mean that I now have a way different perspective. I have more insight on how those lower and more challenging moments can actually mean really great things for the work eventually.

I know this is probably a bit of a sensitive topic. Julia, one of the songs you wrote on the new record is about being sexually abused. First off, I’m really sorry that happened to you. It’s very intense to make art about something like that. What made you realize you were ready to write about that experience?

Julia: Well, first of all, I want to thank you for your question because some people have brought this up to me in interviews in very crass and random ways.

I’m sure.

Which has been really surprising, actually. When that happens, I’m just like, “Fuck this, I’m not going to talk about it.” Context-wise, I didn’t expect that song to be a single. That was kind of chosen as a team. I thought that it was going to be a really powerful touchpoint on the record. I think the way that it musically came out helped tie in our other singles, and helped tie in the sound of the record. That was one of the reasons that it happened. I even talked to the label and I said, “Should we even put out a single that is dealing with something like this?” I have to thank Lucky Number for saying, “I think it’s good that this is a song that is actually saying something. It has a reason to exist.”

It was a song that I had worked on with Olive [Faber, the band’s drummer] a couple of years prior to making the record. I had gone to the studio one day with her and I had been playing with it for a while… I never expected to do anything with it. That’s the cool thing about having an ongoing creative process. Sometimes you have these feelings and they arrive in song form and then you make them, and sometimes there’s nowhere for them to go. That’s okay because you got to do it.

When we were putting this record together, we had started to get the idea of what we wanted it to sound like. We were looking at this kind of really naturalistic sound. I started looking for songs that had that quality. Along with this, these religious phrases kept coming up for us. I remembered that song and I remembered that line: “I just thought I was a kid who said the Lord’s Prayer every night when I went to bed with my parents.” There was something so funny to me about it, about turning it on its head, especially when you’re thinking about religion and how much violence gets used in the name of religion.

What I really like about that song is how direct the lyrics are. They’re very… I wouldn’t say juvenile, but you can kind of see them on paper, you know what I mean? You can just look at them and see exactly what they are. It’s not trying to weave any other kind of story for you. There are a lot of songs that are trying to be like, “Oh, I went through this and this is my fight song.” They’re really triumphant. I thought that it would be more interesting to do a song that was about not being triumphant. I thought that, hopefully, it would resonate with a lot of people. This is not a unique experience. Unfortunately it’s a very, very common experience.

When I thought about if I had something to say in that area, I thought it would be more interesting to create a song that allowed people to be angry and allowed people to be spiteful. Saying, “You don’t have to fix that spite. You don’t have to forgive everyone. You don’t have to appease everyone. You don’t have to pretend that everything is better every moment of your life.” Sometimes you can just say, “Wow, that was fucked, and I’m kind of fucked up about it, and maybe that’s just how it is for now. I’m just going to let that be.”

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Thank you. My next question is for you, Nick. You’ve talked about learning that you don’t need to suffer to make art. What was your journey to realizing that?

Nick Kivlen: Honestly, it was probably from being really depressed, and not being able to figure out what I’m supposed to be doing, what I’m trying to say—or romanticizing it. I’m always one foot in the door of falling into the trope of putting a special, otherworldly meaning onto artists that suffer. I just read this book that Julia had at her house about Nick Drake and his last album, and I’m like, “Oh, I’m getting sucked in again to this old trope of the tortured artist.” I don’t want to say it’s true, but you think that someone who has gone through that kind of thing somehow has this wisdom or special otherworldly ability now.

It’s not usually true that when you’re in that space, you’re creative or healthy or thriving in any sort of way… There’s nothing romantic about feeling terrible about the way you are with people that are really close to you. I also was thinking about the song [“There’s A Part I Can’t Get Back”] in terms of faith, because I’ve always been jealous of people who say they feel the love of god or the love of Jesus, because I’ve never been able to feel that myself. I don’t know what they’re talking about when they say that they have that feeling. I’d rather live my life with that feeling of love and faith, but it’s not something I’ve been able to find yet.

What is something that scares both of you about making art? How do you deal with that fear?

Nick: I would say nothing scares me about making art because making music—and creating in general—is my favorite thing to do. It’s the time in my life when I’m away from everything that causes me anxiety. It’s like playing in a world of make believe. I am never, ever, ever guided by any sort of fear when I’m making stuff.

Julia: I don’t know if it is fearful, but for me it involves having a conversation with my subconscious and working continuously on strengthening my relationship with my subconscious. Sometimes your subconscious is a very ugly and scary partner to have in this journey. It is not ruled by logic. It’s just totally ruled by something else. You can’t control what’s going to happen when you’re interacting with it… I think the further I go on my life path and this journey, the more I can look at it like a partner and less like an animal I’m trying to catch.

What excites you about being an artist?

Nick: So much.

Julia: Besides making something where you really know that you’ve grown, like being able to pull off that chorus you really want, the best part for me is seeing the threads of how the work permeates in the world. When you get to meet kids who say that your band made them want to start a band, or when people say, “Your song was my wedding song.” I think the world is a lot more non-physical than we give it credit for, especially working in a medium that is completely abstract. It’s sound. You buy stuff sometimes to make it physical, but it’s literally, like, a bird song in the wind. It’s something that is hard to pin down. But to get to experience it having real world effects on other people, it starts to look like the roots of a tree. It starts to make you feel really connected to everything. I think that is one of my favorite parts.

Nick: I think that sums it up pretty well, honestly. That’s such a good answer.

What do you think are the biggest challenges for you as artists right now? And how are you overcoming those challenges?

Nick: The most difficult thing for me creatively is the limitations of my recording setup, I would say. The main way that I found to work around it is focusing on lyrics and melody, and focusing on chord structure and emotion, and less on production.

Julia: I think I would say finding a balance. I’ve always kind of struggled with that: balancing the attention that I love to give to creativity and my career, and then how that balances into making sure that I have enough time for family. There’s so much that we’re so reliant for, on our community of friends, family, and creatives that we collaborate with. Sometimes I feel really guilty that I don’t have enough to give back to them. That can be tough. I think especially as you get older, there’s just more pressure in every direction—the people that need you and that you need.

The way that I deal with it now is that I’ve sort of stopped operating with this idea that my life needs to look any certain way. I’m allowing it to unfold [in a way] where I can be the most useful at whatever time. I’m not trying to uphold anything because I think I should. I’m just trying to show up where I can… I’ve let go of trying to do something because I thought that was the thing I was supposed to be doing, and that’s made it easier for me to actually show up for the people that I need to.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Sarah John.

I would say crafting, radical imagination (as usual), and self-sustainability—making sure people are well within and sustaining themselves, which is different from the past.

What initially drew you to crafting?

I was entering my late 20s, single, and I was like, “You know what? I got to shake some stuff up.” So, I took a painting class and a ceramics class. It was just so nice to play. I was also experiencing writer’s block at the time—thinking about my second book. I wrote multiple proposals and they kept getting rejected. I really felt like I needed to just get creative to find myself. It made me feel like I was healing in a lot of ways. I feel like I was able to get through certain problems because I had this creative outlet—that’s been something I’ve wanted to share.

What is your go-to material language right now?

I like doing things with plants—a lot of floral dyeing and learning how to treat clothing so it receives plant color better. I’m also experimenting with learning how to make plant-based milks and things like that. Ceramics have also been so lovely.

What is the value add for you, personally, when it comes to crafting in community?

I want more friends. I have so many amazing, incredible friends that also have platforms, and I think it’s just connecting me to random people. I’m an introverted person but there’s a need that I have to get grounded, get back down to earth, and talk to people about their interests. It’s bringing me a lot of joy—getting grassroots. I feel really lucky that when I was building my platform, I got to just say whatever I wanted and people would listen. I’m like, “Why are you listening to me? I’m 25.” Now that I am older, I want to listen and learn from other people.

What have you learned about people from hosting events?

There’s such a need for third spaces. There was a wave in 2020, when I was really platformed on Instagram, where people were just wanting to be educated about everything from anti-racism to environmental justice. There was so much happening online because of the pandemic. I’ve realized from the craft club that so many people would like to do activities or mindfulness exercises… not only that, but do it with other people. There’s a need to be in community. It also just showed me that there are so many amazing crafters out there. Every event I go to, I basically meet the instructor of the next crafting club that I host. It’s introducing me to the topic of skill sharing, and how that’s really important for building resilient communities that aren’t reliant on huge corporations. It’s teaching me a lot about the importance of third spaces, the importance of learning how to skillshare, and learning these skills in community.

What is making craft club gatherings meaningful or transformative?

A lot of the work that I do is activism-adjacent at times—sustainability is either overtly or not so overtly infused into it. A lot of spaces that are about social good, understandably, can also be incredibly intense. I’ve been spending a lot of time researching Black feminist scholars and learning about radical activism in the ’60s and ’70s. There was always some sort of complimentary offering to the radical work. I want to show people that you can be interested in sustainability, or even activism, but you can also connect in those spaces over things that contribute to the wellbeing of the community. I’m learning that these kinds of complimentary third spaces are needed to support the work that people are doing to try to make a better world. Teaching people that self-care is not just bubble baths—I mean, it can be, but it can also be the radical act of being in community. I feel like a lot of movement spaces are starting to mirror capitalism by overworking people, bombarding them with information, and basically making them feel like they’re a cog in the machine—the very thing they’re trying to resist. That doesn’t feel right. We don’t also want to burn people out through activism. I’m trying to have something that actually resists capitalism, and those systems that say that we can’t rest, by showing people the importance of resting and being creative with one another.

You’re holding the intimacy of crafting alongside the scale of larger environmental issues. I’m curious how your crafting practice informs the way you think about waste and material?

I just did a workshop where people were making fruit syrups and learning how easy it can actually be. All the fruit was essentially farmer’s market waste from this really cool group called Anomaly Coffee Lab—they’re a waste reductive coffee, food, and cocktail lab. It’s cool to be able to work with people like them. It’s been a really nice way to reconnect with sustainability and infuse it into the programming without it being overt. I don’t necessarily market the craft club as an environmental club, but then people are making necklaces with beads made out of recycled glass found on the beach, and they’re learning those lessons in another way—how to repurpose things.

Do you consider crafting a form of activism?

Yes. Craftivism is the new wave. I’m going to make a video about it. I also want to help contextualize why I’m crafting for people who might be confused.

I love that term—you also coined the term intersectional environmentalism. What does intersectionality look like to you in everyday life?

It really does flow throughout the way that I interact with people—understanding that you really never know what someone’s going through or what their family life is like. Intersectionality, or intersectional thinking, just encourages me to tap into empathy a little bit more and understand that even with all of these differences, we are so alike in a lot of ways. I just know that multiple truths can exist at once. I think I know that because of intersectionality—because people’s identities are incredibly complex and layered, and to lean into empathy, not generalizations.

What was it like to write your first book proposal for The Intersectional Environmentalist, and has your crafting practice helped shape or influence your creative voice for your second proposal?

I feel like I didn’t realize that crafting was actually this meditative practice that was helping me feel a lot more confident in myself—especially hand building with ceramics. It’s just you, your hands, clay, and water making whatever you want to make. You can’t be a perfectionist. It’s teaching me about letting go of perfection, and then also getting something beautiful. I love my hand-built pieces even more because they’re all uniquely different. I just love that it’s like infusing bits and pieces of my personality into the work. I think that flows into how I’m approaching my second book proposal.

My first book was an intro to environmental justice, and only the introduction was written in first person. The rest of it is primarily data, and it’s used mostly in a classroom setting. With this book, I’m like, “No, I actually want to write in first person, infuse my personal story, and have more conversation.” My crafting practice has informed my writing a bit by teaching me to take up space—and then also teaching me to be okay with introducing myself into the work that I’m doing. For the last couple of years, I felt like the work I was doing was to represent a movement—to represent the environmental justice movement, and help people really understand the connections between social issues and environmentalism. Things are unfortunately ricocheting and changing right now. It got me thinking, “What do I want to do?” I want to introduce people to me, Leah—not just as an intersectional environmentalist, but as a person who’s doing all these other things and activism is just part of my interests—which I feel incredibly privileged to do. That’s a cool question because it made me realize how those two things did go together and inform my writing.

Can you share any themes you’re exploring in your second book?

It’s all about why we refer to the Earth as Mother Earth. I also love sci-fi, fantasy, and folklore, so the book is going to have a lot of that in it. I’m really leaning into ecofeminism lately, and how the treatment of women and the planet go hand in hand. I’m excited to just explore what an ecofeminist manifesto could look like. I’m going to be interviewing so many incredible researchers, musicians, and random people.

Are there any authors inspiring you right now?

Amanda Montell is one of my favorite writers. She wrote the book Cultish, The Magical Age of Overthinking, and she also has a podcast called Sounds Like A Cult. She’s a linguist, and is just one of the funniest people. I’m learning a lot from her writing—how she infuses her personality, and also includes pop culture references, which I find really inspiring.

Has anything surprised you about being a published author since The Intersectional Environmentalist came out?

It’s been out for a while, but I think it’s the fact that people are still reading it. I think something that surprised me is that I don’t resonate with the book anymore. Even the other day I was like, “What was I talking about?” I wonder if musicians ever feel that way… because, wow, I really had a lot to say. There’s a cognitive dissonance, or a separation, between the work and where I am as a person. That surprised me the most. I’m also still shocked that the book is being used in classrooms. That feels really good.

Cognitive dissonance is very real—especially when something becomes public. It can take on a life of its own and still be attached to you, even if you’ve grown beyond it. Social media can magnify that too. How have you been interacting with social media lately? Has your relationship with it shifted over the past five years, especially since becoming platformed in 2020?

I’m starting to showcase more bits and pieces of myself. I think when I started Intersectional Environmentalist, I really wanted that to be an educational platform, and then my personal platform could be a blog where I post whatever I want. I’ve started to embrace that more recently by sharing crafts. I realize that I am going to build a new audience of people and there are going to be some people who are like, “No, we want you to educate us on every possible system we need to dismantle.” I just don’t have it in me. I’ve had to really use Instagram like Pinterest in some ways. I’m still always going to share certain thoughts about social justice because that’s a part of who I am, but I think I’ve developed a healthier relationship with it. I don’t think I would be able to sustain myself if my presence on social media was educating people solely about all of the trauma that’s happening to the planet and people right now—it’s heartbreaking—and people are already being bombarded with that information.

I’m trying to experiment with how I can be a positive light in the midst of all of this chaos—not in a way that’s toxically positive. There are people online that think you don’t care if you’re not sharing this, or doing this. I want to show people that you can care, and because you care, you can give that care out to other people by posting things that hopefully make people feel a little tiny moment of joy, or feel held and connected.

How do you balance protecting your creative voice while navigating the demands for output on social media?

I started posting on TikTok more because you don’t have to be as serious—I just have hot takes and no makeup on. I’m still talking about the same things, but it just feels like there’s a little less pressure. I’m going to develop a Substack, which feels really fun. I’m also just grappling with the fact that social media is also my job to a certain extent. My dream is to be a professor, but right now some of my income is tied to my social media. I wouldn’t feel genuine if I didn’t admit that part of the reason I’m sharing is because I need to support myself as an artist. If I can post about craft club, and there’s a brand that wants to sponsor craft club, then there’s more crafts for the people. That feels like a worthy way to use my platform and redistribute money. In some ways, I do feel like I am playing the game when it comes to social media.

What do you wish your younger self knew?

I feel like I took a lot of things really personally when I was younger—I wanted everybody to like me. Then I just realized that with some people, it’s really not about you. Just show up the best that you can because social media is not the end all, be all. It’s crazy how this journey has taken me back to getting offline. You can still use it as a job, but it’s more important to touch grass, be in community with real people, and grassroots organizations. Some people are just meanies—let them be mean and move on.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Sammy Steiner.

I think I definitely always wanted to be a writer in some capacity, but I don’t think that I quite understood what was possible. I remember being a really little kid at the doctor’s office with my mom, and there were wildlife photos in the office, and she was like, “Oh, the doctor’s son took those. He’s a photographer.” And she was also like, “You know, he takes [these photos], but he also has another job.” It’s such a funny little thing that stuck with me. You cannot just be an artist. You have to have another job. I internalized that.

I interned at magazines. I’ve done a bunch of marketing work. There’s no shame in that. I do think you come back around; it is just a balance. I don’t think that it’s impossible to be a very fulfilled, great artist and have a day job. We all need to make money. That’s really valid. But it took a lot longer for me to actually write a book. The internet was the gateway for that, because the internet had no rules. I think I wanted to be a writer, but I don’t think that I gave myself permission to be a writer until many, many years later. And I was really unhappy and self destructive, because I was subverting what I really wanted to do.

In one of your newsletters you listed all the things you did instead of write when you were on deadline, which is deeply relatable. What is it about writing that breeds procrastination? Is procrastination just part of it? Why is writing so hard?!

I don’t want to fully buy into the tortured artist trope, because you can be happy. I want to believe in that for us. But I kind of don’t trust anyone who says that it’s easy. The dread… I do think that maybe it’s just part of the process. I feel like I’ve practiced a lot, and every time I have to write something, I will do anything to avoid it. I just feel such a deep pit in my stomach, thinking, “This is gonna be the thing that is bad.” I don’t even know if I can fully untangle what that feeling of anxiety is.

But nothing feels better than having written. Nothing feels better than having made something, even if it’s not great. Just having put words down, I can breathe out a little bit. You know? It’s like exercising. My brain is like one of those herding dogs that needs a job to do. And if you don’t take it out and give it a job, it’s just gonna chew up all the furniture. You need to do it, and also [you need] free fucking time. I guess it’s part of the process. And I’m trying to be kinder about that, and accept that everything is just gonna take three times as long as I think it will. Procrastination is actually an ideation process. I just started transcendental meditation, so I’m trying to get into quieting that part, assimilating that part—being like, okay, dread is there. It’s part of it. That means the process is working.

I don’t believe in laziness anymore. I just don’t think it’s a thing. You’re tired, or you’re feeling avoidant, or you have a very good reason for not wanting to do something, or you’re just weighed down by how sad the world is.

Yes! We’re allowed to be lazy. We’re allowed to take time to rest and figure it out… I read somewhere that to write well you have to be in a lucid state. Does that resonate with you?

I think so? I write emotionally and edit rationally. I tend to write twice as much, if not more, than I actually publish. It’s always a really nice compliment when someone is like, “Oh, your writing is so restrained—a light touch.” And I’m like, “Yes, that’s because I deleted half of it.” It never starts that way. I feel really lucky, working with a book editor for the first time who’s very hands on… She gave me this huge gift where she just deleted every time I started to sound like I was explaining myself, or apologizing for something.

What drew you to memes as an art form?

I started making memes when I was working as a TV assistant. It was a very large bummer, a thankless job. Your time doesn’t matter. Your body doesn’t matter. Your agency doesn’t matter. Especially in that environment, when you have low self esteem, the idea of ever creating anything that other people are going to see feels galactically out of reach. I have this impulse to say that I just fell into it. No, actually—I really, really, really wanted people to like it. I really wanted people to think that I was funny. I had a deep desperation to be seen and liked. And I think acknowledging that is important. People always talk about attention seeking as shameful. I’m human. Is it attention seeking, or is it maybe connection seeking?

What makes a good meme?

The meme itself is this weird folk art subversion of popular culture. It’s like, wait, does anyone else have this kind of strange, ugly response to this? Does anyone have the same fear or hope or anxiety? That’s the crazy magic of relatability. The meme is a balance between relatability and abstraction, because you have to be able to disseminate it… I don’t even think it has to have a very strong visual component or a very strong literary component, as long as those two things are in balance.

Is the meme an essay?

I think that it’s much closer to poetry than it is an essay, because it’s very much about playing with the signifier and the signified, and how those things are connected, and how they’re dissident. That little gap is where the humor is. I love that. I think that’s what makes it good.

I’ve actually been thinking a lot more about long-form writing. I think that what I make on the internet is kind of like a meta commentary on making things. My writing gets to the heart of it. That’s the work. And then [content] is this work that’s about the work. I need to see it that way. Because—and I don’t know if I’m supposed to say this—I feel like people who are very into growth, and engagement for engagement’s sake, are deeply mentally ill. Like, how can you not feel like a fraud? I’ve been in a tailspin the last two weeks. I don’t know if you saw this, but the official White House account posted this ASMR video of someone getting deported. It is so horrible. And as someone who specifically creates wellness content, I’m just like, how do you do this anymore? What are we doing here? That’s not a reason not to, I guess. But I need to take a beat, because this is evil.

You write about your struggles with mental health and how social media often exacerbates these issues. How do you stay off your phone and off “the narcissism app” (Instagram)?

Read a book. Get an analog alarm clock. Have your phone in another room. I like to keep my phone on Do Not Disturb all day. I’m always really upfront with people. As soon as I exchange numbers with someone, I’m like, “I will not text you back.” If it’s a logistics thing, for sure. But if someone texts, “How are you?” I’m never texting you back. I don’t have the bandwidth. We can talk about it in person, or not. I actually love the Instagram Story, because it’s just a really quick way to let everyone know how you’re doing. I love to check in with other people and see them at the state fair or somewhere like that…

I really appreciated that you wanted to meet in person. I wasn’t expecting that. I normally don’t do these in person. It does change the dynamic… In your book, You Have a New Memory, you write that we live in a world of a million conveniences. Do you think that this type of ease breeds bad art?

I think it’s incredibly important for people to make art. Typing shit into ChatGPT or whatever is not inherently “bad,” but it can be destructive. We live in a very sick society in that way, where anything that isn’t commodifiable is not viable. It brings us back to the conversation of laziness.

Is using ChatGPT lazy?

Laziness is a prism. There are so many ways to look at it. A million conveniences doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re going to be making bad art. It just means that we’re going to be making art in different ways, or reacting to different things.

I know you lost your childhood home in the devastating Los Angeles fires. How are you doing?

It still feels very unreal to me. It feels a little bit like I haven’t visited my parents’ house in a long time. I haven’t been back, but there’s nothing there. It’s very much a traumatic event. I lost all my childhood stuffed animals. Sentimentality is what makes us human.

I’m so sorry. What makes you wake up each morning and keep writing? Keep making art?

I’m one of those people who has never woken up refreshed. So sorry to answer that literally, but mornings are crazy. I went to a hypnotherapist to try and become a morning person, and it just didn’t take.

We’re swirling around in an ontological vertex. Is there meaning in this app? Is there meaning in being part of the internet? Is there meaning in writing? There’s commodified content and conservative propaganda everywhere. It’s fucked up and it’s depressing. Why keep doing things? I think violence is dehumanizing. Art is humanizing. So when you are making things in a real and authentic way, that’s humanizing. When you insist on community—that’s the difference. I think you can say something with honesty in a million different ways. I think you can say it very honestly in fiction. I think we can also say it with a silly little image of an animal.

What’s your take on the concept of creative process?

I don’t have a creative process or a schedule. When people talk about their process, they’re always sort of like, “Well, I rise at dawn every day and I write for two hours.” There’s so much discipline. And I do think that’s important. But I also think a discipline is anything we can do that requires personal accountability.

I feel like the people that create more sporadically never talk about it because it’s seen as shameful. It feels very important for me to say that I do not adhere to any schedule. Sometimes I wake up and write in bed on my laptop, and sometimes I won’t write until 5 PM, and some days I don’t write at all. I don’t believe you have to write every day to be a writer. Sometimes I make things while I’m watching The Bachelor, and I’m sitting on my laptop Photoshopping. Sometimes I’ll work for 16 hours straight, whispering to myself, because I’m editing a video that I’m really into. There’s no rhyme or reason to it. I used to feel like a failure because I couldn’t adhere to a strict schedule of creation. But at some point it’s like, why are you fighting yourself?

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Diana Ruzova.

Now is the right time because I’ve had a lot of opportunities to reflect on so many of the goals that I always seem to be striving for, that I don’t want to achieve anymore. It’s really about all of the broken systems that I thought were working for me and for others, and all of the liberal myths I held onto like facts.

Why don’t you want to achieve those goals?

My ambition essay came out during COVID. I was freelance writing and trying to get a job in digital media, which, as you know, can be very difficult. COVID had laid bare all our systemic problems that we were just kind of shoving aside. Everything from racism in the industry, to sexism, and even just the idea that if you work really hard, there will be rewards—which is just not always the case.

I feel like things are worse now. Do you think that’s fair to say?

I thought that when this book came out, I would be critiquing the left while the left was in power. Things have really changed since then. When Trump was elected, we kind of had to go back and think about how these essays would hit in this time.

Was there anything you changed then, based on that?

I didn’t change a thing. But I hadn’t considered that my frustration with the Democrats would be reflected in this past election. So it became more a book about standing for something. Standing for health equity for all, or for doing something to prevent global warming, or for any number of things [where] I think we’ve been in an in-between place for a long time.

How do you put blinders on to get down to work? How do you critique things that some people might assume don’t matter in the long run?

I think that’s one of the biggest problems of my lifetime: the devaluation of the things that I love and care about the most. Even in book publishing, there are so many problems. But the thing that I always come back to with books is that there’s always a new book I want to read, so something is going right in this terrible process. That’s always been my year-end philosophy: things have been shitty, but there have been some really good books, and isn’t that something?

Tell me about the process of the book, from idea to proposal to writing to publication.

After that essay about ambition went semi-viral, I thought I should write a book about all of the things that I no longer feel ambitious about. That very quickly evolved into, “Let me just write about all the shit that pisses me off.” And again, that could be endless, so I needed to put some sort of structure on it. I was very lucky to work with my agent, Sarah Burnes, who helped me narrow it down to a few of the topics that I was really hoping to tackle. As I worked on it, it did become clear that the book was about liberalism and my discontents with that, because, once again, if you get into conservatism and the current state of America, we could talk for ages. But it really became about speaking up for the people who get more progressive as we age, because I think the media likes to say that everyone gets more conservative.

I sold the book on proposal but with a detailed outline of what I wanted to write. And then the scariest part was getting that book deal and having to start actually going and writing them all. Of course, that was ultimately the most rewarding thing. To be perfectly honest, one of the great reliefs about publishing this book was that I had a couple of years to work on it—[although] not the money for a couple of years—and therefore didn’t have to apply for jobs. Because there aren’t that many out there, and freelance writing is an industry in which there have been no raises since the beginning of time. I wish I could be one of those writers who just loves every moment of sitting down and doing the thing.

What does your writing process look like, if you don’t enjoy sitting down at the desk and getting the words out?

One of the most helpful things I realized is that trying to do more than about two hours in a day is just never going to work for me. So I went to a writing space and sat there from 8 to 10 just about every morning, and that was the perfect way to start the day. I couldn’t believe that I was a morning person. I always thought that everything interesting happened at night, and then all of a sudden, I could only have a clear head at 7:30 AM.

It kind of reminds me of a quote from the book: “I’m a childless writer who is often selfish, but not in the good optimized art-making way.” Does that make you feel guilty at all?

It did. It did. I have this essay in the book about how the choice used to be whether you’re going to be a mother or a careerist. And then the question became, in the past 10 years or so, do you want to be a mother or an art monster? And feeling like those are the only two worthy things. In writing this book, it was nice to acknowledge that my path doesn’t look similar to a lot of people I know and that it’s okay to have different goals.

How has the publishing industry changed over two decades? Or, what’s the biggest difference between now and when you first started?

When I first got into publishing, I was really stuck in between two different worlds. There was the world of corporate publishing that was on the rise, but there was also what had been publishing, which was very much a gentleman’s agreement—a kind of rich people hobby industry where publishers were doing it for their own enjoyment for the most part, and didn’t hold themselves to such high standards, particularly of the spreadsheet kind. Since then, publishing has just become so much more corporate. When I started, it was the big six, or maybe there were seven, and now there are the big five.

Why did you make the move from working within the publishing industry to critiquing it?

I had so many different jobs in and around the book publishing industry. I thought I was going to be a book editor. I worked at Simon & Schuster, and I was sure there was a direct career path for me. If I just worked hard enough, I could get the corner office one day. And that is not what happened. I was laid off from a job and then couldn’t get back in.

After that, I was pursuing jobs that put me near books in some way. That includes working at Barnes & Noble Corporate, and also at Kickstarter, and trying to look at the publishing industry from a different angle. By the time I started critiquing the industry—much like when I started critiquing the systems in which I lived—it was because I had enough experience that I was able to see a bigger picture.

What advice would you have for people wanting to get into the publishing industry today?

Run! The advice that I wish I’d had in my 20s is: don’t let the job define you. Don’t let the employer define you. People are switching up jobs all the time in media, and things will be a little unstable all the time. What you have as a transferable skill is who you are—which I hate in the sense that it means that you’ve got to be your own brand because I find that crass, too. But I also kind of do believe it.

Your book is published through Ecco, which is an imprint of HarperCollins, where employees went on strike a few years ago, eventually securing a new contract. Did you feel any trepidation, or receive any pushback from your editors or higher-ups in the company?

I was terrified that that would be the case. But what happened was I sold the book on proposal with one sample chapter, and that sample chapter was about participating in the HarperCollins strike. I wanted to make it clear that no one was going to get off easy. It turns out that in the book that I finished, there is some criticism of HarperCollins. They’re owned by News Corp. They publish people who are pro book bans, which seems, I don’t know, not great for business! When the legal review happened, I had zero notes. I thought, “Okay, at least they’re being cool about this. There are so many other things I could nitpick about, but I’m glad that they allowed me to critique them a little bit.”

You’ve freelanced or been contracted as an editor at different books publications and verticals; I remember pitching you when you were editing for Vulture a few years ago. Is that an arrangement you’re happy with, or would you prefer to be full-time and there just aren’t many permanent positions out there?

I would like to [be working full-time]. My husband and I have figured out recently that we have another year or so of health insurance coverage under his union benefits. The moment that we don’t, I’ll be ready to find a full-time job. I’m diabetic, and I grew up [never thinking about] trying to be an artist or just a writer because I always knew I would have to have a full-time job that had the benefits that I needed.

There is an essay in the book about health insurance as a freelancer. Could you talk bit more about that?

When I married my husband, for the first time I was able to consider what it would be like if I wanted to try freelancing full-time because I could get on his health insurance. It was more difficult for me than I had realized, turning over that care of myself to him.

I was taught from the moment I was a little girl that I could do everything myself. I don’t need to depend on other people when I can take care of my health and my finances. So much of the book is coming to terms with the fact that it’s actually okay to accept help. It’s good to offer it, and it’s good to accept it. And those two things go hand in hand.

Why did you start, and eventually end, the Maris Review podcast?

I started it back in the day, when Twitter could still get you jobs. I tweeted about how my dream job would be to have a podcast where I interview authors, and Jonny Diamond from Lit Hub saw that and said, “Hey, want to do a podcast?” And I said, “Yes, please.” And it was the best, for four and a half years.

To be perfectly honest, the listenership wasn’t big enough to justify the expense that Lit Hub was paying to produce the show. I was told that I should either cut back to two episodes a month, or write instead. So I thought, “Well, after four and a half years of podcasting, maybe I could try writing a little bit more.” And I’ve been enjoying that, too.

I’m never going to get to the end of my podcast list or my book list. How do you decide what to read? Do you feel obligated to read everything you’re sent, or are you picking out what you want and giving the rest away or whatever? And also, let’s talk about schedule. How many hours a day do you read? How many books a week, a month, a year do you read?

My goal for right now is to read one book and listen to one book a week. I’ve found that is pretty manageable, given that my afternoons are very much devoted to reading. We adopted a new dog three months ago so any time I take her out for a long walk, I listen to an audiobook. Penguin Random House has its own audio app that reviewers can access audio galleys through. That has really changed the way that I consume books.

It gets really complicated and tricky in terms of choosing the next book to read because there are so many different things I’m weighing. Because I have been writing about books for so long, I’m familiar with lots of the authors whose new books are coming in. I always feel like I want to be caught up on any author whose other books I’ve enjoyed.

Do you ever feel guilty that you can’t feasibly get to all of them?

All the time. I have a stack of galleys in one location that’s for things that haven’t come out yet this year. And then I have a stack of galleys for the things that have come out this year that I haven’t read yet. Every couple of weeks, I have to look at the stack of galleys that I haven’t read yet and just kind of be like, “Well, you can’t allow these galleys to take over your entire apartment. Therefore, you have to make some tough decisions.” I put them out on the street, and my neighbors are very appreciative. It does feel a little bit like giving up each time, even though there are literally hundreds of them and absolutely no way that I could, as one person, get to them. I try to read the first 15 pages, and if it isn’t grabbing me, I put it down. But I feel guilty about that too.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Scarlett Harris.

A thousand percent, there’s comic inspiration behind it. It’s a loaded question, because there’s always the Donner Superman, which is like—I was reading comic books as a kid, but then seeing Donner’s Superman, it just crystallized everything in my mind because it jumps off the page and it’s so different seeing a real person, like real Superman. And I remember as a kid, it enhanced my love for the medium.

And then for me personally, I think it’s like it’s Nolan’s Batman, when they asked him why Bats and he’s like, “Bats scare me.” Right? I think for me, I’m a big chicken when it comes to flying. I don’t love to fly because turbulence and because who loves turbulence? But I think that there’s something profoundly powerful and almost spiritual at times with the idea of flight. And I don’t mean to sound like it’s corny or anything, but I just think it’s a real thing.

Again, it’s constantly a motif that I play with in my fine art due to the fact that there’s a freedom in it when you’re so high up and you can see the world and how small it really is. And it puts things in perspective, at least for me, of how small certain problems are. And just again, there’s a freeness to it. So yeah, I think again, that’s how flying correlates. It’s that question, too, if you could have any superpower, and my corny ass always would pick flight first over everything.

I mean, embracing the impossible and putting yourself in an uncomfortable situation can yield really interesting results. I think with flight, especially in comics, there’s always a bit of that learning curve.

With some of these characters, especially with my main character, FLYBOY, I try to infuse a bit of myself or a bit of the familiar in them so that they can feel relatable. I think that in the golden age, or the silver age of comics, there was thought given to some of these abilities or powers, but not … It didn’t go as in depth as it could or should in terms of what these powers really could mean for that bearer, the person that has to learn how to manipulate these things. And it’s the great power, great responsibility, blah, blah, blah, blah. But what if there is a person that can fly but is afraid of heights? Again, trying to get a little deeper than just the wish fulfillment aspect of it.

Your bio says that you’ve been on a quest with some of your art to readdress modern mythology. What other parts of our culture or history do you want to explore through your art, either through more sculpture or paintings or comics?

Comics are a great way to explore more because it’s always narrative first. And I think within the world of FLYBOY that I’ve created, there is a lot of revisionist history. This world isn’t necessarily ours, one for one, but it sort of parallels and I appreciate history, but also just this opportunity to re-contextualize certain moments and certain ideas.

In my work early on, I had this series, it was called the Negro Mythos, Black Mythos series. The simplest form of explanation was that it was me appropriating all of these white superheroes that I grew up with loving that were archetypal males and making them people of color. And when you do that, I think you reframe a lot. You change that story inherently.

I mean, think about, shit, a few years ago, the outrage that happened when Warner Brothers at one point was talking about Michael B. Jordan being the Black Superman or the next Superman, not the Black Superman, but he is Black and he was going to be Superman and what that means, but even how that changes from a historical context and then just a narrative context.

And so I think with comics you can obviously do a lot more directly, whereas in fine art, it’s a lot more subjective and you leave the audience to add in their own things within the work or the piece. And so again, I appreciate both paths, but I think having been on the path of fine art for so long, now being able to really just tell a story and be very direct with the narrative is something that I’m looking forward to.

Are there particular pieces of history or any stories or mythos that you have a direct change you want to make or a direct thing you want to say or explore? I know that FLYBOY draws a lot from the Tuskegee Airmen.

I won’t give too much up because hopefully we’ll create a new fan base and have some readers that are interested in following the journey. But yeah, I think it does start there. I don’t want anything that I do to feel like medicine. I don’t want it to feel like I’m trying to teach someone something. I want to entertain, I want to inform, but I don’t want to have it feel medicinal. And so in looking at this story and creating this story, I did look at the Tuskegee trials and things within American history and more specifically Black American history and pull from certain moments and elevate certain moments or change certain moments to benefit a character, whether negatively or positively as just this form of observation of history.

This is a history that we can never escape, and it’s one that continues to shape us, continues to shape our country. It’s a big part of our narrative, so just really leaning into it, I think in a way to, as a point of pride almost, right? What we are able to endure, what we’ve survived as a people, as Black Americans, as Americans. So yeah, just again, finding opportunities to explore these moments.

I think it’s not dissimilar to, excuse me, when you look at Hellboy in the context of using Nazi Germany, using the history of this character and infusing it with, again, the real big bads, which were Nazis and this war with America and all of the history that we share, but the embellishment of…. yeah, there was a double human hybrid that came down, and within this time, these things and these events happened around that. That’s always fun when you can mix history with a new narrative and a new twist.

I’m glad you brought up the directness of comics. It’s a great way to just either take a stance or follow a specific path and really have a point of view and a fun narrative on it. Congrats on taking this dive into the world of comics with the FLYBOY Kickstarter campaign. We touched on the impact Superman had on you earlier, but if you had your pick of the litter, say if DC or Marvel or Dark Horse even came to you and said, “Hebru, do whatever you want,” is there an existing character you would want to create for?

Oh man, this is the question that you have the conversation with your nerd homies over and over again. And then, of course, you ask me and I’m like, my mind goes blank, and it’s like, I don’t want to say the wrong thing because there’s so many. But I mean, my two favorites … Man, this is tough. Let me try and make this as hard as it needs to be. Yeah, dude, I think I’m going to throw a curve-ball here…

What’s that?

I’m going to go away from the Marvel cannons, the DC cannons. I’m going to say Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

When you look at stories like Ronin and where that arc goes and goes, I feel like there’s still so much to do with those characters, and that was a big part of my childhood. I was more of a Marvel fan because I fell in love with X-Men heavy duty, and then all of their offshoots, X-Factor, et cetera. But Turtles were something special. And I think that it sort of melded all of that because I found the black and white comics when I was a kid and I really liked them. That led me to Daredevil and then back to Turtles. They had the cartoon, they had the figures, the collectible just started that insatiable collecting thing for me.

But it’s always been like Turtles… It’s something about those guys. I think it’s the brotherhood, the camaraderie. It’s this idea of them not being wanted by society because of how they look, who they are, what they are, what they can do. It’s just a fun world, and it’s a world within worlds. There’s Dimension X, there’s different planes, and it’s so many different rich characters to play with. I would say definitely Turtles. Long-winded answer, but I would say Turtles first.

The worlds within worlds comment is great. Right now they have a crossover series with Naruto. I think there was a TV special where multiple versions of the characters across television met each other. Of the core four, do you have a favorite between Leonardo, Donatello, Raphael, or Michelangelo?

Oh, it’s Raph all day, baby. It’s Raph all day. It’s funny because I like Mikey. I like Don. Leo’s probably my least, just because I think he is most likely the Cyclops, like the leader who doesn’t get the credit. But I think with Donatello and Mikey, it’s all dependent upon which version of them. There’s some versions that are way stronger and way better than others, but I think that’s the beauty of the books and the series, the different series and the different writers that take on the challenge of writing for these characters. So yeah, Raph is pretty consistently an asshole, mean, tough, rough, and love it, love it, love it.

He’s a lovable asshole, though. We love to be frustrated by him.

Yes, 100 percent. 100 percent. With this process, it feels like a pinching moment. I’m really hopeful that we can hit our mark and this can be successful because this is really a childhood dream that I’ve had for a long time and everything in due time. It’s been a long road to this point, and I’m super, super, super excited and put in a ton of work in crafting this long form story that just has a lot of twists and turns and ways to go, and this being sort of the entry into that world. I’m just really excited for people to dig in and find it.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Sam Kusek.

I certainly was not trying to write a more commercial book. The part of me that gets the ideas for books is unfortunately unable to learn worldly wisdom like that. I was kind of aware that it was a better log line than my other books. It’s kind of hard to describe what the other books are. It’s just like they don’t have a strong pitch, and I was aware that OnlyFans was timely or culturally relevant in some way, but I think that it really was kind of a surprise, honestly, to both me and to my publisher, that MARGO did so well. And I think that it was in part just because of the TV show and all of that happening, I think that Hollywood immediately was like, “OnlyFans? This is culturally relevant!” And I think we thought that the book was going to be too weird or too left of center to have a broad appeal. I was more involved in how this one was going to be marketed and I wasn’t really thinking about upmarket or low market.

All I was thinking about was trying to communicate. I wanted to communicate two things with the cover. I wanted it to be clear that some dark stuff was going to happen, but that overall, the book was going to be really fun.

A lot of times sex work is used as a flagellating-women plot: you’re there to watch a woman get punished, and then you get whatever pleasure you get out of that, I guess. I wanted it to be clear that it wasn’t going to be that kind of book. I wanted it to be clear that it was going to be weird, and I had long thought about MARGO as kind of a superhero, so I was the one pushing for an illustrated, comic-booky style because I felt like that would get across that it’s going to be fun and that she’s going to be kind of a superhero character who goes on these adventures.

You mentioned that you felt like MARGO’S GOT MONEY TROUBLES had a stronger log line than your previous books. Has that influenced your writing today? Do you want to have that piece kind of secured when you’re working on a project?

Well, unfortunately, like I said, it’s more that I will work harder trying to figure out what the log line could possibly be. But the project is kind of the project. You just don’t have that much choice over what you get obsessed with. Then it’s more like, how could I make somebody else understand what I’m talking about fastest?

I think I am much more patient at this point in my career with just understanding that nobody is going to understand how to position a book better than me, and also nobody is going to care as much. And so it behooves me to spend some time thinking about how to communicate about what kind of book this is and who it would appeal to.

I was very keenly aware of this after THE GIRLS FROM CORONA DEL MAR: the hardcover design had this beautiful black-and-white photograph. And I loved the photograph, and I loved the cover, but also I kind of knew that I wouldn’t necessarily go pick that book up in a bookshop because I’m usually looking for things that are a little bit more offbeat or weird looking than that. And then I saw in a bunch of the reviews for that book, which were from a lot of women being really upset that there’s a lot of the F word in it. I was like, “Oh, it’s like we tricked them into thinking this is going to be some sort of nice seaside girlhood memoir.” Since then, I think that I have gotten more confident in my own judgments in terms of how you communicate to a reader what this book is going to be.

It seems like your audience has grown a lot since MARGO’S GOT MONEY TROUBLES came out last year. Do you have any advice for writers about how to handle audience growth?

Oh, I don’t know. I mean, RuPaul said a beautiful thing, which is that all novels are beacons. And I think that it is counterintuitive at first that you find your widest audiences by being most idiosyncratically, passionately yourself. But I think that that’s true. I think that that’s the magic of it: it’s like when you figure out, “Oh, what I can contribute is my own warty, imperfect experience of reality. This little shit hill that is myself is what I’ve got, so I’m just going to work it.” And then you find out that the more you relax into being yourself instead of being who you think people want you to be, that’s when you start to appeal to more people, because you’re being authentic finally, and you’re not just peddling some heavily edited version of yourself.

It is scary to be perceived by a lot of people. It’s scary. I hated the emphasis on social media in the 2010s. It was very much seen as, like, “You’ve got to be on Twitter,” and I was so bad at all of it. I just am a fiercely private little weirdo. I’m not good at taking my personality and making it a product, and I just found it so nerve wracking to try and have these glib little conversations in this public way. And now I just try to not think about it at all. If I’m going to post something, I try and pretend that I’m only posting it for my friends.

If people don’t like me, I feel like that’s maybe a sacred right. I feel like I personally reserve the right to hate books that are even very good books. And honestly, a book that’s capable of pissing me off has really already achieved something magnificent. It’s better than being a book that you can’t remember what it was about a year later. I’ve just tried to let go of trying to control or cultivate how people think about me. And it turns out that it is safe. It’s okay for some people to not like you. You can’t write a book that’s going to please everybody. It’s okay to get some bad reviews. It’s okay. It’s even okay to write a book that’s not very good. You’ve got to try anyway.

It’s interesting hearing what you were just saying about not being a fan of sharing your life online, because I think you have one of the most creative marketing practices I’ve ever seen.

Really?

I mean, you have the most fun author website ever: I watched an interview you did with Emma Straub, and she said the exact same thing, and I was like, “thank God other people are noticing Rufi’s website.” And you made this hilarious video during the pandemic where you put on a wig and interviewed yourself about your novel THE KNOCKOUT QUEEN. I think a lot of writers get really intimidated by the idea of marketing their books, but you seem to lean into it in a way that’s, as you’re describing, extremely authentic.

I kind of came from this position of always feeling like an underdog. In grad school, a professor I idolized and worshiped took me aside and was like, “You’re never going to be a writer. You don’t have what it takes. Let’s brainstorm some other careers for you. You’re just not talented enough.” And I cried. I went home and cried, and then I was like, well, am I going to really literally give up my life’s dream because this lady told me? I thought: if God came down and God said, “Okay, you get to be a novelist, but you’re going to be the very worst one that’s ever lived in the history of literature, would you still want to do it?” I was like, yes. I still want to. More than anything, I want that.

I’m so moved by that. Wow.

I always was just like, “I’m just scrappily fighting to get to be the worst novelist ever.”

But I do think that the way that I took the tasks that felt the most alien and commercial, like social media, the way that I could figure out how to do it was to make it something I was interested in doing. To make a funny little video or, oh, I have to make an author website? How do I make it something that I like and think is fun? That’s been my approach for a decade. It didn’t seem like it was working at all, so I’m glad if now it appears to be paying dividends.

Across your fiction, I find that you place such an emphasis on setting really high stakes for your characters. Where does the writing process seem to get the most involved for you? Is it plot or character or something else?

I think that plot is the thing that I am weakest at and therefore have spent the most time trying to figure out. It was the first thing I found most baffling about fiction.

So I entirely became a fiction writer to impress a girl. I was kind of in love with my best friend, and she was dating a guy who was a fiction writer. And at that time, we were both poets, but so to not compete with her but then compete instead for her attentions with him, I switched to fiction writing, and I found it really baffling how you had to make things up. I kept trying to get people to describe to me how you do it. I was like, “So then you what? You close your eyes?” It was trying to describe to someone how to fall asleep or something.

And then similarly, I found all instructions relating to story to be absolutely unfollowable. I was like, “Beginning, middle, end: who can tell which one is which thing?” And Aristotle doesn’t help. Every single definition he offers is a tautology.

I literally read a bunch of books on screenwriting before I wrote THE KNOCKOUT QUEEN and kind of figured out how to make things like a crisis or a midpoint happen. And then I think I took a lot of that and started to feel like I had a little bit more control with MARGO so that I was able to figure out where the story started and started there.

You have four novels out. From a craft perspective, what do you think clicked for you between your first two books and your more recent two?

My second novel had sold, like, five copies. I was very aware that my editor really loved me and believed in me and would probably buy another book, but that if that book also did poorly, then I might not get to go on publishing. I was aware of wanting to swing for the fences: if this is the last thing that I get to say with the big world microphone, I’m like, give it to me. I’m going to say something good.

I’ve always kind of believed that there’s really no reason why we can’t use the toolkits from both high literature and from what we consider commercial fiction. I don’t know why you can’t have a plot and have compelling deep themes and philosophical questions. I really wanted THE KNOCKOUT QUEEN to have both of those layers and for it to be really propulsive. It also takes an incredible amount of processor speed simply to render people talking, let alone control what they’re talking about and write it in a pretty way with nice sentences. Your own awareness gets so stretched thin. It’s almost like you’re pulling something up out of a dark place, and you don’t even know what it is yet, and you’re just trying not to break it on its way out of you.

I got better at multitasking with each book that went along, where I was able to be in control of more of the process, able to be conscious of more of the process. Whereas I think in the beginning, you’re like, “I don’t know how I did it, but I did it. I got it out, but it’s this weird shape, and I don’t know how to fix it.”

I’m sure everyone’s been asking you about your interest in wrestling since MARGO’S GOT MONEY TROUBLES came out. The protagonist’s father is a professional wrestler. Can you share some wisdom about weaving an obsession into your work, particularly a pop culture obsession, without letting the minutiae completely take over and bog the story down?

You have to show people how high the ceiling is. I think you have to let yourself write it with all your enthusiasm, as though you’re writing to your friend who totally gets you and understands every weird joke, because you’re not going to be able to take the risks if you’re in a kind of defensive crouch. You’re not going to be able to really share the joy.

With MARGO specifically, the book was too long. It was almost 160,000 words at one point, and it published at 93,000 words, so fully 65,000 words were cut out of that book, and some of it was wrestling details. There were just maybe too many anecdotes. I think I just fell in love with those characters and I was willing to watch them go grocery shopping.

I want to ask you about a recurring theme I’m noticing across your books. You write about heroin addiction in quite a few of your novels, including MARGO’S GOT MONEY TROUBLES. That book taught me a lot about methadone and the stigmas and misunderstanding that surround it as a treatment. What keeps you returning to this specific addiction in your work?

It’s complicated. Obviously I have a personal relationship to addiction, specifically to opiate addiction. For me personally, I learned a lot of lessons about moral culpability, and a lot of the toolkit that I was given by a generalized worldview in the nineties, or whatever, was just not very useful for trying to actually dig yourself out of those particular holes or understand other people.

In my family, there was a lot of alcohol addiction. I had a lot of friends struggle with drug addiction. I struggled with drug addiction, and a lot of my work is centered around these questions of, what do you do when someone you love does something bad? What do you do with the part of yourself that did something bad? How do we metabolize harm and evil? Is there such a thing as evil? Are bad people bad? Are some bad people good? Is there such a thing as people who are all good, or does every good person just a bad person who’s trying really hard? I think it’s one of my central preoccupations for a number of reasons. I also just think it’s partially the opiate epidemic and the way that Oxycontin played out. I got to watch that unfurl throughout my twenties, and so it just feels very close at hand.

I got the most beautiful letter from the director of a methadone clinic, who was like, “I cried when I read MARGO because I never see methadone portrayed positively ever. I believe in what I do. I know I’m saving people’s lives, but most people look down on what I do and don’t think it’s really helping people.” It never occurred to me in a million years that someone working at a methadone clinic or directing a methadone clinic would read that book and feel moved by it. That’s sort of going back to the idea of a novel is a beacon: if you write about things as you see them, it’s going to resonate with other people who are also seeing the same little pieces of the puzzle that you’re seeing.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Hurley Winkler.

I do still connect with my inner world through playing music, and I do still connect with it through singing—although my voice has been very changed—but my meditation practice is such a huge part of my life. In addition to vocal dystonia, I’ve also been navigating long COVID over the last few years, but acutely over the last 18 months. And one of the symptoms of that is what mimics Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, so instead of just resting all day, I treat it as meditation time. I’m meditating between two and six hours a day. There’s a meme I saw recently of Lisa Simpson, and it’s like “what it looks like I’m doing,” and she’s laying in bed, and then it’s like, “what I’m actually doing,” and it shows Lisa surrounded in this golden, glowing orb, having an enlightening experience.

And when I saw that, I was like, “Yeah, that’s exactly how it feels.” So I connect with myself and with my inner world through meditation and through connecting with the part of me that imagines, and the part of me that plays, and the part of me that generates ideas, and the part of me that loves.

You spoke about the early pressures on you to sound different than you did naturally. What was the first time you felt like you weren’t using your own voice?

When we were making [the second Hush Sound] record, the producers kept pushing me to sing like Fiona Apple. I was a 17-year-old Catholic school virgin with a very whispery, quiet voice. I was a total late-bloomer, and my voice was as innocent as I was. They were telling me to sing like someone who had had a completely different life experience, who had a completely different vocal tenor.

One of the phrases the producer said was, “You have to sing with your balls. You’ve never felt it before, but it’s time to start singing with your balls.” At that time, my sense of self and my musicality were so completely merged that when they told me I wasn’t singing right, and I needed to sing like someone else, I just immediately thought, “Oh, well, I’m no good at anything,” or “I’m not worthy of anything.”

[Now] I teach writing workshops, and one of the things I’m always saying is keep the weirdness and beauty and originality of your voice. Do not impersonate anyone.

How do you make sure you don’t sideline yourself, and preserve your identity as an artist?

We live in a world where all art is touching all other arts, the same way that in nature, pollen in the air is touching every plant in the area. We will naturally start influencing each other’s art, and I think we will naturally start imitating in really subtle ways just by existing. It’s like we’re all breathing the same artistic air. But I do think as artists, we start to cultivate our own unique vision, and we need to move towards strangeness and towards what feels like us.

Let’s say every single choice you make, you can visualize yourself on two paths: Should the chorus be big and bright, or should the chorus be sad and drop down?

In my mind, I can close my eyes and imagine going one way and imagine going the other way. Whichever way lights up and whichever way feels expansive, I’m like, “Oh, that’s the way that’s the most me. That’s the way where I’m not imitating.”

What role can creativity play in healing?

For me, it’s everything. When I started playing music, it was like making my own medicine, like the way an herbalist would make a tincture. I would write a song that would give me the specific feeling I was seeking. But I do think big-picture creativity is a way to alchemize our experience into something beautiful, like the way that an oyster turns the sand into a pearl.

But I also think it’s a way to come back to oneself. When you’re making your art and you’re not thinking about who’s going to see it or what are they going to think about it, it’s a way of saying, “Oh, there I am.” Like, “Oh, that’s my spirit on the canvas.” “Oh, that’s my spirit in the song.” And in a world that is constantly trying to confuse us about who we are so we will shrink into a certain set of other people’s expectations, it’s really important to make art as a way of remembering who we are.

How did your experience in national parks affect your sense of identity?

I really love imagining that nature is a mirror for unexplored aspects in our own psyche.

When I was in the desert, my voice had shorted out, but I didn’t quite know the diagnosis yet. I just knew something was really wrong. And also, these were the relatively early days of the pandemic when … it just felt like the world we knew was gone, and everything felt strange. I felt so desolate and raw and ravaged.

Being in the desert, I would notice the Navajo sandstone, I would notice these gorgeous lush hanging gardens with ferns and orchids, and all these beautiful plants that were growing out of what looked like solid rock. And it was because they were able to root down and suck moisture from very deep in the rock. [In] one of the mirroring moments, I thought, “I need to do that. I am going to root down to a place in myself deeper than I have known, and find a kind of nourishment I haven’t found before.”

I had been moving so fast and conversing so much and flying all over the world and playing millions and millions of shows, and all of a sudden, being in silence—it was like drinking from a deep well. I had learned so many lessons from togetherness and collaboration and it was time to learn some lessons from just being in silence.

In one of your national park trips, you befriended a woman who said, “You lost your voice. I’m so happy for you.”

It’s funny. I remember her saying that line exactly.

She is an incredible wilderness guide and IFS therapist, a brilliant, brilliant person, and she has noticed in the lives of all the people she works with that often there is a major eruption in the timeline of someone’s life, and that wounding becomes the access point for whatever the greatest healing is.

In a way, I lost my literal voice, and my literal voice has been challenged and changed. But I do feel like I found my voice: my book, the way I communicate in relationships, the way I move through the world.

With my literal voice, I was shrinking constantly. I was not articulating my truth. I was not speaking up to bullies. I was not standing within my integrity as far as expressing my truth as much as I could. Now, my literal voice has changed, but I feel so much more confident in those areas of life.

I think in some ways she knew: “You lost your voice. This might be part of the mythic, poetic journey of your life.”

Day to day, where are you finding joy?

I live in the Catskills in New York, and this is one of the most enchanting places I’ve ever been. This winter, I found a lot of joy by crunching on ice and snow after every snowstorm, because every single snowstorm created a different soundscape. If the wind was faster one night, or if it was colder one night, the ice would sound and look and feel totally different.

I have a lot of joy from just engaging with my immediate environment, a lot of joy reading by the creek. I have a lot of joy being with my friends here. I do have a lot of joy writing and still a lot of joy playing music. It’s interesting—there was just a Chicago NPR story that came out about long COVID, and I hadn’t talked about my health journeys beyond my voice publicly, and I got tons of messages from people saying a version of like, “Oh, this is such a tragedy. I’m so sorry. You’re so sick.” And I was like, “Yeah, it’s been hard.”

But also even on a bad day, I have so much joy. Even on a challenging health day, I’m living in one of the most beautiful places I could ever imagine, and I’m dreaming, and I have a great support system, and I’m able to have a lot of happiness within whatever context I’m in.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Caitlin Wolper Phillips.

My mom loved going to the theater. My dad loved strumming the guitar. But these were not artistic people. Not questioners. Where does this need to question come from? I have no idea.

Well, two things. One is: immigration is so intense and dramatic and traumatic that you can’t help being left with stories. But I know lots of other immigrants who have not chosen to channel [their stories] into writing. So, then there’s the fact of being an only child and having four adults – because my maternal grandparents were almost a second set of parents – really dote on you. I was spoiled attentionally by these people. When I wanted to say something, they listened. What a great gift to receive from your family, right? I never took that responsibility lightly.

So, I feel like some combination of that explains two thirds of it. And the third third is just that mysterious thing that takes hold of us.

I’ve tried to write about things that are true to me, while hopefully being of relevance to others. And some of [my work] has been greeted with great interest and attention, and other work has been greeted with indifference. And I think managing that indifference, to say nothing of the rejection that you frequently encounter, is just a major part of being an artist. It gets easier but you never become fully indifferent to the indifference. At least I didn’t.

I love what you said about being an only child. I can relate to that. There’s something about being an only child where you feel like you’re part of the decision making process, one of the adults. So I do feel like there’s this responsibility that you develop, the confidence that you mentioned, and a desire to speak your mind.

I became an ambassador for my parents. I’m sure you did, too. You had to call the places that they were too nervous to call. You had to stand up for them at the offices where they were too nervous to stand up. And it teaches you to keep prodding and keep asking and keep speaking and keep offering. So many of my non-immigrant friends so often take what they hear for the answer. I don’t. I ask again.

The questioning.

Yeah. And very often the second time, the answer is different, but sometimes it’s not. I don’t necessarily go on endlessly, that can be annoying and disrespectful, but this instinct to keep speaking is easy for us immigrants to take for granted, as it’s such a central part of who we are. But it’s a learned instinct.

What is something you wish someone told you when you began to write?

I was very nervous about becoming a writer. As an immigrant kid, I was surrounded by expectations of financial stability, but writing was like an ailment. I couldn’t manage to do anything else. I tried. I spent a summer interning for a personal injury attorney. There’s no hope of me ever doing anything in finance. And somehow I just couldn’t imagine myself as a urologist. Maybe law was something I could do, because it involves speaking and arguing. But that one summer was enough to convince me otherwise. My eyes were glued to the clock. What other signs do you need?

But I was, nonetheless, because of my [parents’] expectations, very anxious about turning to writing and trying to make a living from it. Because my parents are Jews from the Soviet Union, their perspective was, “Well, what if it doesn’t work out?” Very sensible perspective, I should add. One of my dad’s favorite phrases is, “So, what’s your plan?” There has to be a plan.

I wish they could have said, “Hey, this is risky, but we believe in you. And you know what, you’re 22–you’ve got plenty of time to figure it out. Let it rip.” Instead, they said: “We understand you have to soar, but keep one foot on the ground.” And I didn’t have what it takes to ignore them. You could say that there’s some way in which I have failed my writing by keeping one foot on the ground.

Like playing it safe?

I passionately believe in the power of realist fiction. But perhaps that claim is suspect, because I’ve just never allowed myself to go wild. This is a subconscious issue. Maybe I have never cast practicality aside sufficiently to learn just how wild I could get? I’m always paying very close attention to my reader. I think authors who are paying attention only to themselves can feel very solipsistic. There are people who are able to do both. We were just reading Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy in class. There’s no doubt that his feet were off the ground as he was writing that book.

How did you manage to create a path outside the traditional expectations?

I have always done the pure passion thing, and then I’ve always done an extremely practical thing alongside it. I’m proud of every part of that. That’s how you make money as a writer. Early on, I wrote college promotional brochures. I did research for a maker of temporary concrete. I have edited more manuscripts than you can count. I’ve even–this wasn’t for income, this was for passion–worked on the line in a restaurant kitchen. I didn’t do it for money, but I appreciated the money it gave me. But my kids have paid for this. My mental sanity has paid for this because there’s only 24 hours in the day, and I’m really thorough, so everything I do, I do completely. And other things pay for it, emotionally and time-wise. If you ask me, “What are your hopes for yourself as somebody who has just entered his middle second half of his 40s?” My answer is to stop living this way so that I can focus on my kids.

I would love to hear a bit more about how you balance your writing practice with teaching. Does one ever inform the other? Do they ever get in each other’s way?

Of course, in some sense [teaching] drains your battery, but in another sense, it really, really sharpens your excitement for craft, for storytelling. It puts you back in touch with certain authors you’ve loved. It sort of forces you to realize certain things when you’re preparing for class, because there’s no better way to understand something than to have to teach it. Your students reveal things about the books to you, too, all the time.

Writers who teach love to pretend that teaching leaves time for writing. “I’ll just be more disciplined. I’ll get up at five instead of six.” No.* You went to bed at one. *You answered every email that you got from a student, every single request you got from a student, the 50 other things you do. You never want to say no to students. You want to encourage. But it often leaves you with nothing for yourself.

With writing you need massive blocks of uninterrupted time where you can start to flow freely and inhabit that space, especially if you’re trying to start something. So summers are the only time. And if you want to take a vacation with your kids, you’re basically talking about eight weeks when you can work. It’s not a lot of time. I live in two places right now, so there’s that transition as well.

There are some people whom I went to graduate school with, incredibly talented and promising writers, but for one reason or another, they have stopped writing as a professional way of life. Then there are those other people who are literary superstars, who will be feted no matter what they write. But there are so many of us who are somewhere in the middle: 46 years old, with two kids, with four books. And we are still living multiple lives. We’re still contriving ways to find time to write in between our other obligations. We don’t have the freedom to be one or the other.

A lot of your journalistic work is about food and wine.

[Wine is] pristinely expressive. Smell bypasses the cortex and goes straight to the thalamus. When I put my nose into a glass of well-made wine, it’s mind travel. I go to certain places I’ve never been to. Like I put my nose into one kind of glass and I’m in some arcadian meadow on some sun-swept day with the wind just so. Other times, you’re in a wet wood right after a rain. It’s like therapeutic MDMA–you find yourself in places that if you’ve gone there, you’ve only gone there in past lives. And then it’s over. An iconic example for me is something that I mentioned in this piece I had about wine in The New York Times last fall. My wife and I took our daughter to Istanbul, and we went to a bar that focuses on indigenous Turkish grapes. I was poured a glass of a varietal called Kalecik Karasi. It sometimes has a raspberry-heavy aroma. When I put my nose in it, for the most fleeting second, I was in my grandmother’s kitchen in Minsk while she made her raspberry jam. For a nanosecond, I got my grandmother back. I’m getting goosebumps saying this. I’ve told the story before, goosebumps every time. I want that joy. I want that connection to the land. I want that connection to tradition. I want that incredible precision and meticulousness and artisanship. I want that transport.

What a contrast to academia…

Yes, which can be an utterly joyless, grievance-filled environment, and anybody who pretends otherwise is full of it. For me, wine is also a connection to Europe. It’s a connection to time moving in a different way. Wine will never become instantaneous. Wine doesn’t care about AI. All those things feel very salutary.

As for food, it’s very elemental, right? In the sense that something that was inedible 15 minutes before is not only edible, but nourishing now because of things we’ve done to it. Something is elementally satisfying about providing that nourishment. People’s conditions–emotionally, physically, spiritually, psychologically–transform on a dime if you feed them properly when they are hungry, when they are without that nourishment. The power of food to do that is astounding. You can move people with novels, but it works at a very different speed.

What is it about hunger that defines the Post-Soviet immigrant experience? All immigrant experiences. Even after years of assimilation, pounds of pineapple, why are we all still so hungry?

That’s a great title, “Pounds of Pineapple.” Why are we still so hungry? Well, it’s a learned habit, and it’s learned in formative years. And so it’s very hard to ease into a sense of comfort and luxury. I had every opportunity to let go of this part of myself, because I came here at nine, but I didn’t really come here at nine. I moved out on my own at 24, so I really came here at 24, and by then, I was a deeply shaped human being who had spent 24 years living with his parents. That whole time, you’re imbibing their ideals. My wife comes from non-Jews in Seattle, not immigrants. Their means were less modest than ours, and there’s just a different level of hunger and searching there, whereas for us the security belt could never be robust enough. There was always one more thing you could do, one more angle you could try to calculate, one more sandbag you could add to your barricade, so to speak, because you’re barricading against the kinds of bad things that happen more frequently for us–or used to, but we can’t believe we’re clear of them–than they do for people in Seattle.

Do you have any writing rituals? Superstitions?

I have fewer superstitions than you think. My superstitions are, perhaps over-responsibly, the central elements of a good writing practice. For the three hours that I’m in the chair, I try not to get up, except to go to the bathroom. No food. I’m never hungrier than when I’m writing, but I try very hard to ignore it. No internet. You have to be in the chair. Of course, sometimes physical movement helps you enter a scene. So I might walk back and forth in the room. But other than that, there’s just making sure to [write] as regularly as possible at the time of day when you are at your best. We all know the temptation to reward ourselves by folding a couple of T-shirts and vacuuming a little bit and checking out one email. But if you can do this, this kind of humble, monastic expression of the task, your work will thank you. It’s like going to the gym. The more you do it, the sooner it’ll be over. And it’ll feel great.

How do you know when a project is done or when you have to abandon a project?

I have to tell you that I have never let anything [long] go, ever. Not these four books. I’ve let go of lots of short stories. I haven’t become a seasoned enough short story writer to practice it. I’ve let many of those go, and almost don’t do it anymore. But in terms of longer work, for whatever reason, I’m properly calibrated to that length.

I’d love to hear a little bit more about the hunger you experience while writing. Why do you think that happens? Why are we so hungry when we write?

It’s fascinating to me. Your brain is just working so, so hard. And it’s working in such a different way. I’m famished. I could have just eaten before I started and all of a sudden, I’m famished again. It’s like, you’re watching yourself deplete mental calories as you go. It’s so cool to observe. It feels like a supernatural event because you’re literally sitting still, you’re not exercising, but you’re shedding something so intensely and you need refueling so badly.

It’s really beautiful to think about. What is your approach to starting a project?

There isn’t anything particularly talismanic about beginning. Some idea, some flicker takes hold of you. In order for it to be a novel, it has to have connection to larger issues that have no resolution. And if something feels all of a sudden like it has a concrete situation, but it also has that reach, you might sit down one day and just go there. A part of you is quietly chanting: “I’m ignoring the intensity of this blank page. I’m ignoring the fact that it’s the first page. I’m ignoring the question of, could this be it? Could this be it? Could this be a new one?” Because it only happens so many times in your life that something goes from page one to page 336.

I tend to have a bigger desire to write when I don’t have time to write. I don’t know if you feel that way. I trick myself into note taking, which is not writing.

I don’t know. But you’re making me realize that as soon as you have an idea, you’ve got to have a proper writing day, because notes, as you know, are a pale alternative. They sustain the illusion that there’s a possibility there, waiting for you, but it’s a hologram until you try to write it.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Diana Ruzova.

A few years ago I went down this rabbit hole of reading interviews with women about how they make time for it all. And all these highly successful women (with the exception of Marie Kondo, who refuses to be rushed)—all of them were just frantic. One of them literally said she would microwave everything for 2 minutes and 22 seconds, or 3 minutes and 33 seconds, so she could save time by not having to press multiple buttons. So anyway, I’ve dedicated myself to never living that way.

My strategy used to be what many busy people do: they just pile on more things until you have no flexibility, so your time winds up managing itself. That was me for a while: I was just saying yes to everything. And I did get a lot done! But then I would just crash and burn. I refuse to live that way any longer. My philosophy now is about focusing on priorities rather than deadlines. If something does have a hard deadline, I will try to make that, but I’m never going to be doing it, I hope, the night before in a panic. There’s no worse feeling to me than that kind of pressure. Instead I’m like, What are the most important things that I need to do? I’m going to do those first, deadlines be darned.

Do you include self-care, or some time for protecting your creative heart in there, or not so much?

I do try to do that. I succeed sometimes. I mean, I do protect my time off work very fiercely. I prioritize that over everything else because I’ve burnt out so many times. But as far as my own creative work, that can very easily fall to the bottom of the pile if I’m not careful.

It seems like everything about your life, your creative practice, and your career have been geared toward leading a nontraditional life. How did you figure out how to create those paths outside of established systems?

I’m not sure that’s something I’ve ever done intentionally. Those established systems just never seemed available to me. I was a weird kid. I dropped out of high school, and I’ve kind of continued to say no thank you to systems that don’t seem like they have a purpose or have my best interests or goals at heart. Me and my partner Joe Biel, who founded Microcosm—we’re both business and life partners—we’re on the same page about this. We look at things that we see most people doing and we’re like, Would that work for us? Sometimes really traditional things do work for us—owning a house seems kind of magical to be able to do. But other things, like getting married or having kids or owning a car… for us, what’s the point? Other people might find great joy in all these things, but we don’t.

As Microcosm has matured and does begin in some ways to look a bit traditional, how did that ethos serve you and the press?

Back in 2011, Joe and I went to New York where Joe was interviewed by Calvin Reid at Publishers Weekly. Calvin asked Joe, “Why have I never heard of you?” Which is basically what everybody said at the time. Microcosm was already selling hundreds of thousands of books a year, had a staff of eight or nine, and was kind of too big to be flying under the radar, but nobody in publishing knew who we were.

Now it seems like that was our greatest superpower because we weren’t selling books to bookstores very much. We were selling books to places where other publishers weren’t trying to sell books at all. As we’ve grown, it has become easier to go into more mainstream channels, and the challenge is doing that only intentionally, only in ways that serve us. Because every time we do too much of what we’re “supposed” to do, our business goes down, and when we start having fun again, it goes back up. Our readers recognize that, and our stores recognize that. They can see when we’re having fun and they want to be part of it. We want that, too! Books belong wherever anyone wants books.

I was reading on your blog about your experience going to a coffee conference and thinking through how you had assumed people at coffee shops would just want books about coffee, but that turns out not to be the case. Can you talk a little bit about that, and your thoughts on all the nontraditional places people buy books?

When Microcosm first started, bookstores wouldn’t give us the time of day. We love booksellers—they are the greatest, sweetest people on earth. But there is so much competition for every inch of bookstore shelf space. Every single other publisher is our competition in a bookstore. So for us, selling to bookstores was the final boss, the biggest challenge. Whereas I remember the first time Joe and I were on a trip together and had a box of books in the trunk of the car, we walked into the record store and Joe was just like “hello!” and then started laying books out on the counter. The person working there started picking them up as if hypnotized, and he ended up spending $400 or something to stock all these different titles. So that’s how we got our start, in what we now call “specialty markets”—record stores, grocery stores, apothecaries, sex toy shops, therapist’s offices, places that use our books to educate their customers and tell the story of their own values and their own brand—are still our bread and butter and the majority of our sales. We have more than 12,000 accounts that stock our books.

It’s such a unique way of coming at the book-buying marketplace. In addition to this creative approach to sales, Microcosm has an innovative structure for basically everything you do. Can you talk some about how that was all set up, and how it’s evolved?

I guess it started when we really tried to go mainstream in about 2011. We signed with Independent Publishers Group for distribution, which worked well until the person who brought us in moved to a new distributor and brought us with them. This happens all the time in publishing but it is so, so much paperwork and logistics to change distributors. We went through that two or three times, with the companies getting bought and sold and morphed, and then we decided to go on our own. One of the big things we wanted to do was stop selling to Amazon, because those were all money-losing sales. Amazon is a retailer, but they take the same discount as wholesalers, and they charge all sorts of additional fees. So we decided, let’s leave Amazon and put all that effort into independent bookstores instead. It was such a successful strategy, it blew our minds! We expected to lose business but instead our sales grew 65% that year. Then the pandemic hit, our sales quintupled over the next three years, we grew our team from 13 to 35 people, and that’s where we are now. We did all that by taking a chance on doing things in ways that fit our values rather than doing what we were “supposed” to do.

How does that Microcosm philosophy translate into the choices you make about what to publish? What’s a quintessentially Microcosm book?

We publish mostly nonfiction on a range of topics. The core of it all is self-empowerment, giving the reader tools to live the life they want, to change their life in the way they want, to change their community for the better, to change the world for the better, or to think about the world differently. And we also publish queer smut and feminist bicycle science fiction.

Which goes back to your own roots as a writer, right?

Yes! Before I was with Microcosm, I published a feminist bike zine called Taking the Lane. One of the issues was all feminist bicycle sci-fi, which was so much fun to do that I spun it off into its own series. This fall we’re going to do volume 13, which has a queer Halloween theme and is called What Rides at Night. Look for it on Kickstarter soon!

Speaking of Kickstarter—thank you for the perfect segue. You’re currently running Microcosm’s 100th campaign, a zine celebrating 30 years of Microcosm called The Underground Is Bigger than the Mainstream. You all have been on Kickstarter for 15 years—longer than any current employee. What brought you to the platform all those years ago, and what keeps you here?

Fifteen years ago, Joe and I were living in a camping trailer in a friend’s backyard. A buddy emailed me and said, “Did you hear about this new app where the world funds your project?” And I was like, “I’ve got to try that!” I had just written this big blog post about the sexism I’d encountered in the bicycle world, which got more engagement than anything else I’d ever written. So I decided to expand that post into a zine and put it up on Kickstarter and see what happened. I think I asked for $350 and raised $500, which was so exciting! It seemed like an impossibly high amount of money for me at the time—it was enough for me to pay the anarchist printshop to produce it and buy enough postage to mail it out. Microcosm’s first project was for a book called Scam, and it raised about $5k. That was probably what made the difference between Microcosm continuing to exist and not that month. Very different times! It felt so exciting, those early days on Kickstarter.

What has kept you on the platform all this time? What has Kickstarter meant for you and for Microcosm?

Well the beautiful thing for me is that now we have other brilliant people who run our campaigns so I don’t have to. Abby Rice, our Marketing Manager, does such a good job, and I do not allow myself to ever look at the page unless the project is in trouble or something, because I would spend my whole day just doing that. The feeling of seeing a new person back a project—like, this whole person with their own whole life that is totally unbeknownst to me came and found my project and chose to believe in it—it never gets old, it’s this unbelievable magic. And the folks we’ve worked with at Kickstarter over the years have been incredible supportive collaborators, and some of them have become friends. It feels like Kickstarter wants us to succeed, which is not how we feel with a lot of platforms that we do business with. And you’re also willing to hold us accountable to do better, and we feel the same way about you. It feels a little weird to say this about a business, but we do business with a lot of companies and our relationship with Kickstarter has always been really unique and special.

Your hundredth campaign seems in so many ways to be a celebration of everything that makes Microcosm so special. Tell me how that all came together.

This was all Abby’s idea. They demanded that me and Joe come up with something special for this, so we said sure, we’ll go back to our roots and write a zine. The title, “The Underground Is Bigger than the Mainstream,” is a quote of Joe’s from that 2011 PW interview that people have always quoted back to us over the years, and the whole thing really summarizes what we’re all about. Microcosm was never designed to become a mainstream company. It was started to build something parallel to the mainstream that worked for the people who didn’t fit into the mainstream, like us. The zine is going to be crammed full of a whole bunch of wild, rambunctious content that may or may not totally fit together, but we want to give people a flavor of what it’s like to do this work.

And what is it like to do this work? What are the rewards for you, for your life?

Getting to do this all the time is just really fun. I love working with a ton of different authors, I love reading all the things that we get to put out, I love our customers. The best thing about the job, honestly, is there’s something new to learn every day. It’s never, ever boring.

As a publisher, a lot of your work is in service of other people’s creativity. How do you balance that with your own creative life?

As the company has grown, my job has gotten a lot less creative. When I first started, I might spend an entire day editing a book or spend a whole afternoon looking out the window and thinking up marketing slogans, and now I hardly get to do any of that. At the end of last summer, Joe and I wrote a zine as a gift for a friend who was in the hospital, which was so much fun to do together. So we decided to do one of those every month for a year. It’s been less than six months, and I think we’ve already written fifteen! So clearly there was a creative wellspring that was ready to burst forth.

If you had nothing but time, what would you want to write or do or create or think about next?

My gosh, that’s such a fun question. There’s so many different versions of myself that I’ve imagined over the years and it can be hard to let go of them—even though I now know that I would definitely not be happy as a publicist for NASA. But if money were no object and I could choose to spend my time doing whatever I wanted, I think it would involve a lot of writing. Like maybe I’d write young adult fantasy, or marketing copy for activist movements, or more zines where I could taste all different parts of the world and write about them.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Oriana Leckert.

You’re right. I think it might be exactly 5 years. Well, everything has changed. [laughs] It feels like we live in a different world. So similar to the old, but with something eerily off.

Making music for me has shifted in the most banal ways and also in the most profound. I learned a lot from that first record. Both from the process of making it, as well as the process of it coming out in the world, working with a label for the first time, my career growing, getting attention, etc. I learned a lot about myself and about how people feel about me, about what I make, and how I make it. And that makes me feel. How I feel about how they feel. It’s a constant feedback loop.

Having a real, tangible reaction to a solo body of work for the first time changed how I work now. It’s hard to keep the external voices out, and in a way a big part of the work has become about guarding what I allow to come into the music.

I keep thinking of the analogy of wearing different hats when I talk about the process of making my solo music. I’m a songwriter, producer, engineer and performer, and I believe all of those jobs are very different from each other. So I imagine myself changing “hats” to do each individual job. When I put on my “producer hat,” in many ways, the job is accurately perceiving where certain musical and lyrical ideas come from. With lyrics: “Is this honest? Do I actually feel this way?” or “Is this coming from insecurities because x review said x thing about my lyrics?” or because “x friend said x thing about my lyrics”?

Same with production. Am I producing to flex my skills? Is this sound design for the sake of sound design and flexing or is this making me feel things in my stomach? I guess, ultimately, it all comes down to stomach, instinct and truly “Am I doing whatever the fuck I want?” or “Am I fooling myself into thinking I’m doing whatever the fuck I want, but I’m really just trying to fit in?” Five years ago I knew, without a doubt, I was always doing what I wanted. Now, sometimes I have to actively question myself, take time to check in with the intentions of my work, listen, and steer. I’d say that has been the biggest shift in the creative process since you and I last spoke.

When we first met, you lived in Brooklyn. You’ve moved around a bit since we last spoke. Has that also changed the process?

Yes. I don’t work out of my apartment that much anymore, I go into studios more. I have been living a bit of a nomad life in the past few years so that has naturally shifted the process and the physical context of how and where I work. Now, internally, how much energy I spend in protecting the process is a new thing. I have seen the things in the past that have allowed me to create—or to create in a certain way—and so now I’m aware and I deliberately bring those in, or keep them out. And, of course, as you and I have spoken so much about, the process becomes an instrument. It is another instrument, and with practice, time and discipline, you get better at playing it.

And, yeah, it’s hard to navigate growth. As teams grow, there are so many more people offering input and, in general, just so many things to process: reviews, social media, etc. Really, sometimes having more folks offering input isn’t helpful—it just means more noise to filter out.

Absolutely. At least every other day I ask myself “Is this what I want?” “Is this my life becoming what I want it to be?” It is hard, and confusing at times, to navigate the growth.

On one hand, I have always known exactly what I want: music. I belong with the music…in the music. But on the other hand, I had absolutely no idea about anything else: What type of career I wanted to have? Did I want to make money out of it? So on that second side, for me, it’as been about trying things and adjusting according to how they make me feel. A lot of trial and error, on the go.

All I’ve ever known is that I belong with the music. With sound. With instruments. Period. Music for me has never been a way to acquire something else, or to arrive at something, like attention, fame, or money. It has always just been about music. It’s an end to itself. It has always been. So I wasn’t really prepared for the pressure because it had never been part of my imaginary future. In the past few years, finding myself in this very fortunate position, I’ve been forging my own place in the context of my work and of the industry that surrounds it.

It has been interesting and also exhausting. Like, the simple but important decision of quitting my day job years ago, to completely live off the music, what that entails, the people that I surround myself with, what I need, what I don’t need, the type of team that works for me, the type that doesn’t, what helps me be better, what makes me be worse, etc…. I had never dreamt about any of it, so I’ve had to figure out what feels right to me as I go. Trying, observing, then steering. It’s been an interesting project in exercising will.

I’ve never had specific dreams and, honestly, sometimes I wish I had, because I think that would make things so much easier. I found a lot of my colleagues do have hyper specific goals and dreams. I’m talking about things like signing to a specific label, playing a specific festival, selling out shows. Before accomplishing some of those things myself, I had never even thought about them. And if i’m really honest, I still don’t feel butterflies in my stomach when I see my name billed on a festival lineup. The butterflies for me come from the music and other human beings experiencing it. From your smiles, your dancing with your eyes closed, your tears at a show. The subs tickling us all.

The music itself. I feel so much with it. It’s all indescribable. All that has no words, but exists in the sound. We all have felt it when surrounded by music and sound. And so, yes, I’m always trying to protect that and keep it about that. And, like you say, it’s hard work. And, of course, with the team inevitably growing, the pressure inevitably grows, and it becomes even harder. It’s already hard to stay focused ourselves, and then you add more people and try to keep them focused. That alone is a full time job really. But of course, it should not be.

Sometimes it feels like its all pushing us in a direction that makes everything be so much harder than it should be. Don’t you think? It’s not a very good system.

The system doesn’t work. It’s a good time to be questioning it and starting to figure out different approaches. People are sending 100s of emails, and countless hours in one e-mail thread to make a $50. It’s so cluttered. And, fewer people are making money from just selling records or touring.

Definitely. I cannot emphasize this enough: The system does not work and it needs to change. We need to change it. It starts with questioning it but it has to be followed by action, by artists exercising their will, by us, the artists saying no, way more often. We need to say no when no needs to be said and then figure out new ways.

Recently I’ve been thinking about how much it matters that I actually speak about the decisions I make privately, something I never do. But maybe I should be outspoken, share more, so that publicly you know more about me and the decisions I make privately. So that it’s more clear what I stand for, and what I think are better ways of doing things, or at least what I think are not the way to do things.

For example: I got an offer for a very, very big festival. I think it’s the biggest in the world and it was a ridiculously low offer, like less that I’ve been paid to play Baby’s All right… literally impossible to make it work financially without losing a lot of money. And, keep in mind im a single person on stage, the smallest show I can make work decently, it’s two of us flying. It’s a tiny touring party. And I’m like, “This offer is silly.” I talked to a lot of my musician friends about it and they all said, “That is how that festival is, we all get gutted.” But every single one of them was playing it. They all took the offers! They are all playing it.

So, I said “no,” kind of on principle. Like it was possible for me to invest a little money for the “exposure” of being on the lineup, of posting it, of crossing that festival name on the list of things a “successful album release year” should have, but my gut was like: no. It’s not about what they are selling, it’s what we are buying, right? The only reason the festival works that way is because the artists are all saying yes. Like even headliners spend more than they get paid in production. I don’t have to say more about it, it’s just, it is not a good system.

Now, some of the people that listen to my music probably think “Why isn’t she at that festival?” Industry people probably think I didn’t get an offer and so maybe the record isn’t actually doing so well, but I’m not sure if anybody in the audience or working in the industry thinks there is the possibility one can get an offer and reject it. You know? It’s not a widely considered possibility. Why?

We have been saying yes for far too long to far too many things. Saying “no” is powerful. Less is more. Doing fewer, more intentional things is powerful. Less is power. I think we, as artists, need to regain our wills. We have a will and we can exercise it, and it is not career suicide. We owe nothing to no one and we don’t really need anybody (not really) except the audience. We owe everything to our audiences, and they are the only ones that deserve our sacrifices.

So, yes, the system does not work. Very few people are making money, and the ones that are making a lot are not very transparent about how they make it, so they are creating false hope for the generations to come.

Right. If you have generational wealth, or whatever, it’s different. If you’re responsible for every cost, with no safety net, it gets very tricky. If you have a band—you along with three people playing our music, or whatever—once all the flights are purchased, this and that, you’re losing money. And that’s even if everything else goes right.

Yes. Everyone is losing money. I am terrified for a future without bands, but I genuinely don’t know how a band that is starting out is gonna be able to keep going in this time.

I guess, in general, I’m terrified of a future without live music, which is where we are headed if this doesn’t change. It’s terrifying to me.

I play live music, and I still enjoy live music more than anything, and we need to protect it, all of us. And put our money where our mouths are, all of us.

When we were talking earlier, you coined a term, “horizontal growth.” It’s a kind of pushing back against the need to always be accruing more… that constant escalation. Like, maybe you have a day job, but you’re able to make some time for creative work, and that’s enough. Or, you’re paying your bills with your creative work—which is a gift—and you’re happy where you are with that, and don’t feel the need to keep expanding. It’s different for each person. What if you get to a spot, a spot you love, and you just keep refining things at that level?

Yes. Why is there only one way? Why is it that we all think the same thing about what we need to acquire, the things, the festival bills, the team or whatever? That’s definitely one way, and definitely nothing wrong with it. But it is not the only way. It is so important to choose our own way. To choose what it is that we want and to know when to stop and enjoy.

You know? Like so many people are so clear about it in other aspects of their lives, like with kids: not everybody has to have six kids. You can be like, “Well, maybe I want one kid.” Or “maybe i don’t want to have kids” it’s the same thing but with an artistic career. You don’t have to fit a mold. Just ask the question. You can do whatever feels better to you, and you can also change your mind as many times as you want.

Horizontal growth can also often be the thing that, in the end, makes money, too. If you take your time and believe in what you do, versus just pushing for endless escalation.

In the past, we’ve talked about Fugazi. They ended up doing so well, financially, in part because they cut out so many barriers and so many commissions: no booking agent, their own label, etc.

It’s a different time and different space, perhaps, and there are some other factors, but something I see in the music industry that’s often a mistake of younger artists is paying too many people too soon. It’s so many commissions! At the end of the day, they’re spending beyond their means. And, it’s hard to get out of that once you’re in it.

It is heartbreaking and It’s really hard. That is part of what I mean, when I said there are a lot of assholes out there. Like, if you are a manager and are working with a young artist, make a budget before you suggest hiring a bunch of other people. And they will say—because they said it to me—you don’t have to pay them, they just make a percentage of the work they bring in, but yes, when you add it all up, you are left with nothing and are the one working the most. Why does everybody else make money before the artist does? And, like you said, once you are in it it, is very hard to get out of that, and it is heartbreaking. It’s like credit card companies giving credit cards to young people as soon as they get their first job, without any education on how credit works.

But you know what? I see that happening less when people come from a DIY background. Like you very rightly said about Fugazi… Like, if you listened to Fugazi as a teenager, even if you didn’t have a band yourself, you knew about their way of doing things, it was an education, in a way, on independence and on economics. Or, if you were in a band and you have done all the jobs because you had to do all the jobs, then you grow up and if you end up needing to hire people to do those jobs, then your experience will be useful to both choose the right person for the job and also know more accurately what the job cost, because you did it yourself.

Experience is really important in this. Knowledge and experience demystifies. Something is mysterious when you don’t understand it. When it comes to jobs and money, a way to understand is to experience. You do it so you know how much time, effort, and money it takes. And maybe that is a way to not fall into those traps of spending over your means, especially when you are starting out.

When I first was pitching TCI, my original inspiration for it was Maximum Rock and Roll, which is like the old punk scene. They used to have an annual thing called Book Your Own Fuckin’ Life, that was like, “Here are the DIY spaces in each city. Here’s a place you can get zines printed,” etc. You could book your own stuff. This is what I wanted TCI to be without explicitly doing that, a way to learn how to do your own stuff and have a more power over your work. It’s demystifying because a lot of people just don’t know. And why would they? People like to keep it mysterious. Which is gatekeeping. But what if we answered questions clearly and generously? Like, “How does a person get a booking agent?” Or, “How does publishing work?” “Should I hire a publicist?” “Should I try to get press on my own?” “Do I really need a team of 10 people who are all getting a commission?“

It’s so important, demystification. Asking questions! I think that’s when you realize the most that we are a community, every time I’ve reached out to anybody that I know or don’t (online) asking a real question I have always gotten answers. It is so helpful and so important for people starting out: Don’t be shy about asking questions. None of us knew anything when we were starting out, we all learned by asking others. Or, by trying it out ourselves.

I guess I would say before you hire anybody else, ask questions, ask anything to everyone. Or, just go ahead and try doing the job yourself, you will also learn so much from doing that, even if only for a short period of time. Try doing every single job that you think you need around you, and then, once you know what it takes, what the job actually is, go out and find people to do it, if you have found after all of this, that you still need to.

Thinking about questions, I did a run of listening events for DIA back in December before it came out. In Bogotá, Medellín, Mexico City and London. A big part of those events was a Q&A section. It was my favorite part. It’s such an intimate thing. I find people are so interesting, and when we meet in these spaces where we share something in common, the love for music, it feels safe and adequate to speak about things that matter. I loved it and I want to do that more.

I always try to come out after a show to speak with the audience. Also, around some of these listening events in December, I hosted music production workshops only for women or women-identified people. That ended up being one of the most fulfilling things I’ve done. Now, teaching (or answering questions about your work) makes you speak differently, think differently. The processes and the information is so internalized that when you have to externalize it, another side of your brain lights up. It has made me think a lot about how I communicate, in general.

At the production workshops, I could see in the student;’s faces how they kept feeling empowered and freer as the time together progressed, with knowledge to make things, it’s like you’re giving the the power to be free. I know because I feel it, too. Simply the fact that someone you trust and respect tells you confidently, “You can do it,” and shows you ways to can be life changing. It’s so simple, but that’s something that also comes with growth. It’s good to have a voice that more people hear, because I know I will only use it for good. So I’m glad people want to listen to what I say, because I care. I care deeply.

I remember, actually, the only teacher I had that was still a working musician while i was at Berklee was my drumset teacher. Terri, I’m sure I’ve talked to you about her, Terri Lyne Carrington. She was the only one that would sometimes miss classes for a month because she was on tour. She would come back with all of this wisdom from being on tour, full of real life experiences. Her teaching style was absolutely the opposite to all of the other teachers i had, not only, but in part because she was out there. She was so real, she would share both the struggles as well as the joys, the technical knowledge as well as the knowledge to not let the industry eat you alive. So, I experienced first hand the power of a working, active artist who simultaneously teaches, and I believe we need more of that.

When you are a student and the teacher works in the arts, currently working and creating new work and they choose to spend time teaching you, it absolutely changes the dynamic. Art teachers tend to be jaded artists, like if they had the choice they would have chosen anything but teach. Whereas, this is, “I’m choosing because you the students are important. You’re teaching me as much as I’m teaching you.” It’s powerful, it will make a difference for the future of music.

All of that, to speak about demystification. Ask questions, always, ask questions.

Are there things when you were a student, or first starting out, that you wish you had known you could’ve just avoided in the first place?

I guess two things: Keep your eyes open. Keep your eyes open in regards to yourself, check in with how you are feeling, do it often. Look at the people around you, notice how they make you feel. But mostly take care of yourself. Of your heart and take care of your love for the music. Don’t let the love for the music rot. Take care of it. That is the only thing that will keep you going, if you don’t take care of that you will have a short career. So take care of that first and foremost: your love for the music, and the joy you find in making it, playing it, hearing it.

Trust yourself and always follow your intuition. It’s important to listen to others, but it’s equally important to listen to yourself. Be patient, and don’t try to rush making or releasing music. Or better, don’t rush anything. Be disciplined, but don’t rush. Be disciplined and always thrive to be better. Time always benefits art, I feel everybody’s in a rush now. Just take your time. With whatever it is you’re making, with how it sounds, and looks, and feels, and with finding the right people to surround yourself with. There’s no rush.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Brandon Stosuy.

Because I work with a lot of people who are non-verbal, you really just have to be in the music with them, and that’s how you’re in conversation with them or in communication with them. So I’m able to enter that music-only zone and really immerse myself in it in a way that I’ve never been able to do before. I’m not self-conscious when I’m improvising with people anymore, because my job involves a lot of improvisation. I was always worried that I wasn’t skilled enough as a technical player to do that, but I’m finding that I’m stepping into the music experience intentionally and I’m bringing that home with me, which is good.

I feel like I am also more keenly aware of the neurological processes of entering flow state. I’m finding that I’m able to create an environment in which all is conducive to going into that. I have such limited time. I became a mother, and I have these very short bursts of time and I feel like I’m able to maximize it now, which is cool.

When you have a block of free time, how do you maximize that and force yourself into the flow state?

If the inspiration’s not coming, I can’t force it. I kind of just walk away. But I think my new thing is that I open myself up to more opportunities to let it overtake me. I think my heart is just more open and I’m a better listener now that I’ve been doing this work in music therapy. It’s very spiritual, where you see music as this amazing way for us all to be connected. So I think that I am just embracing music in a way that I haven’t before.

Have you noticed your songwriting change since you became a mother?

I feel like I’ve grown a lot as a person, kind of like the Grinch at the end of the movie, when his heart expands. I think my openness and my empathy has increased massively, and also [because of] the work that I’m doing. So I think I’m able to be more open and maybe censor myself a little bit less, to be kinder to myself, and to welcome all these crazy experiences and feelings. I’m also just getting older, so I can’t really tell what it is, if it’s just age and wisdom or if it’s motherhood that’s increased my wisdom.

Your new record is your seventh album in the last 15 years, and they’ve all been very autobiographical. How has it felt putting your life out there in your music and your listeners witnessing your life changing over that time? There are people who have grown and changed with you. Do you think about that a lot?

I think about it when people get in touch with me and they talk about where they were when they were listening to a specific record and how they were going through the same thing. I guess I don’t think about it enough. It is weird to have everybody know basically exactly what’s happening with me and how I feel at all times. But it’s also kind of beautiful because I connect with people that I’ve never met before, because they can put themselves right there [with me]. When I meet fans or people who like my music and have for a long time, it feels like we’re old friends, even though I don’t know them at all and they have just an idea of me.

Late Great in particular is incredibly personal and I find it very painful to listen to sometimes. I actually find myself having a hard time getting through it. How do you feel in these days right now, right before the release, knowing that soon everyone is going to hear something very heavy that you wrote?

I think I was trying not to think about it. I was like, “Oh, it’s fine. It’s just a record.” But it’s really intense! I’ve been thinking about it more lately and I’m pretty freaked out about it. But what are you going to do?

What part of it freaks you out the most?

I don’t know. I just worry. I tell stories very vaguely and I want to keep it that way. I worry that people are going to try to get more out of me than I put out with the record. People are going to have questions. And that’s what freaks me out, because it is about my life, but I also wrote about my life, so I was kind of putting myself in that position.

Do you feel like people’s perception censors you as a songwriter? How do you balance wanting to be honest in a song versus maintaining real-life relationships with people?

There are some writers [for whom] the matter-of-fact details of everyday life is like beautiful poetry. But for me, I find that it takes a little bit away from the beauty of something if you can’t paint it in your mind the way you want to see it, if it’s all written out for you. So I prefer to be a little bit more interpretive. There have been songs in the past where I was like, “Oh, I better not say that because that’s obviously a clear finger-pointing at a specific person.” But I actually think it’s more personal for me if I can see all the imagery in my mind and am just drawing the outline of it.

Your touring schedule has decreased over the years with your school workload, becoming a mom, and with it just being increasingly prohibitive for anybody to tour now. Is the live performance aspect of being a musician essential to you? Where does it fit in with your career as a musician?

That’s the part that I like the least. I like writing. I don’t even like recording, but now that I work with John [Agnello, producer], I do, because we have a beautiful friendship and so it is really nice. But I have to work really hard to make playing shows feel good. So, I sometimes just have to very carefully listen to the way the room is and get lost in the music. I just don’t like people watching me. And that’s the job! If I could be invisible, that’d be cool.

Has it gotten better or worse over the years?

I can’t tell. I go through phases. When I was little, I was in A Christmas Carol. I was one of the angels in the angel chorus. So I was in a thing that was performed at Madison Square Garden, because my elementary school had a good chorus, so we got picked to be the chorus that goes in. I remember not being scared at all, because I was in a chorus, so nobody was looking at me. There were bright lights but I could just exist and play and sing and experience it and not even think about the people watching me, just be in the music. I loved it. So I try to bring myself back to that, because when I start thinking about everybody watching me, then I start thinking about how I’m going to make a mistake. And then I inevitably make the mistake. And then I get in my own way and feel super self-conscious. I’m a human being. It’s awful to stand in front of people. I can’t public speak at all. I get so nervous public speaking, it makes me feel awful and I freak out. I think music is a good thing to try to get lost in, to forget that people are watching you. But I’m not a person who is looking at people in the crowd and trying to hand them the microphone and Bruce-Springsteen it.

What, for you, is the greatest motivation for releasing new music? Is it internal or external?

It’s very singularly interpersonal. It’s the very small connections that I make with people over the music and the fact that it can help people get through stuff, individuals. Just having those little interactions at the merch table really makes me want to keep doing it. That, for me, is the most important thing. And that’s why I got into music therapy, I guess, because making even just the slightest difference in one person’s life is important.

My supervisor was talking the other day about that parable about the starfish on the beach. There’s a thousand starfish that washed up on the shore, and there was a guy who was throwing them back in, one by one. Some guy came up to him and he was like, “You’re not going to be able to help all these starfish. You’re not going to be able to make a difference. What are you doing?” So then he throws one and he says, “I just made a difference for that one.” The little individual connections are good.

I feel like you have all but given up on social media. What was it about social media that was rubbing you wrong?

I was just getting lost in it and it was always making me feel bad about myself. When I was really still doing music, and that was my only thing, I just felt like a failure all the time. It made me feel like I wasn’t doing enough and nobody cared. I was doing a lot of comparing myself to other people and that was yucky. And then it started happening to me with parenting stuff. [My daughter] was born during COVID, so I wasn’t leaving the house. There were a lot of experiences that she didn’t have. I was seeing other people doing things with their kids, but I was not doing those things because I was too scared. And then I started second-guessing myself as a mother and feeling bad. So I was like, “Nothing can poison this. I can’t allow anything to poison this experience of having a little person. I don’t want to have any sort of negativity coming from the outside world about that.”

Do you ever get ideas from your daughter? I feel like when I’m around my nieces, I carry a notebook because they will drop a one-liner that comes purely from their ids.

She does ask really beautiful questions and we have to talk about death and life and why death happens and if it hurts. It’s heavy. You want to make it developmentally appropriate, but she asks existential and beautiful questions and it kind of reminds you how special life is. You get so caught up in life and having to go to fucking Target, and then she’s like, “Why does a butterfly fly?” It gets you back to just thinking about how wonderful everything is or just having a sense of wonder.

I don’t know that I’ve ever met someone whose music bears so little resemblance to the personality behind it. Your songs are so beautiful and delicate and intimate, and then in between songs you will drop the goofiest one-liner or joke on an audience. Do you think of Laura Stevenson, the musician, as a different person? Does Laura Stevenson behind the mic say things that you would not normally say? Is there a separation?

In life, I’m the same. I can’t be sweet. I can’t just be sincere without making a joke. I can say something that is the most vulnerable thing in the world, but I have to punctuate it with a joke because I’m an idiot. I think it’s just being afraid of your own vulnerability. But humor has always been a defense mechanism. I don’t like to be serious, but I also have big feelings. When I’m playing live, if I had a slide whistle on stage with me at all times, I feel like that would be a perfect way to end every song.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Dan Ozzi.

It’s a Korean word, so it’s typically challenging for most people I interact with to pronounce. By my understanding, in Korean, the B is pronounced with a B and a P sound, so it can have a stronger plosive. As far as speaking in Korean, this is the most I speak, it’s just this one word. It’s funny how random it seems, but it does come from my own roots. Even though the Press kind of obfuscates who I am; I tend to speak about it in the third person, for example. I say “we” a lot in posts and online. I try to keep it professional. The entirety of the Press, the business and its whole mission, it built around me. I can’t deny that.

Essentially, I’m left handed and I was thinking like, “Okay, let’s dive into that a little bit.” I was looking into the typical associated terms. I love Left-Hand Press, Southpaw Press, but these all exist. There are dozens of them across the world, so I’m like, “Okay, let me try something more specific.” I’m thinking, I’m thinking, I’m like, “Wait a minute.” I remember growing up, my dad would tell me that if I was born in Italy or I was born in a more traditional Italian family, I probably would’ve been forced to be right-handed, because for a long time left-handed people were considered to possess the hand of the devil, so you didn’t want to be left-handed. So in Italy you would be called sinistra or “sinister.” I’m like, “Oh, shit. That’s cool. ‘Sinister,’ that’s a really awesome name, but I don’t want to call it ‘Sinister Press.’” It promises something that I won’t be delivering, frankly.

It’s ratcheting up the gore and zaniness to 11 and that’s not quite my bag.

And I was like, “Okay, what’s ‘sinister’ in Korean?” I was checking on different words. I was asking friends and “Bulgilhan” was the one to stick. Once I picked the name, I remember I told my mom and she was kind of mad at me. She’s like, “Why’d you pick a word you can’t pronounce?” and I said “Why didn’t you teach me Korean?” It was not a very fair dig at her, there were a lot of reasons why she wasn’t really able to teach me Korean growing up, but during the first Kickstarter I ran in 2021, I wanted to do an intro video. Then I realized that I would finally need to pronounce “Bulgilhan” live on camera and started to panic. So I would text my mom voice memos of me pronouncing it, and based on her emojis, I would learn if I was getting hotter or colder, and by the end I got a bunch of gymnastics emojis, which told me I was doing great. She loves the gymnastics emoji.

Has this sparked an interest in you learning more of the language?

A little bit, but it hasn’t happened yet. What really sparked it is, I think I told you this, but at the end of the year, my partner and I are going to Korea and are going to Asia for three weeks. So I’ll be in Korea for two weeks. I am learning a little bit of Korean to get by while I’m there. I think it’s “yes” and “no.” Ultimately, in my mind, picking this name is a way to represent my uniqueness instead of my Korean heritage. I consider those as two different things.

I wouldn’t actually consider myself Korean the same way a person from Korea would and I’m very at peace with that difference. It’s not like I’ve not met another Korean-Italian person. I’ve met other Asian-Italian people. I’ve met other European-Korean people, but I’ve never met another Korean-Italian person. So I feel it’s a very unique aspect about me worth celebrating. I’m sure there’s just only a handful of us in the US, so it’s exciting to just have this name that represents so specifically to me.

As you noted, you’re the sole person working at the Press. Every book you produce is really colorful and lush—it’s really beautiful work. How did you go about defining your taste? Your taste drives so much of what you publish, right?

I’ve received pitches by artists whose comic became famous on Instagram, providing this whole pitch around here’s how many followers they have, here’s what the “reader-to-buyer” conversion rate should be, etc. It’s all very professional and it’s like, I have zero interest in this.

But really, there’s a couple of different things here, and one is when it comes to the physical book itself. I really want to make beautiful books or interesting books or tactile books or books that people want to pick up and want to read.

I read digital comics at the time. It’s just that’s not what I wanted to make. I knew that in a decade’s time I wouldn’t feel satisfied looking at a collection of PDFs that I’ve helped create. I need to see them on a shelf. I need to see it in person around other books. I’ve long had this vision of having my books alongside publications by small press publishers who I really admired and who greatly inspired me. So I thought, “I want to make something that stands up to that sort of aesthetic. It stands up to that crowd.” So that was part of it. I’m a very tactile person. I love textures, I love weights, I love physicality, so I wanted to also make books that I would be excited by finding in a shop.

One of my favorite things is when someone picks up a copy of Stray by Molly Mendoza, for instance, which is printed with a textured felt-weave cover. People often go, “Oh, I love it.” I get an, “Oooh,” out of somebody when they pick it up, and then I get to show them that the little smoke trail on the cover is embossed so they can just feel it when they run their finger over it. I just love showing readers that. I am that person as well!

What especially helped me when I launched Bulgilhan, was that I working at a design studio at the time. It gave me a lot of insight to the way in which designers approach creating physical items: products, paper, goods, what-have-you. It really opened the door for me and gave me a bit of confidence to learn and explore what got me excited about book design and printing. So I was already thinking about that process when I launched the Press.

As far as my taste goes though, man, that’s the hardest thing. I get the question a lot at shows and festivals, especially in the form of people asking, “Oh, what are you looking for?” Typically my response has been, “It’s more like what I’m not looking for,” but I also think there’s a critical difference in what my personal tastes as a reader are and what they are as a publisher. I would say it’s like a square, rectangle situation. Everything I publish is within my tastes but I don’t publish everything within my tastes. For instance,I’m probably not going to license a manga anytime soon or perhaps ever.

That’s not really something I’m equipped to do. Or if I was, it’d have to be a really special project that I really think wouldn’t fit anywhere else. It would have to be a project that for some reason wouldn’t fit at publishers that specialize in indie manga like Denpa, Glacier Bay Books, or Starfruit. It would have to be something really unique, and I actually don’t know what that would be! I’m not actually that plugged into the indie manga world. While I would love it, I think that it would come about by such a bizarre scenario, I just can’t envision it.

But as far as the kinds of comics I’m going to leap for as a publisher, I think, this is why I ended up with “self-indulgent” as the Press’s primary motivator to bind the books together; it’s purposely vague and is very much up for interpretation. Ideally the mysterious pit of vaguery is meant to encourage the cartoonist to fill it with something I can connect my artistic desires to. It all sounds fairly metaphysical I suppose, but something I’ve learned about me reading comics is that I have a great desire to be moved by individual stories, so that desire expresses itself with what I’d like to publish.

So I don’t usually go for books that are going to be a series, although we’re gonna bend that rule for Die Horny, but that wasn’t by design. I also tend not to publish overly long books, because I think that a very successful version of a story can be and sometimes should be accomplished in a hundred pages or less. I ultimately find that size really appealing. It’s just enough for you to sink your teeth in and start feeling the emotions radiating from the comic, and then you have to let go and ideally get a very ethereal emotional moment. I resonate with books, with stories and comics that, even if the artist isn’t intending for it, have a very strong motivation and drive to instill a feeling within the reader.

One of my favorite feelings is when I finish reading a short comic and I put it down—I sit there and I breathe out and that exhalation is a reminder to my body that I’m alive. I’m in the world. This may be just a piece of fiction, yet it is a piece of fiction that affects me greatly and deeply, and both things are true. I get to live in that cognitive dissonance, and this is such a ridiculous answer to the question “what defines my tastes?”. It’s tough to answer! It’s stuff that makes me feel things in a way that’s hard for me to describe, and I don’t always know what that is until I read through it.

I have a similar sort of feeling of exhalation that you’ve talked about where if I have a moment with a book where I’ll see something and go, “Oh, fuck.”

That’s the best description of it. It’s an “oh, fuck” moment, and there’s so many different versions of, “oh, fuck,” and that’s one of them. That’s one of the best ones.

You talked a lot about what you look for in terms of what you want to publish. There’s also a working relationship that comes along with your artists based on what you and I have talked about and what you’re very public about: You offer a very good deal for your artists. It’s a collaborative working arrangement, as I understand it, but correct me if I’m wrong there…

I would disagree with the term “collaborative.” I would say that “collaborative” would require a higher level of creative function from me. I would say a very supportive relationship is the goal. I’m ultimately here to help the artist make the best version of the comic they’re trying to make. Really help them fine tune it.

That’s what I was thinking as well. You’re lending your expertise as a publisher to collaborate and take something that maybe had a nebulous shape and help form it into a more beautiful state. What do you look for in collaborators? What makes you want to publish somebody outside of what you’ve already said?

It’s really just like I don’t necessarily think of my artists as collaborators. I think of them as my artists. I think of them as people I’m supporting and helping hone their craft as they need it and stuff like that. When I was writing comics and self-publishing them with artists like Ricardo López Ortiz, K.L Ricks, and Grim Wilkins. I was a collaborator for sure. In this situation I would think maybe the closest I’ve gotten to being a “collaborator” is maybe on Stray with Molly because we were talking about what ended up becoming that book for maybe four years and really that’s just because we were friends.

We were chatting about it for a long time, well before it became the version of Stray you can read now a much more personal book about their own struggles with vices or their own journey with regard to looking at the ways those vices and how they view them has colored their life, both negatively and positively. It was very interesting but it sort of turned into a more fictionalized story, navigating these themes and whatnot. That might’ve been the closest I got, but honestly it was still kind of just editorial. What I look for in my artists, that’s a good question. I can’t say it’s strictly the working relationship because obviously, I get excited about certain artists before I work with them.

The times I’ve reached out to artists directly asking if they want it to be published by me, I’ve been very grateful when they say, yes, like with Huahua who made The King’s Warrior, which we Kickstarted last year. She’s an artist I’ve been following for a very long time and have been in huge admiration of. On a whim, I just cold emailed her to tell her how much I liked her work and if she ever wanted to send a pitch my way, the door was open and I think she got back to me the same day!

Sometimes I’m just excited about the artists, I need to find their storytelling really compelling. A big consideration is that I, like anyone, can be hooked into someone’s art through one illustration, but what I really, really need to see is storytelling chops, the ability to convey a story through their illustration and make it meld really beautifully. That’s one of the reasons why I pretty much exclusively want to work with solo cartoonists; in my mind illustration is a form of communication. Another aspect of this is that I want to give cartoonists a real shot at being their own writer. Perhaps not every comic artist is suited to write a script but I trust my intuition to figure out which artists to trust. So much of comics publishing is built around pairing writers with artists - why not be different?

I know they have a story in them and I know they want to tell it, and that’s sort of where Bulgilhan becomes a desirable and exciting publisher to work with; I’m there for their ideas. I really want to help them shine not only as artists but as storytellers.

I also think it’s about curiosity because exploration is such a key part of art making and mark making and the craft of making comics. I don’t need someone to level up their cartooning when they’re working with me, but I love the idea that my artists get time and room to explore. The way the publishing agreement is built, it’s sort of designed for that. I don’t really give deadlines and I try to be really flexible with them, stuff like that, but ultimately I seek out artistic motivation.

I want my artists to have, even if just a gut feeling, a vision. I need that to exist. My understanding of their vision purely comes through conversation. Sure, I can get a little bit of that from the pitch and by emailing with them, but I really like to speak with my artists, at least once. I gotta have that human-to-human connection so I know who I’m publishing.

Looking ahead, what are your hopes for Bulgilhan and for indie comics in general?

I’ll start with the hope that is impossible, or nearly impossible, which is I hope to win the lottery. That’d be great, and then I could just take Bulgilhan to wherever I wanted, without any concerns about being “profitable.” It’s extraordinarily unlikely, but it’d be cool as hell.

That said, my hope as a publisher, is to be doing this until I die. I’ve been joking about this lately, but the more I say it, the more true it becomes. I don’t know if it means I’m going to be editing when I’m 88 or something. It could be a thing where I sort of pass it on to somebody else if they’re interested in it. I have no idea what this looks like. I don’t think it’s going to “scale” very much, at least not its current form. Bulgilhan was not designed to be a business that takes up my entire time.

If I was independently wealthy and didn’t have to worry about anything else, I would absolutely publish full-time. I would 100% let it eat up a lot more of my time and be very happy for it, but that’s not the reality right now. So the Press is sort of like a consistent crank I turn, ideally at a normal rate. Put out a few comics each year and just keep doing that until the wheels fall off. That’s what sustainability looks like for me and the Press.

It’s meant to essentially break even financially, reinvesting whatever extra funds we have into keeping books in print. That and also being able to pay our artists a little bit more each time are the closest Bulgilhan has to “growth” as a business. I have hopes for something to change in creative industries or something to make people suddenly go “wait, this could be more viable for X, Y, Z reasons” and invest out of interest and excitement, not out of short-term IP extraction.

I don’t know what that answer is. I feel like there needs to be a colossal cultural shift that moves comics readership, and appreciation in western audiences to something more akin to the kind of appreciation you get in France and Belgium. That said, they have their own problems no matter how much people look up to them. Same with Japan. I don’t know if I’d feel okay publishing in their model. But I do love the fact that comics is such a foundational medium for people to access stories, and that’s something I would love for the US and Western countries to adopt and see flourish within our communities.

As for being a publisher, I just wish for it to keep going. I want to be able to keep this a thing that I retain near-absolute control over. I’m grateful for the high level of trust I have with my artists and the business partners that I work with. I just want to keep that going. I love it. It’s sort of funny, I currently have no plans for kids. I often half-joke that all my artists, all the books I’ve published, those are my children. That’s where I’m putting my energy. That’s the legacy I want to leave to the world. This is a life-long project in my mind.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Sam Kusek.

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.

I was sung to a lot by my family, which was nice. My dad is a bassist who plays recreationally, and my mom was a singer-actor. She stopped doing that and went to nursing school when I was eight, but she was always singing. I was made to participate. I harmonized with my parents to James Taylor songs, or I sang showtunes to lull myself to sleep.

I understood the gravitas of being a performer because it was so revered by my family. I listened to a lot of Cyndi Lauper, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and the B-52s. Those are all really vibrant front people—I was exposed to that energy young.

I’m curious about what your life was like when your first band, Strange Names, came together. What was going on that helped make that happen?

I was in Minneapolis, in college to be an actor. I met [my bandmates] in the dorms. I was reckoning with wanting total creative agency over what I was making, and not wanting to say other people’s words. Even more so than the regular plight of auditioning and rejection, and how tiring that can be for lots of people, I felt conflicted and annoyed by having to recite things that I didn’t believe in.

I came to a crossroads where I could continue acting, or I could throw my all into this band. I chose the band. It was a way to interact with an audience, but more aggressively, and, obviously, with my own compositions. It felt scarier and more challenging. Way more exciting.

In Minneapolis, they’re a really insular, prideful community of artists. They let my band become a big fish in a little pond, which made us feel good. That was also one of the reasons that I chose [music over acting]: instant gratification.

Minneapolis is one of the most special cities in the US. I love to be there, breathing Paul Westerbergian air and thinking about Prince. Going dancing at First Avenue.

Paul Westerberg’s sister, Mary Lucia, was one of the main public radio hosts. She’s a super-cool lady, and she was one of my champions. It was her job to know who every single local artist was, and almost all of the local shows were “brought to you by NPR,” or whatever the muckamuck media company was there. It felt like you were a big deal, even if you weren’t.

You grew up in New York and live here now. How did changing cities affect your work?

In 2014, I stayed for an extra year out of college to keep the band going. We came here because we signed to a label based in New York. It was a very quick fall from grace. We were so championed in the Midwest, then it was, “We’re starting from absolutely square one in New York.” Emotionally, I have my family anchor here—I’m from here, I grew up here, and I always knew I would probably die here. Artistically, we were playing the 6 p.m. show at the Whatever Bar.

Did you sense an opportunity in that?

I was so high on the choice to not be an actor anymore that it didn’t matter. I was consumed by that risky decision that I made [to be a musician]. It was so fun.

I wonder if you brought any of your acting skill set into that risk, and into singing your own words.

The way I move on stage is a direct correlation to how I was mostly a character actor in school. I played old men and monsters, and those are the most fun characters to play. I have these jerky, pelvic go-tos when I’m on stage that I got from playing crazy people. I’ve just scaled it down to a rock and roll level.

You were thinking about scaling things down to a rock and roll level?

It felt really good. When you’re a gay guy in acting school, you’re very conscious of being castable, and not being typecast as always playing a gay character. Saying my own words and performing my own music was a very liberating thing for my sexuality, [one] that I hadn’t allowed myself to explore while I was trying to fit into boxes.

I can imagine how that freedom might radiate into the rest of your life. What else have you learned about yourself from writing and performing music?

It’s weird—when I was in high school in New York City, I was going out all the time. I had an older boyfriend when I was 15 years old. I lived quite a lot. I decided to go to this buttoned-up theater school in the Midwest, which was an act of rebellion against my rebellious phase. And then I had to unlearn all of that stuff that I had internalized in [acting] school to re-characterize myself as this cool guy.

I read something about how you compose lyrics—sometimes, from this remove of imagining someone else looking at you, then thinking, Who do they see?

It all comes down to storytelling, and the best way to tell a story is to embellish. If you’re writing it yourself: taking elements of your life, but not necessarily saying exactly what happened, and making some creative choices with where the story goes. And adding elements that are entirely false.

I’ve always quoted a Björk interview where she talks about “emotional coordinates.” That’s how she writes songs: the first verse can be about a real experience she had. The second verse can be about a movie that she saw, but with a similar emotional provocation as the life experience. The third verse can be about a completely made-up character that is in that same emotional world. You see it kind of on a map. Like historiography, as opposed to history. You see the coordinates of where it is.

Her using those words made a lot of sense to me. Writing from the perspective of me watching myself, or from the perspective of the person that I’m talking to, is within those coordinates. One verse, it’s me; one verse, it’s the person that I’m talking to; then it’s the total objective point of view, floating above all of it.

Do you find that, over time, you’re situated at some sets of coordinates repeatedly? What do you come back to?

For most of the music that I like and listen to, I like pretty melodies and hooks. What goes hand in hand with hooks are elements of yearning and excitability and love and whatnot. That being said, I’m now at a point where I want to very consciously and specifically write from my perspective, and write more testimonially than I have in the past.

What prompted that change?

Being on tour and singing my songs over and over again, there were always parts I felt way more hooked up singing than I would other parts. I knew why. Those parts were closer to my real experience. When Marianne Faithfull died, I was listening to a lot of her music, especially Broken English. She’s so mad on that record—so raw and angry. I was in awe listening to it after I hadn’t in a while, and jealous. Like, “I want to feel that way and write that way.” Whatever I make next, I want it to be direct.

Like the antithesis of when you were acting and having to say other people’s words.

Exactly. I still want to use poetic imagery to illustrate what I’m feeling, but I want it to come from a real place. I’ve had friends ask, “When are you going to make an angry record? When are you going to make a spiky record?” I want to challenge myself to do that.

I want to ask about your day-to-day art practice. What do you need in order to make your work?

I need to walk around a lot. It’s extremely physical, as far as I can’t sit down and write anything, ever, lyrically—even melodically, I have to be walking. That’s the only way I meditate. I have voice memos and notes filled with little humming melodies and words that I think of, and street signs that I see. I need to be able to actively observe and fantasize. The only time I can achieve that is not in stillness.

Then I need someone… well, it’s me ultimately, but I need someone to hold me down and force me to pick up my instrument and execute it, because I could live in the fantasizing period forever. But just like when you’re reading a book or watching a slow, artsy movie, you need to get through the first 30 minutes, and then you’re hooked.

Then you’re home free.

Oftentimes, drugs help with that. If not, that first 30 minutes of reckoning with your skills is the most tedious, horrible thing. Picking up the guitar or opening a session to actually start writing a song, I’m confronted with my skill set, as opposed to my more ambient creative process. It’s suddenly, “What are you actually capable of executing? Can you play this? Can you figure out the software?” That’s when I get into my head. “It took you too long to figure this out. You’re not a real artist. You’re not as much of a genius as you think you are.”

Doesn’t it suck that that’s part of the art job, no matter what you’re making? Given that feeling, it’s a wonder anything gets done. Who helps hold you down?

My boyfriend is extremely helpful. He writes fiction, and he’s really good at telling me to focus, and I do the same for him. That’s been nice. Otherwise, nobody is telling me to do anything. I’m telling myself to do everything.

So much of my last record […And His Splash Band] was an attempt to grow my sounding board. I’m so used to working alone that it was a very aggressive pursuit of community. It was feature-heavy, and I had friends in my band. When I listen to the record, it feels less like a totally cohesive piece of work and more like an Uber Pool, where one friend hops in—they have no relation to the next friend—then they hop out, and then the next one hops in.

I wanted community around me when I was releasing music—I wanted my friends there, and I wanted my friends invested. That was absolutely my armor. The most stressful, maddening time to make music is once the singles start rolling out. You have that weird rollercoaster several months before the record actually comes out, and you’re thinking about press and tour. Because I had accumulated this group of people, I felt very, very held by my peers during that time. I didn’t have to think so much about labels and PR and whatever—I could just call my friend who I worked on the song with and be like, “It’s out, huh?” It made it fun.

When you mounted this aggressive pursuit of collaborators, how did you go about it?

It was a very concerted, conceptual effort. For my band, none of them played instruments before we started playing together. Creating the Splash Band was my attempt at industry-plant aesthetics: what it looks like to be a band that’s been handpicked not necessarily based on skill, but on chemistry, looks, and style. I wanted that artificial element to exist on the surface, but then have the music actually mean something. My initial idea was, “It’s going to be a stage show where I’m actually singing, but you’re all miming. I want you in the pictures, but I want this to be fully just a show—I want it to be something different.” But once we got together to rehearse, it made sense for them to just learn the song, and suddenly we were just rehearsing for real, for real.

I’m not a trained musician—I’m self-taught. I’ve often felt like an imposter because I don’t have the lingo that a lot of musicians have. I consciously brought in these people that didn’t have that vocabulary so that I could feel more comfortable, and we could all feel comfortable. Because I wasn’t surrounded by session or touring musicians, we were all using the same onomatopoeia to get where we needed to go.

How do you define success and failure in your work?

It’s always been the validation of my art practice over financial things. I want to be admired by artists that I admire. Success, for me, is depth. Failure is phoning it in, and making something that you don’t totally believe in. Granted, I cringe when I hear some of my older music—even if I did really believe in it. But that’s where the work you make means different things to you at different points in your life. I don’t hate any of it.

The goalpost for success moves constantly. The grass is absolutely always greener for me. I’ve been doing this for a little while, and there have been times when I’ve felt gatekept from music journalism. I’ve often thought that it’s because I’m a gay guy. While there are a million horrible things that are happening in the world and it seems a bit trite, there’s still a lot of homophobia in music. As a gay musician, you kind of have to win the lottery with journalists in order to get to the next level. I talk about this a lot with my other gay-guy musician friends who experience the same thing.

This is all under this success-failure thing. Success is what I said before—having work that means something to you recognized—and failure is moral compromise.

Do you have any creative advice that took you a minute to find out for yourself?

The landscape of music is so different now than it was when I first started, as far as how to hawk your songs palatably for consumers, like TikTok dances and whatever. If this is your lifeblood, then you will continue to do it no matter what, and you can be comforted by that notion of your character. No matter what happens, or no matter what obstacles you come up against, you are a sick individual, and you will never not do this.

There’s something really liberating about that. I can’t imagine living unless I’m doing this. Sometimes I lean too much into that, and that’s when I spiral. When I’m not leaning into it in a dark way, it’s really quite nice. That’s what I needed to tell myself as a kid: just trust in your being insatiable.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Amy Rose Spiegel.

It’s been really nice. The first day I just sat in the chair in the studio and stared out the window because I couldn’t believe that this exists—that you are allowed to just come here for three weeks and have all your meals taken care of. All you have to do is sit here and do whatever you want. You honestly don’t even have to write. Of course you’re going to write or make art because that’s why you’re here, but there’s no expectation, really. And it’s all for free. I was like, “Why didn’t I apply to [residencies] earlier?” And then I was like, “Oh, right, because I was working.” You can’t take off three weeks of your life like that with a full-time job, usually. I’m trying to read a lot for sure, because when I was in New York recently, I didn’t have that much time to. I’ve also been trying to finish the first draft of my fourth book here.

How did you first identify as an artist and how has that identity evolved since then?

I was always making art, since I was young, but it was just my own paintings or these silly little art projects that my friends would support. I think in 2020, I was like, “It would be nice to try something new. I’ve always loved reading, so let me try writing.” I wrote my first short story and it got published, and it was a nice feeling to create this whole world through words. Then I just kept going.

Do you think about going back to painting?

I feel like my writing is interdisciplinary because I am inspired by different forms of art, from film to paintings. In an ideal world, in 10 or 20 years I can have my own studio in New York where I’m just painting and I don’t have to worry about money or anything like that. because it gives you plenty of time to experiment and try new things. But I’m not at that point yet, so we’ll see.

You were a very accomplished swimmer growing up, which has obviously influenced your writing. I imagine that you spend the same amount of time writing now as you did training as a teenager.

I think growing up being such a serious swimmer, and spending three to five hours a day in swim practice while being in school and just trying to be a teenager, really makes you better at organizing your time and structuring your life so that you can get everything done. I think that helped me a lot when I was working full time—knowing how to structure my day-to-day so I was able to get some writing in while not getting fired at my day job, and also having a life. Even though it would be really easy for me to just be super depressive and introverted, I’m like, “No, I have to go see my friends.” Friends are what keep you human.

You’re in a transitional phase right now, no longer working full-time in art direction. Are you planning to write full-time or are you open to other avenues?

I’d love to write full-time as long as it’s financially feasible. I have been freelancing for a friend who’s a creative director at a startup. Book advances and the random foreign sale have been keeping me afloat. I’ll do it for as long as it’s financially feasible. I can do this because I don’t have kids and my parents don’t need a caretaker yet. There’s a lot that contributes to me being able to do this that’s not just money-based.

You know how a lot of people say, “I’m nervous to make the art that I love my main source of income”? I think that when I was working full-time, I was like, “I don’t believe that. That sounds really nice because you don’t have to work full-time and you get to do what you love.” After I got laid off and writing became my main source of income, I was like, “Okay, I get what people mean now.” Before, I didn’t have to think about [if the project was] going to get sold or going to be read. I was purely writing for myself and my friends and because it was fun. Now I do [worry], “Okay, shit, do I want to work on this or do I want to work on this?” I want to work on both, but I’m going to choose the one that I think has the most viability of getting sold or earning me some form of income. I think part of me resents the fact that I do have to think about capital in this way. But I also think it’s irrational to pretend that I don’t have to think about things like this, especially because I don’t have family wealth or anything. I am a working artist. I think I struggle a lot with talking about capital and thinking about it, while also wanting to make art that’s not soiled by that thought. I still haven’t figured out the right balance or the way to do that yet. I don’t know if any working artist has, to be honest.

Do you know where a project is going to end up? Or do you allow yourself to follow an idea and trust that an ending will come?

It depends on the project. For my first two novels, I got these visions in my head and then was like, “Okay, how did they get there?” That’s what I’m writing to figure out. So I really don’t know what’s happening when I write the first draft. Then I started writing screenplays. Because they’re a lot more plot-based and there’s less interiority, I have to outline them out in a way that I don’t for my books.

The fourth book I’m working on now I’m calling “an involuntary memoir” after [Proust’s concept] of involuntary memory, but I think it’s definitely more autofiction… I wanted to try writing it because it’s based on my everyday, in a way. I don’t know what I’m going to do tomorrow. I don’t know what’s going to happen. But I’m going to write about it. It’s completely switching the way that I’ve been writing books, which is always knowing the ending and figuring out how we got there. I don’t know the ending of this book. I don’t know where it’s going, but that’s the whole point.

You’ve written a lot about being a voracious reader and writer, which I can attest to—you’re one of the most widely read people I know. How are you with revision? Are you gentle with yourself or hard on yourself, or both?

I’m not a perfectionist, which I think is how I’m able to write so much. I do kind of wish I was more of a perfectionist, but at the same time, I recognize that that’s impossible. Your writing is never going to be perfect, but the point is to get as close as you can. Perfect is subjective. Re-visualize. I recognize that that’s where the real writing is. That’s where the real story comes out. And I think revising is a pleasure because that’s when you realize, “Oh, this is what I’m trying to say. This is where the story is.” It’s just so much harder than vomiting out your first draft that I resent it, but I do know it’s probably the best part of writing.

You’ve talked about forming an artistic lineage for your first novel, Chlorine. You made an incredible Instagram for it, as well as for your upcoming books. Can you talk about your connection to writing and the internet? You were on Tumblr, right?

I never made that connection, but maybe it is true that the Instagrams I make for my books to hold all the inspirations [for them] really are based from that Tumblr era. I was on Tumblr, but I’m not anymore. It’s really joyful and fun to be able to scroll through and remember all the inspirations.

The internet was the first place where I met my writing friends, through online groups. At that time, I didn’t have community in the way that I do now, so I think it was really helpful and useful for meeting people. But I think that transitioning from online to offline is what really changed my life, so I guess that [the internet] was more like a tool for me to use to meet people. Real-life community has been offering me a lot of sustenance and joy. I am trying to not use social media as much… I think that there are pros and cons. Social media and the internet are really great for staying aware about the world and what’s going on and sharing how you feel. But I also think proximity to community is really important, and the best way to nourish that is to be there in person.

You recently adapted your novel into a screenplay that got you into the Black List Writers Lab last year. What was it like to adapt your own work into a new medium?

I actually think the screenplay for Chlorine is better than the novel because I was so inspired by the body horror movies of Julia Ducournau, David Cronenberg, and Ginger Snaps. Now I’ve written a few other feature-length screenplays and I’m able to recognize in my head what’s a better story for a novel and what’s a better story for a screenplay. After concentrating on one form for a really long time, I think that screenplays feel very mechanical. You have to follow a certain structure and you don’t put as much emotion into it. It’s a lot more concise than a novel, where you have a lot of room and freedom to play with structure, with language, with a character’s point of view. I think it’s just been fun to bounce back and forth.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Ruth Minah Buchwald.

It’s been really nice. The first day I just sat in the chair in the studio and stared out the window because I couldn’t believe that this exists—that you are allowed to just come here for three weeks and have all your meals taken care of. All you have to do is sit here and do whatever you want. You honestly don’t even have to write. Of course you’re going to write or make art because that’s why you’re here, but there’s no expectation, really. And it’s all for free. I was like, “Why didn’t I apply to [residencies] earlier?” And then I was like, “Oh, right, because I was working.” You can’t take off three weeks of your life like that with a full-time job, usually. I’m trying to read a lot for sure, because when I was in New York recently, I didn’t have that much time to. I’ve also been trying to finish the first draft of my fourth book here.

How did you first identify as an artist and how has that identity evolved since then?

I was always making art, since I was young, but it was just my own paintings or these silly little art projects that my friends would support. I think in 2020, I was like, “It would be nice to try something new. I’ve always loved reading, so let me try writing.” I wrote my first short story and it got published, and it was a nice feeling to create this whole world through words. Then I just kept going.

Do you think about going back to painting?

I feel like my writing is interdisciplinary because I am inspired by different forms of art, from film to paintings. In an ideal world, in 10 or 20 years I can have my own studio in New York where I’m just painting and I don’t have to worry about money or anything like that. because it gives you plenty of time to experiment and try new things. But I’m not at that point yet, so we’ll see.

You were a very accomplished swimmer growing up, which has obviously influenced your writing. I imagine that you spend the same amount of time writing now as you did training as a teenager.

I think growing up being such a serious swimmer, and spending three to five hours a day in swim practice while being in school and just trying to be a teenager, really makes you better at organizing your time and structuring your life so that you can get everything done. I think that helped me a lot when I was working full time—knowing how to structure my day-to-day so I was able to get some writing in while not getting fired at my day job, and also having a life. Even though it would be really easy for me to just be super depressive and introverted, I’m like, “No, I have to go see my friends.” Friends are what keep you human.

You’re in a transitional phase right now, no longer working full-time in art direction. Are you planning to write full-time or are you open to other avenues?

I’d love to write full-time as long as it’s financially feasible. I have been freelancing for a friend who’s a creative director at a startup. Book advances and the random foreign sale have been keeping me afloat. I’ll do it for as long as it’s financially feasible. I can do this because I don’t have kids and my parents don’t need a caretaker yet. There’s a lot that contributes to me being able to do this that’s not just money-based.

You know how a lot of people say, “I’m nervous to make the art that I love my main source of income”? I think that when I was working full-time, I was like, “I don’t believe that. That sounds really nice because you don’t have to work full-time and you get to do what you love.” After I got laid off and writing became my main source of income, I was like, “Okay, I get what people mean now.” Before, I didn’t have to think about [if the project was] going to get sold or going to be read. I was purely writing for myself and my friends and because it was fun. Now I do [worry], “Okay, shit, do I want to work on this or do I want to work on this?” I want to work on both, but I’m going to choose the one that I think has the most viability of getting sold or earning me some form of income. I think part of me resents the fact that I do have to think about capital in this way. But I also think it’s irrational to pretend that I don’t have to think about things like this, especially because I don’t have family wealth or anything. I am a working artist. I think I struggle a lot with talking about capital and thinking about it, while also wanting to make art that’s not soiled by that thought. I still haven’t figured out the right balance or the way to do that yet. I don’t know if any working artist has, to be honest.

Do you know where a project is going to end up? Or do you allow yourself to follow an idea and trust that an ending will come?

It depends on the project. For my first two novels, I got these visions in my head and then was like, “Okay, how did they get there?” That’s what I’m writing to figure out. So I really don’t know what’s happening when I write the first draft. Then I started writing screenplays. Because they’re a lot more plot-based and there’s less interiority, I have to outline them out in a way that I don’t for my books.

The fourth book I’m working on now I’m calling “an involuntary memoir” after [Proust’s concept] of involuntary memory, but I think it’s definitely more autofiction… I wanted to try writing it because it’s based on my everyday, in a way. I don’t know what I’m going to do tomorrow. I don’t know what’s going to happen. But I’m going to write about it. It’s completely switching the way that I’ve been writing books, which is always knowing the ending and figuring out how we got there. I don’t know the ending of this book. I don’t know where it’s going, but that’s the whole point.

You’ve written a lot about being a voracious reader and writer, which I can attest to—you’re one of the most widely read people I know. How are you with revision? Are you gentle with yourself or hard on yourself, or both?

I’m not a perfectionist, which I think is how I’m able to write so much. I do kind of wish I was more of a perfectionist, but at the same time, I recognize that that’s impossible. Your writing is never going to be perfect, but the point is to get as close as you can. Perfect is subjective. Re-visualize. I recognize that that’s where the real writing is. That’s where the real story comes out. And I think revising is a pleasure because that’s when you realize, “Oh, this is what I’m trying to say. This is where the story is.” It’s just so much harder than vomiting out your first draft that I resent it, but I do know it’s probably the best part of writing.

You’ve talked about forming an artistic lineage for your first novel, Chlorine. You made an incredible Instagram for it, as well as for your upcoming books. Can you talk about your connection to writing and the internet? You were on Tumblr, right?

I never made that connection, but maybe it is true that the Instagrams I make for my books to hold all the inspirations [for them] really are based from that Tumblr era. I was on Tumblr, but I’m not anymore. It’s really joyful and fun to be able to scroll through and remember all the inspirations.

The internet was the first place where I met my writing friends, through online groups. At that time, I didn’t have community in the way that I do now, so I think it was really helpful and useful for meeting people. But I think that transitioning from online to offline is what really changed my life, so I guess that [the internet] was more like a tool for me to use to meet people. Real-life community has been offering me a lot of sustenance and joy. I am trying to not use social media as much… I think that there are pros and cons. Social media and the internet are really great for staying aware about the world and what’s going on and sharing how you feel. But I also think proximity to community is really important, and the best way to nourish that is to be there in person.

You recently adapted your novel into a screenplay that got you into the Black List Writers Lab last year. What was it like to adapt your own work into a new medium?

I actually think the screenplay for Chlorine is better than the novel because I was so inspired by the body horror movies of Julia Ducournau, David Cronenberg, and Ginger Snaps. Now I’ve written a few other feature-length screenplays and I’m able to recognize in my head what’s a better story for a novel and what’s a better story for a screenplay. After concentrating on one form for a really long time, I think that screenplays feel very mechanical. You have to follow a certain structure and you don’t put as much emotion into it. It’s a lot more concise than a novel, where you have a lot of room and freedom to play with structure, with language, with a character’s point of view. I think it’s just been fun to bounce back and forth.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Ruth Minah Buchwald.

So, the whole ethos of my studio, Anima Interactive, is focused on socially conscious storytelling, and trying to harness the power of interactive media and video games for good, because I really believe that video games are the most immersive art form, and you can foster empathy and shift hearts and minds around specific topics.

So, when I was thinking about the first, the debut game that I wanted to work on, I settled on write what you know. Migration is something that has always interested me as a first generation immigrant here in the US. My father’s from Guatemala, my mother’s from the Philippines, and my father actually made the border crossing and a lot of my family did, so this was always a subject matter that I was interested in.

I had played games like Bury Me, My Love and there was also this VR experience called CARNE y ARENA, which was done by the Mexican filmmaker, Alejandro Inarritu. And that was a really powerful experience, too, that kind of reinforced this possibility that we can use this medium to try to humanize stories and be able to capture the nuance that you can’t really capture in other platforms or mediums.

Before the game took shape or form, what was the feeling or atmosphere you were trying to chase? Was there a moment when you knew this was the kind of story you wanted to tell?

I’ve always been really interested in audiovisual immersion and really just creating an ambiance, the vibes, essentially. And so, I know that might be a take that not that many game designers focus on. Traditional game designers really focus on mechanics and that kind of thing, which is obviously essential. But I think I like living in a world, and so I want people to feel what that world is and what is the emotional impact created. So I think a lot of the pillars that we focus on are rooted in emotions, since that is what we are trying to get the audience to take away from the experience.

I love that. How did you and your team decide to utilize the video game narrative to tell such an important story specifically? I know you spoke a little bit about how great of a medium it is, but whenever you were deciding, even just the style of video game as well, how did you come to that conclusion to use it?

I definitely wanted to focus on making sure that this was sensitive and authentic. And I felt like photorealism, given the constraints that we’re indeed developers, we didn’t really want to go the photorealistic route. Because there’s a lot of abstract ideas and emotion, I think that I really like abstract art and I think there’s a lot that—going back to the emotional impact piece—that you can take away from it.

And so when we were thinking about the style, the art style, for example, we knew that we wanted to focus on the beauty of the natural landscapes because the settings of this journey are actually really beautiful. You go through these deserts, but they’re very lush, so there’s a lot of beautiful vegetation, the jungle, like the Darién Gap, the rivers, these places in Latin America that aren’t really captured much in video games. And so we really saw that as an exciting opportunity.

And then beyond the actual art style, the characters, for example are faceless, and that was actually intentional. The 3D models are faceless because there’s also this kind of poetic intention behind that, which is that unfortunately a lot of these migrants have to be in the shadows, and so they are faceless, but at the same time we do want to show the humanity that they have. And so that’s why we have voiceover because that connects people. I think voice translates emotion really well. And we have 2D character portraits as well, so you can see expression. But yeah, that’s just a little bit about what the thinking was.

I think it’s really interesting that there’s a juxtaposition between the really beautiful atmosphere that’s captured in the art style as far as the terrain that’s traversed and such a challenging kind of endeavor that so many people face, but at the same time, the general public doesn’t really understanding all that well.

Yeah, and I think that’s a theme that’s really been a throughline in a lot of the research that I’ve conducted. There is always this juxtaposition of this harrowing danger, the trauma, but also the beauty and spirituality is a huge part of it as well. And so we lean into surrealism and magical realism, and that is kind of the more artistic elements that we can include. We’ve talked about the things like the shrines and the more meditative aspects of the experience, and juxtaposing that with the physical adversity of what’s happening is kind of the intention.

I know that you drew from lots of sources, but you also interviewed people that had experienced migrating. How do you protect your creative vision while also keeping those real elements at the emotional core of the story as well? How do you stay open to that feedback while also collaborating with the team and then also making a narrative that has to follow certain plot points and beats?

Yeah, I think that’s why we’ve gotten a lot of the folks with lived experience and the experts involved very early in the process, because we’re co-evolving and co-writing the story, essentially. So I had a vision of what broadly I wanted to cover as far as the themes, but the nuance and the granularity and the detail of it I think is very much informed by the stories.

And as far as compromising creative vision, it hasn’t really had to happen yet. Truly, the research piece has only been additive, because I think that’s part of what we’re doing that I think is a little bit unique to other experiences. Obviously, it’s been done before, but because we are really drawing a lot of real world artifacts and real world environments and real world stories, and translating them into this game. It is fictionalized, but it’s inspired by real world. The story has written itself in a way because they exist.

It’s interesting that you said that you haven’t really had to compromise your creative vision at all, which I think is great to hear, but was that something that you anticipated at all or are you surprised of how kind of smoothly it has gone?

Oh, well, it hasn’t been smooth. I think indie game development is very challenging. And one of the reasons why we’re launching the Kickstarter is because we’re hoping to build community and get feedback from the community. I think one of the reasons why a lot of indie developers end up having to compromise their creative vision is maybe because of external forces like publishers.

And certainly, in some of those conversations that I’ve had with publishers, people have been like, “Well, why aren’t you scoping it differently or considering different genres? Why isn’t it a roguelike because of replay ability?” And intriguingly, this type of story can lend itself to a roguelike, but again, because we want to be sensitive to it, I think having a more linear authored experience and taking people on a journey that is a little bit more controlled so that people can’t just run around and kind of abstract themselves from, again, that emotional impact that we’re trying to create.

So with that in mind too, games often go through a long period of iteration. What has stayed the same from the very first beginning, and then what has changed dramatically

Well, this game has evolved so much, honestly. It’s been really cool to watch, but I think the core ethos and philosophy behind it is really what has stayed the same. It’s been nice to kind of check in with the team, because we’ll do these intermittent check-ins, like, “Are we all aligned on what the vision of this game is and the direction that we’re taking?”. In game development, it’s kind of like baking, you never know what you’re going to get, what’s going to come out on the other side.

I think as far as what has remained the same is the general themes like, “Okay, well, we know that traversing this desert is a core part of this experience that we want to capture because the Sonoran Desert specifically is one of the deadliest migrant trails in the world, and it’s really fascinating because of the demographics of the migrants that come through this desert.”

And then initially we were like, “Is it just going to be in the desert?” But there are all of these other parts of the migrant trail that we think are important and enrich the story. And so, I always had the vision to include aspects of the trail, like The Beast, which is the freight train that runs through Mexico, and the Darién Gap, which is another very dangerous but beautiful trail.

But I think that desert piece was really important as well as the walking aspect, because even though you’re on a freight train and you take this long journey, there’s something about the challenge of walking for miles through a desert and having to face extreme heat and extreme cold. And that impact, it’s biblical in a way.

Do you and your team have a core takeaway or just experience or feeling that you’re hoping people will experience whenever they play Take Us North?

I think the primary goal has always really been empathy. And I know that’s kind of maybe a cliché response, but that is truly what I think we need, an understanding. I take for granted, obviously now, the fact that I possess a lot of this [understanding]. And I’m still learning every day, there’s so much to learn about these things, but because I’ve been so deeply rooted in research on the subject matter for a few years now, and have personal ties to it, I know a lot about it. That said, I’m mindful that the broader population might not. And even people who are first generation immigrants don’t really know that much.

One of the things that’s come out of this development process has been the fact that some of our team members have been able to become closer to their families because they start talking about it and then the stories come out. My father didn’t tell me about his border crossing story until I was an adult because he was ashamed of it. And I think it’s opening up conversations. And that’s been an interesting thing that’s come in some of our research, where people are like, “I want to play this game with my parents or even my grandparents,” and that’s really exciting. We also did a showcase in London, and I can’t remember if we talked after that or not, but it was just fascinating to see the reactions.

Because it’s a culture that’s so far removed, people in the UK?

Exactly. Which means it is validating and encouraging because it means that it’s being conveyed. Obviously, there’s still a lot of work to do, but at the bare minimum, people are learning and they are opening their hearts and minds to what’s happening.

Take Us North is kind of a story that never ends really, because there are always going to be people that are experiencing this.

I’m curious how have you and your team come up with an ending point for the game? What did that look like and what did that process kind of feel like? How do you decide when a story that never really ends is finished?

Well, I think there are ways and motifs to show that it hasn’t ended or this is not a finite thing. So in the game, you play the role of a migrant guide, and so it’s literally their job to do this trip multiple times and to go through this journey multiple times. And so, this is just one journey, but then obviously I don’t want to spoil things for the ending, but it is hinted at that it doesn’t really end necessarily.

And that is something that we do want to show, because migration, even if you make it to your dream destination, the adversities that you experience, and what we know about what it is to be an immigrant and the challenges, that doesn’t end. And sometimes you have to go through this, right?

That’s been, again, going back to the whole biblical thing, humans have been migrating for centuries. It’s an interminable journey. It’s just a part of humanity and society, and I think being able to highlight that is certainly something that we want to focus on. And then there are potential multiple endings that are in play, but there is an overarching kind of end note that we want folks to take away from it.

There’s always this challenge of perfectionism in game development, and people sometimes don’t want to show early, because what you show the audience, they’ll react to. And you’ll get these reviews immediately, and it’s a binary response. People either like it or they won’t. And if they don’t, then that’s it.

But in our case, especially with Kickstarter, a lot of creators are showing their work early and showing work in progress.

There’s this Japanese philosophy, wabi sabi, it’s all about finding beauty in imperfection. And I embrace that, because I decided even though it is hard, you have to just know that. There’s also a quote that I’ve seen where it’s like, “Just make the art exist and then you can improve it later.” And so that’s been the approach to the development process. And with games, it’s always iterative.

So, really I don’t think anything is ever truly finished, but I like setting this external accountability structure and having deadlines, because otherwise we will get stuck.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Asia Prieto.

So, the whole ethos of my studio, Anima Interactive, is focused on socially conscious storytelling, and trying to harness the power of interactive media and video games for good, because I really believe that video games are the most immersive art form, and you can foster empathy and shift hearts and minds around specific topics.

So, when I was thinking about the first, the debut game that I wanted to work on, I settled on write what you know. Migration is something that has always interested me as a first generation immigrant here in the US. My father’s from Guatemala, my mother’s from the Philippines, and my father actually made the border crossing and a lot of my family did, so this was always a subject matter that I was interested in.

I had played games like Bury Me, My Love and there was also this VR experience called CARNE y ARENA, which was done by the Mexican filmmaker, Alejandro Inarritu. And that was a really powerful experience, too, that kind of reinforced this possibility that we can use this medium to try to humanize stories and be able to capture the nuance that you can’t really capture in other platforms or mediums.

Before the game took shape or form, what was the feeling or atmosphere you were trying to chase? Was there a moment when you knew this was the kind of story you wanted to tell?

I’ve always been really interested in audiovisual immersion and really just creating an ambiance, the vibes, essentially. And so, I know that might be a take that not that many game designers focus on. Traditional game designers really focus on mechanics and that kind of thing, which is obviously essential. But I think I like living in a world, and so I want people to feel what that world is and what is the emotional impact created. So I think a lot of the pillars that we focus on are rooted in emotions, since that is what we are trying to get the audience to take away from the experience.

I love that. How did you and your team decide to utilize the video game narrative to tell such an important story specifically? I know you spoke a little bit about how great of a medium it is, but whenever you were deciding, even just the style of video game as well, how did you come to that conclusion to use it?

I definitely wanted to focus on making sure that this was sensitive and authentic. And I felt like photorealism, given the constraints that we’re indeed developers, we didn’t really want to go the photorealistic route. Because there’s a lot of abstract ideas and emotion, I think that I really like abstract art and I think there’s a lot that—going back to the emotional impact piece—that you can take away from it.

And so when we were thinking about the style, the art style, for example, we knew that we wanted to focus on the beauty of the natural landscapes because the settings of this journey are actually really beautiful. You go through these deserts, but they’re very lush, so there’s a lot of beautiful vegetation, the jungle, like the Darién Gap, the rivers, these places in Latin America that aren’t really captured much in video games. And so we really saw that as an exciting opportunity.

And then beyond the actual art style, the characters, for example are faceless, and that was actually intentional. The 3D models are faceless because there’s also this kind of poetic intention behind that, which is that unfortunately a lot of these migrants have to be in the shadows, and so they are faceless, but at the same time we do want to show the humanity that they have. And so that’s why we have voiceover because that connects people. I think voice translates emotion really well. And we have 2D character portraits as well, so you can see expression. But yeah, that’s just a little bit about what the thinking was.

I think it’s really interesting that there’s a juxtaposition between the really beautiful atmosphere that’s captured in the art style as far as the terrain that’s traversed and such a challenging kind of endeavor that so many people face, but at the same time, the general public doesn’t really understanding all that well.

Yeah, and I think that’s a theme that’s really been a throughline in a lot of the research that I’ve conducted. There is always this juxtaposition of this harrowing danger, the trauma, but also the beauty and spirituality is a huge part of it as well. And so we lean into surrealism and magical realism, and that is kind of the more artistic elements that we can include. We’ve talked about the things like the shrines and the more meditative aspects of the experience, and juxtaposing that with the physical adversity of what’s happening is kind of the intention.

I know that you drew from lots of sources, but you also interviewed people that had experienced migrating. How do you protect your creative vision while also keeping those real elements at the emotional core of the story as well? How do you stay open to that feedback while also collaborating with the team and then also making a narrative that has to follow certain plot points and beats?

Yeah, I think that’s why we’ve gotten a lot of the folks with lived experience and the experts involved very early in the process, because we’re co-evolving and co-writing the story, essentially. So I had a vision of what broadly I wanted to cover as far as the themes, but the nuance and the granularity and the detail of it I think is very much informed by the stories.

And as far as compromising creative vision, it hasn’t really had to happen yet. Truly, the research piece has only been additive, because I think that’s part of what we’re doing that I think is a little bit unique to other experiences. Obviously, it’s been done before, but because we are really drawing a lot of real world artifacts and real world environments and real world stories, and translating them into this game. It is fictionalized, but it’s inspired by real world. The story has written itself in a way because they exist.

It’s interesting that you said that you haven’t really had to compromise your creative vision at all, which I think is great to hear, but was that something that you anticipated at all or are you surprised of how kind of smoothly it has gone?

Oh, well, it hasn’t been smooth. I think indie game development is very challenging. And one of the reasons why we’re launching the Kickstarter is because we’re hoping to build community and get feedback from the community. I think one of the reasons why a lot of indie developers end up having to compromise their creative vision is maybe because of external forces like publishers.

And certainly, in some of those conversations that I’ve had with publishers, people have been like, “Well, why aren’t you scoping it differently or considering different genres? Why isn’t it a roguelike because of replay ability?” And intriguingly, this type of story can lend itself to a roguelike, but again, because we want to be sensitive to it, I think having a more linear authored experience and taking people on a journey that is a little bit more controlled so that people can’t just run around and kind of abstract themselves from, again, that emotional impact that we’re trying to create.

So with that in mind too, games often go through a long period of iteration. What has stayed the same from the very first beginning, and then what has changed dramatically

Well, this game has evolved so much, honestly. It’s been really cool to watch, but I think the core ethos and philosophy behind it is really what has stayed the same. It’s been nice to kind of check in with the team, because we’ll do these intermittent check-ins, like, “Are we all aligned on what the vision of this game is and the direction that we’re taking?”. In game development, it’s kind of like baking, you never know what you’re going to get, what’s going to come out on the other side.

I think as far as what has remained the same is the general themes like, “Okay, well, we know that traversing this desert is a core part of this experience that we want to capture because the Sonoran Desert specifically is one of the deadliest migrant trails in the world, and it’s really fascinating because of the demographics of the migrants that come through this desert.”

And then initially we were like, “Is it just going to be in the desert?” But there are all of these other parts of the migrant trail that we think are important and enrich the story. And so, I always had the vision to include aspects of the trail, like The Beast, which is the freight train that runs through Mexico, and the Darién Gap, which is another very dangerous but beautiful trail.

But I think that desert piece was really important as well as the walking aspect, because even though you’re on a freight train and you take this long journey, there’s something about the challenge of walking for miles through a desert and having to face extreme heat and extreme cold. And that impact, it’s biblical in a way.

Do you and your team have a core takeaway or just experience or feeling that you’re hoping people will experience whenever they play Take Us North?

I think the primary goal has always really been empathy. And I know that’s kind of maybe a cliché response, but that is truly what I think we need, an understanding. I take for granted, obviously now, the fact that I possess a lot of this [understanding]. And I’m still learning every day, there’s so much to learn about these things, but because I’ve been so deeply rooted in research on the subject matter for a few years now, and have personal ties to it, I know a lot about it. That said, I’m mindful that the broader population might not. And even people who are first generation immigrants don’t really know that much.

One of the things that’s come out of this development process has been the fact that some of our team members have been able to become closer to their families because they start talking about it and then the stories come out. My father didn’t tell me about his border crossing story until I was an adult because he was ashamed of it. And I think it’s opening up conversations. And that’s been an interesting thing that’s come in some of our research, where people are like, “I want to play this game with my parents or even my grandparents,” and that’s really exciting. We also did a showcase in London, and I can’t remember if we talked after that or not, but it was just fascinating to see the reactions.

Because it’s a culture that’s so far removed, people in the UK?

Exactly. Which means it is validating and encouraging because it means that it’s being conveyed. Obviously, there’s still a lot of work to do, but at the bare minimum, people are learning and they are opening their hearts and minds to what’s happening.

Take Us North is kind of a story that never ends really, because there are always going to be people that are experiencing this.

I’m curious how have you and your team come up with an ending point for the game? What did that look like and what did that process kind of feel like? How do you decide when a story that never really ends is finished?

Well, I think there are ways and motifs to show that it hasn’t ended or this is not a finite thing. So in the game, you play the role of a migrant guide, and so it’s literally their job to do this trip multiple times and to go through this journey multiple times. And so, this is just one journey, but then obviously I don’t want to spoil things for the ending, but it is hinted at that it doesn’t really end necessarily.

And that is something that we do want to show, because migration, even if you make it to your dream destination, the adversities that you experience, and what we know about what it is to be an immigrant and the challenges, that doesn’t end. And sometimes you have to go through this, right?

That’s been, again, going back to the whole biblical thing, humans have been migrating for centuries. It’s an interminable journey. It’s just a part of humanity and society, and I think being able to highlight that is certainly something that we want to focus on. And then there are potential multiple endings that are in play, but there is an overarching kind of end note that we want folks to take away from it.

There’s always this challenge of perfectionism in game development, and people sometimes don’t want to show early, because what you show the audience, they’ll react to. And you’ll get these reviews immediately, and it’s a binary response. People either like it or they won’t. And if they don’t, then that’s it.

But in our case, especially with Kickstarter, a lot of creators are showing their work early and showing work in progress.

There’s this Japanese philosophy, wabi sabi, it’s all about finding beauty in imperfection. And I embrace that, because I decided even though it is hard, you have to just know that. There’s also a quote that I’ve seen where it’s like, “Just make the art exist and then you can improve it later.” And so that’s been the approach to the development process. And with games, it’s always iterative.

So, really I don’t think anything is ever truly finished, but I like setting this external accountability structure and having deadlines, because otherwise we will get stuck.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Asia Prieto.

I think my earliest memory of comics is my grandmother letting me read my uncle’s old comics at her house when she didn’t quite know what else to do with me. It was kind of an absurd experience, when you think back on it, to read these vintage comics from the early to mid ’60s as your first experience. But if you know anything about my family, it’s that we save everything. Then she bought me my first comic book here in Western North Carolina at the old Piggly Wiggly off Hendersonville Highway. It was Uncanny X-Men 317, the “Phalanx Covenant” with the lenticular cover. That was really my earliest memory.

The idea of working in comics never really seemed like something I would get to do because I needed health insurance. You grow up poor and you’re like, “I need a regular paycheck.” There’s no savings for those years where you really struggle to break in. But I remember going to Dragon Con when I was maybe 13, and meeting creators for the first time, and that was a tremendously formative experience for me. One of the people I always think about is Mike Wieringo, who was illustrating The Flash run that I had started reading on the newsstand. This would’ve been about issue 94 is where I started. And then, getting issue 92 with the first Impulse appearance was like a grail for me.

He was so kind. He did this beautiful head sketch of The Flash on the back of a backer board for me when I brought him my comics to get signed. I remember being so impressed with the idea that these people were able to make a living with things that they could dream up. The power of their ideas and their creativity allowed them to earn a living. And that really stayed with me.

I think comics were something my mother at first tolerated and then later embraced as at least I was reading. Also, it was better than a lot of the other trouble that some of her friends’ children were getting into. I think she appreciated that I really did enjoy the art and the storytelling and that, as I showed her things that I was reading later on, that they were not just literary, but also meaty.

I talked to her about some of the plots and things that were happening in X-Men and it dispelled the impression she had that these were lightweight stories. She saw the power of me seeing people trying to do the right thing, because it was the right thing to do. She saw it was having an impact on my outlook on life. Over time, she really warmed to it.

And then I went into government because, one, I felt very strongly about what I could do in that space. But two, it was a steady paycheck and a slightly more reliable job with insurance and some benefits and things like that. That was just the decision I had to make as I was looking at careers.

I was the guy in the office who was always talking about comics. When we had to give gifts at the end of the year for Christmas or the holidays, I would give everybody a graphic novel or a comic that I thought spoke to who they were. My first job out of college was working for Lieutenant Governor of Connecticut and I gave him Pride of Baghdad. The initial reaction as everybody got their present was like, “Comic book, that’s cute.” But then, Kevin went and read it and he was like, “This is really good.” It was the height of the Iraq war, and what Brian K. Vaughan did with that was so innovative and particularly uniquely successful in the comics medium. That’s a story that works because it’s a comic. I think it changed his mind a little bit about what comics were at that time.

And so, that’s how it carried into my life over time.

What is it about comics that makes it such a powerful medium?

Fundamentally, comics are sequential narrative as a language. It is the most universal human way to communicate. From cave paintings to cuneiform and hieroglyphics to the Twelve Labors of Hercules to what we think of as the modern comics. Pictures telling a story in order has been how we’ve always communicated. As we develop the written language, words and pictures together are the way to reach the most people with the most information the most quickly. And it allows, essentially, information to transfer from one brain to another, or from one medium into a brain more quickly and more efficiently than anything else. think we’ve only begun to scratch the surface of what it can be used for.

There’s this idea that it’s just superheroes and that’s what they’re for, but that’s just one piece. I think about Will Eisner making manuals for repairing planes and other machines during World War II. The military saw very clearly in those moments, where preconceptions or prejudgments were dangerous, that to survive they had to move quickly, move fast, and be right. In those moments, that’s when they throw all that aside and embrace it and it works and it keeps planes in the air. It keeps people alive because people are able to learn more quickly using the medium.

In my own work, the research on Martin Luther King and the Montgomery story and how it was used to inspire some of the earliest acts of civil disobedience of the movement is another example where the medium grew and served yet another purpose within that framework of teaching people more efficiently. But it also added this other element that, in my graduate thesis, I called “manufacturing lightning.” The idea being, How do you manufacture a lightning bolt moment? Would you change someone’s mind?

These are not just tools for information dissemination, they’re tools for inspiration. And comics—because of how wholly they engage the senses, stimulating both the art brain and the analytical brain—can help people unlock greater understandings, which then influence their actions and their decision making.

I wonder what moments are happening right now, where comics are lighting people up, especially with all the protests that are happening globally.

I think the most immediate example we have is March. When John Lewis and I first published March, following the procedure or the rules of nonviolent civil disobedience, we wrote out our objectives, which we said were twofold. One was to educate the young people on the history of what happened during the movement. And two was to give them a roadmap to inspire a new nonviolent revolution. We wrote this out in 2013. By 2019, March became one of the most widely taught graphic novels in America. You had the first generation of students growing up with civil rights education pervasively taught in their schools because of March.

So, it came as no surprise that, by 2020, you saw the uprisings happening. You saw Black Lives Matter written down the streets of Washington, just like the cover of March Book 3 emulating it. You saw places like the March For Our Lives come out of this tragedy with the Marjory Stoneman shooting. We had, just weeks before that tragic incident, been in Miami-Dade County doing a reading program where the Knight Foundation gave out thousands of copies of March to the students.

There’s no coincidence that these things happened as they did. It shows the power of the medium. Like we were just saying, it shows the power to inspire. I think the unique thing about comics is that it is an inherently positive medium. It is very difficult to teach hate through comics, but it is very easy to teach love through comics.

What is your advice to young writers and comics creators today?

I think the first rule, if you want to make comics, is to make comics. My small publishing company is releasing a comic in a few weeks called Comics of the Movement. It pairs Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story with comics made by SNCC in 1966. And they were used to educate and inspire people to participate in the first election after the Voting Rights Act was passed, which was particularly challenging for these Black voters who’ve never been allowed to vote, who were scared to vote, who didn’t know what that process was like. And so, they wanted to reach as many people as they could, and it was the most cost-effective way they could come up with.

But the reason we wanted to bring them back into print for the first time is that we wanted to show how simple they were, that they were just drawings and very simple layouts. But the information, the sequential narrative of it, made them incredibly informative and incredibly useful. I think sometimes we get a little wrapped up in what a comic should look like. And I think a comic looks like whatever you want it to look like, whether it’s six and a half inches by 10 and a half inches, or whether it’s three inches by six inches, it is a piece of paper with drawings and words, and you can make that canvas into anything you want it to be. And the best way to start is just to start.

If we really want to get into it, don’t be afraid to pitch. I think the story of my career is rejection. Every time I come up with an idea, I spend I don’t know how long having everyone tell me, “No, it’s a terrible idea.” But then, you find that one person or you start it on your own and then it becomes March. And if you listen to those people who don’t have the vision or the understanding that you do, you’re allowing them to determine your future. And you can’t do that because everyone sees the world differently. And we all have something that gives our perspective a unique element.

It’s like Appalachia Comics, which was inspired by a graduate thesis that I read by a woman named Elon Justice, who published it in 2021 through the MIT Media Lab. In it, she made some critical observations about the depiction of Appalachia and popular media, and that it is being used to perpetuate stereotypes that take away the power of the people of this region.

What we’re trying to do through the Appalachia Comics Project is to change that, to give the power back to the people of this region, to control their own depiction so that they are able to find their voice, but also to reemerge as an important culture within the United States that is more diverse than people understand, that has a rich and complicated history that people don’t understand, and that has tremendous value that has influenced this country for generations.

With that, when I went around to a lot of the foundations at first, they all looked at me like I had three heads. I’m pointing at March saying, “Trust me.” And they didn’t necessarily see it. But you keep pitching, you keep pitching. And I hope what we can do is be a vehicle for that sort of change so that people can find as many creators as we can who wouldn’t otherwise have the opportunity to tell their stories, to be creators, so that they can show the unique and special things that they see in Appalachia, in their history, in their community and in their culture.

That’s how I came to Kickstarter and y’all got it, y’all understood the importance of what we were doing and the potential for what it could become. And you get those people, the people who see the future, the people who understand the world a little bit differently—find them and work with them and be grateful for their help.

And then, the sky’s the limit. As long as you’re willing to be persistent, to have resilience, to not be frustrated just because someone else doesn’t understand your vision. You just have to be dogged. Then, one day you look up and people are like, “It was an overnight success.” And you’re like, “Yeah. That was like a 10-year night in that case.” It’s just the way it is. And it’s very rare that anyone’s going to hand you a golden opportunity. You have to make that opportunity for yourself.

I’ve talked to a number of creators who have a specific vision, where they want to explore a particular piece of media or have a specific thing to say that, from a larger perspective, probably doesn’t gel with the majority. But like I always tell them, just fuck them. Just make what you want to make and you’ll find the people who get it. The peole who are interested in it will come find you and be adamant about it and supportive of it and excited about it.

I have a writing or mentor friend who’s older, who’s been around a long time and done a lot of things that I looked up to as a kid. He has this unbelievable attitude where he’s just always happy to be there, it all rolls off his back like water off of a duck’s back. And I asked him, after watching him for a little while and being like, “How do you stay like that?” And he’s like, “fuck ‘em, man.” And now, over the years now, whenever I’m having one of those moments or he’s having one of those moments or something works, we’ll text back and forth, “fuck ‘em.” And then, the other one will be like, “Hell, yeah.”

And that’s it, right? Just because they don’t see it doesn’t mean you’re wrong. If everybody could see reality or see the future or see the potential, our world would be a better place because there would be more understanding. But if anything is evident in this world, it is that there’s a tremendous amount of misunderstanding. And so, You can’t rely on other people’s opinion to set your course. You have to be your own navigator, and you have to do what you believe in. And if they don’t believe in it too, fuck ‘em.

I make role-playing games. Most of mine are Power Rangers focused, but it’s more about the character development and relationships rather than the action. And a lot of people don’t like that because they want the action. They want to punch and kick. I’m like, “Great, go make your own game. If you want that, go do it. I made this thing that I’m interested in and my thing is valid. Your thing can be valid, too.”

I’m trying to take the attitude with criticism of saying, “I took the time to make the game, and you can, too.” Everything we make is valid and we can have a better society if we’re all making stuff that we’re interested in.

You’re making a key point here, which is that just because you don’t like something or you don’t see the potential in something, maybe keep that to yourself. We don’t need to go around policing everybody else’s actions or what they make or what their art is. Art is a personal expression. Storytelling is a personal expression. Making comics or anything else, it’s a personal expression. And I think there’s too many people out there who get too much of their self-worth off of criticizing other people, and these people doing the criticizing aren’t making any works themselves. If we get past that, if we can get to a place where we’re just, “Great, I’m really proud of you. You finished something. You tried…” That’s where we have great discoveries. That’s where new ideas come about. We’ve got to get to a place where we appreciate people creating and not denigrating people because it’s not what we would’ve created.

That’s something I try really hard to do because people ask me for advice and what I think they should do, and I tell them what I think, but that’s my opinion. That’s how I would do it. You have to do it your way and it will be different. It will inevitably be something else because it is through your prism, your experiences, your ideas, your loves, your hates, all these sorts of things. But it goes back to what we said earlier where comics are so good at teaching love, and not very good at teaching hate. I think if we all approach the medium and the industry with a perspective, which is that love everyone who is doing the work, that is the hard part.

And be grateful that they are participating in this medium as well. Because you never know, it may be that person who inspires the first reader that then becomes the reader for your work and the advocate for it that helps get it out into the world. We’re an ecosystem. We’re dependent on each other. It’s a very fragile ecosystem. And so, we should be lifting all of each other up and trying to find a way to help everyone make a living and being honest with each other and just try and make more cool things.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Sam Kusek.

Well, I think the idea is the easy part. I come up with ideas daily, but really it depends on where the destination is, if it’s for an exhibition or if it’s just for my own investigation. And if I have the space and time to develop an idea, I guess. For years I had a very big studio, when I was ranching, I had basically two studios. One was just a workshop, so that afforded me a lot of space and I was able to try out a lot of things there.

Sometimes I get invited for thematic exhibitions. I did that a lot when I was young and getting started in my art career. I just dove into these things and I would work with the curator and curatorial team on their theme and try to come up with work around it. I don’t really do that anymore because I’ve never really enjoyed that. A lot of times for that I would make the work on-site. So that’s a young man’s game. It’s stressful, but it’s exciting, too, because it’s very immediate.

We met through Compound. a project we did together at Matthew Barney’s studio. From my understanding, you had an idea, but in order to make this happen, you needed the space to bring it to fruition.

Yeah.

The piece involved shooting hundreds of arrows into a full-sized play piano. This is not a thing that takes up a small amount of space.

Right. And I don’t have a studio right now, I haven’t had a studio since my ranch burned down. I’ve been living in a cabin in Northern BC [British Columbia] where I grew up. I enjoy archery, but there’s no real indoor place for me to actually use that skill to make art with it. There’s archery ranges here, but I can’t just go and set up a bunch of furniture in there, fire into it.

I did the first archery stuff at the Walla Walla Foundry while I was working with them to develop the first of this archery work for Prospect in New Orleans [in 2024]. That was the start of it. Then Matthew came to visit BC last year. I showed him the work I was doing at the Foundry. He thought it was great, so I suggested that maybe this should be something that’s live. He really liked that. But he comes from a performance and art video background.

That was new for me. I’ve never been part of a performance or done live performance like that before. So it was exciting and it was a great way to meet you, but I didn’t know if a lot of it would work. Although it can be very scary, having that unknown is also very exciting.

I remember when Matthew and I first started doing those events fifteen years ago or so, one thing he told me was that he liked that you could fail with live performance. He was saying to me that, with film, everything could be edited and it could appear perfect. Doing something live, though, meant that it might not always work. You’re operating without a safety net.

One of the early pieces in the studio involved trying to get a bull to mount a car, and the bull just wouldn’t do it. Everyone’s watching, and it failed—but even though it didn’t work, the people in the space were still so engaged by this performance. Plus, they didn’t know what the plan was, and it definitely succeeded on another level.

I come from an agriculture background, so I know that bulls are very difficult to work with. It’s more human in a way, it’s more real because it’s live and there’s small mistakes.

I was working with a bunch of archers I’d never met before and there were some issues with some of the arrows because they’re all handmade and the archers had never really fired arrows like that before, so there was a bit of a learning curve for them to figure it out while it’s happening live. We had a loose script that started to go out the window pretty quickly—you just have to think on your feet. Even though it was scary at the time, it worked out. But even if it didn’t work out, like you say, it’s pretty cool seeing the audience react to just the environment. I never had people watching me in my studio, so it was unusual in some ways. We were very much in a workspace.

That’s something funny. [My son] Jake [who who was in the performance] was saying, “Man, people really like watching me and analyzing what I was doing.” I said, “Well I think part of it is, it’s just an unfamiliar space for them,” and they’re watching a kid shoot clay pigeons into a wall. Even if they don’t know what it means, they’re like, “All right, this is interesting. We left work and now we’re here.” It feels like they’re in this magic space, something different.

Since the ranch burned down and moved into the cabin, has it been harder to make work? Do you have ideas that you can’t do at this point in the smaller space? Has it changed the way you’re thinking of making art?

The first little while I was just dealing with practical things, insurance claims and whatnot. And then I realized I needed a bit of a sabbatical from my art practice, so I took time out. I got recruited to be on the volunteer fire department here, which I was very reluctant to do at first. Eventually I agreed to go and it was very therapeutic, actually.

That took my interest in a very different direction. It’s very different from anything I’ve done before. And it really gave me a sense of community involvement but also this appreciation for the elements of water and fire. That’s all you’re really doing, is putting out fires. That occupied a lot of my time because really this is a very small cabin and I had to refocus how I wanted to make art after having a very big ranch and a huge studio. My footprint became way smaller. When you lose a lot of stuff to catastrophe like that, including artwork and all of your archive, you have to look at it as a rebirth to keep going.

So I thought, “What could I do here?”

I was doing a little bit of drawing and I took on some public art projects, then just turned my attention to thinking about where I wanted to relocate to and what studio set up I’d like to have in the future. I am largely a studio-based artist, I would like to have a studio again. It was really great to see how Matthew works and see his space, but I’m a country guy at heart.

Was it therapeutic learning how to put out fires after you lost so many things due to fire?

Yeah, just learning about hydraulics and how fires behave and differences between wild land fires and structural fires, and also the chain of command and systems… It’s so different from anything art related. There’s people that I would never necessarily hang out with who I’m working with. So we may disagree on things politically, or whatever, but we’re all working together for the community and I think that’s very important.

We also respond to traffic accidents and stuff, too. It’s hard work and I have immense respect for people who choose this as a career. I just volunteer.

I’m not sure if something I’m going to continue with, because it’s a very small community here, and there’s very basic training to get people involved. Which is what I’ve done. Anything that’s beyond that you have to really get involved in terms of going in more of a career direction.

I’m also not sure I want to have a giant place anymore. Especially the way the climate is going, it’s just becoming drier and drier. Having to worry about fires every summer, especially out west and north, it’s not necessarily something I enjoy.

You’ve done drawings and other more traditional work. How did you move into using objects and mass-produced things, transforming them and shifting them around?

Growing up and in art school and even after art school, I mainly was interested in drawing and painting. I never really started making objects until I did a residency at the Banff Center, in Alberta in 1998. I was also in New York City that summer. I went to a Nike Town store and I saw all their Air Jordan shoes that they had in vitrines and museum-like displays.

That’s where I noticed a resemblance to Northwest Coast indigenous art. So that’s where all that started. I decided to buy some for my residency at the Banff Center and I cut them up and pinned them together and took photographs of them. I thought that the final work would actually just be a photograph. I did that the first week and there were six more weeks to go in the residency. So I decided to take them apart properly and reassemble them. I got way more of a charge out of doing that than I did with just making an image of the work. That was very important to me, not even necessarily the object itself, but what happened to my thinking in terms of moving away from 2D and going into more of a 3D direction.

Then I stopped drawing for a while. I was making objects and became much more known as a sculptor. Like I was saying earlier, I started getting invited to do these site-specific projects where I would make everything else, like all the whale skeleton I made with the stacking chairs, those were all made for exhibitions on location because those chairs you could buy anywhere. It was really something I could make universally. I like making objects more than drawing images.

How many ideas do you come up with that just don’t turn into anything? Do you abandon ideas or do you try to follow through and make them happen?

You kind of archive them. I’ve talked with musician friends about this, too, who they know might be strumming a song or tune or something that they like, but it never goes anywhere. But they remember it, they remember a part of it. I think with me it’s very similar. I look at something, I see something in the world… a lot of the times I’ll see some things that are broken and then they’re liberated from their use.

You usually see people throw them out or try to fix them. I find it fascinating when I see things that aren’t being used for what they’re supposed to be. I’m more interested in how things don’t work than how they’re supposed to work. I’ll see stuff that might spark me to investigate that material or look at how these two things aren’t working and how they might go together with something else.

Sometimes different things in my life come into play with that. Whether it be my interest in modernism, or my background as an indigenous person, or my life in agriculture. I’m not always coming at it from the same place. Now because I hang out with all these firefighters, there’s things I see in that realm that I find very fascinating. Or stuff that I learned when I was doing a lot of irrigation when I was ranching.

What is success to you? It feels like a project is successful if you get that charge you’d mentioned and follow the idea through to completion. Is success, at all, you make something and someone buys it?

Maybe if I feel like I’ve reached some closure with the material. I try not to look at the commercial side of art production. I’ve never really been entirely comfortable with that world. I’m very truant in the commercial art world, but I’m tangled up in it, it pays the bills. But I don’t like being put in a position where I’m having to make art to pay bills. I try to keep my interests very wide so I’m not doing the same thing over and over and over again. But no, if I’ve resolved a use for a material, then I feel like that’s success.

I tried making other things with the white plastic stacking chairs I wasn’t entirely satisfied with. I made these really odd, very ’60s geodesic domes with them at first. And it was fun at the time, but it wasn’t until I developed a use for them as whale bones that I felt like that was more the direction that they belong. But again, having a studio is very important for making objects.

Do you ever work on multiple projects at the same time?

I love working on multiple things at the same time. That’s my favorite way of working, where there’s no real destination for the object. Because I was ranching and funding this ranch from a lot of art production, I thought when I moved to the ranch that it would be more freeing, but it was the opposite. I wound up making a lot of stuff that was just going immediately out to the commercial art world. It was my other work that was more investigative, and experimental, that was getting smaller and smaller.

Actually one of the last things I did at the ranch before the fire was start on the archery stuff. I set up a course inside the studio and was shooting arrows into pieces of furniture that I had leftover from this giant bronze piece I’d made. That was several months before the fire.

I’m probably going to have a new studio within the next several months back down in southern BC just lining all that up now. I’m really excited.

Have you been storing up ideas for when you get into this new space? It’s going to be like when they have a bucking bronco behind the gate and the cowboy opens up the gate and it just runs out the chute and into the ring…

I’m going to be running faster. I have notebooks and I write things down, but I edit them fairly regularly. So we’ll see. I do like to have some structure with things in terms of whether it be a material that I’m interested in that has some limitations that I have to work with, that I find a good challenge. What I find most difficult is when I’m given complete freedom of things or when I have to build something from scratch. I can’t just take clay and make something. I find it boring. I need some challenge or limitations added to it to make it more of a challenge, let’s say.

Do you get creative blocks, or because you’re doing enough stuff, can you move on from one thing to the next if something’s not working?

You can move on, or if something gets overworked and you can put it down, cover it up, or something, and then come back to it and take it back to a place where you were still excited about it. I’m excited about having that opportunity again. I’m probably going to buy some land, but I don’t want to have agriculture be such a huge part of my life. As much as I believe in agriculture—and I think it’s very important that people know how to grow their own food—it’s another thing to take it on as another business and try do that at the same time as having an art career. I would not recommend it.

I get that. It wasn’t your decision, but you’ve had to whittle everything down to the barest essentials. Has this intense scaling back been at all helpful?

I think so. There’s expansion and contraction in everyone’s life. I went through this quite big period of expansion and then now it’s reducing that. It’s also been good for me to move back north where I grew up. Initially I bought this place before the fire as a summer place, and I never intended to live here year round. Because it’s very small, it changed my thinking in terms of what I wanted to do. I spend a lot of time out in the bush, too. I like being out on the land, so it’s very important to me. I’m alone a lot and I’ve always been comfortable with that, even as a kid. So when I lived at the ranch, that was during Covid and I didn’t even really notice that there was a pandemic because I was already living way out there and it wasn’t that much of a change for me.

Artists and creative people spend a lot of time in our heads, so we drop out of the physical world in a lot of ways. I think that’s why I really enjoyed the fire department because it’s the complete opposite of that. All your attention is out in front of you. You have to deal with the crisis.

So, in a way, it was a really good exercise for me, because it pulled me out of my head. As an artist in the world today, especially with things like Instagram, the idea of self-promotion is becoming so dominant and it’s changing the way we interact with our own art. For artists who are more introverted, or their process is more about thought, that place of having to promote yourself on social media is daunting.

I’ve enjoyed this bit of a sabbatical. One year turned into four, but a lot of that was because I had been looking for the right space to relocate to, and I did start working again last year, technically. It was nice to get invited to the Prospect in New Orleans because I hadn’t made work for an art Biennale in years. It was nice to get back in the saddle there.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Brandon Stosuy.

My inner child, she is always with me. I may have this experience now, and all these years behind me, but ultimately I’m the same vulnerable, sensitive, curious, wondrous, exalted little being that first wandered this earth 36 years ago. And every time I am moved by music or by what someone says—like what you just said about alkalizing density—I’m the same child who’s feeling just as grateful and excited for the sensory experience of that revelation.

When it comes to music, every time I play my guitar or piano or sing with someone else, it feels as magical as the first time that I knew music existed. And it offers the same access point as it did when I was a child… Music really does connect all those dots for me.

In my experience of listening to your music, you invite in this medicinal, raw catharsis. Instrumentally, you bring in beautiful percussions from a very particular part of the world, then I’m taken to a whole other part of the world through strings. There are melodies that feel very nostalgic, and lyrics that reorient me towards the future. How do you channel this vastness in your music and how do you approach creating a multi-layered landscape?

Thank you so much for those beautiful affirmations and reflections. I’m struck by this whole conversation so far. I’ve been tearing up because I feel very seen by you, so I really appreciate it.

I think being a dynamic being is something we can all relate to. We all have so many layers, and a spectrum of emotions and aspects of ourselves that are brought out by different people, different environments. In terms of my music, the rhythms, tones, frequencies, and even the underlying lyrics and textures are portraits of different times in my life as well as different emotional containers. Some songs are meant to help you access and be with joy, and some are meant to help you cry and help you release those tears. I love creating across that spectrum because, thankfully, my life has given me those multitudes and those many different emotions to channel… Being a conduit in the sense of being open to being a channel for art, or whatever else might come through. We must be deep listeners. We must listen deeply to the earth. We must listen deeply to the people around us. We must also listen to our own thoughts and idiosyncrasies. When I’m receiving melodies and then crafting songs, it’s often like I’m seeing this higher perspective. It’s from having listened deeply to something, and then distilling it into a shareable medicine of sorts.

I always give credit and thanks to Spirit no matter what I’m doing. If it’s waking up and having air in my lungs, thank you for that. Especially for something as magical as writing a song or creating something from this physical realm—how could I not be so grateful for that and not give reverence to something bigger than myself for being able to do that? Even if it’s just to soothe myself; even if I’m not necessarily sharing it. The fact that I’m able to do that, I feel that is certainly a gift. Also, so much of my music feels like it comes through me when I’m around water. Water is a big one, actually.

I was just thinking about water at this very moment.

Really? Being near the ocean, it feels like songs flow right into me. Similarly, if I’m near the river, songs are flowing in. Even with a human-made shower or a bathtub—because the water is there, songs will so often come to me that way.

Water came up for me when you described this process of essentially surrendering to what wants to be channeled through you. Being in bodies of water requires so much surrender and trust, as does the process of being an artist. Within my own practice, surrender and trust are cultivated practices, which I am always ebbing and flowing between. There are times where I’m utterly depleted and then there are times where I’m oozing with openness and connection. What tools do you use in order to hold both ends?

That’s such a beautiful thing to think about. I do believe surrender is one of the first connection points of creating. When you think back to being a child, children are so good at that. They’re so good at coloring what they want, saying what they want, singing when they want, moving like [how we moved] before we learned how to walk a certain way down the sidewalk. Children are skipping and they’re doing twirls and they’re dancing.

I think that trust and surrender are natural modes of curiosity and faith that we’re born into this world with. Some of our systems strip them from us, whether it’s our education systems or in many of our familial lines, with this intergenerational passing down of certain colonial values or social customs. As artists, trust and surrender are the first step. It’s the first step to believing that something you have to sing or say or paint is worth materializing, even for oneself. Having an idea and then saying, “I want that to be not just in here, but out there,” takes trust and surrender to be able to do.

I’m thinking about those artists who are on the precipice of wanting to share their art with the world but are moving through that thick blockage of fear over how their art will be received, or are moving past any of the limitations that capitalism confines us to. Capitalism tries to tell us that artistry is only valid when consumed, whereas so many of the creative prophets of our time and beyond show us that we’re not meant to be palatable. And if we try to be, we’ll lose the plot. The plot being the core essence of who we are, our authentic coding. So how do you keep to the plot? How do you stay in your integrity as an artist, even when you feel blocked and even when it feels unsafe to share with the world?

I do believe that some of the funniest people you’ve ever met might not ever be on a stage. Similarly, some of the most talented musicians you will ever hear are playing in a little house somewhere across the world. Some of the most profound exchanges of words happen between two people who are channeling an intimacy and depth of humanity which not all of us will hear.

When it comes to sharing, especially in this world that is so capitalistic, it’s important for artists who feel like their art is part of a deeper mission to remember that what you’re creating and putting out there will impact the collective in any small or big way. I think we know when we’ve created something that we want to share—when we believe that it’s for the collective, when it’s messaging that we genuinely feel strongly about.

In terms of moving past that initial blockage, we have to remember that we’re not alone. There are artists all over the world who want to share what they’re creating because they feel that it can have some kind of a ripple effect… I think as artists, we’re just wearing a giant sign that says, “I’m a sensitive human being.” To be a bleeding heart artist who says, “I feel a lot and I want to share”—I just think it’s cool.

I studied herbalism for a while and some plants act as sort of a panacea. They help with a lot of things, but so many of them actually are for certain things and for certain people. And I think that of art, too. I think your art is going to reach the people it needs to because that’s how wise and intelligent that greater energy is that makes us want to create in the first place. It might not be that all 8 billion humans on this earth will necessarily resonate with what you’re creating. But it will be that there are people out there for whom what you’re creating is going to help them on their path as a human being.

This connection between plants and artists reminds me of something Alok Vaid-Menon poignantly said in an interview: the natural world templates change, yet humans are uniquely resistant to change and to our growing edges. This brings me to queerness, because queerness offers nonlinear, wayward, fractal ways of existing. I know queerness to be an integral part of both our artistries, and so I’m curious as to how queerness, fluidity and nonlinearity has shown up in your creative process as well as in how you live your life as a creative act?

Yes, yes, exactly. I think that for me, queerness and being able to see life through this dialectical perspective has been the biggest gift I could have had, because it keeps my mind and my spirit fertile. It keeps the soil of all those spaces ready for what may come, because there are generally less preconceived notions or containers or fixed ways that things ought to be.

And so in everything—be it pre-scripted genres in music, how one might dress, the way a person might dance—queerness allows you to step outside of those prescriptions. I think it’s really important—especially now, when we live in this uniquely globalized era of human civilization where many of us are connected to people who are in many different places in the world—we have a diversity of relationships we can co-create with. The idea that we would have these fixed ways of being and relating to one another is antiquated. We are of each other. That’s how we must move. Queerness feels ancient and inevitable as a future template for our beings.

That wording felt like poetry moving through my blood. Thank you… How do you, in your creative process, give roots to all of the messaging that is moving through you?

I would say bringing it back to nature, because nature always harmonizes. If I’m kind of floating away, nature makes me feel so held… Also my conversations with artist friends. It’s the same feeling. I think knowing what elements or people or foods or things help you ground is important, especially if you are a person who’s getting those otherworldly signals often.

What about when you have to convene with technology to transfer that messaging? If I’m in front of my laptop for too long, it feels so invasive to my creative spirit. Yet it’s also the easiest way to transfer my ideas at times, and to organize myself and so on. We’re all constantly contending with the invasiveness of technology while trying to stay rooted in our bodies.

We live in this technological world and it’s ubiquitous. It’s just everywhere all the time. But I will say, I’ve also been thinking about the word itself: technology. It’s a Greek word from the 17th century, and it can be broken into two words: techno and ology. Techno just means an art or a craft. And then ology is the study of something. So technology was here before we started using computers and phones.

I’ve been thinking lately about how certain technologies are given so much credence and so much respect and admiration because they are fields that are dominated by mostly men and white people. But there are all these other technologies that exist and have been developed by so many women, trans people, non-binary people, queer people, Black and Indigenous people. And they are technologies that we can use to help us in our artistic practice as well. For example, I think cooking is a technology. Any time I need to detox myself—let’s say from what a computer or a phone will do to the body and to the brain—cooking will always move me back to all my senses. Anything can be a technology when you break that word down—from the way that you dance, the way that you put furniture together.

What you’re speaking about, it sounds like the Indigenous worldview of animism. If we are to believe that everything carries information, and that technology is, in essence, the way in which information is transmuted, then everything can be technology. Our bodies are our foremost technology, and within that, our breath is also technology.

100%.

I’ll ask one more question to close us out. When I’m listening to you speak, and when I watched your profile on CBC Arts, there is such a strong sense of liberation coming through. Not just in your own practice, but in what you hope for this world. How do you maintain being a liberated artist and human being, while also living within the confines of these colonial, narrow, violent systems? The dissonance is so often jarring.

I’ve been an artist my whole life. I’ve been creating, singing, and writing songs since I was little. But I’ve also been engaged in a more capitalist professional world of arts since I was 13 or 14. Before, I would call myself an independent artist. Sometimes it still might come out that way, as a way of differentiating myself from the machine of major labels and this big machine that exists in the music industry. But now I like to call myself an “interdependent artist.” And that is because I am in mycelial networks and relationships with other interdependent or independent artists who are now in network with me. It’s through these relationships that I’ve been able to unlearn colonial frameworks and lean into the safety of imagining and co-creating something different.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Sania Khan.

My inner child, she is always with me. I may have this experience now, and all these years behind me, but ultimately I’m the same vulnerable, sensitive, curious, wondrous, exalted little being that first wandered this earth 36 years ago. And every time I am moved by music or by what someone says—like what you just said about alkalizing density—I’m the same child who’s feeling just as grateful and excited for the sensory experience of that revelation.

When it comes to music, every time I play my guitar or piano or sing with someone else, it feels as magical as the first time that I knew music existed. And it offers the same access point as it did when I was a child… Music really does connect all those dots for me.

In my experience of listening to your music, you invite in this medicinal, raw catharsis. Instrumentally, you bring in beautiful percussions from a very particular part of the world, then I’m taken to a whole other part of the world through strings. There are melodies that feel very nostalgic, and lyrics that reorient me towards the future. How do you channel this vastness in your music and how do you approach creating a multi-layered landscape?

Thank you so much for those beautiful affirmations and reflections. I’m struck by this whole conversation so far. I’ve been tearing up because I feel very seen by you, so I really appreciate it.

I think being a dynamic being is something we can all relate to. We all have so many layers, and a spectrum of emotions and aspects of ourselves that are brought out by different people, different environments. In terms of my music, the rhythms, tones, frequencies, and even the underlying lyrics and textures are portraits of different times in my life as well as different emotional containers. Some songs are meant to help you access and be with joy, and some are meant to help you cry and help you release those tears. I love creating across that spectrum because, thankfully, my life has given me those multitudes and those many different emotions to channel… Being a conduit in the sense of being open to being a channel for art, or whatever else might come through. We must be deep listeners. We must listen deeply to the earth. We must listen deeply to the people around us. We must also listen to our own thoughts and idiosyncrasies. When I’m receiving melodies and then crafting songs, it’s often like I’m seeing this higher perspective. It’s from having listened deeply to something, and then distilling it into a shareable medicine of sorts.

I always give credit and thanks to Spirit no matter what I’m doing. If it’s waking up and having air in my lungs, thank you for that. Especially for something as magical as writing a song or creating something from this physical realm—how could I not be so grateful for that and not give reverence to something bigger than myself for being able to do that? Even if it’s just to soothe myself; even if I’m not necessarily sharing it. The fact that I’m able to do that, I feel that is certainly a gift. Also, so much of my music feels like it comes through me when I’m around water. Water is a big one, actually.

I was just thinking about water at this very moment.

Really? Being near the ocean, it feels like songs flow right into me. Similarly, if I’m near the river, songs are flowing in. Even with a human-made shower or a bathtub—because the water is there, songs will so often come to me that way.

Water came up for me when you described this process of essentially surrendering to what wants to be channeled through you. Being in bodies of water requires so much surrender and trust, as does the process of being an artist. Within my own practice, surrender and trust are cultivated practices, which I am always ebbing and flowing between. There are times where I’m utterly depleted and then there are times where I’m oozing with openness and connection. What tools do you use in order to hold both ends?

That’s such a beautiful thing to think about. I do believe surrender is one of the first connection points of creating. When you think back to being a child, children are so good at that. They’re so good at coloring what they want, saying what they want, singing when they want, moving like [how we moved] before we learned how to walk a certain way down the sidewalk. Children are skipping and they’re doing twirls and they’re dancing.

I think that trust and surrender are natural modes of curiosity and faith that we’re born into this world with. Some of our systems strip them from us, whether it’s our education systems or in many of our familial lines, with this intergenerational passing down of certain colonial values or social customs. As artists, trust and surrender are the first step. It’s the first step to believing that something you have to sing or say or paint is worth materializing, even for oneself. Having an idea and then saying, “I want that to be not just in here, but out there,” takes trust and surrender to be able to do.

I’m thinking about those artists who are on the precipice of wanting to share their art with the world but are moving through that thick blockage of fear over how their art will be received, or are moving past any of the limitations that capitalism confines us to. Capitalism tries to tell us that artistry is only valid when consumed, whereas so many of the creative prophets of our time and beyond show us that we’re not meant to be palatable. And if we try to be, we’ll lose the plot. The plot being the core essence of who we are, our authentic coding. So how do you keep to the plot? How do you stay in your integrity as an artist, even when you feel blocked and even when it feels unsafe to share with the world?

I do believe that some of the funniest people you’ve ever met might not ever be on a stage. Similarly, some of the most talented musicians you will ever hear are playing in a little house somewhere across the world. Some of the most profound exchanges of words happen between two people who are channeling an intimacy and depth of humanity which not all of us will hear.

When it comes to sharing, especially in this world that is so capitalistic, it’s important for artists who feel like their art is part of a deeper mission to remember that what you’re creating and putting out there will impact the collective in any small or big way. I think we know when we’ve created something that we want to share—when we believe that it’s for the collective, when it’s messaging that we genuinely feel strongly about.

In terms of moving past that initial blockage, we have to remember that we’re not alone. There are artists all over the world who want to share what they’re creating because they feel that it can have some kind of a ripple effect… I think as artists, we’re just wearing a giant sign that says, “I’m a sensitive human being.” To be a bleeding heart artist who says, “I feel a lot and I want to share”—I just think it’s cool.

I studied herbalism for a while and some plants act as sort of a panacea. They help with a lot of things, but so many of them actually are for certain things and for certain people. And I think that of art, too. I think your art is going to reach the people it needs to because that’s how wise and intelligent that greater energy is that makes us want to create in the first place. It might not be that all 8 billion humans on this earth will necessarily resonate with what you’re creating. But it will be that there are people out there for whom what you’re creating is going to help them on their path as a human being.

This connection between plants and artists reminds me of something Alok Vaid-Menon poignantly said in an interview: the natural world templates change, yet humans are uniquely resistant to change and to our growing edges. This brings me to queerness, because queerness offers nonlinear, wayward, fractal ways of existing. I know queerness to be an integral part of both our artistries, and so I’m curious as to how queerness, fluidity and nonlinearity has shown up in your creative process as well as in how you live your life as a creative act?

Yes, yes, exactly. I think that for me, queerness and being able to see life through this dialectical perspective has been the biggest gift I could have had, because it keeps my mind and my spirit fertile. It keeps the soil of all those spaces ready for what may come, because there are generally less preconceived notions or containers or fixed ways that things ought to be.

And so in everything—be it pre-scripted genres in music, how one might dress, the way a person might dance—queerness allows you to step outside of those prescriptions. I think it’s really important—especially now, when we live in this uniquely globalized era of human civilization where many of us are connected to people who are in many different places in the world—we have a diversity of relationships we can co-create with. The idea that we would have these fixed ways of being and relating to one another is antiquated. We are of each other. That’s how we must move. Queerness feels ancient and inevitable as a future template for our beings.

That wording felt like poetry moving through my blood. Thank you… How do you, in your creative process, give roots to all of the messaging that is moving through you?

I would say bringing it back to nature, because nature always harmonizes. If I’m kind of floating away, nature makes me feel so held… Also my conversations with artist friends. It’s the same feeling. I think knowing what elements or people or foods or things help you ground is important, especially if you are a person who’s getting those otherworldly signals often.

What about when you have to convene with technology to transfer that messaging? If I’m in front of my laptop for too long, it feels so invasive to my creative spirit. Yet it’s also the easiest way to transfer my ideas at times, and to organize myself and so on. We’re all constantly contending with the invasiveness of technology while trying to stay rooted in our bodies.

We live in this technological world and it’s ubiquitous. It’s just everywhere all the time. But I will say, I’ve also been thinking about the word itself: technology. It’s a Greek word from the 17th century, and it can be broken into two words: techno and ology. Techno just means an art or a craft. And then ology is the study of something. So technology was here before we started using computers and phones.

I’ve been thinking lately about how certain technologies are given so much credence and so much respect and admiration because they are fields that are dominated by mostly men and white people. But there are all these other technologies that exist and have been developed by so many women, trans people, non-binary people, queer people, Black and Indigenous people. And they are technologies that we can use to help us in our artistic practice as well. For example, I think cooking is a technology. Any time I need to detox myself—let’s say from what a computer or a phone will do to the body and to the brain—cooking will always move me back to all my senses. Anything can be a technology when you break that word down—from the way that you dance, the way that you put furniture together.

What you’re speaking about, it sounds like the Indigenous worldview of animism. If we are to believe that everything carries information, and that technology is, in essence, the way in which information is transmuted, then everything can be technology. Our bodies are our foremost technology, and within that, our breath is also technology.

100%.

I’ll ask one more question to close us out. When I’m listening to you speak, and when I watched your profile on CBC Arts, there is such a strong sense of liberation coming through. Not just in your own practice, but in what you hope for this world. How do you maintain being a liberated artist and human being, while also living within the confines of these colonial, narrow, violent systems? The dissonance is so often jarring.

I’ve been an artist my whole life. I’ve been creating, singing, and writing songs since I was little. But I’ve also been engaged in a more capitalist professional world of arts since I was 13 or 14. Before, I would call myself an independent artist. Sometimes it still might come out that way, as a way of differentiating myself from the machine of major labels and this big machine that exists in the music industry. But now I like to call myself an “interdependent artist.” And that is because I am in mycelial networks and relationships with other interdependent or independent artists who are now in network with me. It’s through these relationships that I’ve been able to unlearn colonial frameworks and lean into the safety of imagining and co-creating something different.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Sania Khan.

A Sailboat in the Moonlight at the Ogunquit Museum, is a survey show that focuses on the last four years of painting mostly in Maine. Some of the landscapes have figures in them, but they are primarily about light in the trees, the seashore. There’s a room of nocturnal paintings and pastel studies. I’ve never actually had the two of those together, in such a direct way. Then for Cheek to Cheek at the CMCA, I expanded the scale of a series of initial studies [made from life in the landscape], allowing them to grow in size. And those will be installed in a building that was designed by a wonderful architect named Toshiko Mori.

The show with Maison La Roche in Paris, includes a series of flowers—seaside roses and wild hydrangeas—in a very beautiful Corbusier building, designed with Pierre Jeanneret between 1923 and 1925. It has a modernist scale and the paintings have that kind of scale. As an architect, Corbusier had a way of bringing the outside to the inside. These flower paintings [engage with a] very different kind of space than what I was playing with before, which was much deeper andvast. I made studies last summer when I was feeling quite compressed by the world—less landscape, more interior.

How are you handling being so busy?

Honestly, I’m a little knackered, you know? I’m tired. Maine is a month behind in terms of the weather. So the blossoms that are already gone in New York, they’re just beginning to start here.

David Salle has written about your work several times. He wrote about you once again for the upcoming monograph that is being published by Moncelli, Phaidon, as did Jarrett Ernest. What is your relationship to them?

Jarrett has really become such an active voice and presence in the contemporary art world, writing about art and other themes related to writing and thinking. David is an icon, a fantastic painter, and his writing is really wonderful. I’m lucky to to be connected to these voices and to have a chance to be in conversation with them. I just reread one of Jarrett’s books, Valid Until Sunset that I recommend to people. Each story has its own identity combined with an image. They are very focused around his own experience, and feel very seen. It was important for me to read this book again recently.

Your new monograph comes out in July, and truly focuses on a variety of paintings you’ve made over the span of your career. These range from natural landscapes to the figurative. Do you approach a body in the same way, you would approach a tree as a subject?

When it comes to my subject, I’m a bit omnivorous. I don’t tend to categorize things in a kind of subject matter. What we [painters] do is constantly shifting in scale and focus.

I’ve always spent a lot of time in nature, longing to be back, to be around things that are growing and of their own volition. Being outside gives us the time and space to think and to have reflective thinking not just active thinking. It requires unscheduled time. I just planted a tree. It’s a yellow magnolia and it’s going to bloom soon.

Some landscape designers have been a very important subject matter for me. I like to spend time reflecting on Gertrude Jekyll (1843-1932), who was an English horticulturist and garden designer (amongst other things) and did quite a few fabulous projects [including over 400 garden designs across the United States, U.K. and Europe]. And then somebody who’s related to her in ideology, is landscape architect Beatrix Farrand (1872-1959), who was born in New York, but ended up moving and working in Bar Harbor in Maine. She’s done quite a few very famous projects, including the Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden at the New York Botanical Gardens, the gardens of the White House (during the Presidency of Woodrow Wilson), and campuses of Yale and Princeton. I’ve been influenced by these very powerful female voices that permeated the history of landscape design. [They forever altered] how we see landscape design now, and how we have experienced nature during my lifetime.

Once the shows are actually installed, will you have a moment to rest and relax?

Well, I have some projects forthcoming and the show in New York at Acquavella opens in October. I’m also working on a large commission right now. Do you need to keep busy all the time?

To be honest, when I was younger, I would say yes. As I get older, I’m in my forties now, I actually really relish that in-between time and find that I can be more efficient when I can recharge.

I think that’s a really important aspect of living. It’s a strange thing about our time now, in our culture, there is pressure to make things, get more done more quickly, to [match] the ease of and speed of communication. But this ease and speed of consumption has not made the quality of our conversations increase and it hasn’t made the quality of our consumption increase either. It’s just increased the quantity. I think that it’s a kind of a compulsive behavior, and there’s something about making art that needs to be more obsessive.

The word purpose or purposeful comes to mind.

Exactly, because there’s a purpose behind an obsession. So, I think that is the word that defines or distinguishes the difference. I would say the paintings in my studio, aren’t really about the way something looks, but they’re more about the way something feels. The sensation is actually the narrative, and not a story per se. I’ve been thinking a lot about how art functions in our our world and in dialogue right now. There’s more visibility in our culture and in our lives now. It’s an interesting dynamic of our time, a strange commodification of culture. And it still takes a lot of time to be a painter…to learn how to be a painter. There’s the craft, or the technique of making a painting, and then there’s the thinking behind making a painting—an intellectual component to painting as well.

After years of trying to understand this while in art school, then after art school, and even as a professor, I’ve realized that art isn’t really about anything that can be described specifically and accurately in language. Perhaps art is something that can be, in its best sense, experienced. And experiences don’t always fit within the parameters of words. They go beyond or go into places where words can’t reach them. So a lot artists try to describe painting or artwork in language, and some people do it better than others. But it’s never never fully amounts to the experience of experiencing an artwork.

That’s true, especially now when so much art is shared via social media and email.

Talking about my art is an interesting exercise. Because it’s something that isn’t about my artwork, but is parallel to my artwork. Some people understand what these paintings are and what they’re about. I’m asked the question a lot, “Why do you paint?” and “What are your paintings about?” And after a lot of unclear statements and missteps with words, I think I can say that these paintings are experiences and ideally somebody can have the opportunity to experience them in person.

That makes a lot of sense to me because one of the things that I always find fascinating about artwork as an experiential entity, is the way that the body interacts with the work.Your work looks like it’s very physically involved—the marks, the drips. There’s a lot going on. Can you talk about what the experience of making is like for you?

Like you say, the paintings are very physical. They are large and [in contrast] I’m not a very big person. I started these paintings thinking about a certain feeling I had when I saw, in this case, wild flowers growing last summer in Maine. Beach roses are a kind of rose that grown by the seashore here, and they are everywhere. I make very quick drawings of them in about 15 or 20 minutes. The drawings function as visual notes about how I’m feeling [while] looking at those flowers at that time of day, on that day. They’re personal. I show them sometimes, and I make a lot of them, yet not all of them become paintings. They have a sense of scale, color and form.

They’re spontaneous enough that I don’t feel like I have to stop time to catch that time. I take all of these personal notes and think about the painting and how to translate those notes into something that’s made with a much different material. Paint is very wet, viscous, it moves around and has its own kind of tendencies of what it likes to do. I don’t really like to control paint very much. In part, I’d say these paintings are just the way the notes and my personal recollection of that moment feels, combined with changing the scale and the material. The result is the [finished] painting. In a way, the painting is also completely separate from that experience because no two things in life are ever really the same.

There is a sense of freedom and control within your canvases that I really appreciate. Being a painter, one can have a didactic or academic way of approaching art. The next level is how an artist actually creates or uses the medium to help fulfill their vision. What I really like is how your hand feels so evident, it feels uniquely you.

It’s all so personal, depending on who’s holding the brush. Any kind of painting could be a great painting or a bad painting. When you experience an artwork, we can feel the way the painter feels about what they’re doing. Anything could be a great painting, if the painter feels connected to it. Artists have their own set of values and in that way, it’s interesting because it’s incredibly personal. Not a lot of things in life fit into that [category].

Self-awareness, is really hard as an artist. I think it’s hard for everyone probably. It’s hard to know who we are through other people’s eyes.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Katy Diamond Hamer.

There is no philosophy in the sense of an overarching set of principles or an ethic that serves as a filter for the work. The exigency is: work or die. Do the work. The work itself asks and answers the questions necessary to its existence. Dig in and find out what’s what. Shut everything else out. Let the work speak through you. It’s been hiding there, just behind the air, all along.

You’ve written music, lyrics, fiction and nonfiction. What do you see as common threads in your work?

After hundreds and hundreds of songs and stories and various other writing over the course of four-plus decades I guess one obvious answer is the mind of the author behind all this work. But now I’m not so sure of even that. The author himself is suspect, if he exists at all. I question the existence of self, or at least my own self specifically. So maybe a common thread is erasure. I’m always struck by how an adamant statement or proclamation contains inside it its own opposite, which is equally and simultaneously true, and this friction between the two opposite poles serves the function of a positive negation. For all the talk of love, desire, frustration, hatred, contempt, compassion, transcendence, it’s all just phenomena, suspended and rearranging itself in space, all at once, past and future quivering on the same plane simultaneously. But musically, sonically, I guess a common thread has been to find a sound that is so all-consuming that I, and by extension the audience or the listener, disappears inside it, at least for a moment. The obvious analogy to that is the beautiful, selfless act of true sexual love. To me, that’s where God lives.

You’ve worked in collaboration with many musicians, including Swans and Angels of Light, and you’ve written many songs on your own. What do you see as the pros and cons of collaboration versus the creative control of working by yourself?

There are no pros or cons, and it’s all a mystery to me how anything happens at all. Here’s how I see the process. I’ll tell it as a story: Alone in my room, I pick up my old and beaten and broken contraption made of wood and wires and I thrum the thing, waiting for resonance. When eventually a sound evokes meaning I search for another sound, and before long I have a collection of chords. Through repetition, an invisible, shimmering mist of sound envelops me completely, and before long I notice a portal opening and I walk through it and I suddenly find myself in an unfamiliar room, similar to a prison cell without windows. I scratch words onto the wall of this cell, and those words become the lyrics to a song. This is the first stage of elation, and it is solitary. I sing the song over and over by myself until it inhabits me completely.

Then, excited at my discovery, I gather my friends and collaborators in a rehearsal space and together we unfold billowing waves of sound that grow outwards, way beyond my initial childish discoveries. We’re led through the vaulting archways of cathedrals where dancing fractal shards of light sing down to us from above. We’re ushered through tunnels of sound into new chambers connected endlessly, one to another, where the echoes stretch out and reverberate infinitely. We breathe in and exhale the magical dust that is the intangible substance of these echoes, and we’re transformed from within. We travel around the world, making sound in this fashion.

Over time, the music continues to grow of its own accord, and we follow it where it wants to go. We’re helpless inside it. By the end of a tour the songs bear little resemblance to their shape at the beginning, and you’d be hard pressed to recognize the original songs I wrote alone in my room. Finally, we find ourselves in a vast underground cavern and we no longer know ourselves, who we are or where we’ve been. We’re drained and spent, and the songs are then finished and forgotten completely and never performed again. Then, time for something new, and the process starts over. I want to be sure to mention here the current musicians in Swans who so tirelessly devote themselves to this often arduous spiritual quest: Dana Schechter, Norman Westberg, Kristof Hahn, Larry Mullins, Christopher Pravdica and Phil Puleo.

You’ve also produced albums for other musicians, like Devendra Banhart and Akron/Family. What do you enjoy about that process, and what have you learned from it?

What have I learned from it? NEVER AGAIN! I absolutely love Devendra. I have never met anyone so preternaturally talented and magical as he was in those days. He literally quivered with light. Akron/Family were also tremendously gifted and unique, and fine people too. I remember seeing them live a few times and thinking “They’re the Beatles!” or “They’re Led Zeppelin!”–they were that good. But I am temperamentally not suited to working on other people’s music. I care too much and invest too much in the process psychically and it’s draining for all involved. Worse, I’m selfish as regards my own artistic pursuits, and I inevitably committed too much of what should be a personal store of energy into those projects, to the ultimate detriment of all involved.

You could say that I’m too intense, especially when I get into the studio. It’s a sort of spiritual crucible for me, and it’s not correct to involve that level of personal feeling in the work of others. Of course I’m proud of the work we did together, but never again. The only thing that would induce me to produce someone else’s music again would be if they were to buy me, fully paid off in advance, a modest house along the strand in Hermosa Beach, California, where I could finish my days with sand on my feet and salt on my lips. This is a hopeless dream of course, since the Hermosa Beach of my childhood memories doesn’t exist anymore, but there you go.

You moved around a lot as a teenager. How do you think that prepared you for life as a touring musician, and how do you think it widened your creative perspective?

My personal motto used to be, “I’m only happy when I’m leaving.” When I was 15, I ran away from my father in Germany and hitchhiked down through Yugoslavia to Greece to Istanbul, then got to Israel somehow, where I stayed for close to a year as an itinerant hippie kid. Then, when I returned to LA I took off again and hitchhiked across North America twice, with almost no money, sleeping on the side of the road in the woods or the fields, or with people that would put me up, giving me work sometimes. Through all these various experiences I never had the sense to be afraid. I just threw myself out into the wind. It’s what I still do, musically. I have no idea what I’m doing! I just dive in and figure it out along the way. But as for touring, it’s the opposite of adventurous travel. You drive some random long and boring distance, you arrive at the venue, you unload, then set up, then sound-check, then wait a bit, then perform the show, then sleep, then repeat. Rarely do I get the chance to get out and experience whatever city we’re in, and these days I carry my agoraphobia with me, and I sleep and hide as much as possible when not performing.

You’ve said you took a lot of LSD during this period as well. How do you think that affected your creativity?

Actually, my experiences with drugs began much earlier. I had a completely unsupervised, pretty horrible childhood, from an early age. This is decades upon decades ago, so my memory is hazy, but I must have started taking drugs as early as 11 years old, first with inhaling glue, gasoline and spot remover, then barbiturates and amphetamines and ultimately by 12 or 13 on to LSD, which was ubiquitous at the time. So right at the age when one is first discovering or formulating who they are, developing what we call an identity, I took rather large quantities of a hallucinogen that said instead, “No, actually, you are NOTHING” and I still don’t necessarily disagree with that realization. The thing about LSD, or at least the versions of it that existed back then, is that it came at you in waves, washing over you and dispersing your self and your molecules out into the surrounding world, so that there was no separation between you and everything else. I used to lie on the beach late at night and stare up at the stars and feel myself rushing up and out through the universe, vividly conscious and unconscious simultaneously. Paradoxically, this kind of vision or experience imbues you with a sort of faith, or a certainty of the interconnectedness of all phenomena, and I suppose I’ve since sought out that experience in various ways throughout my life, perhaps especially through music.

You went to art school at one point. What was that experience like for you, and what did you learn from it?

Once I discovered, in my late teens I guess, that I had a natural facility for drawing, I threw myself into it absolutely, drew constantly, and it became a sort of religion for me. Pretty quickly I knew that this would be my path in life—to be an artist. I had no idea what this entailed, how one might go about it in their life, but I’d found something that gave me a conduit to meaning. So I ended up in art school, where my most productive time was spent in the library, devouring art books and reading art magazines. I don’t recall teachers imparting me with any special knowledge or technical skill, other than to perhaps point me towards artists I might not have otherwise known about. Gradually, I discovered that contemporary art was considered to be a profession, replete with its own specialized, recondite language, and that if one were to succeed at it a certain amount of social skill and networking would be involved, and that I, generally feeling like a leper amongst other people, wanted no part of it. I might as well become a lawyer. Around this time Punk Rock happened. I quit art school and threw myself into that milieu, for better or worse. I started a band, and it failed. Then I eventually moved to New York City, where Swans was soon formed.

How do you deal with writer’s block, either musically or with the written word?

For me, that’s an ironic question because I have never known anything other than writer’s block. I liken my process to trying to carve an image in a granite cliff face with a steel toothpick. But through persistence, something eventually emerges.

You’ve spoken of a voice that channels through you called “Joseph” that you credit with many of your songs. What can you tell us about him, and how would you describe your relationship with him?

That’s just a trope I’ve used a few times to depict the unknown entity that reaches into the back of my head somehow and writes the words through me. I have no idea how else to describe it. I sit for hours sometimes staring at a blank page, but eventually when I give up completely something gets written. In the best instances, I don’t really feel like I wrote the words myself at all.

You’ve written two collections of short stories, published nearly 25 years apart. What do you like about writing fiction, and why do you think the impulse to do it (or at least publish it) came at such a vast interval?

I have always written, for as long as I can remember. I suppose I started doing it at the same time I started drawing. I hesitate to call the writing “stories,” since in most instances very little happens, there are no clearly drawn characters, and certainly no plots. I don’t even know who the narrator is—it’s certainly not me personally. It’s more like a disembodied mind dissecting itself, taking a scalpel to itself, tearing apart and arranging and rearranging memories and sensations, putting them in a form that makes an intuitive sense. The collections you mention occurred only when I felt there was enough compelling material to include. My primary focus has been music. It takes up all of my time.

You’ve also published a collection of Swans lyrics/stories/journals. What was that process like for you? In reviewing your own lyrics and experiences, did you learn anything about your own creative process?

During Covid, like everyone else, I had an overabundance of free time. I decided to use the opportunity to finally go through the trunks of journals and ephemera I’d collected over the decades. These plastic trunks had traveled with me from abode to abode over many years, usually residing, never opened, in a basement wherever I lived at the time. I lugged the onus of my past along with me wherever I went. When I opened the lids to these containers, I was sickened to discover a thick carpet of mold over everything, and it permeated the journals, staining the pages. It reeked and was toxic. I have asthma, so the effect was not insubstantial.

Nevertheless, I was determined to go through the writing. I was forced to wear a respirator, eye protection and surgical gloves as I worked. A fitting metaphor for the writing that I encountered! In much of the early writing and unused song lyrics I hardly recognized the author. Truly a maniacal, but focused and determined character. It was interesting to see. I definitely lived in a world of my own making in those days, very solipsistic and self-obsessed, and unapologetic about it. After a long, slow period of trying to type the stuff up for future editing I finally found an obvious solution and took hundreds of pictures of worthwhile pages with my cell phone and was then later able, unencumbered by my ridiculous hazmat protections, to go through the material, type it up and edit it.

Fittingly, as the decades approached more current times, the mold was less pervasive, and eventually of course the writing took place on a computer and was easily accessible, though about a decade was lost when a computer was stolen. But what did I learn? I don’t know. Maybe that work is what matters, just doing the work. The early writing was done during a period of extreme hardship and poverty and general isolation, but I persisted, and then here now is this much older person with an entire life history behind him, and certainly no longer hungry, going through this stuff and mining it. In the end, I used a relatively small portion of what I found, and I excised the material that I thought too personal. There’s tons of it left, enough to fill another book. But my hope is to find the courage to take all those trunks, the entire mess, to the public dump and dispose of it once and for all.

Do you read reviews of your own work?

I have read reviews in the past, yes. It’s always a mistake. A bad review can be misguided and stupid, which has hardly any effect. Or a bad review can contain some truth, and that can be devastating, but perhaps productive in the long run. The worst is a good review, because it can foster complacency and self-satisfaction, which equals death.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by J. Bennett.

Touring is hard, not for the faint of heart. People who tour know so many degrees of stress and worry… I started touring in 2003. It kind of snowballed and didn’t stop. I’m always on the road. It wasn’t until lockdown where there was a whole year without playing shows. That was cool for a lot of different reasons. Not for sustainable reasons, but in terms of mental and physical wellness, biological wellness—as a means to survive, I think it’s one of the only ones at this moment.

It feels like you put out a record and you have to tour, continue to make everything float. There’s no independent systems. It’s not like you can make an album and that makes its own world, then you can tour and that’s its own world. Everything is so dependent on the other one doing its job. If you don’t tour, then people don’t know you have a new album out. It really is a cycle. That’s the terminology used within labels and media. It’s kind of sad because doing something because you have to do it is not enticing to anyone.

I’m not here to reinvent the wheel. I’ve always viewed it from the standpoint of a worker perspective. It’s my background; I grew up in a worker family. I’m not necessarily trying to redefine something. It’s always hard for me to know what to do to help mitigate the hardest parts of it, which are burnout or stressing about things that are completely impossible to control, like selling tickets or making something financially feasible.

It seems like touring is becoming untenable for many artists.

My situation is isolated from everybody else’s, but there’s a misconception about how well an artist is doing depending on who they’re releasing records with. I’ve definitely had a lot of people approach me and be like, “Oh, you released with 4AD, everything must be going super well.” There’s still this common misconception that leaning on someone who has a lot of legacy and reputation changes the dynamic for your life. Everyone wants one answer, but never the full system answer—which is, “You have to do all these things, but there’s a healthy way to do them without it being the end all.”

Working with a label is fun and exciting because they bring a creative perspective to how you get your music to more people. They’re looking at it from that perspective. In the most sincere perspective, they’re looking at it from a place of, “We want to support your art. We want people to support your art. We want people to pay for it so you can finance whatever else you want to do.” So that’s great, and I think that’s important to keep in your mind when you’re working with a label.

A lot of people position themselves like, “I don’t need a label. I can do this independently.” And like, yeah, you can. That’s always been the case. People have been doing independent records forever; it’s nothing new. Maybe the tools are new, like Spotify, but the same systems are in place. Just because you release it independently, you still encounter the same obstacles everybody else encounters. There’s still the same amount of people releasing music. It’s just working with a healthy system, finding the right people, and being really honest about what you want.

Any advice for taking care of yourself on the road?

One easy place to start is food. Something I’ve learned is to ask for the things that you really want. Like, “Man, I just need these four things.” Be very specific with brands and things like that. It’s really helpful, as opposed to just being like, “I don’t know, just put out some nachos, guacamole, and hummus.” Everyone’s happy to do the easiest thing, but it’s like, whether it’s difficult or not, who cares? Try to get it the way you want it. It’s so much more helpful to have that peace of mind—to know, “Okay, at least I’m going to have this salad that I can eat backstage.” It’s maybe the one thing you can possibly control. Everything else is extremely difficult. Even just trying to do an ounce of exercise, you’re stealing time from something—from sleeping or taking a shower or eating breakfast or writing an email. Time is nearly impossible to control on tour.

Your sound has changed a lot from album to album. Has this ever presented a challenge for labels or teams you’re working with?

I’m lucky. I’ve worked with a lot of great people and I’m really happy with everyone. I think I’ve gotten everything that I should get. I don’t know what else could be coming or what should have come. It’s hard to know these things… Things move in huge swaths and everything changes. In that respect, I’ve always done what I could do out of necessity. [When] touring, sometimes I can have a band, sometimes I can’t. I’ve heard people say, “Oh, I wish I could always have a band.” But I don’t. It’s cool to have different experiences. I don’t think there’s an ideal way to do live performance. You’re the only one creating these barriers and the perception that your live show should be a certain way. It’s important to never say to yourself, “There’s a better way to do it,” when the moment that you’re in now is actually the best way.

Where did your initial spark to create come from?

I started making music through samplers and drum machines. That’s how I learned. Listening to records and thinking about the sound that I’m listening to. Looking at the back of the record, seeing who played on it, who did what, and then being like, “Damn, that’s an alto saxophone. Okay, that’s different than a tenor.” That opens up your mind and you follow new music and musicians. You chase all these sounds down.

I was really into the label Thrill Jockey. It was like ‘98, I got a Tortoise CD, and asked my cousin, “Man, who are all these people? I don’t even know what this kind of music is.” I started looking them up, finding these different bands, and being excited about seeing folks into a lot of the things that I was into… Then having a guitar and knowing a few chords and just playing it and figuring things out slowly. When I finally went to New York, I started to meet more folks who went to music school and played with them live. I understand more musical language through hearing my band and the different people I play with talk. It’s educational in the sense that I’m taking what I need to take, but in a very generous environment. It isn’t this academic environment with some kind of structure that’s been formed around what you’re learning, so you have to stand inside of that. It’s just applied to the moment that I’m in.

Music education is important. I’ve never felt like it’s not important. Like anything, it’s based on your own creativity. It’s a bunch of instructions on how to do something one way, but then I could do it a million different ways. It’s cool when I meet people and we’re both thinking about music in the same way, they just have a different way they’ve learned it.

How do you lead a group or communicate your ideas with limited rehearsal time?

Music is best understood when played. I’m less of a theoretical person.

When you’re making decisions, you’re coming from a place of respect—respecting the people that you’re with and letting them know you trust them in the skills that they have, but also coming up with decisions or concise ideas. Being like, “Cool, I think we should do it like this.” And they’re like, “Okay, great.” It’s such an amazing balance of not just communication but creative thought in the moment—instantaneous process. Whatever band, whatever music you’re making, whatever you’re doing, rehearsal is so much fun. You could ask anybody that’s played with me: they’ve probably rehearsed in my band a million more hours than they’ve ever played in any of their other bands. It’s just listening. I love listening and sitting there and thinking about everything.

You used to work as a Foley artist for film. What did you learn about sound or listening during that time?

The thing you think about when doing Foley is just how much performance is a part of sound creation. Performance is an umbrella term that can cover so many things. Everybody thinks about acting, or poetry, or music, but the performance of creating sound for film is a thing. You have to move around, distribute your weight differently. There’s a lot of specific jargon when doing that stuff. What you also learn is, as humans, we make so much noise. You’re not in a room by yourself; you’re moving around; you have these clothes on you, rubbing against your skin; your feet are touching the floor, making a sound. We’re just these noise-making animals. It’s cool for people to think about all the sounds that are around them. What sounds are taking up your head space or your ear space when you’re making music? That’s what I think about.

It’s cool to hear you reference acting. You’ve also mentioned that certain sounds can become the protagonist of a track or album.

I try to find things I can anchor myself into—some kind of foundation of, “Okay, stop floating, you’re going to be here.” For PHASOR, I dug into these specific recordings that I made from this machine called the SalMar. It’s a synthesizer made by Salvatore Martirano. What I love about it is his intention: he wanted a tool that would be constantly composing sound and music. A lot of the sounds are primitive sounding. They’re squelchy and blippy and bloopy and beepy. But it was the intention that he was pushing forward. Some of the sounds are radical and beautiful to me, but not necessarily musical notes or specifically tuned sounds.

I love the idea of getting lost in something. That can create a new place for you to start, or to think about, or to be in… What’s grounding me? What’s telling me something new that I don’t know about myself in this music? That’s what I think about when I’m making work. I want to know who I am at that moment.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Jeffrey Silverstein.

In high school, our history teacher asked us to write a story about a particular moment in history. He asked us to write one page. I went home that night, and I wrote 12 pages. I thought that was normal. The next day [my teacher] went around, making sure that everyone did their one page. When he saw that I had written a ton, he looked at me like, What? What is wrong with you? Why did you do this? But I think in that moment, seeing his reaction, for some reason made it click for me. This was something that I did because I enjoyed it, not because it was expected of me. I was always a big reader. I knew that I loved literature, but I didn’t know that this was something that I could do.

What does it mean to be a queer son of immigrants AND an artist? Was there any hesitation from your family about your pursuit of an artistic life?

My parents were never discouraging. They were always like, “Do what will make you happy in life.” But I don’t know that they’ve always understood what this artistic life really means and what it entails. I think now they’re starting to sort of wrap their minds around it. They came to my book launch in New York. I was on the local news in the Bronx, on a small channel. When my mom saw that, when my grandparents saw that, they were like, “Oh my God, you’re a serious person. You’re on the news.” It’s been less about them being discouraging and more about working with them to understand what this artistic life entails, what it means, what it doesn’t mean.

Just because I have a fancy fellowship here or there, just because I published a book, they think I’m rich. “You’re a writer and you’re traveling and you’re on a book tour, so you have all this money,” and I’m like, “No, no, you don’t understand….”

That tension between money and art always comes up when I’m talking to my family about what I do. Part of what helped them feel okay with me being an artist is that I always had a full time job in my 20s. I lived on my own. I moved out of my mom’s house after coming back from college. I’ve always sort of taken care of myself financially as an adult. Because they see that, they’re like, “Oh, well, we don’t care what you do, as long as you can pay for your own rent and take care of yourself.”

I would love to hear a bit about your previous work as a community organizer. So much of your writing is about community and place. And I know you yourself are very rooted in the Bronx where you grew up. How has community organizing informed your writing? Why is it important for artists to do this line of work?

I started doing community organizing in college. I went to college around the time of Trayvon Martin’s death, and the subsequent Black Lives Matter movement. I was organizing in college around racial justice. When I graduated, I went back home to the Bronx, and I started getting involved in efforts around responding and resisting gentrification. The first moment where I realized that art and writing has a place in community organizing was during a city council hearing with people in power. It was about the rezoning of Jerome Avenue which would change the landscape of one of the longest streets in the Bronx. During that hearing, I went up there and I read a poem. I hadn’t planned to read that poem. I just decided at the last minute to do it and I saw how much that shifted the room. I wasn’t saying anything that other people weren’t saying. [The poem] encapsulated the feeling, the frustration, the anger and the pride in being someone from the Bronx. It really moved people.

And so from then on, I spent a lot of time trying to bridge the gap between writing and community building, specifically trying to bring artists and writers to spaces where folks were already doing community organizing work. I will say it’s something that I struggle with. I wrote an essay recently about the tension that I find between community organizing and writing. I think that it is important for artists to be involved and engage with their community, to make their local community the best that it can possibly be for its residents. And I also find it a little troubling the way we talk about art and activism these days. It feels to me like we often judge a piece of writing’s value only on its political utility. What issues does it explore? What “communities” is it representing? And I think that is an important part of the conversation, but it cannot be the only way that we judge the value of a piece of art.

Isn’t all art political? Does art have to be political to be good?

I just had a three hour conversation with a friend about this yesterday, and he said the exact same thing. He was like “All art is political. Everything is political. You can’t escape it.” And I said, sure, that’s fine, but I want you to know that when I am sitting down to write a story that is not top of my mind. I am not trying to explore or expand or tease out my politics on the page. I am asking myself questions about people and their feelings and their hearts and their minds and the things that draw them together in community or in relationships, and sure that can be political or be interpreted through a political lens. The reader and the critic can do whatever they want with the work, but I am not thinking about these things first and foremost.

As immigrant writers, as queer writers, as writers of color, there is this question of what are you trying to say about your marginalized group? And sometimes I’m not trying to say anything about any group.

**You don’t want your work to be contrived. You don’t want to try to fit into some sort of immigrant queer writer box, in order to be appreciated as an artist. **

You are a recipient of the prestigious Black Mountain Institute Shearing Fellowship in Las Vegas. What have you learned about yourself as a person and an artist during your time in Sin City?

First I will say that it has been an incredible honor to be a Shearing Fellow. I have written more than I have written ever in my life in the last nine months. I always wanted to know what kind of person, what kind of writer, what kind of artist I would be if I had the privilege and time to just be a full-time artist and dedicate all my energy and time to being an artist. It’s just been pretty incredible to find that out on a very practical level. What time do I write? How do I like writing? How do I revise? Can I make time for reading while I’m writing? There are different questions [to ask] when you have a full time job, as I did for 10 years before I got this fellowship.

I forget who said this. I’m sure many writers have said this: it’s best to write about home when you are away from home, in a place very different from where you grew up.

Yes. I 100 percent agree with that. I think often our job as writers is to mystify and demystify what is familiar to us. When you’re in the place, it’s really hard to see the things that you’re not seeing. And so it has been really helpful. I have been writing about the Bronx and other projects. I’ve been writing about communities in the Bronx that are not Dominican. I spend so much time in Loca and in other projects writing about what I know, what I call a Dominican village, but it’s been such a revelation to write about all these different corners of the Bronx. For example, there’s a huge Irish population in the Bronx that I have been researching and reading about and writing about in my work. It’s been nice to have that space away from home, in order to see it better, or to see it from a different perspective.

Distance makes the heart grow fonder.

Yes, and [makes the heart] ask more complicated questions.

Your debut novel Loca came out in February 2025. The act of writing/creating is so contrary to the publicity machine of a book tour. What have been the most surprising aspects of promoting your book?

I spent so much time working on this novel, understanding it from beginning to end, backwards and forward, but it’s a totally different learning experience when you have to talk about it with other people. It is also incredibly challenging to see your work as an object that you have to sell to other people. You have to anchor your work in the theme and keywords. I have to talk about the fact that this is a queer transnational novel. I wasn’t thinking about that when I was writing the work. I was just asking myself questions about these people on the page. And so it’s incredibly challenging. And the biggest thing that I have learned is that for things to move along, you have to remain in the driver’s seat of the promotional experience as the writer, which is really hard. So if I had to give a piece of advice to a writer that is about to go do this, or will do this one day, it is to get a ton of writing done before your book comes out. Because for a little while there will be no space and time for creativity or spiritual connection to one’s work in traditional ways.

Let’s pivot to Sex and the City for a minute. You have written about your love for this show and spoken about it on book tour. I know it’s a comfort show but also deeply problematic lacking LGBTQ+ representation amongst many other pitfalls, despite all that, why is this show important to you?

The show was important to me because growing up as a queer person, I wanted to have the life that these women had; going out, dancing with friends, meeting random lovers, buying nice clothes, having artistic lives and professional lives. As a young queer person, I projected a lot of my dreams and hopes for adulthood on these white women who were not me but who I was able to connect to just on the basis of emotions. So much has changed in the culture regarding representation, and I really value seeing people who look or sound like me or whose experiences are more aligned with mine on screen or in a book. But I also really value that watching shows like Sex and the City or Buffy the Vampire Slayer attuned me to connecting to people across differences. I don’t begrudge having grown up that way. And sure, it would have been nice to see more people like me on TV or in books or whatever, but I also think that is what has made me a writer. Even when I’m writing about people who are “like me” on the page, I still feel that I’m writing across differences. It just makes me a rigorous thinker and a rigorous writer.

I think it’s such an easy cop out to be like, “That’s not for me because they’re not like me.” The whole point of why we open up a book or watch a television show or movie is to learn about other people.

It’s so true. I was just having a conversation with a young writer recently. He was like, “I don’t read these white people in the canon.” And I was like, you know, I understand the sentiment and also white people write things that slap. I would not be the writer that I am or the thinker that I am without having read Virginia Woolf for example. I follow James Baldwin’s philosophy. He used to say something like, “I’m an artist. I’m a human being. And so all of the art is available to me.” I get to read about the writers of the Harlem Renaissance and connect with those folks, as well as Virginia Woolf or Forester.

What inspires you?

The thing that inspires me the most is [the Bronx.] I’m really interested in the ways in which people share space, even when they don’t want to share space, and the kinds of beautiful things and conflicts that come out of living in an apartment building or living on a block with other people.

When I want to connect to a source bigger than myself, I go to nature. I go to the park. I go on a hike. It’s the same feeling that people get when they go to church. And so I need to do that in order to connect. Reading is a huge source of inspiration. Seeing the way that other writers do language on the page usually pushes me to think differently about what I’m trying to do on the page.

There are some writers that don’t want to get “tainted” by other people’s work. They don’t read.

I used to be one of those people when I was in my early 20s, trying to be a serious writer. I was like, “I don’t want to be influenced by anyone. I want to be my own person and my own thinker.” I appreciate that young version of me and his drive. But I also think it’s quite alright to live and write and exist within a tradition.

I would love to talk a bit about endurance. Writing a novel takes stamina and discipline. How do you convince yourself to get up every day and write; “butt in a chair” as the writer Anne Lamott likes to say?

The thing that propels me to sit down and write every day is just the fact that I’m going to die. When I tell people this, they sort of look at me like, are you okay? I’m not depressed. I’m not walking around with this huge weight of existential dread. I just read this quote by Didion, where she says, “Everyday is all there is.” I am so aware that every day is all that we have and that I am not promised tomorrow. And so while I am here, I have work to do. There are things that I would like to accomplish. There are sentences and stories that I would like to get on the page before it’s my time. Sometimes that pressure can be a lot and I need to be easy on myself and allow myself to rest and recuperate. There’s this American idea that we are endless and that we are going to remain young forever and that we’ll just keep going but I am very aware of my own mortality, and it informs my everyday life.

When I read Claude McKay, I’m able to visit Harlem in the 1920s. Or when I read Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, I’m able to be in London in the 1910s and 1920s. My dream is that in 100 years (if we have a literary society, if people are still reading books) that people will be able to see how some people lived in the Bronx 100 years ago.

This goes back to your origin story. How you wrote all those pages for your history class. You’re contributing to the history of time. What advice do you have for other writers who can’t seem to stick to a writing routine?

My primary piece of advice is that it’s really important to not romanticize the writing process. Writing can be very magical and it can be very spiritually fulfilling, but when I am creating my writing routine, I am grounded in the fact that this is my work in the world. And just as I used to show up from nine to five for my organizing jobs, how I used to show up after work hours for a community meeting, I need to treat my writing work as practically as possible, so that I can build a writing life. That means that you have to get really practical figuring out, what times do I write best? How long can I write? That was a really important question for me. When I was figuring out my process. It was really important for me to figure out that the first hour is usually horrible, the second hour is okay, and then if I’m able to make it a third hour, which I’m not always able to make a third hour, but if I’m able to make a third and fourth hour, that’s when the good stuff really happens. And then after that, it just goes to shit again. But that was really important for me to figure out, and you can only figure that out by experimenting, trying new things and getting very, very practical about your writing process.

Why is it important to get serious about your art?

The world could care less if I write or not. The world will not be moved if I don’t write another book. It’s fine, but I am here in the world to write. If it is my calling in life, which I believe it is, the thing that gives my life the most meaning, then I have to say no to distractions. We are living in a time where one of the most important commodities is our attention, and people are making a lot of money out of grabbing our attention. Not only social media companies, but also our government throws a slew of things at us every single day to keep us distracted from the things that we are meant to pay attention to.

How can we avoid distractions in a world that profits off our time?

On a very practical level, turning off your phone is really helpful. I know that we like to be available to people all the time, and we like to be connected all the time, but we don’t have to be. Sometimes, turning off my phone for like, two or three hours and putting it somewhere is the best thing that I can do for my mind. I was talking to some students last year, and they were telling me, “We have a hard time getting off social media, even though we know that it’s really bad for us, it makes us really anxious, because we want to keep up with the news. We want to keep up with what’s going on. It feels like the ethical thing to do, to be connected all the time.” I hope that individually and collectively, we are able to one day divorce what we believe is our ethical responsibility to the community from being online or reading the news, especially national news, every single day.

We’re not meant to consume this much information.

It’s paralyzing. I asked my students, what would your life look like if, instead of being on social media and reading the news every day and engaging with that all the time, what if you turned off your phone a couple days a week and used that time to volunteer somewhere locally? How would your relationship to yourself and your relationship to this responsibility that you have for collective engagement be different at the speed of a human life? This is always what I go back to. I am interested in living at the speed of a single human life, and anything that demands that I move at the speed of an influencer, at the speed of being everywhere all the time, that’s just not for me. I can’t do it.

Back in the day when novels first came out, people thought that they were addicting and distracting.

The difference between a book and a phone is that you engage with a book, but the book does not change. You change. You can come back to a book 100 times and read it differently and feel differently about it 100 times, but the book is not modifying itself to capture your attention, versus the phone. Technology is constantly being upgraded and changed to capture your attention, manipulate your taste and manipulate the way that you think, how you think, and how much time you spend on these things. It’s just a different beast.

Technology is also homogenizing. It makes us all these stereotypical, algorithmic versions of whoever we’re supposed to be.

It’s boring. I feel like there’s more group think now than people are willing to accept. Everybody wants to think that they are thinking bigger and better than the next person. But if you’re on these platforms, and most of us are, you’re probably getting your information from the algorithm and falling into these niches and thinking the way that other people are thinking.

I do believe that my single job as a writer is to make up my own mind about things. And so that means that it is my responsibility to try to disengage with the group and encourage others to do so by reading about characters that they may not have encountered in their daily lives.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Diana Rozuva.

Graphic NYC was a web project I did with a photographer named Seth Kushner. I did these interview-based critical essays with creators. They usually ran about an hour.

It was a weekly website, a new profile every week… It took me about, on average, eight to nine hours a profile, the subway, transcribing, writing the darn thing. I had to stack my prep quite a lot, so I had to just go back and forth between reading the work of different creators.

To prepare for them, I read as much of their work as I could. I never got Dan Clowes, but had I gotten Dan Clowes—and, at one point, I will get an excuse to interview Dan Clowes—I will read all of Eightball, and I will make notes as I read it. I will look at themes. I will look at stylistic development. I will look at the context in which it was created. I really wanted to get under the hood for why these creators made these decisions where they were with their work.

It depended on the creator. That differed between an author like Mike Allred with Madman, or Jim Shooter, who was editor in chief at Marvel, and a comic book writer in his own respect. It depended on who the subject was, but I would then basically come down with bullet points that I would have handy during an interview. I rarely write really straight questions because I like for it to be an organic conversation. It will be, of course, chopped up, and dispersed, and reorganized within the essay itself.

I was sick of Q&As at that point in my career. I felt like general Q&As for books were kind of lazy. When you look at magazine spotlights and feature articles, there are these fantastic essays. That’s how I started thinking about my work.

Graphic NYC really started as a book on creators. [hold ups notebook] I did these from 2008 to 2013… Peter Bagge was the first one which got printed, and Dean Haspiel was my second. These are actually notes from that. I had a flip phone, but I have all of these notes that I would go through and make as I talked with them, but I would also have these really wonderful bullet points.

It was an amazing experience, and I insisted that when possible, which turned out to be 95% of the time, these were in-person interviews, so I got to really capture the personality. I got some really cool people, like Raina Telgemeier. We had lunch, and I interviewed her. This is right before SMILE came out.

The preparation was to be prepared enough so that I knew what I was talking about, or at least sounded like it, and to know what the high points I wanted to address were. There were some instances, like Jules Feiffer, I found out the night before that we’re going to talk to him the next day. The legendary Jules Feiffer! The reason I’m here today is because the great comic book heroes were given to me by my father. That was the thing where I just had to brainstorm the best I knew, do some last minute Wikipedia-ing. I had a flip phone, so I had to use my ex-girlfriend’s laptop and hope for the best. Those things happen, too.

Would you, for somebody, like a Mike Allred, would you isolate their best known work or particular work? You obviously can’t read everything in preparation.

When I moderate for GalaxyCon, have to still do the same thing. You have to hit the big work, the high notes, but at the same time, try to dig deep enough and find the work where it feels like that artist was starting to develop.

For instance, I can’t remember if I got to talk with Frank Miller about Ronin, but Ronin, that’s where you can see him develop into being the Frank Miller we all start to know in love.

I’ve found that creators want to talk about their early work, and if you ask them about the more esoteric work, it’s good to create a connection between their earliest work with their big signature pieces of work.

Art Spiegelman did not want to talk about Maus. You can’t fault the man, but you can still find sneaky ways to get Art to talk about Maus by asking him about the graphic novel form and what qualifies as a graphic novel.

A lot of that comes from having a conversation with people, breaking the ice. You know these things, but you also have to think on your feet and figure out ways to respond and work with your interview subject as a human being.

There’s a few tricks I’ve found that have worked real well. Basically, when the interview’s done, that’s when I get the most responses. I’m like, “Well, I think this about wraps it up.” People kind of feel naturally like, “Oh, okay. I don’t have to be guarded,” and that’s when you start to get the good stuff. You keep the recorder going, you’re there with them. They know you’re still recording, and that’s when the conversation starts.

With Frank, he had the Adventures of Superman show from the 1950s. He had a box set, and I started talking about that with him. It’s just icebreakers, typical things. It’s why I look at Graphic NYC as me starting to appreciate the art of the conversation. A good interview is a conversation. Even though it wasn’t presented in a Q&A form like a conversation, I try and convey that through the prose, where I describe the creator and maybe even how they respond.

One of my favorite stories is from Joe Kubert. He started in the 40s. Had the School of Comic Art. Joe was in his eighties when I interviewed him. Bear of a guy. He was a big tough dude, and a very, very nice man. He did a graphic novel called Jew Gangster. It was about a kid who turns to a life of crime during the Great Depression, because the gangsters, the mob, they were kind of like the heroes.

We were just talking, and Joe was like, “Yeah, many of my friends were really kind of lured by the mob.” I was like, “Were you ever?” Joe just sat there for a second. His mouth was kind of open. For a millisecond, I was like, “Oh, my god, he’s going to punch me and I’m going to hit the floor.” I don’t care if he’s 80. He’s…”

You’re about to find out the hard way that he does have some pretty tough mob skills.

He just kind of laughed. He was like, “That’s a very provocative question.” It’s like, “Well…” He still never answered it. That made for a really great moment, because I was able to convey his character as this guy who, I don’t know… I just couldn’t believe I asked him that. It just kind of came out just in conversation. He thought it was funny, but he would not have hit me. He was a sweet, lovely man. For this millisecond, I panicked and I’m like, “Oh, you stepped across the line, Irving.”

You’ve mentioned a number of great creators. Looking through the list of people featured in this book, it’s obviously a very heavy emphasis on creators. I’m curious, are there other aspects of the comics industry that this book touches on, or that you feel like you would want to explore in further interviews? I often think about how these kinds of interviews can capture a real moment in time.

It’s been 15 years since the last one in this book, I think. Looking through it again, I realized what an interesting moment in time was captured in regards to comics and technology—we were on the precipice of digital. The iPad was just out [in 2010]. There’s a sense that the tablet was going to happen, but how would that affect comics? I was kind of like, “Well, do you think print issues are going to go away and it’s just going to be trade?”

I’m honestly still surprised by print, like floppies, I hate to use that term, but single issues exist. It’s a really interesting moment in how people address it. Scott McCloud, we had a really great time with him. I’ve known Scott since I was a student, so like 1997, and I’ve come to consider him a friend. Hearing him talk about that, and the missteps we make in trying to predict the flow of technology, and how it’s going to change things a little too soon as he talked about reinventing comics…

Also web comics, there’s quite a lot, because Dean Haspiel was basically the person who made this happen. Dean and a bunch of friends were doing a thing called ACT-I-VATE, which were web comics. They had some really incredible people there and we were really having discussions about, “What is the point? Where is it going? Do we offer things free on the web? How do we pay for this, or how do we sell this?”

There are 85 creators in this book, and I would say at least half of them were active young creators who were really thinking about these things. No one foresaw the subscription model.

That’s what I would say would be the real moment in time we captured.

What I think is also really fascinating, looking back at this, this collection is dedicated to the friends and storytellers we’ve lost. Seth is of course top on the list. He died from cancer about a decade ago. I miss him. I miss him still.

We’ve got Neil Adams, Gene Colan, Jules Feiffer, Irwin Hasen, Hernan Infantino, Al Jaffee, Joe Kubert, Stan Lee, Dwayne McDuffie, Denny O’Neill, Harvey Picard, like this list of creators, at least a dozen creators, maybe a little bit more, all kind of in the same space. It makes it a much more generational work from the literal beginnings of the industry. Joe Simon was 98 when I talked to him for this. Sharp as a tack, 98.

We go back to, as far as people I spoke with, Simon and Jules Feiffer, Al Jaffee… Al was there early on. I think you’re not only going to see a generational collection, a multi-generational collection, that you’re just not going to be able to make anymore, as far as in-person interviews go. I think that’s part of what makes this a distinctive collection.

Was that always part of the inspiration for wanting to do this is capturing the moment and giving historical perspective to then color where we are now? You mentioned Scott McCloud. He gave this fantastic Ted Talk about comics, and in it, uses an example of a comic that is an infinite scroll.

The way he sets it up, he talks about the influence of his father who’s blind, but he worked in Massachusetts for a missile provider, and then all of his siblings have more typical careers. He ended up being a comic artist, and even though his dad was blind, he had blind faith in him, and does a nice job illustrating, I think, some of that belief even from older generations feeding into it.

I’m curious what inspired you to write this collection of essays? What continues to inspire you to engage in the scene, and is it primarily about capturing the history in the moment of this space?

Well, I had the benefit of Seth’s photography, which is not reproduced here because this is an essay collection, and honestly, the photos were reproduced in Leaping Tall Buildings, and I could not do them justice through what I’m doing for this campaign. I really wanted to complement the work he was doing as a photographer, and he was amazing. That was a high bar for me to meet.

I couldn’t half-ass my work as a writer, because I didn’t want to feel like I want people to only go to the site to look for the pictures. Some people did, let’s be honest. I think a lot of capturing a moment in time is creating the context around it. You’re establishing where this person is through where they are now physically. Denny O’Neill met up with us in a Starbucks, and I put that in there. I don’t really wanted to show, “Hey, guess what? Denny O’Neill, legendary comics writer, editor, hangs out and gets a cup of coffee too, like anyone else.”

Peter Bagge, and I’ve done an entire book on Pete, who I love very much, and he’s one of my favorite creators and human beings. We went to this Belgian, it was like a waffle place or something, or crepes, or I can’t remember, but they had an accordion player. I’m like, “Of course, Pete Bagge is going to have an accordion player.” Pete’s funny as hell. He’s a really good guy. I really wanted to place that.

I think the one in this piece that really hit me was Dwayne McDuffie, a legendary writer. I really wanted Dwayne for this project. We were limited by geography and budget. We could only photograph people in New York. We traveled with advance money to Chicago where we got Alex Ross, Jill Thompson, Brian Azzarello, Jeffrey Brown, and Chris Ware. We got Chris Ware in his house. We got to see his really cool house, but most of it was in New York, and Dwayne lived in LA. He came through to promote the All-Star Superman animated movie.

He wrote a script, adapted it for it, whatever. I was on cloud nine, because I’ve always loved Dwayne’s work. He had always been nice to me when I’d met him through conventions and his wife, Charlotte. I had a great talk with him. Seth took a great photo of Dwayne in Central Park. It was winter, and Dwayne passed away a week after, on my birthday.

I had a hard time writing that essay because I was pretty upset, and I barely knew this man. I imagine with people who really knew him and loved him and worked alongside him, but it was very important that I capture what had to be part of the narrative, the story I was trying to tell around him is, yes, this is a vibrant, brilliant creator. Like Scott McCloud, Dwayne was an actual literal genius, and he decided to do anything, and he decided to write comics, and some of the best comics.

One of the things for Comic Book Artist Magazine is for a couple of years I did straight tribute pieces. It was tough after a while, but it was capturing that moment in time. Part of the reason I stopped doing it and took the site down was again, Seth had already started to move towards some other projects he wanted to do, and once he passed away, I couldn’t do it without him. It didn’t feel right. Also, it was exhausting.

If I do go back into this and bring Graphic NYC back, which I’m debating, I think I have to see how well this campaign goes. I would probably focus on more than just people who were graphic novelists as we had for our original, because we had to narrow it down. We had so many people who wanted to be in this, and we could only do so much. I would go and include folks who are artists for the big two writers, there’s a whole new generation of creators who came up since these were originally done, folks like Scott Snyder comes to mind.

He was one we wanted, but we weren’t able to get. Jason Aaron has really blown up since then. There’s a creator, Tana Ford, who I’ve met through the cons, who I would love to [interview]. Tana’s like the greatest person to have on a panel, because they’re just so quirky, and funny, and interesting, and brilliant, and I would love to do a profile on Tana. There’s also a lot more, just in that short amount of time, I think we have an even more diverse range of creators.

It’s nice to get it out on paper, but yeah, who knows? I hope that this interview and this campaign inspires people to see the real power of interviews and conversation. There’s an element of comics that I always tell people with Kickstarter, letting the work speak for itself, but then there is letting the creators speak for themselves.

That’s a large part of what The Creative Independent interviews are about, is the person behind the work, and not necessarily always just about the work—the intention is capturing the moment and their experiences. I think it’s a really vital piece of the industry.

Larry Hama’s one of my favorite people. I did a conversations book on him for University of Mississippi, and what I love about Larry is it’s all craft. If you ask him, “Well, hey, why did you have snake eyes?,” blah, blah, blah, he might give you one or two answers, but he really likes talking about the craft of storytelling, and I love that about him. I also love, conversely, Chris Claremont will go in, and he’ll dig into the weeds, and tell you why he had Jean Grey wear a green dress instead of a blue one.

He’s still present in those books he wrote years ago. It’s like there’s so many different approaches to the work, and then you have an up-and-coming creator who’s doing their comic, they’re so invested in it, and it’s such a personal piece of work for them.

I wanted an Inside the Actor Studio-approach to creators, and that’s still my dream, to do Inside the Actor Studio for comics creators, because no one’s doing it.

I think that they deserve that level of respect.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Sam Kusek.

I was younger, trying to figure out what to do with my life, and going to school for graphic design. I struggled, and during this era, I was getting into trouble. During a psychotic episode, I was afraid to go outside. But I started taking photos obsessively. Not necessarily in a good way, but just obsessively. I got really involved in shooting film, but not developing it myself. Fast forward a bit, to around age 23—I began thinking more critically about taking photos, getting more serious.

I didn’t get an education in photography. I taught myself how to print in the darkroom, and at the same time I was learning how to sew. I set up a darkroom in my parents’ basement and I started doing it there. It was a really janky set up. I saw a picture of it the other day, and I can’t believe I made anything in that place. The trays were on a washing machine. Around that time is also when LAAMS started. I had worked with Scott Selvin and Stevie Baker for a few years prior, so we did it together. The shop was an opportunity to show what I’d been working on. I had experimented so much, and things began to click. I began to understand what worked and didn’t work, whereas in the beginning, I was just trying things out, seeing if I could make something at all.

How did you find your style? It’s so easy for me to identify when something is a JOERO piece.

I wasn’t searching for it. It was a result of the process that I was doing. The style of making pictures and collaging them together with sewing was a direct result of the limitations of my materials. I wanted to make bigger pictures, so I tiled the paper together and began experimenting with ways to make my pieces larger with tape and thread. I was also learning how to sew books and zines, so it all went hand in hand.

I would say there was at least a few years, maybe more, of making pictures that were pretty generic overall. But once I started really doing it, then it happened naturally and relatively quickly, because it’s a direct result of the process and the workflow. That said, I don’t want my style to just be a cheat code. I could easily be like, “I’ll just write on this picture, sew it together, and now it’s a JOERO piece.” I’m trying to think about it more critically.

If you’re thinking more critically about what your work is saying, what does it mean to you? Not that art has to “say” anything, really.

I’m assisting this teacher at the International Center of Photography named Jim Megargee, who teaches black and white darkroom classes. He’s one of the greatest living master printers. He says, “There are a lot of people who have something good to say. But because they don’t know their craft, what they’re saying isn’t clear. They don’t have the vocabulary. And then there’s people that are really good at the craft, who don’t have anything interesting to say. You want to be somewhere in the middle.” So I want my process and the form to compliment my message.

Tell me about your creative routine. How do you structure your creative output?

I wouldn’t say that I have a particularly good routine, but it’s about the regularness of doing it every day somehow, consistently, in whatever way makes sense to you.

There’s two parts to my process. There’s picture-taking, which I try to do every day. The second part is a completely different area of my brain. It’s reflective, and I’m looking at photos I’ve already taken. For me, it’s important to dedicate the time and the space to let something happen. I try to look at my pictures often and work on prints. Even when something good isn’t happening, having the space, sitting down, and doing it is important. Then when you have an idea and need to act on it, there’s less resistance.

What advice do you have for people who are starting to make art and are scared?

This is not for the faint of heart. You can’t be a tourist. For someone to really make an impact, to make something worth saving and preserving when you’re gone, you gotta be pure. The art has got to be what you’re about. It takes a lot of courage. Make time for it every day when no one is watching, and no one cares. And that’s the most beautiful time, because it’s when you’re experimenting freely and it doesn’t matter.

The more you do, the more you’re more self-critical. You want to outdo yourself. And then you have to have the bravery of putting yourself out there to show it and put it in the world. But there is no rush.

Are you nervous when you’re showing people your art?

Usually there is enough time in between when I’m presenting something to the world and when I’m actually creating it and getting initial feedback. The self-questioning phase when you’re like, “Is this good? Do you like this?” That’s when only a trusted group of people, maybe one or two, are seeing the things as you make them. I try to really protect that phase. I don’t want unsolicited advice, because then the art becomes something I don’t want it to be.

How do you decide what you’re going to write on your images?

It’s completely performative. It’s like a journal. I just write what’s on my mind. And sometimes I’ll make it really hard to read. I write things that I wouldn’t say aloud.

How do you determine what’s worthy of being photographed?

I try to view everything equally. It’s complete instinct. If anything catches my attention, if I even thought to look at it, then it’s worth photographing. It’s different with a big camera, like my large-format camera. Everything is heavier and more expensive. I’m under a curtain, so I need to be methodical about what I’m shooting. It’s slow and it takes mad time, but I follow the same instincts.

What’s your relationship to social media? You post pretty sparingly, I’d say.

Content is soulless. It’s noise that no one needs, noise that’s meant to be consumed and then thrown away, with no lasting impact. I hate it. But sometimes, it’s a necessary evil as an artist. For me, it’s better to make something in real life and share that, rather than making “content.”

What made you start LOOK Publishing? What’s it like running your own small press?

LOOK Publishing is about making things that can exist in the world for myself, for my friends, and for people I admire. In making my own books, I learned how to lay out a book, print it, get resources, and execute a vision that felt like mine. It started with self-publishing my own stuff. I began to make small editions of 50 copies, maybe 100. Then other people I know wanted help making books. Since I already figured out how to do it myself, I was glad to help publish their ideas.

I run LOOK with Alex Barcenas. Primarily, we lean toward handmade books. We have a risograph printer, so usually some portion of an edition is risograph-printed. I want to help people that have never printed a book before, or publish projects where I know the person personally. I want to encourage them to put their work in the real world. Every time we make a new book we’re like, “I’m never using that method again.” We’re folding and binding and sewing everything ourselves. It’s good we’re not trying to make a living off of making books, because we’re able to work on only the projects we care about.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Madeline Howard.

Do what you gotta do to keep writing. That’s really it. Make sure you don’t get so sucked into a day job that it becomes more important than your writing. I know so many creative people who took their day jobs too seriously. It interfered with their work.

If you can find a job where you can phone it in a little—don’t take it home—that’s ideal. Kevin Killian used to write at his day job as a secretary. That’s the dream [laughs]. Something you can do while still feeding your art.

It’s okay to want your art to support you, but if that becomes your main focus, it can get in the way. You start creating with the market in mind instead of serving your voice. So just remember: what can you do to serve your writing? Not the other way around.

You recently started Dopamine Books and edited your second anthology, Witch, which comes out in May. When putting it together, did you solicit contributions or open submissions?

I did all solicitation. I did the same with Sluts, which was last year. The first anthology I ever did was Without a Net, and I opened submissions for that. I didn’t know what I was getting into. It was wild—so many contributions. And honestly, a lot of people clearly didn’t even read what I was looking for. Submissions that didn’t make any sense, not on theme at all. It was a learning experience.

Open calls are amazing because you get people you wouldn’t normally get, of course. But at this point, I know so many writers. I’m always learning about new writers—someone recommends someone, a young or emerging writer. I have a huge file. I’m writing down everyone’s name. I pull from people who I know will surprise me.

As someone who’s so prolific and wears so many hats, what did you learn about managing your time?

I try! [laughs] It changes day to day, month to month. It really depends on how busy Dopamine is and how busy I am. Do I have my child a lot? I share custody with my ex, so I’m way more productive when I don’t have a child around. That makes a difference.

Sometimes I try to create structure. Like, is this a day for administration? For Dopamine? For my own writing? Or is this a day off—to clean my house, see a friend? I try to structure days like that, but it often falls apart because something else needs attention and just creeps up.

This year I got into Yaddo after applying for a long time, and it was amazing. I’ve been to one other retreat, plus some I organized myself when I was doing Radar Productions. I’m working on a book right now, and I really feel like if I don’t have retreat space, I can’t get lost in it the way I need to. I came back from Yaddo and was immediately like, “When do I have a week? Where can I go? Who has a back house?” [laughs] I was like, I don’t care if it’s in LA—just get me out of my own house.

I can get in that zone and get really feral, and just work in a way that I can’t otherwise. I need that full immersion. I can be really inspired by press deadlines, but when it comes to something creative or fiction, I have to live in that world. I have to go to sleep and wake up in it.

When there are all these daily responsibilities—whether they’re to my own work or to Dopamine—it cuts into the obsession you need to really surrender to. I say no to opportunities all the time. AWP was just here on a weekend I had my kid, and I basically didn’t go to anything. It was probably the best decision ever. [laughs] Honestly, I probably got out of stuff that other people wish they could’ve used their kid as an excuse for.

You’ve been in the publishing industry a long time. How have things changed for you as an author?

Authors have to do way more now. That’s just real. But there are also tools that make it easier. I started on small presses, and even now when I’m with a bigger press, I’m the small author on a big press, so I still do a lot for myself. I hustle. I think publishers like that I hustle.

Whether it’s getting my own blurbs or booking my own tour, that’s part of it. What’s funny is, I’m supposed to be getting blurbs for a novel I have coming out this fall, but I’m too consumed with getting blurbs for Dopamine’s authors. And I’m like, why isn’t my press doing this for me? [laughs]

But I want to give our authors as much as I can. That’s our reason for existing.

Do you organize book tours and promotion for Dopamine, too? Or do the authors take the lead?

We want the authors to do as much as they can, but I do book the tours. I’ll help them find an interlocutor if they don’t know anyone. We promote on Dopamine’s Instagram and through my personal network.

It’s more successful when authors have their own vibrant networks. We’ve seen a big difference between folks who do and folks who don’t. And it’s rough, because writers shouldn’t have to be popular. I never want to put that pressure on them. But the truth is, if you have a big network, word gets out, more people come.

Do you think live events and touring still matter in a digital publishing world?

Yes! Publishers rely on the internet way more now—instead of an author tour. Author tours used to be something we had to push for, but now publishers often don’t think they make a difference. I think that’s insane. Touring is what gave me my career. You can’t replicate that online.

Zoom events kind of suck. [laughs] Every now and then I’ll do one if it’s fun—City Lights did a great event for Dopamine. There’s a great store, A Room of One’s Own, in Madison, Wisconsin I love working with. But in general, I’m like, put us on tour.

Live events keep it real—being in a room with people keeps me connected to my voice and purpose in a way the internet never can.

We can’t financially assist with our authors’ tours, so if folks don’t want to go, I get it. It’s expensive. But if you’re able—if you’ve been wanting to go to a town anyway—do an event. It makes a difference.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Jennifer Lewis.

Noah Van Sciver: Comics are more easily accessible. They’re visual, so they grab people’s attention right away. It’s sort of like a sugary way to get somebody to eat their medicine, to take their pills.

Ryamond Tyler: One of my favorite things about comics is that they really lend themselves to social history. In 1912, there was this piece Eugene V. Debs wrote titled “The Cartoonist and the Social Revolution,” in which he lays out the importance of cartooning and the socialist movement. Funny enough, that was a contributing factor to why in the DSA comic Eugene V. Debs is the narrator. It was a contributing factor because he had such a favorable view of cartoonists.

The thing about radical cartooning is that it’s always been central to the Socialist movement. There were some great IWW cartoons that came out in various forms. You could look at those IWW cartoons and could get a general political sense even more so than maybe sitting down and reading Capital, Volume One.

One thing I’ll say is that, generally speaking, the ruling class gets upset about comics and cartoons throughout history. All the way back in the 18th century, there was this gentleman named William Hogarth who created a series of etchings called “A Rake’s Progress,” and it was ridiculed and widely hated by the ruling class and loved by the peasantry and workers in general. And then you can go all the way to Fredric Wertham writing Seduction of the Innocent, and it kind of speaks the same sort of denigration of the cartoon of being a medium that appeals to everyday people.

I feel like that history can be very inaccessible at times, and then the comic book can make it very accessible.

We’re at a point where comics and cartoons are as popular as they’ve ever been because of the movies and the proliferation of manga. That said, people don’t really seem to have a sense of how historical and prevalent comics have always been and how political they’ve always been, so getting that historical perspective is great. Raymond, you’ve written a number of other comics about historical social justice movements, too. What patterns do you see between all those stories?

Raymond Tyler: One of the things I often say is that there’s a hidden history in the United States, and it’s a history of people being very capable of organizing their own lives.

What you’re going to see if you read any of my other comics is people who are immensely capable of doing a great deal of organization without bureaucratic or hierarchical institutions, at least in the sense that they exist today. To put it simply, as far as a theme in history, people don’t need kings or tyrants to manage their lives… People are perfectly capable of managing their lives, their workplaces, and even the economy. This is the theme of all of my comics.

Noah, what changes to your usual comics process did you make for this project, if any? I know you’ve done some work in this space, you’ve done some autobiographical work as well, so would love to hear more about how you approached this collaboration.

Noah Van Sciver: I tried my best to use my limited skills to be as realistic as possible and not to cartoon and go for humor, which is something that I naturally, automatically have to catch myself doing. I tried to take it more seriously because my big concern doing this was that I knew if I messed up, if I slipped, one of my drawings could be used as a right wing meme. So if I’m drawing AOC, I better make sure that it’s as accurate and serious as I can make it, because I don’t want to see it wind up on X as a meme or something.

Were there any other comics that you referred to as an anchor point of what you wanted this book to feel like or be like?

Noah Van Sciver: Not that I recall. Did you have anything in mind, Ray?

Raymond Tyler: No. I mean, I will say that I actually looked at you and Paul Buhle’s Eugene V. Debs comic, and I love the way that you draw Eugene V. Debs. Some of the panels and some of the writings here were designed for you to bring out that amazing work that you did on the Eugene V. Debs comic. But besides that, I don’t think so.

Noah Van Sciver: It was great to be able to get back in touch with Debs for this comic after doing it for that book and being like, “Oh, yeah, that was a great time.” I had such a great time doing that book, and I can see it when I look at the artwork I did for it that I was having a blast. I was lost in it. And so that was a really delightful surprise when I’m like, “I get to go be with this character again.”

We interviewed Paul for the Between the Lines campaign for Partisans, which Raymond, I know you were an editor on. He has this really interesting wealth of knowledge. He’s been in the space for such a long time. Were there any lessons you learned from him either about the process of making a book or about history in general that you’d like to pass on?

Raymond Tyler: I’ve learned a great deal from Paul Buhle, to say the least, I didn’t even know how to do history comics really before I reached out to Paul Buhle. What’s wonderful about Paul is just how accessible he was. I was working on the comic about the West Virginia Mine Wars, and it was just a dream at this point of me wanting to write a comic book about one of my favorite historical events. I reached out to Paul because of all the work that he’d done before, and he made himself so available, and he ended up editing that book.

There’s such an incredible amount he’s taught me. But one of the things that I love about Paul is he’s a remarkable wealth of knowledge in a very non-pretentious way. You can just talk to him and ask him about anything, and we both share the belief that history is for everybody.

I think that would be the primary things that I learned from Paul… Also, just the people that he’s put me in contact with like Noah. I was in contact with Noah because of Paul Buhle.

Noah, how about you? Any takeaways in working for Paul? It sounds like you’ve had multiple instances.

Noah Van Sciver: Yeah, I became friends with him in probably 2014 or something. We started working together and, same thing…. I mean, he kind of educated me on the secret politics of things or things that are happening behind the scenes in the arts or in literature that I hadn’t thought about or I hadn’t known about. He still does that. If I post a comic about Little Orphan Annie on Facebook or something, he’s there to talk about Harold Gray’s odious politics or something, or especially if somebody happens to be from Wisconsin or something, he’s going to tell you all about that. He’s been a great political teacher.

What was it like working together? What was the working relationship like of building the framework of this history and story together?

Noah Van Sciver: It was great for me. It was super easy. Luckily, Ray already knew my work, so he knew sort of what it was going to turn out to look like, and as I recall, he just kind of let me do my thing, and you didn’t have too many edits or changes or anything.

Raymond Tyler: I love the comics medium, but one of the reasons I love it so much is that I get to work with folks that I just hand the script over to, and I trust them to do their best work. I was so excited to work with Noah. I told him before he hopped on, he did one of my all-time favorite books, which is Joseph Smith and the Mormons. And so when Paul was like, “I’m going to message Noah,” I was so excited. I was like, “I didn’t know that that was ever an option.”

Then, I just got to add really quick, it was such a pleasure working with the DSA Fund and the DSA NPEC.

One of the other beautiful things about comics is finding those collaborators where you’re able say, “Hey, I’ve done my piece. I’m going to hand it to you.” And it is that group effort. Nobody’s struggling or choking a project for control or a high amount of visibility.

Raymon Tyler: That’s something I talk to other writers about a lot of times because there are some writers who can be really militant about what an artist draws and where they put it, and one of the recommendations I would always make to writers, especially new writers, is work with artists that you trust and know that they know a lot more than you do about art. They’ve worked on this craft for a long time, and you can have preferences, I think, but you never want to work with an artist, and then the artist feels like they’re just drawing a panel over and over again the exact way that you want it. It just kind of ruins the whole process. So that’s always a big recommendation that I have for anyone. Hand it over and trust them to do some great work.

Noah, you alluded to this earlier—there’s a level of letting people have fun with the process, too. I work with a lot of artists on role-playing games that I make, and I’m just like, “Put whatever you want in there,” but if there’s references or specific things, depending on the gist of the game, it is nice to see what people come back with, from a writer’s perspective in terms of little Easter eggs, because art is 50% of the product.

Noah Van Sciver: Earlier you asked about why we decided to use comics tell this kind of story, and I just want to say that I really believe that comics are a machine for empathy in that it’s a very private medium. Somebody has to sit alone and read this thing. It’s a one-on-one communication, and you’re telling a story as a cartoonist or as a writer, you’re having to live in somebody else’s skin and communicate what that living is like, and then the reader is taking that in and they’re becoming the person whose story you’re telling, and it begs you to have empathy.

I think that using comics to tell these kinds of stories, stories about having empathy for others and living in other people’s skin, it’s a powerful natural tool. It’s the best way to do it, I think even better than film, because film is passive and comics are active. You have to take part in being a part of that story. So I think comics are the best way to get people to live in other people’s shoes and see what their lives are like and have empathy for them.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Sam Kusek.

Yes, I wrote a short story called “Auntie Shirin,” which was published in McSweeney’s in 2018. The story is about an Iranian family, and it was the first time that I’d seriously tried to write about people from my culture, about Iranians. I’d been hesitant about doing that for years.

Before then, if I was writing a short story, there’d be a character in my head or a line of dialogue or a situation and I’d just follow that little piece of inspiration as far as I could. That didn’t really involve my cultural history or background, and that wasn’t why I’d initially gotten interested in writing fiction.

I was actually working as a lawyer and I took a fiction writing class, a one-day class, and I remember that in that class, I was shaking in my seat because I was being given this permission. I thought to myself, “I can write anything I want. Anything. Anything!” It just felt so freeing and like nothing I’d ever felt before in my life. So to me, having that kind of limitless possibility in the subject matter was really important. Focusing on what was closest to me, in terms of family background or culture, at that time it might have felt more constraining. It just wasn’t appealing to me.

So I was writing short stories for a number of years. Then, with this story, I think what was different about it for me, and why it ended up later becoming my novel, The Persians, is that these characters were formed to me in a way that characters hadn’t been before. I think it was because I let them be from my background and so I had all these ideas. I was just getting to know them, but I felt very strongly that I wanted to know everything about them. I wanted to know why they were the way they were, what happened to them, what their problems were. I had this level of care for them or curiosity that just kind of burst open a bubble, where I felt like, “There’s so much there. There’s so many directions I can go with this.” It felt extremely exciting.

Writing for me was such a lifeline from the career track that I’d always been on, between work and school, work, school, work, school, and always having a very concrete goal. I think what attracted me to short stories was that it felt like it wasn’t a career choice. I was following my artistic passion. That’s why I didn’t go into writing thinking, “Well, I’d like to be a novelist.” Because that would’ve felt like I was just going from one career choice to another, and that would’ve cut off my feeling of infiniteness at what was available to me at the time.

I’m curious how that’s affecting you now that you are a novelist. I don’t know if you’ve started working on your next project yet, but do you still feel that sense of limitlessness, or how are you holding it?

That’s a really good question. I’m finding that a bit challenging at the moment, I have to say. The book just came out in the UK, it’s coming out in the US, and it’s been a really exciting time, but it’s also had its stresses. It’s extremely activating. For me, it hasn’t been very conducive to writing fiction and being creative. That’s where I really want to be. That’s what I want to be doing, I want to be back in that place. I’m yearning for that feeling again.

I know there are some writers who seem able to do both at the same time, the promotion and the writing. I think I need to work on walls of protection for myself. Maybe as a first time novelist I haven’t quite figured out how to do that. I’ve been falling into kind of the opposite of having those walls of protection for myself, as I Google the book’s Amazon reviews, for instance. Which is not helpful for having that kind of calm mind or infinite expansiveness that I think you need to feel when you’re writing.

Yeah, you’ve been feeling very porous during the publishing process.

Exactly. I haven’t been someone who’s not read her official reviews. So far, I’ve had a few reviews over in the UK, and I felt very grateful about them. I felt like, “Okay, someone out there is seeing what I’m doing and they get what I’m trying to do.” That has helped me. I kind of hate that I have to rely on another person’s opinion to create that, but that’s just how it is right now.

I really wonder about this. Because…isn’t the whole point of publishing books, to feel received by people in the work? Like, as an artist, I’m sure you got a lot just from writing it, but then you decided you wanted to share it by publishing it. And the reason you wanted to share it was you wanted it to be received by people who understood what you were trying to do, so of course that feels good when it actually happens.

No, you’re absolutely right. I would just be writing and putting things in my desk drawer if I wasn’t interested in communicating to other people. But I do think there is a healthy kind of distance that one can create between, “This is my work and this is me and I’m not my work.”

That makes sense. One thing I’ve noticed in both your stories and your novel is this distinctive emotional tone. You strike this balance where your work has genuine feeling and poignancy, but it’s never overwrought or purely melancholic. Instead, there’s often this interplay between humor, intelligence, and emotional depth—it’s not just ironic or detached. Is that emotional balance something you consciously cultivate during your writing process, or does it emerge naturally? Do you find yourself editing toward a particular emotional tone?

In a way, I use humor in my writing as my way of painting pain, my way of expressing pain. I think some people have a need to make jokes about the world we’re in and our lives and our feelings. I’m in that category, because I think that life is really funny. People are funny and life is funny. It’s also really sad and things are really hard. So I think I have these two feelings about life that you might think would be very separate, but I think that they’re really tied together.

When I started seriously writing fiction was right around the time that my dad died very suddenly, and I very clearly saw that there were these two ways of living at the same time. I had my actual life that felt very sad and I was in grief and confused and almost paralyzed by what was happening around me, and then I had this other life that I could go into and write fiction. It felt like somewhat of a relief to be able to go into another world where I could find funny things, even about really sad things, because I do think that crying and feeling your feelings is really important. I think humor goes along with pain, and I feel like they’re twins together, in a way, for me and in my writing.

I totally agree. If there’s a short story writer who’s reading this, and they’re like, “I want to write a novel, but I really don’t feel like I can or know how,” what would you tell them?

I was going into it not knowing what would happen, and I think maybe that’s the exciting and frightening thing about writing a novel. Compared to a short story, where you have maybe 15 pages to figure something out, with this, it could be as many pages as you want really.

I do remember at times thinking, “Wow, am I writing a novel?” Not fully understanding what it was. And maybe that was helpful. There was this feeling of, “I’m here just playing. I’m here just figuring it out. I don’t know what will become of it.” I honestly didn’t write this thinking that anybody would read it. That gave me energy. I was just following what I thought was interesting.

All of your short stories that I remember reading are either set in California or feature characters that connect to California in some way. It strikes me that you moved away from California to London, and then you started working on this book that’s about more than just the California part of your identity. Do you think that being in another country, a new country to you, had anything to do with writing the book?

That’s interesting, about California. I’ve spent the majority of my life in LA. I think distance and absence are important to the way creativity works for me. Being at a distance from LA, from California, from the United States, I felt like it leveled things for me, where now I’m in a neutral place, London. I’m not in Iran, I’m not in the United States, I’m kind of far from my biological family. It felt like I was safe to explore these topics.

I love California and I love LA, but there are expectations around it for me, having grown up there. Living here feels more aligned to being a writer. I’m sitting here observing and I’m on the outside. People don’t completely understand what I’m about, why I’m here, and I can just do my thing.

People read a lot here, and there are mostly independent bookstores in every neighborhood, so it’s very much a reading culture, which is really nice, but it feels apart from any kind of celebrity culture or Hollywood. It’s not like, “Oh, you wrote a book. Is it going to be a movie? Has it been optioned?”

I think it’s really nice to have artist friends, but when it starts to feel like it’s a business, that aspect of it really turns me off. Nobody really cares what I’m up to here. And honestly, the people that do are mostly readers, they’re people that really care about books.

That’s so nice. I’m curious if you’ve had to work through any internal thoughts of: “This is taking me too long,” or, “I should have already had a book out by this point.” Because we met in 2012, at the Community of Writers in Tahoe, and I think you’d already been writing consistently for a couple years at that point. Now it’s 2025 and your novel is coming out.

Actually when you were saying that, I was thinking, “Oh, 15 years, that’s not that bad.” From the first moment that I took writing seriously, and thought, “Oh, maybe I’d like to do this,” to then having a book come out, I think that’s actually pretty good! 15 years is not that long. And I feel like it just has to take what it takes, in a way.

Sure, sometimes I feel I would’ve loved it if I had been writing fiction straight out of college. That would’ve been great because maybe I’d be on my second or third book now. But you never know. And I don’t want to tempt fate with those thoughts.

I think it needs to take whatever time it takes. We’re all here for a limited amount of time, so that’s maybe where some of that feeling anxious about time comes from. What I see with writers is that there are some writers who will write a book every year. There are other writers who take 10 years to write a book. And I don’t know if writing a book every year is the way to go for me personally. Art takes time. That makes it different from a lot of the world and the culture around us.

I don’t think being younger actually is an advantage to writing. I think having some maturity and wisdom is really helpful for writing fiction or writing anything, really. I don’t think a 19 or 25-year-old brain is one that necessarily has an advantage over someone who’s lived more years.

I feel proud that I’m not 20 or 25. I’m not a young ingenue. You don’t need to be that. And feeling like you do is a view that puts one kind of a life experience at an advantage—the person that early on, say, had that encouragement to be a writer, and had a family and culture that encouraged that. It takes a lot to break out from what is a more conventional life path, of not having a lot of support and backing for that dream.

If you’d asked me even a year or so before I started writing fiction, “Do you think you might be a writer in the future?” I would’ve never guessed that. It was something that I liked to do as a kid, but it never occurred to me that it was something I could actually do with my life. I’m being mean to myself when I start to think in terms of, “Am I taking too long? Is it too late?”

I don’t want to be mean to myself. I much prefer thinking, “Actually, 15 years is nothing and now I have a book.” And that’s a dream come true, really. And if I can write another one and that can come out too, that’s just another dream come true.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Janet Frishberg.

In the creative process, it’s not hard. It’s only hard to let go when turning in the final project. That’s the only grieving I feel like I’m doing, at that point. Only once it’s sent off to be commodified is when the grieving starts.

Why?

It’s the sad truth that music is a product. You just have to mature with the piece and remind yourself that you’re doing a job. And as much as you would love to put yourself and your spirit into it, it is at the end of the day a commercial product. Remembering that will help.

When you’re working on an album, do you have a clear vision from the start or does it evolve as you go?

It definitely is just something that evolves. Even if there’s a clear vision, it’s going to evolve on its own, so I just have to ride that wave until I figure out what exactly it is. It could be a record. I want it to be a record. But it could just end up being one song, or an EP. There’s definitely no telling where it’s going.

Do you feel tension between the business side versus the artistic side when it comes to making music? I’m curious how running your own label factors into the process as well.

I think one thing I’ve learned throughout this career is, in order to strive for efficiency and sustainability, you need to also facilitate the industry somewhere. Somewhere along the factory line… either inspiring others by giving talks to students, or opening a creative studio, or a recording studio, or just being a producer or a mixing engineer and helping other artists’ ideas get out and completed. That’s what I’ve taken away from a lot of this: there’s tons of jobs and roles within music other than rockstar.

I think a lot of people tend to forget that they can find happiness in different roles that aren’t the main character. And I try to remind myself of the same thing. I’ve always tried with Toro to sort of show myself through my songwriting, but it’s not necessarily about my story necessarily all the time. It’s about the artist’s story, and I try to connect with artists. I think that’s the one thing that I’ve always been attracted to: just trying to talk to the artist, as opposed to talking to a listener or a new face. I strive to talk to people who I’m familiar with, or who are familiar with me. Just a conversation.

Do you think that you’ve always been making music for the artist, or is this something that you’ve evolved into?

In a way, I think I’ve always been for the artist. Just given where my taste lies and what my goals and motivations are. I feel like whenever an artist gains traction, in any field, there is this tendency to just focus on money, and it’s really easy for that to happen. I have to remind myself that I got to where I am without money and it’s more just about the ideas. People really care about the ideas and they could care less about how much money you have. So that’s not the goal, I just try to remind myself. A good way of doing that, especially as a successful artist: you have to burn through your cash. And what I mean by that is, you just have to sort of live it. You hear whatever rappers or pop stars talking about whatever lavish lifestyle they’re living in because they’re actually living that. I don’t have that kind of lifestyle. It’s not really lavish in that sense. I’m not really striving to be part of that consumerist culture, so it’s more that I’m down with secondhand clothes and I’m trying to just talk to that crowd and really think about the bigger picture here.

It’s very interesting to me when artists dabble in different mediums or projects. You have the DJing and the design. Is there a discipline to how you work between them?

I made a deliberate decision around the pandemic lockdown to really focus. And it’s nice that I have the privilege to do these different art forms, but I think there was a little bit of imposter syndrome, earlier on in my career, where I was like, “I don’t consider myself a musician. I don’t practice. I don’t take lessons. I only play at the shows.” That is the practice. The show is the practice. I made a deliberate choice to just focus on music. And I think a lot of people will get to that step. Everyone can arrive to that step through a different path. Eventually you have to focus and just pick something. And for me, that’s music, and I think it’s apparent that music is my direction or my route. But as far as offstage, how do I fulfill my time? Yeah, I like to paint.

Tell me more.

I went to school for graphic design and it’s been a practice ever since 2016… I really feel like there was a moment where two things were pulling at me and it’s music or art, and I did have to make a choice which one to prioritize. It is kind of bittersweet, but you just have to pick a direction and go with it. I think mainstream culture appreciates people that are experts in their field. When you’re too much of a jack-of-all-trades, people can also lose focus of what you do.

Do you have a tic you have to fight against while writing or creating music?

I think at this point in my life, I’m a new dad and my time is not flexible, so I really don’t have time to get distracted by rational decisions or just being ADHD about things. I just have to be disciplined about stuff. I have studio time and studio days, and I have a team outside of my music management team that’s on salary as well, that’s just keeping me on track. Basically I hire my own boss. I think that that’s a thing a lot of people are a little intimidated by, because it stems from the 9 to 5 culture, and I think a lot of creatives might be turned off to that.

But I think one of the big revelations I had when I had a kid was that the 9 to 5 is for the kid. It’s not for us.</span> I could keep working before 9 and after 5. I think adjusting to domestic life and knowing that you have these eight hours to really get what you have to get done… yeah, there are two hours of interviews and then there’s one hour of recording and then one hour of painting, and then you go home and do whatever errands you got to do. At the end of the day, you can’t really lose yourself in the art like that because you will end up getting sidetracked.

Sometimes the best work happens when you have limits or constraints. Do you feel that some of your best work is created that way?

Yeah. Growth really comes from constraint. You don’t know you need to grow outside of something until the pot’s too small and you’re like, “I have to bust out. I need more space. I need more time.” So yeah, it’s good to feel those moments of constraint because it tells you, “Okay, it’s time to expand.”

How do you know when a project is done?

Luckily, I’ve had a lot of practice with that. At this point, it is my 15th year of doing music, which is kind of crazy. I remember the first record I turned in, and I was asking myself all the time if it was done or whatever. It was great, but in retrospect, when I listen to things or look back, I’m like, “I should have done this differently.” Things like, “This is mixed weirdly.” Those are the types of mistakes you don’t notice in the moment, but that’s how it has to happen. You have to be a little bullheaded about it, a little stubborn and delusional, so the vision just sort of happens.

I saw something yesterday. Someone posted a quote about, “Just make it exist. You can make it good later.” I thought that was pretty cool. Stuff like that reminds you it’s never really done. Even when you listen to music from the 70s that’s been remastered, it’s an example of music that’s not done. They’re still touching it to this day. They just bounced all The Beatles tunes to digital so that Apple could have it. The music is constantly evolving, so there’s really never a finish line. Your song could end up getting sampled, and that could be what makes you the most money at the end of the day—when someone else uses your music.

Once you realize that it’s never-ending and that there’s this infinite life to music—maybe in ten years, another app makes your music go viral, and it’s a song from 10 or 20 years ago—and you’re like, “Huh. Now I have traction again.” It’s incredible. So early on, I just accepted that it’s done for now, and you have to be happy with where that is.

It’s the same thing for paintings. I look at paintings that have already sold and I’m like, “Damn. I should have really done this sort of process before I sold.” Now I’ve found that process, and I know to do it from here on out.

What keeps you excited about making music after all these years?

I guess there’s still lots of uncharted territory with music, and each musician has their own different levels they’re trying to beat in the game. There’s no correct path, but I do love those moments when you’re making music with someone you really resonate with, or even when you’re making music by yourself and think, “I know for sure no one’s done this. This is crazy. No one’s ever made this sound.” Those moments are great. You get really high from them, especially when you’re collaborating and discover those things together.

It’s a very rewarding job. The things we make can really break down different cultural barriers, especially with music, because it’s so bound to cultural experience—whether it’s Black culture, gay culture, Americana, European folk. There is that DNA in it that keeps evolving, and it’s fun to use that as a communication tool.

What practical tools or habits do you use during the ideation process—like note taking, mood boarding, or capturing ideas on the go?

I do all those things. I do everything from writing notes to voice memos. I definitely use the Notes app for random little thoughts that come through my head. Other than that, I really try to keep it simple. I think if anything, a lot of what motivates Toro as a project is trying to blend genres and different cultures. I feel like a lot of the stuff I’m attracted to is outsider stuff and trying to bring that to the mainstream. A lot of bohemia and hippie culture did turn into what the tech industry is now… It’s a double-edged sword. I think about the passing along of information. I feel like that is probably the biggest agenda: how we pass information along generations and what’s worth passing on. I find a lot of my work these days is more tied to that ancestral line and finding truth through that story—as opposed to culture and politics—and trying to find the essence of my human experience.

Even if you look at my Instagram, I used to post a lot of my art or even pictures of myself on the @chaz.wick Instagram. Now it’s more nature finds and little textures that tend to inspire me. If anything, I feel like I’m telling people to look down at the ground as opposed to at their phone. It’s more about trying to find the human element and that human essence through all of this technology. There are so many layers between our communication right now… Here we are still trying to get to the root of these motivations. So it’s about trying not to get distracted by these little technological advancements.

At the end of the day, for me, it’s about face-to-face, real connection. Shaking hands and getting that face time in, because I feel like that’s the most efficient and rewarding way to communicate. I think that’s what I still love about touring, and the cool thing about music is that it puts us in front of people and forces us to gather, which is rare.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Rona Akbari.

Art in the Western world has been relegated to this side thing because it challenges profit motives, colonial motives, and imperial motives. But if you look at a lot of other cultures throughout history and a lot of Indigenous cultures, life is art. Culture is art. It’s a holistic thing. I reject the notion that art is a side thing.

I went to public school in Pennsylvania, and as is the case in many American public schools—especially in small towns—art and music are side things. Like, “Okay, you don’t really have time for these; it doesn’t really matter.” I’m like, “If art, music, therapy, and all these other things that are put on the side were actually put in the center, it would drastically affect culture and how we live our daily lives.” If we’re stuck surviving, it’s because we live in a world that does not value creativity. And I value creativity, and I believe that creativity is for more than just arts and crafts, or music or dance or painting, or any of these things. Creativity is essential for being alive. It’s essential to create culture. It’s essential to being a sentient human being in community, in ecosystem with other living beings on this planet.

I want to hear you speak even more on creativity being not just music, art, dance, painting, but something greater. Can you talk more about that?

I think that creativity is survival, if we reframe it. We have always needed to be creative throughout our evolution as a species. Creativity is essential, and it’s not outside the scope of what constitutes our life. It’s this sleight of hand by people in power to make you think you don’t need creativity, when in fact creativity is the key to our freedom and flourishing.

Wealthy people who want to maintain the status quo do not want lower-class and middle-class people to be more creative. If people have education and creativity, they can influence culture. They can influence the economy with their buying power or boycotting. They can reinvent their dependence on certain products, or they can farm. Creativity challenges the elite who run the world and who harvest, exploit us.

There’s a fundamental irony that, often in certain creative spaces, the audience is entirely wealthy people.

Yeah, exactly. I do feel that limitations in creative process and curation are important. For me, it means that having a clear process or aesthetic idea is a value. It could be quite a maximal aesthetic, and I’m still into that, but I can tell when someone has put thought into the output of what they’re doing. And similarly, a thoughtful curation I find really important. It’s not like I want art to be totally democratic. I don’t think that would be better. But I think there is so much room for more people to be making art, and for creativity to be more of a holistic part of every human being’s daily life. For more people to have access to art and art education, and to bring art into their own practices in whatever they do, even if they’re not artists.

On the other hand, for me, creativity is also connected to spirituality. I consider my musical practice to be devotional. I consider that I make devotional music, and that means it’s a spiritual music. Hymnal has been a process for me to further define what is my devotion and what is my spirituality. The creative process for me is also a process of exploring mysticism, and exploring not just a technical industrial exploration of art—of “I’m making an album”—but also exploring the magical or animistic potential of technology through creativity, of tools through creativity, to try to get to some feeling of divine or cosmic consciousness through intuitive choices.

Can you walk me through the process of editing your work? How do you know you’ve reached the point where you feel a piece of music is ready to share with the world?

I feel like that’s so intuitive, and it has a lot to do with my experience of the work but also other people’s. There’s a point when I’m putting together demos where I might share some demos with a few people. I’m someone who benefits a lot from conversations and feedback. I work in a very solitary way when I’m producing or composing for a significant time, and there comes a point where I want to start sharing it with other people.

I remember the mastering engineer Emily Lazar saying, “You have to think that there are two different types of listening. There’s the listening you do in the studio in front of the speakers, and there’s the listening you do that’s less work-centric, where you just throw the music on and grab a magazine or lie on the couch somewhere else in the room and listen to it as an experience. Not so technically minded, not trying to interpret it, not approaching it with intellect.” I make changes very intuitively, but I experience my work. I try to find some kind of distance to it outside the worker’s room [as] someone who loves music—to listen to it and feel like, “Is this something I love to listen to?”

How or where in your process do collaborators come into your work?

I might frame that within a larger model of how I go about a project—and this probably doesn’t work for everyone, but I am a very meticulous person when it comes to processes and systems. I knew I wanted to collaborate with even more people on this album, but it’s also important for me to have a system for that… I’ve set out with some kind of process of steps or phases, and how they feed into each other. I like to set up these systems, and the systems have to have limitations, otherwise it would be too much.

For example, I set up two different recording sessions for Hymnal. One was a two-day recording session with the Sonar Quartett, a string quartet in Berlin. I had written a bunch of music on my laptop and then worked with Francesca Verga, a string player and arranger in Switzerland, to make arrangements. And then we recorded together, conducted the string quartet for two days—75% of that was pre-composed material with me in the studio. I had all these other strange vocal production sketches that I do in my free time. That’s my base practice. I produce with my voice. I had a few sketches I thought I might want to put on the album. We did some structured improvisation with the quartet. I would frame an improvisation like, “Okay, maybe in this style.” Or, “The two of you starting.” Or, “Can you play a minor chord?” Or, “Start with these pitches.” [I would] call changes in their in-ear monitors and work like that.

I did another recording session two and a half weeks later. I worked with demo string recordings, put together 20 or 25 demos from the string parts, and recorded with those. I knew I wanted to do a recording session that was only improvising with the voice because I wanted it to feel more folky and improvised. I didn’t write any top lines. I didn’t write any vocal parts.

That was fundamentally all the material for the album, from these two recording sessions. That was a system I set up, and I said, “Whatever I finish with, that’s what I’m going to use.” I wanted to explain that as the system, then say that there are different people involved—there was a really important collaboration that I didn’t mention as a part of this system. Can I share a bit about that too?

Of course.

I used very little, if any, English language on my debut album Fountain. I wanted to let it speak with the sound of my voice and the emotional impact of the sonics of my voice, to let that be at the center. That came primarily from being a native English speaker who really enjoys language. I was already touring in Europe for some years, and I had performed some very verbose, wordy English songs, and it felt weird doing this in Europe with many people who were speaking English as a second or third language. When I started to make music without any words, it was so freeing because I felt like I could connect organically with people without them needing to have a dictionary or a translation assistant… I loved the immediacy of it.

I think declaiming language on stage takes people out of the deep listening experience, the deep feeling with the language of music. A big process challenge for me [with Hymnal] was, I knew I wanted to bring in more language but to do it in an original, kind of fragmented way. I commissioned my dear friend Nadia Marcus to write eight poems to a prompt, which was this idea of a character who’s running around the earth in time-lapse from sunset to sunrise, through the night, guided by distant stars, exploring all the landscapes and creatures you might find on the earth, on our home.

The poems are absolutely beautiful. I’m really into astronomy and astrology. Nadia’s very into the symbology of tarot, so the poems have a lot of tarot symbols in them. They were still literally poems. But they affected the compositional process in terms of the fantasies or impressions I got to come out into music, just from reading the poems. We did this blackout technique where we only left a few of the words in each poem, key words or phrases. So most of the words were erased.

My idea was to work with a friend of mine, the Finnish artist Jenna Sutela, who had worked in the past with this single-celled organism, this yellow slime mold. She works at the intersection of post-humanism and technology, and her work is incredible. The slime mold was used in Tokyo to make a miniature map of the subway system with these little pieces of oats over all the subway stops. When they allowed the slime mold to grow over the map, consuming oats as it went along its path, it showed some paths for the subway trains to run that were more energy-efficient and faster than the existing system. Following the process strategy of one of the great American modernist composers, John Cage, I thought it would be really interesting to create a randomized environment using the collaborative intelligence of the slime mold. [We mapped out] a bingo card with words and phrases from the poems, then Jenna created an environment with the slime mold and oats for me to grow under my bed for a week.

I took pictures of it morning and night for seven days. With those pictures, I charted with arrows the path the slime mold took over the words. I used this as a visual score for my eight-day vocal improv session. Formally, what that meant was I had all these demos, and when I listened to a demo, I would find a section of the map that felt like it resonated with the musical idea, and then I would only allow myself to go to words that the slime mold had gone to. If the slime mold went forward and not backward, then I couldn’t go backward to another word. I had to only go forward. It was a really beautiful experience, and I feel that collaboration across the whole record.

I wanted to ask you about your journey of moving to Berlin, going to clubs more, and getting a new perspective on what it means to be a composer. What can experiencing club music in its loudest, most immersive setting do for a creative person’s process?

I got inspired as a teenager finding out that Björk had gone from Reykjavik to London when she was 25, and she wrote all this incredible music that was inspired [by] club culture and was working with a lot of incredible producers… I was really inspired by her courageousness. And I was always so into electronic music. When I finished studying classical music, I was like, “I need to just soak in electronic music culture.” It was this intense craving. It totally changed my approach to creativity, music, and socializing in general.

The slime mold morphs, grows into this multi-headed beast, and moves together. That’s a very good analogy for what happens to consciousness among human beings on a dance floor during a really deep set. It’s so immersive… Your breathing and heartbeat become kind of entwined with the people around you. You literally are electromagnetically charged with the energy of people around you. It’s very intoxicating and transformative. You feel like you lose your identity, and you merge into this multi-headed being that is vibrating with the music.

For me, being a raver, being a clubber in Berlin, was a big challenge to my ego, but such a gift. I was able to feel immersed in community and as a node in music, in culture. I am someone who grew up singing in choirs, so it unlocked this freedom in me to approach my music in a more choral way. There could be many voices in my music. It didn’t just have to be one. And that’s very freeing. It’s a very spiritual principle of trance, really, because dance floors are trance spaces.

I’ve been researching in the last year some different trance music coming from Sufi mysticism in North Africa, West Africa, Mauritania, Morocco, Senegal, and Tunisia… It’s resistance music for people to survive, build energy in their community, and overcome difficult circumstances. I was doing that as someone who was discovering she was transgender in a world where trans people don’t exist very publicly and aren’t supported very much. The histories of African-American music, blues, disco, house, Detroit techno—these are all musical cultures that started as safe havens in marginalized communities and spaces of resistance. It’s resistance music. I think that’s important to say because it’s a musical culture that’s about liberating people.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Max Freedman.

I have creative blocks of every variety. It isn’t often that I don’t have anything that I’m working on; I usually have a stockpile of story ideas. But I inevitably come to a point where I don’t know what to do or why I’m doing this, and I feel as though maybe somebody should have told me to get off the bus, or like I’ve lived through my expiration date and didn’t know.

But it’s not the end of the world if I’m having a still moment, and inevitably, curiosity wins the day. There will be something. You can even mine your own neurotic life for areas of inquiry. So if I’m worried about my age, then I start thinking, “How do I make a story about that?” Or maybe I go to a party and talk to somebody about a school in Granville and think, “What the hell’s going on over there?” Once there’s any sort of spark, you just make the call. I never think before acting on a story idea. I back into every story. If you crash around enough, you inevitably will find something.

Sure, there are dark nights of the soul where I’m exhausted and worn out. But what else is there to do? Rumble Strip is the way that I process the world now. It’s the way I make sense of things. Sometimes I don’t feel like making sense of things, but when I do, the show is what saves me.

You’ve said that when you started making Rumble Strip, you had no idea what it was about. Do you have a clear idea of what the show is now?

I really deeply did not know what it was about, initially. I wish more people started projects where they didn’t know what it was about before they started. I think that’s a great starting place for anybody.

I still don’t like answering the question because I’m bad at it, but it’s about helping people fall in love with each other across divides, I think. Generally, it’s about falling in love with strangers. It’s about the recognition that every single person is a world expert in their own life, and if we could understand what they understood, we could get through our days a little better. That I know is true.

I’ve interviewed people with unusual outlooks or ideas, and sometimes I’ll hear from a listener who’s like, “Wow, that person was a real kook.” It feels like they’ve completely missed the point—or worse, like I’ve only widened the gap between them and the subject. Do you do anything to shape how a listener receives your work?

Yes. First of all, I think there’s a difference between like and love. I don’t have to like people, but I do have to try to love them. Those are really separate things.

I can interview a neo-Nazi and be pretty sure that I don’t want to have dinner with them. But they arrived here somehow. I believe that there is utility in understanding how they got here. I also think that whether or not I like them, there’s a necessity to try to love them, and try to identify humanity in them.

I only have one rule in my show: I will not put out a show if I don’t believe I built a bridge, so that the listener can be inside with that person, instead of looking at them from the outside. The job is to make stories where we are not making guinea pigs out of other people.

How much of a role does editing play in how you tell stories?

I edit the shit out of everything I record. It’s like a 100:1 ratio.

We’re really smart when we listen—we can hear dynamic. There are always two things happening at the same time: talking—what we’re saying; and dynamic—the sound of how we’re talking.

What somebody doesn’t say is often just as interesting as what they say. Silence in a conversation has value. It’s not an absence of something; it has a substance. When I’m listening to tape, I’m listening to the sound of it in addition to the content. Content, dynamic and silence—all of those things have equal value.

Do you ever work on projects that have constraints like deadlines and sponsors?

I work for Vermont Public as a reporter, so that’s my money job. I love the job because they’re really good to me, and they let me make what I want to make. I never leaned on Rumble Strip as a means of income. I don’t think I would have had the nerve to start it if I thought that I had to be successful at it. I knew I was doing it in order to stop feeling profound regret or the foretaste of regret. That was why I started it and why I still do it. If I did it for money, I don’t know what would happen to it. It’s just not what the point is.

If you’re doing work that you care about for public radio, why then do you feel the need to also make an independent podcast?

I don’t have the license to fail at my job the way I have license to fail with Rumble Strip. And that’s important—the capacity to experiment. Rumble Strip remains that place where I can go for broke in a way that I can’t with radio.

Do you go into interviews with a clear idea of what story you want to tell, or is it more about talking to a person and seeing where it goes?

I often spend days before an interview imagining the person and thinking, “Who are they? If this is true, then what about that?” Essentially, warming up my imagination about a person or subject.

There was a young woman who I interviewed for a show about addiction, and I spent days thinking about what her life was like, and not just in broad strokes. Where was she the very first time she used? What was it, and what happened the next day?

I’m looking for anecdotes, so where would those be? What can I ask her that might really get my mom into the experience of active addiction? It can’t just be, “Tell me how that felt.” I have to really think about what the bridge might be to my mom from that young woman.

So there’s a lot of preparation. But then you sit down and hit record, and it’s terrifying because you really don’t have control over what’s going to happen. But it doesn’t mean you’re not prepared. You’re very prepared, but you’re also prepared to be wide open. You’re prepared to not have the next question. You’re prepared to look stupid, and to not know. You have to be able to not know sometimes, and let go of control, because that is where the most interesting conversations happen.

The best interviews are ones where you and the person find yourselves in some mysterious place where neither of you expected to be, and both of you have run out of things to say or ask. Suddenly you’re both just looking at what’s going on together. That takes preparation, and you have to allow for that. And that has a sound to it.

Tell me more about this mysterious place.

To me, that’s what god is. It’s the realization that we are here right now in this state, and we are together. There is nothing better than that. There’s an understanding that you are more alike than different, that you are both just trying to get through the day as best you can, and that you recognize that in the other person too. It’s a moment of shared humanity. What that silence is saying is, “Here we are”. That’s all it is. Two strangers together saying, “I don’t know, what do you think?” That’s beautiful.

How do you handle it when an interviewee says something you find objectionable or untrue?

I’m there to figure out what you know and what you think; it’s not my job to argue with you about it. If I’m reporting or investigating something, then of course I’m going to try to get to what the facts are, but that’s not usually what I’m doing.

After a big flood here last summer, I did a story with a woman who lost her home. She was in dire straits. Near the end of our conversation, I asked her, “What’s next? What do you do now?” She said, “Well, I don’t know, it’s hard. There’s a housing crisis, and millions of people are coming into the country taking our homes.”

I didn’t agree with that, but I wasn’t going to argue with her about it. That’s not the point of the show. The point of the show is for you to climb into her experience. I published the episode, and shared a link to her GoFundMe. A listener wrote to me saying, “How dare you not challenge her on that, and how dare you ask us to give her money?”

I wrote back and said, “I’m not a reporter; it’s not my job to correct her. I don’t agree with her, but I think it’s more interesting to hear that she believes that than to not hear it. I liked the balance between the story of a flood and the story of this belief of hers. There’s interesting tension there, which you clearly felt! But instead of seeing that as informative or interesting, you want to be right. So that’s actually an interesting question for you. You don’t think she’s worth helping because you don’t agree with her. Isn’t that kind of the problem that we’re dealing with here?”

She lives next door to me. That is what is true—she lives there, I live here, and she has lost her home. Those are bigger realities than her watching too much Fox News.

I don’t want to go down rabbit holes talking about people’s misguided political understandings. That’s just stirring coffee. Everybody’s doing that; it’s boring and stupid, and it’s not taking us anywhere. So what is beyond that?

Have you run into situations where someone you’re interviewing is not cooperating with your intentions for the interview?

I interviewed a 95-year-old lady recently for a show, and she was like, “I don’t need this. I don’t need to have any more conversations.” I was asking questions and leaning in, and she was just not having it, giving two- or three-word answers. So you think, okay, what can I get from her, where actually that is the interesting part? The interesting part is that she’s got nothing more to say.

Sometimes you have an idea of what it is that’s going to be interesting, and then you’re wrong, and you have to think on your feet. A lot of radio producers or reporters just manhandle it. They’re like, “No, this is what it’s going to be about.” Any interview where you’re not reacting to what’s happening in the moment is such a fucking bore. If you’re not playing ball—catching and throwing—then what’s the point?

I hate when an interviewer is obviously trying to set up their subject to say something that they’ve already said somewhere else.

Right!

So, do you have the same… Do you do this because you also have a weird interviewing compulsion?

I think so. I relate to what you said about falling in love with strangers. I think if we pay attention to someone or something that we otherwise wouldn’t, it can be very beautiful. So I like directing people’s attention to new places, people and ideas.

But why? Why do we care? For me, I think it comes back to the same thing—that there’s something heartbreaking about recognizing you’re in the same slipstream with strangers. Just the project of being human. To be reminded that in fact, other people are real and we’re real. I think we don’t always know that.

Every now and then we realize, “Oh, that person is real. They have a whole life with wicked boring struggles, heartbreak, good days and bad days.” It’s beautiful to remind each other of that. And not only are we real, we are more alike than different.

I don’t totally understand my compulsion to interview people, because I also find myself actively avoiding social situations all the time.

I think extroverted introverts are the best interviewers. I have to be alone a tremendous amount for my own sanity. My most important relationship is with myself. People leave the house, and I’m back to my real life, which is wondering what’s going on. I have to be alone to ask that question.

There’s this woman, Rose, who counts votes with me. Whenever we have something going on in town, a few people volunteer to show up and count papers, and I always work with Rose. We’re nothing alike, but I feel so filled up when I get to be with her for a little while. We’re not talking about anything important, just “How’s your son?” or whatever. But I don’t want it to end because there’s something I’m getting from it. In the parking lot, I don’t want to say goodbye to her.

In life, we have our family, our colleagues, our close friends, and then there’s everybody else—just people. Those people are as important to me as my dearest friends, because they’re the context of my life. They are the glue. They remind me that I am somewhere. We think our lives are just about the important people and the important parts, but it’s the lady at the store, the five-second conversation about butter. That’s your life.

But small talk can also feel like hell. There are versions of it that are meaningful, but talking to strangers at a party can really feel like a kind of death.

This is interesting. I hate small talk too. Small talk at a party is death. So what is the difference between that and my conversation with Rose at the town clerk’s office? They’re both small talk, but there’s a different investment. What is it?

Maybe it’s the opportunity to commune with somebody who I’m not going to be at a party with, who I’m never going to see at a dinner. That feels like opportunity to me. We get to find out where there’s overlap in our Venn diagram. That’s comforting to both of us because it makes us feel like the world is less bifurcated than we’re told. You can find love between people who have nothing in common, and that’s profound.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Fez Gielen.

Yes. I mean, this isn’t even the first one I’ve started. I’ve been in and around the book world a lot, I suppose, as a translator, and then my wife is an editor-in-chief of a publishing house, Catapult.

There’s something that draws me back to magazines, both in the sense that they’re a bit of a laboratory for what’s coming. My proudest moments ever being a magazine editor were when a piece that we’d published and worked on got picked up and turned into a book, or when a writer went on to embark upon the career that they wanted for themselves.

I think with a magazine, you can take a lot more risks inherently because of the scheduling. You can try three things out and if they don’t work, it’s only a month or a couple months until the next issue. But there’s also an ephemeral nature to it. What I mean by that is not that the writing is lesser or not as strong as what you might put in a book, but that there’s something about chasing the moment that is different in books. I think books have a different sort of timeliness to them.

Tell me more about that––that ephemerality and chasing the moment.

I suppose that with the magazines I’m working on–Kismet, for example–it’s not reportage and it’s not tied to the news cycle, but it is very much about writers trying to figure out what’s happening for people right now. In our first issue, there are a few articles that touch on that in different ways. Sheila Heti’s asking about how we can talk meaningfully to other people about the mystical moments that interrupt our everyday lives, and how we write about them. César Aira’s character has what he can only describe as an encounter with a ghost of his wife, even though he considers himself agonistic. I think many people who have experienced grief know what that sort of feeling is like. Then you’ve got Missouri Williams’ short story, which follows an older editor who comes to realize some very deep truths about himself just by reflecting and actually taking time to think about. There’s a gardening metaphor, as well, which is always nice.

What’s exciting to me is to get all these different writers from different places, at different ages, and put them up against each other and see where there’s friction, where a spark catches. The best part for us is that every two months, we get to do it all over again.

What do you think most writers need that they aren’t getting?

I mean, time and money are the big ones. Also, this might be controversial, but when I did my MFA, I found that the thing I most wanted to learn was how I liked to edit and collaborate. I don’t think I see too many things get better with two rounds of feedback from 12 individuals. I think finding a great editor who matches your style, who understands your vision and can help you be more of what you want to be is always the key.

I’m a bit more of a laissez-faire editor. The two beliefs I hold most dear are, one, that nobody knows more about the story or the article than the writer themselves, and two, it really is important after a certain point to get out of the writer’s way. I think things can be easily over-edited; their light gets extinguished. I always admire something that’s shaggy and ambitious and maybe misses the mark a little. I have a lot more time in my heart for that than the perfectly chiseled gem of a short story. Those things can be beautiful, too, but that style, to me, has had its cultural ascendancy. I’m much more of a baroque, “more is more” kind of a guy.

Perhaps it’s more exciting to work on something that has elements left to be explored?

Yeah. You can write something that’s edgy and experimental without having to have no verbs in it or something like that. I mean, there’s been a really big flattening of things. You see it in any sort of art form now, like with a Netflix-style documentary that’s meant to be recognizable and consumable. And I think small independent magazines are somewhere we can chafe against that, you know?

At Kismet, at the moment, it’s all online and all free. This is my other philosophy–you don’t have to read anything that we put out. I don’t kid myself that we’re at the forefront of what is the most important thing for people to be doing and reading.

Having a healthy relationship to literature is something that should be spoken about a bit more. I think a lot of people like to talk about how, “No one reads and we’re losing our ability to read,” and that’s not necessarily true. However, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to say that if you’re looking to really deeply understand a complex cultural issue, maybe you’re not turning to a novel first anymore. That might just be where we’re at.

Are there any books or writers who have changed your life? Or do influences feel more holistic?

There are some in there, yeah. Roberto Bolaño would be one. I think I’ve always been drawn to writers that have a semi-organized vision. I did a PhD on Latin American writers who had constructed an interconnected body of work across their books in the Balzac way. That’s something that really spoke to me, this idea of a parallel, connected literary world.

When I was a bit younger, I would articulate my passion for fiction by saying that it increases the amount of reality that’s available to me. There are some people who read to confirm or confront their own worldviews. For me, a lot of it really was armchair travel. There was a sense of wanting to see the world and get out of the skin into something so unlike my lived experience.

Can you talk about your experiences as a translator and linguist?

I started translating while I was doing part of my PhD in Argentina. I had a few friends who worked in publishing and part of their way of scouting for new books was to find someone who could read books in Spanish and write a bit of a report on them. So, I started doing that for a few places and approached it from that critical side. One of my reports was bought by a publishing house, and they asked, “Well, would you be interested in translating?”

I think, too, talking about how one has this sort of a life, that there’s no way I could have done that if I wasn’t in a funded PhD program. The amount of time and money it takes to do this doesn’t really compute with what the market’s got for it.

I’ll be honest, over time I’ve done a bit less of it because of those reasons. I’ve also been trying to write my own things and I find it more difficult to get out of the translating headspace. That said, it was a fantastic apprenticeship in terms of the high attention you have to pay. I think when you write, the phrases can come fully and flow. When you’re editing, you’re looking at the work as a whole, but translating is looking at one word at a time.

I would say that in a greater sense, translation is a very important thing in my life, but I don’t think I was ever interested in translation per se. It started out as wanting to read things that I couldn’t read.

I do believe in increasing the amount of reality available to writers, but I really don’t like the idea of having books in a translation section. I think these books belong next to writing in English. Calling attention to the fact that something that’s translated is useful insofar as it shows that we’re not living in a monoculture. Though, I can be a little skeptical of some of the metanarratives that have been around, which sort of imply that reading without translation just inherently makes you a better person. I think that’s almost going ‘round too far in terms of the globalist view.

You’re something of a polyglot. What are your top tips for learning a language?

My top tips… If you’re going to watch any movie, put the audio or subtitles in the language so you’re hearing and seeing it used all the time. Hearing it used properly is also important. Whatever your hobby or interest is, you can probably find that stuff in the language. If you like NBA, for example, you can go to the NBA website and put it in Spanish. It doesn’t have to be such a chore.

I was informed by an anonymous source that you have very specific ideas around which clothes should be worn to each event and professional situation, so I have to ask you about your outfits.

Oh, yeah. I’m not prescriptive with those sorts of things, but I do kind of believe in and enjoy a sense of occasion. Part of it comes from going to this very traditional boys school in Australia. We’re talking blazers and ties even in the height of summer. What we got to wear on the weekend or after school was something we really did get to choose.

I’m trying to think who put you up to this, but… Something can be lost when we think about the difference between style and fashion. You don’t have to be wearing expensive clothes to have a personal style.

I was at a party once with my wife and we saw these three guys, and we just couldn’t figure out what it was about their clothes that communicated something. Then, we hit on the fact that they were all wearing clothes head-to-toe that were brand new. It felt like they’d just gotten their packages from ASOS or whatever. I’m not here to cast aspersions or anything, but I think there wasn’t anything individual about that look except for, “I spend money on clothes.”

I think you can have fun with it. I think I used to wear almost exclusively monochromatic stuff. During the pandemic, we weren’t ever going anywhere. It meant that you could try something that was a little out there, but you’re only wearing it from the couch to the kitchen. Then there’s the idea of the sense of occasion. I like to say yes to things. A nice meal with friends–you don’t have to spend a lot of money to enjoy it–can be a pleasure you give yourself once, twice, three times a week. Is having a sense of occasion, having fun with it the be-all and end-all of everything? No, but does it bring an extra element to what life is? I think so.

You said that you’re working on your own writing at this point. Can we talk about that a little?

Well, all I’ll say is that I am working on a novel that I’ve been thinking about and planning for a very long time. I said to my wife about it, “I’ve written my novel. Now, I just have to write it.”

I’m on track sort of to have a draft finished by the end of the year. It’s something, you know, I’ve done every type of writing there is, really. I’ve done copywriting, speech writing, ghostwriting, translating, editing, but the thing I’m drawn back to is the novel.

I’ll be honest with you in this conversation, life has gotten in the way a few times. Now that I’ve got a bit more stability at the moment, I’m finding that I really enjoy writing it. I’m also at a point in my life where I’m like, if I don’t like it, if I’m not enjoying it, how could anyone else like it? That’s been a North Star for the project.

Has it been difficult to find or understand your voice when you’re always editing or translating other writers’ work?

That’s a really good question. It’s funny because I do find that every time I go back to visit Australia and I pick up an old history book or a novel that’s fallen out of discussion, or even talking with someone, there’s something vivifying about that. I think, again, we were talking earlier about this sort of flattening. There’s a specificity to everyone’s writerly voice. That’s something that I’m feeling much more comfortable leaning into. I think that’s also part of growing up, getting older.

Editing magazines and writers from all over the world, I’ve learned to value doing what you want. You don’t want everything to sound the same. I think what I’ve realized is that anything I like to read is always style-forward. Even a shopping list in the hands of the right writer can be interesting.

Given the nature of Kismet, I wanted to end by asking you if you’ve had any supernatural experiences?

I’ve thought about this a lot, and I’m starting to get this question given the nature of the magazine. What I come back to happened when I first moved to the US and to go to graduate school down in Tennessee at Vanderbilt. My mother got very sick, terminally ill, and basically, the hospital called me up and they said, “If you get on a plane now, it’s unlikely you’ll have time to say goodbye.”

I got back and she actually held on for about four or five months. It was sort of a long, drawn-out period and she eventually died. I had a very complicated relationship with my mother, and as when these sorts of things happen, it was suddenly just me and her. Everything else had to go on hold for an indeterminate amount of time.

When she did eventually pass–and I’m very grateful for this–I was in the room with her, I was holding her hand. For two or three or four days afterwards, I had this sense of clarity that I’d never felt before about so many things in my life. I felt touched by grace, I felt very forgiving, and very determined and sure about what I wanted in my life in many different ways.

I still recall that feeling. The air felt different. That’s, to me, the closest sort of thing to a mystical or supernatural experience. The sort of bittersweet thing about that is that the intensity of those days does lift after a while. Unfortunately, or fortunately–whichever way you want to look at it–time does march on.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Maria Owen.

Yes. I mean, this isn’t even the first one I’ve started. I’ve been in and around the book world a lot, I suppose, as a translator, and then my wife is an editor-in-chief of a publishing house, Catapult.

There’s something that draws me back to magazines, both in the sense that they’re a bit of a laboratory for what’s coming. My proudest moments ever being a magazine editor were when a piece that we’d published and worked on got picked up and turned into a book, or when a writer went on to embark upon the career that they wanted for themselves.

I think with a magazine, you can take a lot more risks inherently because of the scheduling. You can try three things out and if they don’t work, it’s only a month or a couple months until the next issue. But there’s also an ephemeral nature to it. What I mean by that is not that the writing is lesser or not as strong as what you might put in a book, but that there’s something about chasing the moment that is different in books. I think books have a different sort of timeliness to them.

Tell me more about that––that ephemerality and chasing the moment.

I suppose that with the magazines I’m working on–Kismet, for example–it’s not reportage and it’s not tied to the news cycle, but it is very much about writers trying to figure out what’s happening for people right now. In our first issue, there are a few articles that touch on that in different ways. Sheila Heti’s asking about how we can talk meaningfully to other people about the mystical moments that interrupt our everyday lives, and how we write about them. César Aira’s character has what he can only describe as an encounter with a ghost of his wife, even though he considers himself agonistic. I think many people who have experienced grief know what that sort of feeling is like. Then you’ve got Missouri Williams’ short story, which follows an older editor who comes to realize some very deep truths about himself just by reflecting and actually taking time to think about. There’s a gardening metaphor, as well, which is always nice.

What’s exciting to me is to get all these different writers from different places, at different ages, and put them up against each other and see where there’s friction, where a spark catches. The best part for us is that every two months, we get to do it all over again.

What do you think most writers need that they aren’t getting?

I mean, time and money are the big ones. Also, this might be controversial, but when I did my MFA, I found that the thing I most wanted to learn was how I liked to edit and collaborate. I don’t think I see too many things get better with two rounds of feedback from 12 individuals. I think finding a great editor who matches your style, who understands your vision and can help you be more of what you want to be is always the key.

I’m a bit more of a laissez-faire editor. The two beliefs I hold most dear are, one, that nobody knows more about the story or the article than the writer themselves, and two, it really is important after a certain point to get out of the writer’s way. I think things can be easily over-edited; their light gets extinguished. I always admire something that’s shaggy and ambitious and maybe misses the mark a little. I have a lot more time in my heart for that than the perfectly chiseled gem of a short story. Those things can be beautiful, too, but that style, to me, has had its cultural ascendancy. I’m much more of a baroque, “more is more” kind of a guy.

Perhaps it’s more exciting to work on something that has elements left to be explored?

Yeah. You can write something that’s edgy and experimental without having to have no verbs in it or something like that. I mean, there’s been a really big flattening of things. You see it in any sort of art form now, like with a Netflix-style documentary that’s meant to be recognizable and consumable. And I think small independent magazines are somewhere we can chafe against that, you know?

At Kismet, at the moment, it’s all online and all free. This is my other philosophy–you don’t have to read anything that we put out. I don’t kid myself that we’re at the forefront of what is the most important thing for people to be doing and reading.

Having a healthy relationship to literature is something that should be spoken about a bit more. I think a lot of people like to talk about how, “No one reads and we’re losing our ability to read,” and that’s not necessarily true. However, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to say that if you’re looking to really deeply understand a complex cultural issue, maybe you’re not turning to a novel first anymore. That might just be where we’re at.

Are there any books or writers who have changed your life? Or do influences feel more holistic?

There are some in there, yeah. Roberto Bolaño would be one. I think I’ve always been drawn to writers that have a semi-organized vision. I did a PhD on Latin American writers who had constructed an interconnected body of work across their books in the Balzac way. That’s something that really spoke to me, this idea of a parallel, connected literary world.

When I was a bit younger, I would articulate my passion for fiction by saying that it increases the amount of reality that’s available to me. There are some people who read to confirm or confront their own worldviews. For me, a lot of it really was armchair travel. There was a sense of wanting to see the world and get out of the skin into something so unlike my lived experience.

Can you talk about your experiences as a translator and linguist?

I started translating while I was doing part of my PhD in Argentina. I had a few friends who worked in publishing and part of their way of scouting for new books was to find someone who could read books in Spanish and write a bit of a report on them. So, I started doing that for a few places and approached it from that critical side. One of my reports was bought by a publishing house, and they asked, “Well, would you be interested in translating?”

I think, too, talking about how one has this sort of a life, that there’s no way I could have done that if I wasn’t in a funded PhD program. The amount of time and money it takes to do this doesn’t really compute with what the market’s got for it.

I’ll be honest, over time I’ve done a bit less of it because of those reasons. I’ve also been trying to write my own things and I find it more difficult to get out of the translating headspace. That said, it was a fantastic apprenticeship in terms of the high attention you have to pay. I think when you write, the phrases can come fully and flow. When you’re editing, you’re looking at the work as a whole, but translating is looking at one word at a time.

I would say that in a greater sense, translation is a very important thing in my life, but I don’t think I was ever interested in translation per se. It started out as wanting to read things that I couldn’t read.

I do believe in increasing the amount of reality available to writers, but I really don’t like the idea of having books in a translation section. I think these books belong next to writing in English. Calling attention to the fact that something that’s translated is useful insofar as it shows that we’re not living in a monoculture. Though, I can be a little skeptical of some of the metanarratives that have been around, which sort of imply that reading without translation just inherently makes you a better person. I think that’s almost going ‘round too far in terms of the globalist view.

You’re something of a polyglot. What are your top tips for learning a language?

My top tips… If you’re going to watch any movie, put the audio or subtitles in the language so you’re hearing and seeing it used all the time. Hearing it used properly is also important. Whatever your hobby or interest is, you can probably find that stuff in the language. If you like NBA, for example, you can go to the NBA website and put it in Spanish. It doesn’t have to be such a chore.

I was informed by an anonymous source that you have very specific ideas around which clothes should be worn to each event and professional situation, so I have to ask you about your outfits.

Oh, yeah. I’m not prescriptive with those sorts of things, but I do kind of believe in and enjoy a sense of occasion. Part of it comes from going to this very traditional boys school in Australia. We’re talking blazers and ties even in the height of summer. What we got to wear on the weekend or after school was something we really did get to choose.

I’m trying to think who put you up to this, but… Something can be lost when we think about the difference between style and fashion. You don’t have to be wearing expensive clothes to have a personal style.

I was at a party once with my wife and we saw these three guys, and we just couldn’t figure out what it was about their clothes that communicated something. Then, we hit on the fact that they were all wearing clothes head-to-toe that were brand new. It felt like they’d just gotten their packages from ASOS or whatever. I’m not here to cast aspersions or anything, but I think there wasn’t anything individual about that look except for, “I spend money on clothes.”

I think you can have fun with it. I think I used to wear almost exclusively monochromatic stuff. During the pandemic, we weren’t ever going anywhere. It meant that you could try something that was a little out there, but you’re only wearing it from the couch to the kitchen. Then there’s the idea of the sense of occasion. I like to say yes to things. A nice meal with friends–you don’t have to spend a lot of money to enjoy it–can be a pleasure you give yourself once, twice, three times a week. Is having a sense of occasion, having fun with it the be-all and end-all of everything? No, but does it bring an extra element to what life is? I think so.

You said that you’re working on your own writing at this point. Can we talk about that a little?

Well, all I’ll say is that I am working on a novel that I’ve been thinking about and planning for a very long time. I said to my wife about it, “I’ve written my novel. Now, I just have to write it.”

I’m on track sort of to have a draft finished by the end of the year. It’s something, you know, I’ve done every type of writing there is, really. I’ve done copywriting, speech writing, ghostwriting, translating, editing, but the thing I’m drawn back to is the novel.

I’ll be honest with you in this conversation, life has gotten in the way a few times. Now that I’ve got a bit more stability at the moment, I’m finding that I really enjoy writing it. I’m also at a point in my life where I’m like, if I don’t like it, if I’m not enjoying it, how could anyone else like it? That’s been a North Star for the project.

Has it been difficult to find or understand your voice when you’re always editing or translating other writers’ work?

That’s a really good question. It’s funny because I do find that every time I go back to visit Australia and I pick up an old history book or a novel that’s fallen out of discussion, or even talking with someone, there’s something vivifying about that. I think, again, we were talking earlier about this sort of flattening. There’s a specificity to everyone’s writerly voice. That’s something that I’m feeling much more comfortable leaning into. I think that’s also part of growing up, getting older.

Editing magazines and writers from all over the world, I’ve learned to value doing what you want. You don’t want everything to sound the same. I think what I’ve realized is that anything I like to read is always style-forward. Even a shopping list in the hands of the right writer can be interesting.

Given the nature of Kismet, I wanted to end by asking you if you’ve had any supernatural experiences?

I’ve thought about this a lot, and I’m starting to get this question given the nature of the magazine. What I come back to happened when I first moved to the US and to go to graduate school down in Tennessee at Vanderbilt. My mother got very sick, terminally ill, and basically, the hospital called me up and they said, “If you get on a plane now, it’s unlikely you’ll have time to say goodbye.”

I got back and she actually held on for about four or five months. It was sort of a long, drawn-out period and she eventually died. I had a very complicated relationship with my mother, and as when these sorts of things happen, it was suddenly just me and her. Everything else had to go on hold for an indeterminate amount of time.

When she did eventually pass–and I’m very grateful for this–I was in the room with her, I was holding her hand. For two or three or four days afterwards, I had this sense of clarity that I’d never felt before about so many things in my life. I felt touched by grace, I felt very forgiving, and very determined and sure about what I wanted in my life in many different ways.

I still recall that feeling. The air felt different. That’s, to me, the closest sort of thing to a mystical or supernatural experience. The sort of bittersweet thing about that is that the intensity of those days does lift after a while. Unfortunately, or fortunately–whichever way you want to look at it–time does march on.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Maria Owen.

My grandmother was a taxidermist. When I was growing up, she would give us stuffed wolves, stuffed gila monsters, stuffed birds, bear rugs. I used all of these in our haunted houses. They were pretty silly—we’d blindfold people and put their hands in something and tell them we were feeling eyeballs. The only cool thing was… We had this big walk-in refrigerated locker. I guess you were supposed to put meat in it, but it wasn’t used anymore. I’d open the door and say, “What’s in there? Let’s go look.” Then people would go in, and I’d shut the door and leave them there for a really long time. [laughs]

The film was very much an indie operation; you and [co-director] Zac Farley oversaw everything creatively. Do you have any advice for other filmmakers who are trying to get their indie projects off the ground?

Each of our films was made in a different way. The first one, Like Cattle Towards Glow, was financed through Germany, and it only cost $40,000. You can actually make a film for $40,000, but you have to get a lot of people who really want to do it and do it for basically free. Our second film, Permanent Green Light, was done through grants from the French government. This one was tough because it cost much more than our other films. It took four years to raise the money, and I don’t want to do that again. We want to make our next film inexpensively, so we’re trying to come up with something that we can do easily.

There was another film [at the LA Festival of Movies] called Debut, by this young director named Julian Castronovo. I thought he was a very interesting guy. He made the whole film by himself on his computer for $900. I would encourage people not to get intimidated by this whole thing.

We don’t expect this film to get a big release or anything like that. We’re just going to try to show it at interesting festivals as many times as we can. We were thrilled that [LA Festival of Movies organizers] Micah [Gottlieb] and Sarah [Winshall] wanted it.

At the Los Angeles Festival of Movies Q&A, one of the actors, Charlie Nelson Jacobs, mentioned that his audition process was like nothing he had ever gone through before—he said it involved answering a lot of questions about himself. I’m curious about how exactly you screened the actors and placed everybody in their roles.

The way auditioning worked was, we’d send a questionnaire to prospective performers and they’d film themselves answering the questions just so we could get a sense of who they were. “What do you love to do?” “What are you afraid of?” Stuff to get them to open up a little bit. We like to use people as they are—we don’t try to make them change in some way. We don’t really have a visual idea of the characters before we start casting a film, so we never have actors do extensive line readings. We mostly just sit and talk with them. It’s also about how we vibe, because we work very collaboratively.

You often work with actors who aren’t trained professionally. How do you approach that? Do you give a lot of direction on set, or mostly let them follow their instincts?

We like working with non-actors because they don’t know what they look like when they do anything. They aren’t paying attention to, “How is it going to look if I’m sad, or if I get angry?” They’re just themselves. In rehearsals, we explain what the film and characters are like, and we ask them, “What do you want to do with this?”, and then we might ask them to make adjustments. Once we’re actually shooting, they know what they’re supposed to do. We find the performances very pure. They’re kind of amateurish, but in a beautiful way.

You and Zac are credited as co-directors and co-writers on your various films together. How do you divide up work throughout the creative process?

I mainly do the script, because I’m the writer. We discuss what we want to do with the characters, and then I’ll go home and write, and then I’ll show it to him. He’s a visual person, so sometimes he’ll say, “This is interesting [on the page], but visually it will not be as interesting—can we set this in a different location?”

Other than that, he doesn’t challenge the writing so much. When it comes to directing, he is the director on set—but we’ve discussed everything ahead of time, and we know what’s going to happen, because every other part of the process is completely collaborative, from casting to editing to post-production. It might be too complicated for the DP to have to listen to two people, so Zac takes care of that, and I work on the performances with the actors. Sometimes, he’ll say, “Do you think the performance could be a little more like this?”, and I’ll say, “What do you think about shooting from this angle?”

Has your writing background informed your directing style in any way?

Well, I’ve written all these theater pieces for Gisèlle Vienne, and that’s how I learned to write for a sentient, three-dimensional, solid being that’s going to be speaking the text and moving around. Whatever I know about directing, I learned from theater.

How, in general, do you know when someone is a good collaborator?

It seems like I just fall into collaborations. When I met Gisèlle, I was going to Lyon to do a lecture about my work. She had read my books, and she wrote to me and said, “Do you want to stay a few extra days and try making something together?” And I liked what she sent me. She was working with this musician, Peter Rehberg, whose music I liked, and I said, “Ok, sure, what the fuck?” We made our whole piece in three days. We got along really well.

Usually, when I collaborate, I feel like I’m contributing to somebody else’s vision. I write the text for Gisèlle; I also am a dramaturg with her, but she’s the boss. I did a bunch of performances with Ishmael Houston-Jones in the ’80s in New York, and even though they were very collaborative, it was always Ishmael’s work, you know?

With Zac, it’s different. It’s not my work or his work—it’s our work. My projects with him are the first time I’ve done something like that.

How did you know that Zac specifically would be an ideal collaborator?

We’re totally on the same wavelength—we want the same things, although we have different approaches, which is good. We met through a friend of his who said, “There’s this guy named Zac who likes your work. He seems kind of like he’s at sea. Maybe you guys should meet.” We had a coffee, and I said, “Can I look at your art?” and I really liked it. I don’t know how you can explain these things—we immediately became best friends and started collaborating. We worked on some things that we didn’t end up doing. We were going to do a book about theme parks in Scandinavia—we might still do that one. And we were going to do a live performance with no people in it, in an ice rink—it was more about the machine that cleans the ice. Then the opportunity came up for us to make a film.

Was the book about Scandinavia going to be nonfiction, or was it more like a novel?

What we did was, we rented a car, and we drove up to Scandinavia from Paris, and we spent two and a half weeks driving to every theme park we could find in Scandinavia. We went to maybe 15 theme parks in Norway and Denmark and Sweden, and while we were there, I was writing these fairy tales set in theme parks, slightly inspired by Hans Christian Andersen. We may still put them together and make some kind of book out of them.

You should—that would be so cool. What’s distinct about the theme parks in Scandinavia?

There’s a little more mystical, a little more folksy. There are maybe three or four truly great theme parks there. A lot of them are very old. Our favorite park was in Denmark. It’s called Kungaparken, and what was really great about it is that every single person that worked there was a goth teenager. You’d try to talk to them and they’d be like, “Yeah, yeah.” They weren’t friendly. I don’t know what the owner’s deal was, but it made the whole thing very magical.

You mentioned your hatred for the Frisk movie during your Q&A. Would you ever consider adapting one of your books with Zac?

Oh, no, we wouldn’t want to do that. We’d want to write something specific for us. God Jr., which is kind of my “nice” novel, was optioned for a long time by the people who made Coraline, but that fell by the wayside. People always want to make The Sluts into a film or a play, but they all want to take it off the internet, which is stupid. I mean, it’s about the internet—you can’t.

Yeah, that wouldn’t work. I will say that when I first finished The Sluts, my immediate thought was, “How has this not been made into a movie?” Then I took a second to reflect on it, and I realized you couldn’t adapt it because you never know who’s actually talking or what’s actually happening at any given moment.

Maybe it could be one of those CD-ROM games from the ’90s—you know, when they were very primitive and text based. But I think it’s just not a good idea. My books are really about reading, so I don’t have any desire to have them made into films. If somebody interesting wanted to make one, of course I’d talk to them—but Zac and I don’t want to adapt anything. We want to make our own art.

The books are so much about language—especially when you use internet speak. The first short story from Flunker, “Face Eraser,” comes to mind.

I’ve read it out loud. People think it’s funny, but it’s much more about the page. I used to be really interested in emo; my novel The Marbled Swarm is about emo. There used to be these fascinating emo message boards and chat rooms; everyone talked like that, and it was beautiful. I studied them and stole lines I liked.

When you delve into darker subjects, do you ever find yourself disturbed by your own work during the writing process? If so, how do you deal with that?

No, never. I was disturbed by my brain before I started writing. I was disturbed by what I was thinking and fantasizing about. It scared me and excited me. But when I started writing, I could approach those ideas more formally.

Have you ever gotten messages from fans who write to you with the same obsessive tone as the characters from The Sluts and your other books?

I do, but I always immediately turn the conversation on them, because I’m not interested in that. People will come in as big fans, and I’ll ask them, “Well, what do you do?” And then they’ll say, “I want to be a writer,” and I’ll say, “Tell me more about that,” because I’m much more interested in them. I have this need to be supportive towards people, so I’ll say, “Let’s talk about you.” Then they start opening up about what they’re doing and what they care about. My blog isn’t really about my work at all, so I try to direct people towards other topics. Almost everybody who reads the blog is super interesting and smart and weird. I like for people to get to know each other, so it’s nice when they start talking to each other.

The thing about the blog is that it’s so old-fashioned. It’s from another time—which is what I like about it. Everybody’s doing Substack now, but it seems like that’s mostly about, “I have an interesting brain, and I can make some money off of my interesting brain.” It’s not about interaction.

I was going to ask you about that. With all of the Substack hype, would you ever transfer your blog to Substack?

I don’t want to. I don’t want to make money off it. It gets a large audience—like, shockingly large—so I could put ads on there, but I want it to be this weird free thing that people find. I like that it’s kind of secret—people stumble upon it.

At this point, you’ve done films, you’ve done novels, you’ve done poetry, and you’ve done theater. Is there any medium you haven’t yet explored but would like to?

Nothing realistic. I don’t want to make bigger films or television. I can’t really make visual art; it would be nice to be able to do that, but my GIF novels are probably as close as I can get. Right now I just want to keep making films.

So you’re more excited about screenwriting than prose writing right now?

I’m more excited about filmmaking. Screenwriting is just a teeny bit of it. I’ve written novels my whole life. I wrote 10 novels—that’s a fucking lot of novels. Earlier in my life, I was always experimenting, trying to chase new ideas. Now, I’ve gotten to the point where I know what I can do and what I can’t do. I’ve tried so many forms.

I do want to write more novels—but filmmaking is so exciting and so foreign to me. It’s such a complete challenge, and that’s the kind of thing I really like. I miss feeling like novel-writing was a crazy experiment. With the films, I’m still like, “What can we do? How far can we go with this?”

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Brittany Menjivar.

I didn’t think it was going to be easy per se, but since the art and creativity part comes somewhat naturally, I didn’t really study. I wasn’t a musician that was like, “Oh, I’m going to learn piano…” I think what I wish someone would’ve told me to do was to manage my energy a little bit. How to manage your output, how to manage you being a human outside of being an artist. I think that’s the part that I struggled with a bit —in terms of just remembering to eat, remembering to drink water, remembering to take time for yourself, remembering that you have a life that exists outside of the things that you do and make. I think that one is still a very difficult one. When the creative intuition is flowing, you’re just flowing in that. But you have to come back down to earth at some point. It’s like, “Do you have vitamins, girl? Did you take care of yourself at all?”

In your music, you’ve discussed needing resets from the digital world and its constant flow of information. What are some of the challenges the digital world presents for you and how do you deal with them?

I think some of the challenges for me, at least as it relates to being a music artist, is that there’s this constant need for content. I don’t think the time we live in really allows for much time for reflection about life between projects. A project can come out every five years; you can still do that. But every time you do that, you’re fighting against this uphill battle—now you have to bring all your numbers back up, bring all of the eyes back onto you… People’s attention spans can be quite short. I think dealing with that is a negotiation. Sure, you can constantly be in public and you can constantly be creating, doing, and making. But what are you sacrificing in terms of reflection? What are you sacrificing in terms of your personal life? What are you sacrificing in terms of how you want to spend your energy?

For me, I haven’t solved that yet. I’ve just been playing with different ways of being and exploring. I think it’s a balance. You have to do a little bit of both. I’ve discovered that I’d much rather spend my time in the bubble of the work that I’m making, and maybe outsource some other things that are not as interesting to me. A big one was touring. That’s a huge part of being an artist for a lot of artists. So when I first started to not be on the road constantly, constantly, constantly… you give up some things. But then you gain other skills. I much prefer to spend my time doing design work and building out the world a little bit differently, spending my time and energy in the creative space versus in the presentation space. I think everybody has their little balances that they do.

Why do you think it’s uniquely difficult to set boundaries with creative work? You were talking about how hard it can be to stop when you’re in a creative flow and return to self-care. What are some of the demands on you personally? Why do you find it so difficult to break away from the creative flow?

I like to honor that time because it doesn’t come every single day. It’s one of those things that’s like a train: you just have to catch it, and I don’t want to miss my train. I’m a creator that works in bursts, whereas some people have a discipline of a daily practice. That’s not how I work because I do a bunch of different things, so I’m always jumping between, “Okay, we’re doing our show. Now we’re doing music. Now I’m doing video work.” So I have to kind of catch the wave when I can. It’s hard for me to step away from that sometimes, because you don’t know when you’ll get that next big, big spark or that idea.

How do you keep yourself inspired when you’re not getting that big spark?

I do a lot of different kinds of projects, which keeps me inspired. I’m not always inspired to make music. I’m not always inspired to do design work. I’m not always inspired to do performances. But when I’m not inspired to do those, I have other things to fall back on that can reinvigorate me in other ways. Eventually I’ll get bored and then I just move over to the next one. That’s how I’ve figured it out. Or just spending time in nature, actually taking a break, traveling, doing things that create possibility in the mind is something that I enjoy.

What does a healthy relationship to your work look like for you in your ideal world?

I think it’s separating it from who I am as a person. In an ideal world, I wouldn’t want my work represent my entire identity or how I feel about myself—who I am, whether I matter, or whether I’m good. I think in the arts, we sometimes tie our [self worth] to our work because it’s such an expression of who you are, so how can you not link it with your identity? I’m trying to get to a place where I’m free of that. I don’t know if that’s possible to do, but I’m trying to get to that place where it’s like, I am myself and these are the projects that I’ve made, but I have a healthy distance.

Right now I’m practicing that. Even with this rollout and this release, I don’t have this weight attached to it that I used to have for past releases, where I’m just sitting there seeing if people are going to receive it or not. It’s this weird delicate balance because I’m like, “Am I giving my all?” I am. But taking a little bit of a step back makes me feel this twinge of guilt that maybe I’m not giving my all or my best. But actually, I’m giving my best to myself. I’m remembering what I need [in order] to be a functioning person who is able to do this again without crashing out.

What do you think has led to you being able to create distance between your self worth and the work? Anything in particular, or just time?

I guess a little bit of the futility of the system itself. I think just through trial and error. Through pain, through heartbreak, through failure—all of those things made me question things. Or doing a lot of stuff and being like, “Why did I just have to do that?” Things that labels will be like, “Oh my god, this would be such a good thing for you to do.” You’re like, “Okay, I’ll do it.” Then you do it and then you’re like, “Did that even have a point?” Then after hundreds of those kinds of things, or putting all of your money or your savings into a project, you’re like, “Oh, that didn’t return the way that I wanted it to.” You have successes and failures. That’s just life. When you tally it all up, you’re like, “If I have one life to live and I want to make art forever, how do I manage these things?”

What has this latest project taught you about being an artist?

It’s taught me that within my own practice, I love to build a world, and that just gets more and more clear. The fun parts of the project for me are the music, of course, but then it’s all of the other things, like the design work, the visuals, the writing. All of that helps me to understand myself, understand my world. It’s taught me to process where I want to go next.

As opposed to looking for a specific return or result in terms of the public, I’ve started to use projects as a way to guide my life on a more personal level. Where do I see myself? What do I like about what I’m doing now? What do I think I don’t need anymore? That’s what this project’s taught me. It’s always been there. But American Gurl was about systems that can be imposed on you, and I feel like Negotiations is a continuation of that, but from a more internal landscape. It’s similar to Reflections in Real Time, where I was just in my own head and being super heavy about things. Negotiations is a similar project to that. It’s taught me also to revisit concepts. I think now I’m just getting at enough years where I’m able to do that. I’m like, “Oh, this is similar to something I made 10 years ago…” So coming back to concepts and ideas and building upon them.

What do you mean when you say “where you want to be next”? Is that in terms of your identity and your personal life?

In terms of where you want to go creatively, where you want to go personally. Just everything. I think there’s no limits. Especially with creative work, you can build your own future. You’re literally the person that’s coming up with the ideas and putting them into action. I’m in the driver’s seat. You can truly go anywhere, so it’s a question of what do you actually want? I think that’s an ever-evolving kind of question.</span?

What is the most meaningful part of being an artist to you?

I think it’s the communication with god, and I think the communication with the ether. It’s pulling down ideas and having this internal dialogue with yourself that you’re then able to share with others, that prompts their own internal dialogues with themselves. Just the act of reflection and reflexive living, almost, where you’re living and you’re experiencing things, but you’re taking the time to truly reflect on them. It’s happening simultaneously and you’re able to open up these portals for other people to do the same. I think that’s a beautiful thing about making art.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Sarah John.

I first started thinking about making projects through my undergrad at FIT, responding to prompts that I got from different classes and then seeing what narratives I could make from that. Post-university—it’s already been almost five years [since I graduated]—I’ve been photographing a bit more intuitively and responding to the spaces in which I [exist]. Typically, the main thing that I pull out of my archive is the work with my family, both in New York and El Salvador. I’m very much a long-term project sort of person. I’ve been working on this family project named Adelante for close to 10 years. It started as one thing called Mi Familia Immigrante, which was a 20-image photo essay of sorts, describing this departure that happened with my stepdad when he was applying to get his residency here in the US after marrying my mom. He was undocumented in the US for 18 years, give or take. [My work] grew out of that specific time period, to this idea of returning and responding to different ways in which immigration has built my family dynamic in these places: New York and parts of El Salvador like Sonsonate, Soyapango, La Capital, etc.

You’ve discussed your experience using the Lomo Pop 8 camera. It made me curious: when you’re making work, what tools do you use and how do you decide which ones?

That’s funny. The Lomo Pop 8 camera: I love those pictures. I didn’t make a ton of them, but I do still really love them. That was fully a thing of me being like, “Okay, I know that I’ll bring a medium format [camera], I know that I’ll bring a regular 35[mm], but what are different ways in which I can make an image of something with existing formats?” Sometimes my approach is purely experimental. Like the Pop 8, for example, or cyanotypes or transparencies, or even appropriations of my family album. It’ll be from a standpoint of, what are the different ways in which I haven’t engaged with the medium that could add some interesting friction? Or that could add some additional context, that a straight image made with a very specific camera or specific format couldn’t do? So far, I typically shoot film. But I’m not really the sort of person that gets stuck in one medium. It just depends on what I have available, what’s economical, and what’s consistent.

How do you edit your own work?

Edit as in sequence? Or edit as in color correct?

I think your response to the question shows me that there’s two different ways that you approach it. So what comes first and what comes second, and how do those interact with each other?

Definitely what comes first is the color correction/post process. Because I’m typically shooting a high volume of film, it takes me a while to even pay for it to get scanned and developed and printed [before I] start to work within sequences. So in that way, my practice is structured as a typical photo archive would be. The good thing about, for example, my photographs in El Salvador, is that I’m mostly using natural light. So there’s a consistent sort of balance and consistent color profile, especially with the sorts of film that I use, like Kodak Portra and Fuji Films. It does help me tie in images that have nothing to do with each other into a sequence of images that could exist in sequential or non-sequential [order], as prints or in exhibitions. I will say I’ve mostly done group shows, so I haven’t really been able to figure out how a lot of [my] work would look in just one space. That’s a little bit more abstract to my experience at the moment. But I do sometimes think in the book form—even though I haven’t made a book—to sequence or put stuff together for people to view, or for a grant application, or even for myself to really sit and live with.

I do have a little bit of ADHD, so if I get bored looking at works that I’ve made in a specific sort of timeline, I try to find different ways to scramble them or turn them into something that stands on its own… There’s a lot of pushing and pulling that happens even when I stick to a structure. That comes out of experience with other photographers much further ahead who have advised me on ways to break my own structure.

How long does a project take and how do you know when a project is done?

This is my biggest anxiety, especially now that I’ve spent 10 years working on [Adelante] and I’ve disseminated different versions of that out into the world through web formats, print formats, etc. I don’t really know when a project is done. I don’t feel like I have the wisdom or the right to say… I haven’t published a full book of a wide edit; I haven’t done an exhibition. The typical markers that I feel like I would have to say, “Okay, that’s done. I said what I need to say with that specific thing” haven’t really happened in that way. I just know that things are in progress versus I have a feeling that things are complete.

Maybe this is me being an Aquarius, but I feel like you can always return to a thing and then remix and say something else that you might have missed the first time. With a photo you can really do that because an image can exist in so many different contexts. A straightforward portrait or photograph of specific items, depending on the context, can always turn into something else. I like that malleability.

Yeah, this is something I’ve learned as a writer and artist myself. It got to a point—and this probably helped my anxiety a little bit—where I realized, “Oh, I’m going to be working on these ideas forever.” Oh, I’ll be reading and looking at images for the rest of my life, and that’s the work.

I relate to that, too. It’s hard, especially for us as creative thinkers, to pinpoint if this perspective you have will be the same in a year, or two years, or 10 years from now. There’s that openness, that is exciting to a certain degree and also anxiety inducing.

Also, when I first started seriously engaging with photography, most of the photographers I was looking at were dead or at the end of their careers. There was an ending to their work. It’s such a different experience as an active photographer, realizing there’s no ending until I can’t make work anymore.

100%. I’ve recently been working on the side as a freelance archivist for different photo places and for living artists. That experience has made me [realize] there’s a version that gets put out, but then the artist in the future is still finding ways to refresh the thing that they’ve already made. You can always return. It’s definitely been really interesting, working for somebody else in their archives and seeing how they respond to it both on a practical level and on an emotional level.

What do you do when you’re creatively stuck?

I love to get physical and also leave things alone for a while. Like, literally unplug. I need to go and live and do something else that will then inform this feeling of being stuck. Not to be a Kardashian about it, but literally we’re just living life. I think as I’m getting older and as my mentors keep reminding me, I don’t want to get too ahead of myself. When I’m feeling stuck, I’ve lately been taking more agency, like, “I’m going to leave this alone and that’s okay.” The only deadlines that I have are the ones that I make for myself and that’s all I really need to think about or compare it to, you know?

I travel and experience different things, especially in El Salvador. I’ve done trips in El Salvador where I haven’t made any pictures. Even trips to my home and with my family, I’m not photographing all the time and I’m allowing myself space between the intent of photography and the intent of living. Then I don’t feel that sort of pressure to always be on it.

The thing you said about deadlines is so funny because last week I was freaking out about some deadlines that had passed. When I was talking to a friend about it I realized, “Wait, all of these deadlines are my deadlines that I imposed on myself.”

There are real deadlines. Obviously, if you need to return something for an opportunity, or you’re being reached out to, that’s different. Post-grad I had applications to residencies, grants, etc., and as soon as I graduated I was like, “I have to apply to all these things. I need to make all these projects. It needs to all happen in a row.” But then a friend of mine who is much older than me [advised] that when you’re applying to something, you have to think about, “Do you think that it’s the right time for you to face that opportunity and potentially get it?” That was really impactful because [they] were right. There are those opportunities that are exciting and of course you want to say yes to. But there’s also that question of, “Is this the best foot that you’re standing on for that experience?” Especially with photo, there’s only so many things that you can get in the US. So figuring out a way to pace yourself in the way that works for you gave me more of a calmness and less of a hurry and rush.

When you’re talking about when the opportunity is right for you, how do you think about it? What’s the thought process for figuring that out?

I think I look at the external factors. What do all these relationships [that] exist in my life demand of me now? That goes back to the different responsibilities that I want to take on. There’s also the financial responsibility. What financial responsibility do I have right now, to myself, to set myself up for something? What does that take away? Or, what do I exchange to get that responsibility done, in a certain sense. Can I take X amount of time away from not being in a specific place and feel like I can come back to it and still find what I need, as far as work? Even when I’m traveling or making work with my family, I’m asking those questions all the time. It’s a very “immigrant guilt of my late 20s” mindset. How can I continue helping my family? What responsibility do I want to give myself? How can I set myself up with my archive and then with my commercial practice in a way that I can balance it? I don’t plan to have kids so I don’t have that weight of that responsibility on me. I do feel like I have the weight of my family on me.

Every artist has a phase of finding their voice or their point-of-view, or, in the case of image-making, their eye. Do you have an idea of what makes a Steven Molina Contreras image?

There’s a sense of atmosphere that I’m after and there’s a consistent sort of portrait structure that I have. In a more formal matter, yes. But in a more abstract matter, no—and I don’t think I know yet. I need to live another 20 or 30 years for that question to really apply in a way that I think is substantial. But there are formal qualities to my pictures. Formats like the vertical 4:5, natural light portraiture, staged non-fiction. Staged images that look like they could be [documentary] but are very much produced and very much in response to something larger than just what is immediately in front. I have those formal things that I think put me in that sort of image-making lineage, but I think right now I don’t know if I could fully answer that without some sort of humbleness.

Did you have an idea of a threshold for success when you first started making pictures?

Yeah. My first idea of threshold for success was getting images published by some sort of photo-related space.

Which you did, quite quickly. You had that feature in Aperture.

The thing that’s also a metric of success is how my family responds, and what sort of resolution or what sort of emotion comes from seeing a picture of them in a place they would not have imagined. I’m thinking of printed pages in a magazine, exhibitions, or even disseminated on the internet outside of personal social media accounts. Hearing their reactions and seeing how they feel about those things existing outside of themselves I’ve also marked as success. I would say I’d be more comfortable saying progress, you know? At first it was like, “Let’s make this thing, let’s put the PDFs together, let’s put the pitches together, let’s send it, let’s get published.” But then it’s obviously changed because that’s not all [of it].

I think the reason why I ask that question is because—at least in relation to me—you’re still very young and have had what is perceived as great early success. To your point, one threshold of success was getting into some type of publication. So I guess the second part of the question is: once you pass that threshold you’ve set for yourself, what happens next?

Aperture has been my main supporter since the beginning of me sharing my family pictures. They published an early version of the work online and then I was able to continue growing that relationship. Honestly, networking through that, I was able to go from web to print to exhibition spaces. That’s how I think about these sorts of opportunities: what are different ways in which I can grow in those spaces and also grow in conversations with other people who are aligned? With Anderson Ranch Arts Center, I was there to teach a workshop, and that was my first workshop that I ever taught. It was a week long and for people of various ages and experiences of photography. I was able to participate in that with them, and also do a talk. This year I’m returning to do more workshops for different age groups, like high school and middle school, students because of the sort of relationship that I’ve grown with [the organization]. The New Yorker is another example. When I had my work published with them, I was introduced to them as an artist, as a photographer, through their audiences. That led into me getting assignments from them every once in a while and helping them visualize their thing within the context of the style that I shoot. I think about what’s next in the sense of, “How can I grow in this specific thing and maximize?”

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Daniel Sanchez-Torres.

It has been an exercise in self-trust and clarifying my POV. I think there’s safety in doing what you’ve done before. That can feel comfortable and predictable and easily understood, even if it looks like dissent. So I think I’m still in whatever portal it is that I said yes to, and it’s ever evolving.

That makes sense. It’s an alchemical process when you step into a creative project, and you’re still inside the release part of it, where you get to experience it in front of other people and experience their reactions to it. That’s a huge part of the whole thing, I imagine especially for music.

Definitely. I opted out of playing shows directly after the release of the album. I was listening to what felt right to me. I’ve always imagined playing this music in environments that are intentional, slower, and supportive. So I waited for those opportunities to come through. I just played my release show at Pioneer Works, where I recorded the bulk of the album. I had the best time. Pioneer Works has meant so much to me. I recorded my second album there as well as a part of the Clocktower Radio residency. I feel cared for there. My pace is matched.

There’s something very oppositional to hustle culture about not playing shows directly after an album’s release.

I mean, it doesn’t even feel like a choice to me. If I could, I would love to be able to do the hustle thing. But I’ve done it in the past and it was a path of destruction. So I’m trying to allow for slowness and sustainability, which in the immediate can feel a lot less sexy, but I want to be sexy for a long time.

I’m still figuring it out. I feel very green somehow. The last time I spoke to The Creative Independent, I had just opened for Beverly Glenn-Copeland at MoMA PS1. And then Covid hit and I burrowed. Now I’m reemerging after having been in touch with my nervous system. And the nervous system is so bossy if you’re trying to listen to it.

Right, once you’re in a relationship with it.

I know. I want to rebel sometimes, but I just can’t stomach it anymore.

I’m proud of the work, and of this album. I feel like I saw it through, and now it’s about discovering ways of feeding it. I want it to blossom into the many interdisciplinary expressions that are in my mind. And that takes time, it takes intention and commitment.

One thing I’ve been thinking about for myself in regards to slowness and delays that feel out of my own control, and that I can’t overpower internally, is that whatever I’m going through during those times is preparing me to be the person to hold the work.

100%. I think of that a lot. It’s just time for you to be chiseled into the figure that can hold what’s coming.

In one of my favorite songs on the album, “Put Your Faith in God,” it sounds like you’re talking to yourself, about how you used to listen to dance music and now you’re just crying into this microphone. You’re encouraging yourself to try something new, saying, “I mean, it’s not like whatever you’re doing now is working.” I’m curious about that track and that idea, and whether you knew that you wanted to make an album with some joyous or danceable songs.

Yeah, that came from talking. And I’ve been calling the post-album tour my Yap Tour.

I love that.

I didn’t go on tour, but I’ve definitely talked my ass off. I wanted music that felt like it had levity and reached towards ease. I guess all of this is a process of allowing. It’s funny: when you set out to find peace, if you don’t have practice in that, you approach it in a non-peaceful way. For so long I was trying to work to find this peace, but then you realize that it’s just allowing.

I was really struck by that idea of trying the other thing when something is not working. Because I feel this impulse to stay with what feels safe, even if it’s not working.

Definitely. There’s the option of following curiosity into the unknown, or there’s the option of doubling down on what you’ve done before and creating safety that way. And maybe it’s that different seasons call for different approaches or different people are oriented in different ways, and we need all of it.

When we talked last, one thing that was happening in your process was making something that would feel accessible to your family in a way that some of your music hasn’t in the past. I’m curious how that turned out.

It worked. Check.

How’s it feel?

It feels fantastic. I think there’s a romanticization of rebelling into who you are. But there’s actually a fulfillment in coming home… The most avant-garde thing would actually be to bring it back and seek resonance with your roots, I guess.

Are there any artists that are particularly inspiring you right now?

Honestly, I’m really excited by journalists and music writers who are doing their own thing. I think we need new contextualization that’s not owned in order to create a more supportive future.

In terms of artists, I’ve stopped looking at output as much as I have personal infrastructure. American Artist has a show at Pioneer Works called Shaper of God. And oh my goodness, it was amazing. It was inspired by Octavia Butler, and I think it was an example of really prophetic work because the show started right when the devastating fires started in Altadena, and they’re from Altadena. Octavia was making prophetic work, and then they’re making work that aligns with that. That’s when you’re really just following your guidance, whatever you conceptualize guidance to be. That really inspires me, when I see that kind of alignment.

Tell me a little bit more about what “personal infrastructure” means to you.

I guess it’s following your interests to their furthest degree, in whatever way they want to be expressed. And then allowing that to resonate with people, and having that be a way to create creative and intellectual community. I’m really psychedelic this morning.

I love it.

I guess it’s materializing collective consciousness. Putting things out there that resonate with people, and then they get in contact with the material or with you. That’s the dream. And I think that deep roots happen when someone is making from a place of curiosity.

It strikes me as very precious, and a tricky thing to hold onto, to make from a place of curiosity and not feel as much pressure around output.

I guess it’s a hard thing to do. It’s very meditative, and I don’t always do it. I’m just trying to understand how to balance. If you’re committing to being an artist and want it to contribute to your livelihood, you have to have output. So as dreamy as it is to think that way, it’s also like, what’s the moment that you shift? What’s for you? What’s for the world?

The last time we talked, you mentioned that you were working on making the most shameful part of yourself a room. It was about making space for more earnestness, which is how you experience yourself to truly be. I’m curious if the album feels like that room.

Well, earnestness is definitely present. I see it affecting every part of my life. So yes, it did that. And now, ideally, any sort of effort to make space in myself is leading towards a way of serving people. So hopefully that allows other people to access that, if that’s what would help. So long as I can stop myself from hiding.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Janet Frishberg.

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.

My friend, Trevor Anderson, has an interesting theory. He thinks directors either emerge out of acting and performance but are afraid of the camera, or they emerge out of image making but are afraid of actors. I emerged out of the latter. I drew a lot when I was a kid. My parents figured out quickly that if they left me alone with a pen and a stack of paper, I’d raise myself. I drew constantly and eventually I wanted the drawings to move, so I entered cinema initially through animation, experimental filmmaking then documentary and fiction. Even today, I often like to draw scenes instead of writing them; some of my scripts have no written version, they are just drawings. To me, drawing is closer to cinema than scripted words.

So it stemmed from a visual language, but also a desire to relate to the world. Processing the chaos of the world feels necessary. Most people with a creative impulse share the idea that the world left alone isn’t enough; we need to relate to it imaginatively and I do that through cinematic language. I don’t process the world through words; I’m not a not a very good talker or writer. What activates my subconscious is images, so my practice involves a lot of drawing. My drawing hand will discover something. There’s something my hand knows that my thinking brain does not. I also like to wake up and start immediately. My best ideas come when I’m still partially asleep.

It reminds me of those split brain experiments where each hand shows that it has its own goals and intentions.

It’s as though we have parallel satellite brains that we can activate for creative good.

Do you have any must-have items for pre-production? What are your needs for success in your workspace?

Can I show you?

Oh, yes. I love show and tell.

[Matthew shows a small pile of beige sketchbooks with colorful spines]

I’m a very analog person. If I were more of a professional I would do this all digitally, but I love books. I always start by picking up a couple of these sketchbooks that open flat. Here’s a storyboard for a new thing. Kunst und papier binder board sketchbook. Swiss made and so good for pencils! But that’s just for drawings. I write any and all words down in this size of Moleskine.

[Matthew holds up an 8.5x11-sized, black Moleskine with lined paper that fills the screen]

I like a large canvas.

Sometimes I think about what my archive would look like if I suddenly died, and I feel like yours would be very nice! But moving on, I loved Universal Language so much. It’s rich and dynamic and imaginative. I kept thinking how I wished more films did this. Could you talk a bit about what you want your films to do? What do you hope audiences walk away with?

I really can’t think about audiences because you just never know how the world will respond. I’ve made films that I was disappointed with and yet they connected with audiences. I’ve also made things where I achieved what I set out to do but nobody had any interest in it. And, in the case of at least one film, I was disappointed with the results and also nobody liked it. You just never know.

I’m a big believer that we have to make new images and look at the world from unfamiliar angles. It’s important right now more than ever because we’re oversaturated with images. We see the same images all the time because filmmakers repeat formulas that have worked in the past. I understand why that happens. Cinema can be a commodity ruled by the cold logic of markets. It’s also a vulnerable thing to make art—filmmakers can get complacent—but leaning on the same tricks and tropes that have brought them love before can be a real trap. Myself, I need to do what thrills my soul, and I try to be honest about that.

I’m hearing that you had no hopes for how people would feel, but what did they end up feeling after the screenings of Universal Language? What resonated?

The gentleness of the film really stood out. We’re living in a post-pandemic era shaped by extreme individualism. The solitude of the pandemic has lingered on and it’s become pathological. It’s hurting people more than they realize, and the injury is metastasizing. More walls are going up; more oppositions are being imagined. People are seeking out tensions and insisting on distance when it’s easy to imagine proximity; insisting on solitude where it’s easy to imagine community.

That was troubling to [co-writers] Pirouz Nemati, Ila Firouzabadi, and me. Part of the film was creating a world that reflects the one we live in as friends. In our friendship, it’s extremely easy for us to live in a space that is somewhere between Winnipeg and Tehran and feel fluid and at home in that space. I think those in-between spaces are actually where most of us live, and yet the world has become very insistent on fitting into absolute oppositional binaries.

Our movie resists these oppositional paradigms. Rather than being structured around conflict and adversarial tension, the story is mainly a sequence of tableaux of people being nice to each other. Audiences have found catharsis in that. I think a lot of us have grown tired of binaries and are longing to step outside and reach out.

The movie is such a sensory force. You’ve got a beautiful script, this complex quilted narrative, thoughtful cinematography, and curated sound design. There are clearly a lot of hands in your films, so what’s your secret to good collaboration?

Making a film is a spiritual undertaking. It’s like we’re assembling a brain. There are people who think film can be a tool for their narcissism but no film can ever be made by one person. The director is there as a point of synthesis. You have to cast your crew very well. You have to think about how different energies might relate. I think carefully about how people’s energies might complement or contrast each other, and it’s rewarding when you get it right. I like to surround myself with people who believe in the process and who have something personal to say through the prism of the movie we are making together. It has to be personal for everybody.

I know a film is really working when it transforms into something much bigger than what was alone in my head. Going back to the brain analogy, it’s like each one of us becomes a synapse. When that brain is well calibrated, it’s producing its own thoughts and other things latch on. The brain becomes more intelligent as a unit because it represents everybody. We are all serving the brain and the brain is making the film.

Did everyone on the team contribute something that you weren’t expecting?

Yes! But within a well-defined framework. The film does have a very specific tone and visual identity. I drew up a rigorous storyboard to figure out the visual grammar of the film and get everybody—both cast and crew—firing on the same frequency. Once you get everybody on the same page, you can really get dreamy. Other ideas start attaching themselves and it becomes more of what it’s supposed to be. If you compare the storyboard to the final film, it’s practically identical except for shots we added in spontaneous moments of divine inspiration. The storyboard gave us a foundation, a tuning fork that we could bounce things off of, and it allowed us to follow ideas that suddenly captured our imagination.

Near the end of the film, for example, there’s a scene with an elderly turkey monger, played by Bahram Nabatian, who sings. That wasn’t in our script or in the storyboard; it was an idea that Nabatian proposed. On the day we were shooting he said, “I think I should sing for the turkeys.” And right away that just sounded so correct to me. So I said, “Of course you’ll sing for the turkeys.” Right away Isabelle Stachtchenko and I knew where to put the camera and that we should dim the lights. I thought if he was going to sing for the turkeys, it had to be nighttime. Nabatian didn’t tell us what he was going to sing or for how long. We started rolling and he sang three poems—one from Hafez and two from Saadi—for an entire roll of film. That’s 10 minutes. He called cut himself. I can’t imagine the film without that scene now. It became a moment of great synthesis when Xi Feng and I positioned it in our edit. The composers Amir Amiri and Christophe Lamarche-Ledoux composed an elaborate musical cue that eventuates with Nabatian’s voice.

This moment with Nabatian represents every synapse in that brain taking in new information and processing it.

Maybe this is quasi-related. I’ve been trying to think about identifiable features of current Canadian cinema, and a tendency towards dry surrealism—like magic realism but more jaded. In your movies there’s a lot of it, and I’m thinking particularly of a scene in Universal Language where a person in an ornate tree costume almost topples into the two children on the street and grumbles, “my misfortune is unrelenting.” Can you talk about these moments and what’s appealing about them?

The movie is playing with different spheres of cinematic language. The plot with the kids—the two sisters—is very much in the vein of Kānūn-style Iranian poetic realism. The next sphere would be Winnipeg absurdity, which is very much in a surrealist tradition. And then the third sphere is what I like to call “cinema gris,” an inconsolably melancholic movement in Québécois cinema. Our idea was to merge all three.

The story is also drawing from very personal material which, though it might seem surreal, is a sincere representation of my own memories and feelings. I grew up in Winnipeg and a lot of my childhood memories are there. There was a lady in my neighborhood when I was about seven who dressed in Christmas ornaments all year round. She wasn’t dressed as a tree, just Christmas-themed. She would wear either a star or angel on her head. Sometimes she would wear actual cedar boughs and a stole made out of glittering tinsel or a jacket composed of hundreds of mini candy-canes in cellophane. She would wish you Merry Christmas in the middle of August. I was always amazed by this lady. The adults in my life, I later realized, had a somewhat more ironic relationship with this local eccentric. But [to me] that’s how she was—just a normal fixture. So when the kids come upon the Christmas Tree Man, it’s completely normal for them. The ornamented tree he is wearing goes completely unremarked upon. There’s something about the absurdity of that which I find to be funny and also beautiful. And very Winnipeg.

All humor requires some degree of tension and in Universal Language that tension lands between the sublime and the ridiculous, the mundane and the sacred. The emotional tension of the movie also comes out of that.

That’s quite lovely. I want to move on to a few about your relationship to autofiction. I saw an interview where you interviewed yourself for press material, and you also play yourself in the film. So, do you like talking to yourself?

That interview emerged out of desperation. Our PR team was desperate to find a celebrity to interview me in time for the premiere at Cannes and they couldn’t find one. At a certain point I thought, “Hey whatever I’ll just interview myself.” We thought that’d be funny because I do play “myself” in the movie and the movie is getting into some mischief with the notion of cinematic authenticity, which is always a fallacy.

As for autofiction, it’s me playing “me” and those two are not the same. One is a person, one is an image. And [that’s] always the case in cinema. There’s always a cheat. A city plays another city, a season plays another season, day plays night, a person plays another person—even when they are playing themself! Realism is an amazing technical achievement, but where does it get us? I always liked how painting was liberated from realism when photography was born because photography could do realism better, and painting was released, at last, to explore artifice. Me playing this version of me and the idea that I might actually be badly cast as myself is an idea that I find very fun.

Jumping off that, do you notice a difference between yourself and your written self? Not necessarily who is more “true,” but is there a certain way you draw your screen self?

It’s funny to try to depict yourself when you already are yourself. The movie gets into some personal zones. There’s some oversharing. I probably wouldn’t overshare so much in my regular interactions, but in the film I do. But what’s interesting is when I watch it, I don’t see myself. I see the movie as feelings that I know, but I don’t see the person that I am. I call him “him,” even though it’s me.

I’m not exactly sure what that means, but it underscores that there’s a blurry distinction between cinema and reality. That’s a nice tension when you watch a film because it forces you to remember that film is always an artificial construction which we should not so easily mistake for reality. I think the artifices of cinema have enormous expressive potential that we’re only now beginning to explore because we have been [historically] obsessed with making the artificial appear authentic.

For example, Canada is a system, an artifice. There’s nothing naturalistic about Canada. When you stand on the Canadian-American border, you will see space where humans have imagined a line. So what does this structure mean? Why does it exist? Should it exist? If it does exist, what good does it serve? I’m interested in zones where people realize they can step out of the structures they’ve been assigned, and connect across great distances. Those are things that have been meaningful to me and what I most want to explore.

A few beats ago, you said that you said you love to work, which is great. With rest and recovery so in the zeitgeist, do you need any rest and what does that look like?

I just took a week off, actually. In the 28 days of February, I was in 23 airplanes for a promotional death march. When the tour came to an end I went back to Montreal and immediately started working. But about a week and a half ago, I hit the ground after 10 months of free fall and shattered into a billion pieces. I spent all week inside. I read Two Serious Ladies by Jane Bowles, a biography of Mordecai Richler—he was a rascal; not too many rascals anymore—and another biography of John Norquay, a politician from late 19th century Manitoba.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Lindsey King.

It’s funny to know if I’ve charted it or if I’ve stumbled into various parts of it, because there’s been a lot of different chapters. Growing up, I always knew I loved to be on stage in front of people, trying to make people laugh. I feel like that’s the oldest thing in my life. That’s the origin story of anything I’d make now, and maybe it’s [the origin story] of all gay people.

I just have done that in a lot of different kinds of rooms. I certainly did that in plays growing up, but then, I spent 10 years doing it as an organizer leading popular education trainings, support groups, and political education using humor as a tool, as a strategy to welcome whoever’s in the room and be like, “We all have something to contribute, and we can do this.” I think it’s because of my own feelings of, “What do I have to offer,” that I’m highly attuned to that in other people and wanting to disarm that feeling in us that says, “We don’t have what we need to have this conversation,” and that wants to make people feel comfortable. Once I go to psychoanalysis school, I’ll really be able to understand all the ulterior motives that I have.

In terms of charting the course, at some point, I just realized I need to get that need met, to make people laugh, more directly and with less of a utilitarian rationale. That restarted this journey of being like, “What do I like to do on stage? What comes easy to me? What comes naturally to me? How do I let these deep convictions and commitments that I’ve developed inside social movements animate, but not overdetermine, the humor?”

Looking at the current times, I feel pretty despondent about the level of apathy we all have, so hearing you say “humor as a strategy” makes me wonder, what does that entail?

I think the first thing is to recognize that humor has always been a part of our strategies as people surviving Planet Earth and the systems of oppression that seek to destroy life. Even growing up, I remember my mom always used to be like, “We have to laugh. We just have to laugh.” And that phrasing is so interesting: “We have to.” Know what I mean? It’s essential, it’s a survival strategy. I feel like, for so many people navigating an unjust world, humor is a way through, a way to tell the truth and find agency where we feel like we don’t have any and disarm rooms that feel scary. It’s always been a part of a strategy of liberation, survival, whatever word we want to put to it.

I think what happens in many social justice spaces is that—and I think it also can happen in artistic spaces—we’re like, “Now is the time to be serious. Everybody be serious now.” We think that the playful part of us has nothing to offer to the tasks ahead, which is either to dismantle something horrible or make a piece of art. And I just know over and over again that not to be true. I’ve seen over and over again in so many organizations, groups, collectives, teams, and relationships that, when we welcome the playful part of ourselves and make the space hospitable for ideas that seem impossible, irreverent, useless, and pleasurable, we sometimes stumble into tactics, strategies, and group cultures that are really inspiring and empowering, and that take people by surprise and offer a vision of the world that is really compelling.

I always think about Toni Cade Bambara saying that the job of the cultural worker is to make the revolution irresistible. So much of what the right [wing] is doing is manipulating our fear and our desire for belonging and safety, and we have to reclaim feeling good and being like, “Actually, it feels better over here.”

A lot of what you’re saying sounds, to me, like a much less cliche, more thought-out version of “joy as an act of resistance.” Maybe even “creativity as a form of resistance.”

I mean, certainly when I see that online, I do sometimes want to bang my head into a wall…the irresolvable space between the hard work of resistance and the irreverent commitment to joy is where I think the juicy spot is. That’s why I love working with organizers whose life is dedicated to the mostly invisible work of building organizations and campaigns and being like, “You also get to have a good time along the way.” It’s amazing when people who are committed to the fun parts also get to learn about the unfun parts of movement work, which is organizing the meeting, taking the notes, facilitating the meeting, planning who orders the food, organizing the jail support team, organizing the logistics. Those are the unfun invisible parts, and I think we all have a lot to learn from the parts that we think we’re not entitled to.

You mentioned the environment of fear, the way the right wing wants us to live in that. Given that we’ve been in an environment of ongoing repression since long before the second Trump administration—the Biden administration attempted to shut down all the campus protests to support Gaza—have you had any moments where you’re like, “I shouldn’t do this anymore. This is getting too scary, the consequences could be too real”? How have you motivated yourself to keep going if doubts have emerged?

To me, a much worse fate is to do nothing or to feel like you can do nothing. A feeling of powerlessness, of not moving with others toward change, to me is a fate worse than death. Spiritually, emotionally, sitting at home alone watching MSNBC sounds scarier than anything I can imagine, because we get to be here in this time on Earth, and that means we have agency, and…there is nothing as life-affirming as taking collective action with other people toward justice. I truly believe there is nothing on earth more life-affirming than saying, “It is worth us being brave together, fighting for something we may not achieve, risking failure along the way, but giving ourselves to it.” That is, to me, an ecstatic, erotic, spiritual, life-affirming, joyful, deeply connective experience that is also reparative. It’s healing of the false idea of false separation between us. I want to keep choosing that every day.

To talk more about who you are within your creativity, from the creative work of yours that I’ve encountered, it seems that there’s an ironic persona within it. What kind of work do you have to do to maintain that persona? Why is that persona important to who you are creatively?

I don’t know, necessarily. I feel like this is part of what I always joke about: “When I go to a psychoanalysis school I’ll understand, I’ll have an answer to your question.” I don’t really know which part is me, but I do know what that persona does. It catches all the things I think are bad or not the right way to react and says, “Maybe there’s something really useful and funny here.” It’s like the compost of me. It’s like the refuse that you’re like, “Wait, maybe there’s something deeply relatable, human, and true here that so many of us, including me, work so hard to hide.” We’re like, “Oh my god, don’t you dare show that narcissistic side of you. Don’t you dare show that self-involved side. Don’t you dare show the mixed motives that you have in any given interaction or commitment.” What that persona gives me is a place to plug back in all the things I’m trying to vow about myself and the fact that…what’s funny is what’s true. I think what people are responding to is also like, “Oh, that resonates. That just seems that true.”

I have this other totally earnest [persona]—I just have both those things in a domestic partnership between me forever. I have an odd couple inside me that’s both deeply earnest, deeply sincere, and also deeply like, “What the fuck is anybody talking about, and what the fuck am I even talking about?”

I want to go back to what you said earlier about how you think it’s something that all queer people have in them to just want to be on stage and be funny—that sounds like me. Can you talk more about that?

I think that’s what Can I Be Frank? is about, in a lot of ways, that we could approach [the link between queerness and wanting to be funny on stage] from so many different angles. We can pathologize it and be like, “We’re trying to get the love we didn’t get,” or say we’re trying to get people to delight in us in a way that maybe we didn’t feel delighted in earlier in our lives—people delighting in our full expressiveness and extent. There’s also the kind of superhuman power that I think so many queer people have of being so hyper-vigilant, so hyper-attuned to the microclimates in the room and the micro-facial gestures going on in hundreds of people. We are able to play with that almost like an instrument. That’s a story that we can pathologize, but we also can be like, “Oh wow, actually, you can make music that way.”

And then, I think it’s just a beautiful part of our heritage. I mean, that’s part of what Can I Be Frank? is about. It’s about solo performance and queer people, gay people on stage being like, “Let me try this other thing. You want songs? If you want jokes, I’ll do jokes. You want me to do a monologue? I can do a monologue. Whatever you need that…gets us there, let’s get there.” All of this, I resent that about us, I wish we were free of that. And I also think it’s been the source of so much creation.

You do so many different things—music, writing for the stage, writing in other capacities. It makes me think you’re probably a very curious person, so I wanted to know what your curiosity looks like.

I am promiscuous. I’m a deeply promiscuous person where I’m working on a song and I’m like, “God, I’d love to write a book.” I’m like, “Can I do this at the same time?” And again, this is something we can pathologize or see as a source of methodology or a source of whatever. I find myself needing to work on many things at once. It just soothes my brain to be working on many things at once. I can’t ever sit and focus on any one thing, and I start to get obsessed. I do start to get upset in terms of the curiosity. I start to get kind of—it sometimes feels like I’m in a folktale. I’m like, “I’ve got to keep following this, a breadcrumb. Oh my god, I’ve got to keep following this.”

Each show or project has its own kind of learning involved, its own kind of thing that I need to confront inside myself, or its own kind of invitation that it’s asking of me. And as much as I love to talk, I also love other people talking…for Can I Be Frank?, I interviewed 30 people who were friends, family members, lovers, and collaborators with Frank [Maya, subject of and inspiration for Can I Be Frank?]. One of the most delightful things to me is listening to people talk about something that they care about. And that’s certainly a thread in a lot of my projects, is making people talk to me.

One of the things I discovered about you specifically by researching you for this conversation is that you also do somatic coaching. This is something I had never heard of. It feels completely in earnest rather than at least somewhat steeped in your ironic persona. What does somatic coaching fulfill for you creatively?

I find something really pleasurable about putting my focus on other people. This is probably connected to the joy of interviewing people for me. Some may call that a very deflective personality—certainly if you interviewed my exes, you might get the consensus that it’s easier for me to ask a question than to answer a question.

Also, my mom’s a therapist. It feels like it’s really matrilineal in me. It’s this kind of sitting with people one-on-one and reminding people that the things they think are bad, horrible, and shameful about them are…perhaps sites of incredible wisdom, creativity, and humanness, because I need that. There are so many parts of me that feel so bad and wrong that, somehow, we just need to keep passing this back and forth with each other in as many conversations as possible.

It’s also a really nice counterbalance to being on stage, because being on stage is so much about me being the center of attention. It feels almost like when you’re stretching the other complementary muscle. It feels like…when you do the backbend, then you do it the other way or something where you’re like, “Oh, this is the counter stretch” … It’s the other side of the pleasure of giving attention.

I think the other way it’s useful is—and this is from years of leading workshops and support groups—I’m very attuned, but not always fully, to what’s too much for an audience and what’s not enough. [I’m always] trying to find that juicy middle ground where it’s like, “Let’s do something, but let me not blow out your system.” The somatic work, or the healing work, you’re always listening for that sweet spot between discomfort, challenge, affirmation, and rest to find that kind of juicy tension. That’s the place where interesting stuff can happen.

That’s everything I wanted to ask you today, but if you have anything more you want to say on creativity, your creative process, or in response to my questions that you didn’t think of when I was asking them, go for it.

[Amid] the fascism of…the moment we’re in, we are right to be terrified and overwhelmed. And I think we bring so much to it. We bring soul with us that’s going to help us get through this period. I think it’s right to be terrified. I don’t think we should minimize fascism and be like, “It’s fine.” … No, actually, it’s very scary, and it’s going to get worse quite rapidly. And we have so many tools, strategies, spells, relationships, jokes, alternate endings, and alternate futures that are going to help us get through it.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Max Freedman.

I always knew I wanted to study something in the vein of drawing but I wasn’t sure what. My first year I went to London and did a foundation year course in Arts and Design. You just study everything.

I hated it. I ended up transferring to SVA. That’s how I ended up in New York. I graduated from there and started working on books.

What was your discovery journey?

I was nervous because I was an international student. There’s a lot of issues when it comes to international students and getting work after you graduate, a lot of deadlines that you have to hit or you have to leave the country. So I was so nervous that I started prepping early in school.

I put my website up on a directory called Women Who Draw, which was started by Julia Rothman and Wendy MacNaughton. They had looked at all the New Yorker covers and were like, “Why are all of these done by men and why aren’t there many done by women?” This directory was where women or women identifying illustrators could submit their website. Then art directors and editors would look on the website to discover new work.

I had a website so I put it up, not really expecting anything. I got two emails pretty back to back from an editor at Harper Collins and an art director at Penguin Random House. Both of them found my website and were like, “We love your work. Do you want to chat a little about what stories you might have?”

I didn’t even have a portfolio put together yet because I was still a junior. I hastily put one together and wore my one formal outfit. Then I was ghosted. I was like, “Well, I guess I blew my only chance.”

But a couple months later, an art director that works with the editor at Harper emailed me to see if I was interested in illustrating middle grade novels. It took off from there. After I finished illustrating, they gave me their first picture book manuscript for me to illustrate. From there, people saw that I was getting hired for things and it kind of went into each other. I was really lucky I didn’t really have to go and query people.

How has your style evolved?

The work I was making was very different. Everything was not as solidified. But the fun thing about working in books is every single book is a different approach. I don’t know if I have a style, but people say, “Oh yeah, obviously Lian did that.”

Do you have a one-size-fits-all process, or do you vary your process depending on your project?

I follow the steps but it’s sort of different each time. I’ll start out with thumbnailing and writing, and then go into sketches. I always do research and gather a lot of reference images for my books and for my art. From there, it’s a lot of experimenting to see what kind of mediums I want to paint the book in. It’s seeing what actually matches the story.

Do you send your sketches for feedback?

I am my harshest critic. I don’t need any more cooks in the kitchen, so I don’t share it with them. It is a vibe thing. For one of the books I did called, It Began With Lemonade, about summer and a little girl selling lemonade, she goes to the water and there’s all these animals, and it was bright and summery and poppy and warm and it just felt right to paint that book in watercolor.

The one I’m working on now is about three brothers that open a pizza joint and they’re all round and graphic. I wanted something bright and punchy, so acrylic felt nice for that—felt really goopy and squishy, like the pizzas.

I love that. Squishy like pizza. Do you feel like an instinct has developed better as you’ve gotten more mature in your career? Is there less experimentation because you have more experience now?

No. I feel like it might honestly be worse now that I’m older. I feel like when I was younger, I had more drive and more excitement for life. I was more excited during the research and experimentation phase. And now that I’m older, I get frustrated quicker. It feels great when it works out, but yeah, maybe it’s a sign that I’m getting older.

That’s such a familiar thread that I’ve heard from creatives that you take more risks when you’re younger. Once you get to know the industry and the limitations, it’s easier to talk yourself out of trying things and playing. People miss the freedom they had when they were students because it was entirely based on play and nothing was real. Do you relate to this?

Well, I was going through all the art I made in school and I was like, “Oh my gosh, she had so much zhuzh in her. Who is this person? This is a whole other person.” I don’t think I would spend that much time or effort anymore.

When you’re young, you have the energy and the motivation but you don’t have the means. Then when you get older, you have the means, but you don’t have that energy or motivation anymore. It’s trying to fight and balance that and trying to stay excited about things and pursuing things that excite me. So I’ve been trying to develop hobbies.** **I’m trying to do things that I am excited about. I talk to a lot of college students and they always ask, “What do you do if you feel burnt out and you don’t want to draw anymore?” And I just say, “I don’t draw and just do other things.” All of that is going to filter it. It’ll inspire you to make work. And if I quit this job and never draw again, I’ll just sew clothes or something. That’s totally okay too.

Do you have that sense of burnout right now?

I’ve definitely been feeling a little burnt out over the past couple of years because I’ve just been hustling since school. I’ve done 12 or 13 books, I can’t remember, but I’m tired. All the picture books, it’s been getting a little bit repetitive. That’s also why I started my newsletter and doing those comics, because I wanted something that was a little more different and exciting to play around with.

Life is short and I’m still young. I could live anywhere. All the days in New York were just blurring together into one. I didn’t know what I was doing the day before. I knew exactly what was going to happen every week. It felt repetitive and burnt out.

Do you think you’ll be working during this time or will you be working on personal things, like your Substack?

I have two books I’m working on this year, then I’m free of my contracts. From there on, I have a book idea I’m working on that I want to pitch. I tell myself maybe I’ll take a break and chill out and not do anything for a year. Then I never do it. I’m a workaholic, so we’ll see. But there will be a lot of fun, exciting adventures happening this year.

What ideally if you didn’t work would you want to do?

I don’t even know anymore. I just really like to tell stories, My Substack and comics, that’s a way of storytelling. Books are a way of storytelling. In school, they were always telling us to do editorial work and single illustration stuff, and that just never clicked with me because I like to tell stories.

You mentioned earlier that you are your own worst critic. How do you remove pressures from your work?

Oh, no, I dug a hole for myself. All throughout college, I was really depressed. And I’ve always been incredibly self-critical. It’s part of being a perfectionist. There’s a lot of pressure of wanting to make it big and wanting to be the best that I can be, which is on one hand really good because it pushes you to try harder, but then it also leads to burnout.

It’s hard to come to terms with accepting things. As I start to approach an age of wanting kids in the future, I’m scared of passing that criticism down to them if I’m self-critical in front of them.

A lot of it is thinking of how I think of the loved ones around me and their work, or just them as a person. I am very accepting of all the things they do and the way they look or the work they make and everything. So I should try to give myself that kind of grace too, and to treat myself like that because I’m sure they all think I’m great.

It is easier to be forgiving of others than of yourself because we have high expectations for ourselves. Do you feel like it’s gotten easier throughout the years?

It’s still hard. I’ve been trying to limit being on social media. When you’re on that a lot, you see all the other achievements that other people have made. You see all the ways you don’t measure up compared to everyone else because all anyone does is just share their achievements.

I need a couple more years and then the age will hit and I’ll give less of a fuck. Once I hit 33, it’ll be more chill. Because I’m 29, it’s like, “If I do something now, it’d still be really impressive.” Once I hit a little bit older, it’ll be like, “Okay, no more Forbes 30 under 30. It’s all gone now. Just relax. You’re free. Just do whatever you want.”

What’s your relationship to social media?

Since I’ve started doing these diary comics for my Substack and newsletter, it’s been kind of fun. I’m seeing a more personal side to people on social media. I started the newsletter because I wanted a way to open up about my feelings and process things. I was coming out of being really, really depressed. I was finally seeing the light and I wanted to practice verbalizing all of my thoughts.

I wasn’t sure what was going to happen, if people would even be interested. But people really liked it. And I think sharing a part of yourself makes other people want to share parts of themselves. So that part of social media has been really interesting and fun, to read people’s comments and things that they resonate with.

But on the other hand, social media is weird because when I become really personal, people think that they know me, and then it becomes that parasocial relationship that happens with celebrities. It can be a little weird. I did a newsletter post talking about it and told everyone to share their comments so they had to reply to personal questions too. So people were telling me all their personal secrets as well. We had to get the balance right.

You also have a Discord group that you get where you get feedback from your peers. Tell me about that.

Oh, you dug deep. I thought we were a secret little group. I started it in 2021. We’ve got 40ish illustrators in it. It started with word of mouth; I would invite people and they would invite their friends. It was really nice because it started during the pandemic so we were all really depressed in our homes. We were all working on books and there’s nobody to really talk to.

We used to, during the pandemic, do weekly book clubs where we’d read picture books on Zoom to each other. It was a really nice way to build community and feel connected with a lot of people from all over the world.

What is the importance of community in your eyes?

We are so isolated that it’s so easy for people to take advantage of us. A big thing in our group is we share openly about how much money we’re making on projects and how experiences have been. It’s essentially a little union that we’re forming, which is really important. Because for so many students and people starting out, starting to do jobs and being hired for things means being taken advantage of, burning out quickly and not making enough money and being in predatory relationships. A big part [of the group] is having a community and being open with talking about that with each other.

How is the children’s picture book world? Is it fairly competitive?

It’s a little competitive, but there is room for everyone. I don’t know how things are going to shape up with our current economic downfall. But in the past, there’s space for different stories to be told, which is really nice. But as in most industries, there’s more men at the top making more money and more acclaim despite there being more women in the industry.

Everyone in our Discord is pretty much female or female-identifying or non-binary. Most people that actually work in the industry aren’t men. Sort of like cooks and chefs—all the acclaimed ones are men because it’s serious. Whereas with women, you’re just a homesteader.

You’re a hobbyist as opposed to taking it seriously. I feel like in most creative professions, that is often the case. Do you have any thoughts, opinions, fears around AI?

For me, I feel chill. What makes my work interesting are the stories I tell, whether they be about myself or just a picture book story. All of those come from my human experience in a way. If I share a comic about me shitting my pants, no one’s going to care if it’s a robot being like, “I pooped myself.” No one cares. But if it’s like, “Oh my God, this happened to a person, that’s so embarrassing.” That’s way more interesting. Maybe I’m being naive, but I feel okay. What’s important in my work is the story and the heart, and I feel like AI can’t take that away.

I love that mindset. It’s easy to be doom and gloom, but like you said, AI can’t replicate heart and human mistakes and struggle. Everything you talked about, of feeling comparison and being a perfectionist, those are the human experiences and computers can’t replicate that.

It’s so funny, whenever I’m trying to learn how to draw, like I don’t know how to draw a horse, so I have to look at images of horses and practice drawing that. Now when I do that, I’m like, “I’m training the AI. Oh my God, I’m the AI.”

The AI was us all along.

It really hits me each time.

That is so funny. We are pattern recognition software.

Exactly. It’s kind of blurred all together.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Jun Chou.

It’s kind of always been there. I’m actually classically trained in piano and clarinet and I was part of a singing group as a very young kid, but I’m self-taught as a guitarist. That was a lot of gradually finding music that resonated and learning how to play as much as I could over years and years. A lot of learning by ear. Not learning from sheet music. When I moved to Chicago, I gradually started meeting more people over a period of years who I wanted to play with, at the same time as I started realizing that some of the music I was working on needed other people to join in order for the song to feel complete. When I started playing and started entertaining the idea of being a working musician, I never thought of collaboration entering the picture. I always imagined it as a solo endeavor, and generally a solo acoustic guitar endeavor. And in short, Chicago has changed that.

I wanted to ask about Chicago and the Chicago music scene! Was your album before this one the first time you’ve collaborated with other musicians on a record?

It was the first album with the band on the whole thing. But there’s not a single solo song, per se.

Yeah, the Chicago music scene is so strong. I think part of what makes this album stand out from the self-titled album is that a lot of the music came together playing it live on tour with my dear trio bandmates. Sam Wagster plays pedal steel, Tyler Damon plays drums. And those are also the Chicagoans who play on the first band song that came out on an album of mine. So, by the time that we had recorded the music for this album, and the foundational parts of the music–metal steel drums, bass, that sort of thing–the music that made it on the record by and large was music that we had played in concert as much as we could. And I’m lucky I get to play with people who I love who also are older than me. You know, Sam and Tyler are each like roughly 10 and 20 years older than I am. And I can’t really believe that because they bring so much to their instruments in ways that I would be hard-pressed to imagine people in my age bracket–I’m about to turn 28–would be able to bring to the music.

Does that feel like mentorship or does it feel like full on collaboration? And does it fuel your creativity?

I think both. I’m definitely pretty uneasy with the idea of being a band leader in what might be a more traditional sense. I don’t like to take solos, I don’t like to play in a flashy manner. I think the way that I play prevents me from playing in a more superficially flashy or pyrotechnic fashion anyway, because the foundation of my playing comes from what people might call a folk fingerstyle guitar, which is a completely different toolkit from playing fast jazz guitar single-note leads. So the way that we each approach our instruments, we each come at it from somewhat of a sidelong way. Tyler is such a deep listener of so much music, including jazz, but is not per se trained as a jazz drummer. We each have these ways of playing our instruments that strike me as being pretty active, but also as a whole, the music feels pretty active. Going in to record this music, I tend to think of it as being modular, in that we add more pieces to a certain song in a certain setting. Then the whole is filling up the same amount of space. How people are filling this whole changes a little bit from song to song. Because, as loosey goosey as this might sound, it’s always just about finding out what the music wants.

Do you have intuition or do you have narratives you structure that become ideas of what you want the song to be like? Or as it comes to you, you have this sort of instinct of, “Oh, that’s not what I want it to be?”

I think it’s some of both. I think the only extent to which I could say there’s a narrative is in terms of, does a given song produce in me an emotional impact? In short, do I choke up or cry at some point when I’m listening to a mix or something like that? Maybe that response will change at some point, but generally that’s always the response I’ve looked for.

You look for the emotional?

Yeah. It might not be choking up. It might be feeling some kind of energy that is somewhat hard to describe. But it always connects to some kind of emotion. Or more than that, some kind of emotional ambiguity. Like a sense that there are a lot of different things happening and they could be difficult to untangle, but they’re all there, even if you don’t necessarily know what all those different pieces are. I think there was a time when I was seeking that and also seeking technical perfection. And now technical perfection seems not just asymptotic, but that it runs the risk of sacrificing the thing that could give other people meaning or an entry point to the music.

This album seems like it did come from a heavy place. You mentioned the death of your friend, jaimie branch in your liner notes, for instance. Is it difficult for grief to be a part of the music? Is that part of the emotion you’re searching for?

Yeah, I mean, I think if it’s not moving you, it’s hard to justify it. Maybe that’s just because I’m a sensitive B-O-I boi, but I tend to feel like most of the things that I take in–it could be a meal, it could be a book or a movie or something–most of the time, if something leaves an impact, it’s leaving an emotional impact. And it seems like it’s preferable then to try to tamp that down for the sake of something I wouldn’t myself understand because it would be a different goal than I would have. And you know, sometimes I have to take breaks during shows. There’s a song that we play in Jaimie Branch’s memory, “Dayenu.” That’s usually a song that if any song in the set makes me take a break to collect myself after, it’s usually that song, but that feels like how it wants to go, you know? Buttoning it up isn’t going to help you.

It seems like you’ve really been able to let your intuition take the lead and since you also do some improv, I’m wondering if it took a while to get to this place where you are now, where you’re accepting of everything that happens in the music?

The first recording sessions for this music, I kind of had to repair my relationship to playing guitar; which then happened again about a year later. I think [in the way that] intuition is natural to some degree, I had to teach myself how to trust it. I think partially as a function of some of the things I was trying to work through musically when this music started coming together and some of the things I was working through personally when this music started coming together, and also as it developed as well. But regardless, intuition is a pretty big guiding force.

What is the balance between improvisation and composing for you?

It’s pretty poor. It’s funny you ask. On the one hand, there’s a song, “Cracking the Jaw,” on this album, which is pretty much totally composed from my perspective. But my bandmates are more or less improvising around the structure that my music provides. And there’s the title track, which my playing happens to provide a loose structure, but when we were recording what became that song, I was thinking about it more in terms of spontaneous composition rather than arriving with something fully composed.

I tend to think of improvisation as spontaneous composition anyway. I think partially in part because of my own toolkit and my own limitations. I don’t feel like I’m all that good at playing fast. The guitars I play, I often have them set up in ways that in short are just kind of hard to play. I use heavy strings and use all these mode tunings that sometimes are kind of odd.

I’ve worked with people who are really good at understanding what a song wants, and then they can either have me bring it out or they can bring it out themselves. I trust my ability to help guide something in a certain direction that might be. I think particularly in a live setting.

There’s a William T. Vollmann quote, I really want to dig it up, but he said something to the effect of, “At least my mistakes are my mistakes.” And the idea that he’s a writer and he had the idea that no artwork will ever be perfect in some quantifiable objective measure. I think it informs a lot of how I’ve approached that more recently.

I wanted to go back to your writing, because your music is mostly instrumental. I know we’ve talked about you wanting to sing at some point, but I’m curious about your writing and if those are separate things for you or if you ever see them interweaving.

I’ve actually demoed a singing record that I hope will come out with a good home someday. I realized that I think a lot of what my guitar playing is doing, or the instrumental work that I’m doing, regardless of what instrument it is, is filling the role of a vocal line. I think a lot of the music that I resonate with in terms of instrumental music tends to have a more active quality. The sense of there being a narrative. I think it comes from the fact that whatever music I’m playing in a group context or on my own, it fills the same function as if there were a singer there.

I started playing instrumental music in part because I was a shy singer. I shared a room and my poor brother would listen to me practicing guitar with headphones on, and I just did not want to sing. Sometimes I would sing quietly on my bed at home if I were the only person home, and only then until somebody else got home. But I think it bears on how I approach this music, even though it seems different on some level. The same way that I have a creative nonfiction degree and the kinds of things I was exposed to in terms of how to structure a given thing and figuring out what kind of narrative something wants.

What path led you to where you are today?

This feels sappy, but it feels worth mentioning, that a lot of the things that have happened musically and a lot of the work that I’ve done, it often seemed that various things would seem insurmountable, and then one way or another, they worked out. And the process in my experience, though I know it’s not the case for everyone, has been pretty organic, pretty slow and steady. I would just hope that speaking as someone who was once a younger person reading The Creative Independent interviews, thinking, “Oh man, maybe I can be like that person someday, doing something like what this person is doing.”

Coming from no meaningful musical training in my main instrument and no deep financial pockets or things of that nature, weird, “nepo baby” style connections… Obviously there are a lot of different factors at play that are important to be mindful of, especially with the whole fascism issue going on and the, we call it an omni-crisis, I guess, politically. But I can’t help but think that the sorts of things that I’m doing are not out of anybody’s reach. And if anyone reading this ever has a question about that sort of thing, they can hit me up any time.

Do you feel like things were accessible to you when you were starting out?

I reached out to a lot of people on the internet and wrote them emails saying something like, “Hey, I’m Eli, I’m 17. I want to do what you do when I grow up. Can we be friends?” and just enough of those people wrote back in kind with some kind of encouragement. And now those people are continuing to, by and large, blaze their creative trails. Some at progressively larger scales, and for others, it’s different. But either way, just doing whatever their thing happens to be at a given time. I grew up in Houston, and even just meeting a few people who had some sense of the same musical interests felt impossible. It’s a surprise that I started meeting people in Houston who I felt like I could work with on some level after I moved away. But through that, I started reaching out to people and I would wait for these people’s replies in my inbox and open them terrified that they’d say, “What are you doing, kid? Go away. You’re 17 and I’m about to go on tour in Germany,” or something. And of course it never happened because… Well, I suppose that I don’t even need to explain it, but I had that fear.

But that was really just about building some kind of community, whether it’s on your own or with other people. And, of course, Chicago has so much of that infrastructure built in already and this music really benefits from that. But also sort of to the earlier point, it happens in so many different ways; I just tend to feel like there’s never any harm in reaching out.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Mána Taylor.

You have more pegboard than me. I’m jealous. You can get big kits for them. They make all sorts of crazy shit for pegboard walls.

I’ve had those in my hands before, at the store, and felt overwhelmed with possibility and put them back.

I will say the one thing that I’ve struggled with, with my own peg board, is how to set it up. I’m not one of those people who has a vision and then I follow it through. Are you?

No. That’s why I showed you that shelf I made without making any cuts. It was so satisfying, just intuition and chance.

That’s beautiful. It’s also how I make music. I don’t hear the music in my head and then go from there. It’s always been a process of seeing what happens and seeing what wants to come through. I know that that can sound really corny, but I’ve learned to not feel like that’s a bad way [to do it] and that it doesn’t make anyone any less interesting, as a creative person, to not have a plan.

Let me pull up my questions. First of all, how are you?

I’m good. I’m doing my own music videos next week because I will be gone with Perfume Genius for the months leading up to my record. So I’m kind of front-loading a lot of stuff.

Tell me about your collaborations.

It’s always different and that’s what I like about it. The experience of collaboration varies between people because people have such different ways of making art, even in the sense of what we were just talking about. There are people who know what they want to make, and then they make it, and they don’t sleep until it’s exactly the way that it is in their head. For me, sometimes I don’t know what I don’t like until I see something.

[Collaboration] is not just this solo endeavor; something completely new will inherently come from working with someone else. I’m more invested in it because it always goes somewhere that I would never have imagined. I find that to be more enjoyable and interesting, even if ultimately I don’t like the final thing that I make. Also, I think some of the more challenging collaborative projects I’ve been a part of showed me that maybe I do know what I like, even if I can’t explain how to make it or even if I don’t know how to make it myself.

I’ve been producing other people’s music a little bit over the last couple of years. People will come to me usually because they like my music, but my music is very collaborative. It’s such a sum of so many parts. Obviously the lyrics and me singing are just me, and I get a say at the final stages. But when people want me to produce their records, I almost always want to send them a questionnaire: “What do you like about my music? And which part?” I don’t want to just keep making the same record over and over again.

When I’ve worked with other people on their music, it’s really hard not to just make it something that I would want to listen to. That’s not always the goal, so it’s been an interesting challenge to figure out a shared language with people. That comes up in every collaboration: figuring out how to be on the same page and how to understand what you mean when you say, “I like the color blue.” And I’m like, “Which blue do you like? Because there are so many, and this blue is really, really different than this other one emotionally.” Do you ever run into that?

Yeah. I actually just wrote something about that exactly, related to color. I was having a conversation over email with a photographer who was color correcting some images of my paintings. I asked, “Can the red be hotter?” and then I thought, “Whatever that means.”

I was just talking to a friend who said, “I’ve never really had a good experience making a recording until now,” and that got me thinking. I was curious how that affected their perception of what they had made. To me, the most important part, and the reason why I continue to make music as my job—which is a weird thing in and of itself—is the feeling I get from making music. I didn’t start playing guitar to sell hundreds of records or thousands of tickets. That wasn’t what i felt when I first held a guitar in my hand. I try to remember that feeling all the time. It’s obviously hard to hold onto in a world that is obsessed with growth and production.

I took the most time I’ve ever taken with this record that is going to come out in August. It was extremely collaborative and it was very fun. I hadn’t really experienced that kind of fun exploration. I think that that maybe comes with getting older and having done it, and having known that this old sense of loss always happens. Even if everything that I fantasized about happening when I put out a record actually happened, it can still feel like this endless pit of wanting more. I’ve seen a lot of friends revel in the making of the record and not be so obsessed with the outcome. I’m sure if you had this conversation with me after my record came out, it would go differently. But I really am trying to make the experience of making art the most important one, and not what the art does for me after it’s made. Because the most special and sacred time is the making of it. I always learn something. It felt like I fell into writing songs as an accident, a secret accident, you know what I mean? Do you feel that way with making artwork at all? It’s this place you can go.

Yes, absolutely. I’m constantly feeling grateful for my inner world, and that I have this way to process things. I also love the word secret. I think about that a lot when I am in my studio, and what I end up ultimately revealing in the artwork when it leaves. I also think about my time as an artist in seasons.

I deeply have seasons as a musician, too. It’s clear to most people now, who already know who I am and what I do, that I have a lot of different channels. I play in other people’s bands and I write my own songs. I am learning to see some sort of cyclical, seasonal pattern within my own creativity. A couple months before a Hand Habits record comes out, I will want to swing so hard in the other direction and not write lyrical music anymore and just make experimental, improvisational music that’s highly unable to be repeated. Because that was my roots, too—I started playing music in an improvisational setting and exploring soundscapes.

Also: the season of being in the resting and gathering phase. I haven’t written a new song in about a year, maybe. When I was younger, I used to be really afraid of not writing, especially being around some artists who are really prolific and they’re constantly making work, and they’re on their seventh album and I’m on my fourth. But because of what I mentioned, I didn’t come to making songs. It just felt sort of divinely orchestrated… After the periods of time when I’m not writing and I’m not compelled to write, I want to write a song again, but it comes from the desire to do it, rather than feeling like I should be doing it or getting hard on myself for not being productive or something. Somebody wrote me the other day and was like, “Have you made anything cool lately?” And I said no, and I didn’t feel bad saying that, or try to find something I made six years ago. My wish as I get older is that I can learn how to expect the seasons a little bit more, or have more of a relationship of remembering, “Oh, okay, this happens.” It doesn’t mean that spring will never come just because winter’s here. It’s hard to remember, though. Does it ever feel hard to remember for you?

Absolutely. I made and showed dozens of paintings last year, and right now I feel like I’m still awkwardly tiptoeing back into my studio. I am starting to integrate that feeling though, as you said. Do you have a routine around your creative process?

It’s always different. When I didn’t live with a partner, my creative process was different because I didn’t have to include someone else in some way, shape, or form in my creative process. For example, I can’t just start playing loud guitar at 2 AM… I’m not a rigid person with my creative process at all, but I go through periods of having more of a structure, at least more of a morning routine or something. If left to my own devices, my most creative time in the day is the afternoon into the evening, but then what will happen is I won’t eat and then I am crazy by a certain hour and then I crash. So getting away from that is good for my mental health, I think. But definitely I’ve had to renegotiate my relationship to my creative schedule and be okay with not being able to do exactly what I want to do because of the way my house is set up.

What do you do when you feel stuck?

I feel like that’s a good question for right now, because I do feel stuck a little bit. I think I take space and come back to it, which can be very, very challenging for me because I get so hooked on whatever the present target I’m chasing might be, even if I don’t know what the target is. Sometimes when I walk away and then come back to it, I really just scrap it. Or I try to find one thing that I do like about something that might not be working. I try to find the element that I am gravitating towards and distill it just to that… And then if I’m stuck in so much that I can’t start, collaboration can be really generative and can get me unstuck very quickly. That goes for finishing things, too. Sometimes I can just take something as far as I’m able to take it and have the humility to know I’m at the threshold of my ability, or the threshold of what I consider my strengths. Not that I like to think about it in terms of strength or weakness. I don’t really like that dichotomy, or the language around weakness, because sometimes what I’m not good at is actually what makes the song feel human. Even if it’s really uncomfortable for me to interface with that bar, I’ve been there many times and have learned that I’m not making music for me, at the end of the day. I’m not going to listen to my music as much as other people will.

What non-musical things influence your music?

Getting outside gives me a lot of perspective. Music is such an internal experience inside my head, inside my heart, and inside my literal house, or even inside of the computer. I think getting outside of any of those things can be really, really refreshing and inspiring. Also, I find other people and relationships to be really inspiring. I think something that’s been a through-line for me and my work, across all projects, collaborations, anything that I’ve ever worked on. The thing that I find the most interesting is the undefinable space between people and what happens there. The things that you’re not supposed to say to people, or that you’re too afraid to say to them, or the things that you’re too afraid to admit to yourself.

Beautiful. Lastly, what would you say to your younger self or younger artists?

I think telling my younger self: don’t see the forest for the trees. Don’t lose stock or lose sight of the things that you do have and the things that you have accomplished. I don’t like to use language of production, or “goals,” but I think it is important to have goals even if they’re within your own creativity. I think it’s so easy to feel like everybody else has more or is better or has the real way to do it. And definitely for my younger self, you are faking it. You don’t know how to do the thing. But there’s not one way to do art, as we know. Even just five years ago, with the things that I have done and the music that I’ve made and the people that I’ve worked with, I would’ve not really believed you if you told me that this is where I would be headed. It’s easy to lose confidence, and because of that, I think it’s important to remember the small things that you wanted and that you got. Even if it’s like, “I wanted to be able to write a song that has a key change; I wish I could do that,” and then not forgetting when you actually do that.

I recently re-listened to some of the music that I really liked when I was in college and high school and really getting obsessed with guitar. I revisited this Jeff Beck record. It’s so good, and it reminds me of hearing somebody do something on the guitar that was really out, really inspiring and out, for the first time. The record’s called You Had It Coming. A lot of it’s really corny, but it’s nostalgic, and I was just thinking about how you don’t know what’s going to influence your work. I feel like as artists, sometimes it’s hard to see what actually does influence your work. That’s kind of for other people to decide, you know what I mean? But I was listening to this record and thinking, “Wow, there was a time where I would try so hard to play along to some of this music and I just felt like it was so beyond me. And 10 years later, I do play like that sometimes.”

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Annie Bielski.

I think the biggest challenge was to create a narrative that is sustained and makes sense within itself. Because as a poet—even a fictional poet, as I like to call myself because I lie in my poems all the time and make up settings and scenarios and dialogue—even though the emotional truth is at the core of everything that I write, the challenge is to build a world that is intact.

I always remember Rachel Cusk saying that writing a novel is incredibly embarrassing because it means that you have to build a house that will still stand even when you walk outside and aren’t holding up the roof anymore. That’s exactly what it felt like to me. But I’m also incredibly interested in the moment where a character or a lyric “I” in a poem—as opposed to fiction—experiences an irreversible change and understands that there is no turning back. In a novel, you can focus on a single character’s consciousness and illuminate how that change has occurred, what external and internal factors led to, let’s say, a political awakening, or a breakup, or a turning away from your past self.

I love that, kind of like the volta of a poem.

Exactly.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve had a really hard time returning to poetry since publishing my debut novel. I’m curious if your relationship with poetry has changed at all since Good Girl came out.

As I said earlier, I feel like I have a narrativist bent even in my poems. I like to tell stories and was raised in a family of storytellers where the arc, as we understand a classic Aristotelian story with a beginning, a middle, a climax, and an end, is very common in the way we relate anything that has happened in our lives. I tend to look at periods in my own life or in other people’s lives also as story arcs.

So it didn’t feel that hard to move into fiction. But now, moving back into poetry, I have the same dilemma as you. It’s kind of hard to turn that part of my brain on again that is more associative, more risk-taking, more melodic, and doesn’t just adhere to narrative as the primary impetus when I write. I haven’t written a poem since I finished the novel, and I don’t know when I will. But I still think of myself as a poet first.

You translated Good Girl into German yourself. Do you feel like the English and German versions have different personalities? Are there parts that you feel hit differently depending on which version you’re reading?

I’m still in the process of understanding the differences. I just returned from my German book tour last week, and the response has been, interestingly, very similar. People ask similar questions in America and in Germany about the book.

That’s wild.

Yeah, it is pretty wild. Translating the book was almost harder than writing the novel itself. Maybe I’m saying that because it’s more recent and I don’t really have access to what it felt like writing the book. I always suffer amnesia after completing something. I have that after writing poems too. But they do have different personalities, I think.

One thing that I enjoyed doing in the English version was to play with syntax and sound and really allow my poet self to come forward, especially in the childhood chapters, which are more associative and syncopatic. In the German, even though I tried to maintain the same melody, I really couldn’t because German grammar is very different from English grammar. German is a much more variegated and proliferating language, whereas English seems like a very flat language. The fast pace of the language and some of the paragraphs got lost in the German, but a certain type of elegance was gained.

I’m not sure I will ever attempt self-translation again. It was important because it facilitated a bridge back into my original language, which I had alienated myself from by building a career inside of the English language. It felt emotionally and spiritually important that I do this translation myself, because it is ultimately a German story about growing up in Germany and reckoning with German history. But it is also an American story, because my protagonist who’s telling the story in the first person is writing it in English. So that alienation is part of the DNA of the narrative.

There are a couple of instances in the German where I added some political tidbits or changed a sentence. I feel like content-wise, it’s the same book, but the sound to me is very different, and I notice it because I’m a poet.

You, like me, are an immigrant writer from a culture where shame about sex and how to be a good girl are very relevant. How did you navigate writing about sex, queerness, and coming of age through nightlife without being eaten alive by anxiety about how your community is going to perceive you?

Writing in English afforded me the liberty to pretend that no one is ever going to read it. Even though my parents do speak English and half my family lives in Canada, I kind of assumed no one would read it. With my poetry, people did actually buy the book, but I don’t know how many read it page by page. I try to not think about audience at all, regardless of whether it’s my immediate family or anyone else. I also struggle with a question of who my audience is or who I am writing for. I think I write for a past and a future version of myself. When I am in front of the page, there is only me and language, and I really try not to get deterred by that kind of anxiety.

At the same time, I understand that it’s a very common problem, and I probably now have a different relationship to subject matter that is as transgressive as sex and nightlife and drugs and queerness, which are topics that I don’t really talk about with my family openly. But it is understood that it’s creative. We can hide behind the mask of fiction, and it’s not an autobiographical novel, even though there are similarities between me and my protagonist. It’s important to allow yourself that kind of creative liberty. And if there is a lot of anxiety about the reception of family members—use that anxiety to create an interesting creative restraint for yourself. There are ways to write about these topics while maintaining a kind of disguise.

I have this theory that writers are either bleeders or pukers. Bleeders bleed over every word, cleaning up as they go. Pukers barf up a terrible draft and clean up the mess later. Which one are you?

With poetry, I’m a bleeder. I go line-by-line and see where it takes me. Obviously, it’s easier to do with a 200-word poem than with fiction. With fiction, my writing process resembles puking more than bleeding. I try to get everything down. I go through many, many drafts of chapters, of paragraphs. The most important thing is to find the right tone. I know that tone is kind of an esoteric and vague term in itself, but it has something to do with melody, with mood, and also with the temperature of how the language is being transmitted.

I’m currently working on another fiction project and just taking notes for it, and I haven’t quite found the right tone. So puking is really important, and I think the bleeding comes later. I like to gather all the material at first and then whittle away at it. I think otherwise I would never write or my fiction would look very different because, aesthetically, I am a maximalist.

Do you outline your fiction?

No. Even though when I tried to teach myself how to write fiction, I really had to do it as an autodidact because I never went to a fiction class. I didn’t do a fiction MFA. I didn’t have the benefit of having workshop experience in that genre and knowing how to create and scaffold those craft elements that include a plot. So what I did while writing this novel was look at my favorite novels and outline their plots, even though my reference texts are not really plot-heavy at all. They’re much more meandering and fragmentary and kind of stream-of-consciousness style, like Marguerite Duras’ The Lover or James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room or all work by Jean Rhys basically. But it was still helpful to understand how a chapter is structured or where dialogue comes in and all of those more minute details that are part of fiction. Like, how do I get this character from one room to the other? To me, plot comes more subconsciously. I think if I did work with an outline, I would really struggle adhering to it because the granular level of writing is more interesting to me—like the sentence level, and the music, and the setting of scenes—so everything else comes second.

Are you an ass-in-chair kind of writer? Or do you wait until you have the urge to write?

Both. When I know that I want to write something, I have to put my ass in the metaphoric chair. I don’t actually write at my desk, or very rarely do. I write in bed and on the couch, sometimes on the floor, everywhere. I am a private writer. I don’t write in public, ever. I don’t even like having another person in the same room as me. But once I am in the flow, I can write anywhere. I also like generating on my iPhone Notes app on an airplane or on a train. Being in transit helps most of the time. Generally, I prefer to write when the urge takes me to it. But if it were just the urge, then I would probably never finish anything, so I do have to force myself to write. That’s usually in the evenings. I’m very nocturnal with everything. I like to write after people have gone to bed because I don’t like witnesses.

When you’re not writing, you’re a creative writing professor at a university. How do you protect your creative energy when you’re spending so much time on other people’s work?

That is really difficult, and I don’t have a formula or set technique yet. I usually try to write and read things that I don’t have to teach, especially on the weekends or during semester break. It’s really hard to maintain a balance though, because when I am teaching, I tend to prioritize my student work. I’m not like Louise Glück, one of my mentors, rest in peace. She said that teaching was really inspirational for her because her students’ poems would fuel her own creative impetus. I don’t have the same relationship to student work. I love reading it. I love being moved by it. I love scaffolding it. I love editing it. But it’s difficult to carve out my own creative time.

Though usually when I am knee-deep in a project, I manage to find time, even when I’m working in academia. And that often means that I’m sacrificing my own social life, where I can’t go out for dinner or on the weekends because those hours are my writing hours.

What does success mean for you at this point?

I think success is a very vague term that is tied to capitalism and sales, of course, and a certain kind of reception that we regard as prestigious. That often plays in the background of my mind when I think about success. But more than that, I think success means that I am able to do what I want to do, which is to write and to teach. I feel immensely grateful to have that.

You and your partner, the excellent poet, Noah Warren, are both creatives. How do you protect your relationship from the potential friction of being contemporaries in the same genre?

In some ways, it’s not really a topic in my life because we’re very different writers, aesthetically. And also in terms of subject matter, we’re drawn to different things, so it doesn’t feel like we’re occupying the same niche. My closest friends are all writers and artists, and I don’t feel in competition with them, either. Where we’re happy for each other’s successes and try to uplift each other. And I try to bring that into my romantic life too, just this gratitude that I can be with a person who understands me on my most molecular level. We can talk about writing all the time, and I can share my drafts with him, and he can share his with me. I learn from the way he sees the world, from the way he writes. I hope the same is true for him.

What did writing Good Girl teach you about yourself?

One thing that it really affected is my relationship to shame and desire and how I understand those two emotions as vehicles of self-discovery and self-destruction. When I started writing Good Girl, I thought of shame as something cultural that is being instrumentalized by the patriarchy in order to oppress women, especially in the Afghan community. But I’m now understanding shame is not just cultural; it functions globally and on a national level. Witnessing or working through German history, as I did in the novel, taught me so much about how certain groups of people, not just different genders, are shamed to assimilate within majority society.

My protagonist Nila has this moment where she’s staring at a photograph of her father and his cousins sitting on a hill wearing Afghan dusmal shawls or keffiyehs, and she understands suddenly that they’re seen as a threat in Germany and had to emasculate themselves to assimilate into society. Shame was being used as an instrument by the German white society to silence what these men stand for or how they represent themselves.

And so the universality of shame as a social and moral feeling that we feel when something inadequate has occurred or we have behaved inadequately or made a mistake was really interesting. To see it transpire in men as well as in women was something that I learned in the process of writing this book and crafting these characters. And that desire can be an antidote to shame, but that it’s also intricately related to it because desire comes with a feeling of shame. To want something is inherently embarrassing and risky.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Ruth Madievsky.

Yes and no. It was a gradual coming together. I wrote the album over the course of 2021, and the album creation process was the thing that helped me figure out who I was and what I wanted. First and foremost, I approached the songwriting process as a means to figure out who I was as a friend, as a lover, just as a person in general. I felt really lucky, by the end of the writing process—lucky and happy to have arrived at a place of understanding who I was.

I’m a relatively slow writer. I’m not the kind of person who typically can just breathe out a song or have a song appear out of thin air. Usually, when I write something and then I record it via voice memo, I do so with the intention of then having it be part of whatever record is going to be next… But obviously the subject matter is such that I’m singing about something that is happening in a very specific moment in time for me, which is figuring out that I am a transmasc person.

I thought about a lot of the coming out stories that I had watched on YouTube or heard of myself, and I realized that I hadn’t really seen any documentations of one’s coming out process, specifically a trans coming out process, where the old self accompanies the new self as they are becoming that new self. I totally understand the validity of wanting to cast the old self to the side so that the new self can shine. But my experience is one where it’s really important to me that my old self is with me even today. I tried to kind of erase that dichotomy, erase that either/or and turn it into a both/and.

I’ve always felt like voice is the most intimate instrument, like it’s pulled from this undiscovered or unnamed organ. How do you think of your own voice as an instrument, or how has your relationship with it evolved?

For a host of reasons, I never really thought of myself as a vocalist. I never thought of myself as a singer… I was talking about dichotomies, and the singer-songwriter dichotomy or identity is something that I’ve also carried with me for a really long time. But I’ve always focused very, very strongly on the songwriter aspect. I’ve always considered myself a storyteller first and foremost, and then it’s almost as though the musicology is an afterthought. I think a part of that has been imposter syndrome. I think a part of that has been gender dysphoria and feeling a certain degree of discomfort with my voice for a really long time. But of course, having my main instrument change made it so that I had to think of my voice as exactly that, an instrument, for the first time in my life.

The album is lingering so much in change, with this sense of anticipation that feels fluid and kind of open to unpredictability. My favorite lyric from “514-415” is, “The things you reach for in your life reach back when those things are right,” which carries this profound patience. Did writing these songs help you move through change more gracefully, or did you have to learn to sit with that uncertainty?

I am actually pretty uncomfortable with uncertainty and lack of control, which is ironic for someone who intentionally dove headfirst into change, of course, through the making of this album. Just the last couple of years of my life have implied so much change. So I do think that the writing of this music actually really helped me to embrace that. I don’t know off the top of my head, but I’m inclined to almost say that pretty much every single song includes the word “change.”

When I was first writing these songs, they were for me. Of course, I had the intention of recording them and releasing them, and my hope is always that people, regardless of walk of life, will see their experiences reflected in my own. But these songs, at least at the point of writing, were for me to process these very big questions that I was asking such as, “Who am I? Who am I in the context of dating someone? What does it mean to be a brother to someone who you have a bit of a fraught relationship with?”

You’ve said before that a song feels complete when you can share it with someone else. Did that still feel true with Blurring Time, or did your definition of what makes a song complete start to shift, because you had to set them down and come back to them later on?

In some ways, it did feel complete, and I do think that that sentiment still rings true. However, I think that because of the current sociopolitical climate, I would say that these songs have now taken on this sort of tone of being incomplete. Or maybe it’s not a completion as much as it is a continuation, if that makes sense.

It’s very interesting listening back to some of these songs now, having had no idea what the world would look like when I was first writing them. I think that from the point of view of a recording like an archival [tool], yes, they’re complete. But more from a topical point of view, I think that they are still finding their meaning for me and also in the world.

Your work feels very intentional, or like you have a clear vision. I know you’ve talked about working with a concept before, and that feels especially true with this album. How does having a concept shape your writing process? Does that guide you from the beginning, or is it something you can keep referring back to?

Concepts can be really freeing in their limitations. I really enjoy when I make rules for myself in my creative practice. Whether that means I’m going to try and write a song without the use of the word “I,” I like having rules in my songs. Even if I don’t follow them exactly, it’s kind of nice to have a very loose guideline. And then when I try to create that universe for myself, I at least can visualize the path that I’m trying to follow.

So at the time of writing, there was no intentional concept building within that. When I thought about how I wanted to capture it from an audio point of view, the concept started to emerge. And within that, of course, there’s creative limitation… I definitely felt freedom in my ability to let go, and understanding that my voice would drop and it would sound however it would sound. Perhaps my pre-T calculation of how low it would drop would be correct, and perhaps it wouldn’t, and that I would have to meet my past self where they were at if I wanted to go through with this project.

How are you thinking about these songs when it comes to performing them? I saw you were planning on creating both parts at some of your shows, if you want to talk about that a little bit.

There’s one show specifically, which is the album release show in Toronto, where I’ve asked two of my friends to join me and sing with me, both of whom are on the trans spectrum. One is a fellow trans guy who’s on testosterone. His name’s Lane Webber, and he’s actually someone that I have admired for a really long time. He was someone I looked to a lot in the early days of my transition and specifically around singing.

I’m almost considering it as something kind of theatrical. [Lane] is going to be playing the part of the low harmonies, and then my friend J—who is non-binary and not on testosterone; their artist name is Your Hunni—will be singing the higher parts. I have sung with other people in other musical contexts before, mostly cis women friends of mine. And it was really important to me that I asked people who had a lived experience as a trans person to be singing with me just because I wanted that honesty to come through in the vocals. My band is exclusively guys, and I also think that there’s something really beautiful about that, too, to be singing songs about what it means to be masculine and become a guy, and have the guys who have helped inform my masculinity behind me.

When you reflect on your past work, does it still feel active to you or does it kind of feel like an artifact?

I think both. I’m just thinking of your question that you asked before about the completion of a song… I do almost feel as though I am taking this box off of the top shelf and blowing off all the dust and opening it. Almost like refurbishing this old artifact that I’d placed to the side for a really long time.

In some ways, it’s been very active the last couple of years. I’ve been playing these songs at shows while not mentioning the fact that they are part of an upcoming album. I have been considering the ways in which I want to release this in ways that will feel good and authentic to the self that I was, and authentic to the self that I am now. But also, it’s just a totally different experience to open up the meaning of all of these songs and share them with the world in a very vulnerable way, again, especially as the world is looking as it is right now.

How has the act of creating shaped your sense of identity at different stages of your life?

You’re asking a lot of heavy hitters, it’s awesome. I think that whether I’ve known it or not, every song that I’ve ever written has begun with a question, and I think that the lyrics and the melody of every song are answers. I can think back to the very first songs that I was writing in high school at 15, 16, and figuring out my identity as a young queer person. What does it mean to write a love song and use exclusively “she” pronouns as someone who was identifying as “she” at the time? What does it mean to write a song where the lyrics are kind of nonsensical and whimsical and almost Magical Mystery Tour-esque in their whimsy? Is that something that I can approach as a 17-year-old songwriter? And then later, what does it mean to watch someone else process their grief and then be able to better process mine? Asking questions through creativity has provided me with answers, with regards to who I am.

How would you define what it means to be an artist, and when did you first feel that word belonged to you?

I first felt that that word belonged to me after I completed The Artist’s Way in 2021. I don’t totally know what the block was there in me identifying as an artist beforehand. I spent all my time playing guitar and writing songs, arguably more than I do now. But I felt far less comfortable identifying as a musician or an artist or a singer-songwriter than I do now, which I think is interesting. I feel like it took me reading and completing The Artist’s Way to understand the degree to which I was artistically and creatively blocked. And by extension, the degree to which my inner artist—which is an important term in the book—was wounded and very much in need of some TLC.

We’re having this conversation following the news that you had to cancel your US tour [following the US’s new rule that passports must reflect one’s sex assigned at birth, which can also affect visa applicants]. I imagine you are navigating difficult emotions with this deep undercurrent of disappointment and anger, and I just want to give you the space to talk about how you’re moving through that.

With as much grace as I can. With patience, with confidence in myself and my story. Trying to honor the art while also remembering that me having to cancel my tour is obviously devastating for my rollout and my career, while also remembering that this is so much bigger than me.

It’s funny, you’re asking me these very, very thoughtful questions about creativity and my creative practice, and I’m having a hard time answering a lot of them because I haven’t really been able to actually think of that part of my practice for a couple of weeks now. So I’m almost at a loss for words with a lot of these things that you were asking, because I’ve just been thinking about the story as it pertains to me not actually being able to do the thing.

It seems like the Canadian music community is joining together and trying to get your voice out there, and that’s such a powerful thing. And I’m thinking a lot about what we as neighbors can do to support you and other trans artists this is impacting.

Cheryl Waters at KEXP read your statement live on air. That visibility is crucial, and my hope in all of this is that it leads people straight to your voice—because to me, that’s the most sacred thing. What kind of support feels most meaningful to you right now?

It’s kind of ironic, I guess, that I will not be able to play my music in person in the States for at least the next four years, but that since announcing that I cannot, more people are listening to me in the States than I ever anticipated, or, potentially, than they would have should I have actually been able to go through with this tour. Yes, borders are real. Yes, these policies exist and are harming real people with real stories to tell. But also, music and art is borderless. Even if I can’t reach certain people in person physically, I do hope that this music will continue to speak for itself, spiritually and through sound waves.

How are you thinking about your album now, as it begins to move beyond you?

I hope the album will speak for itself. I really do. I think a lot about social media. I’m someone who had a flip phone until January. I loved my flip phone, and I was pretty sad to go back on my iPhone under the guise of having to be a good self-promoter or whatever. I think a lot about social media and the algorithm and Meta and our shortening attention spans. I also, of course, think about the shit show that the last week has been for me. And I bring those two things up because there’s a fear that with this treacherous algorithm that we are all at the mercy of, and with this “visagate” thing that I’ve just been through, that the music itself will actually get lost in the mix. So I sincerely hope that even in this age of social media that we are all living through—that feels often very trite and fleeting and superficial—that the music will have a beautiful life for itself removed of all of these things, and that it will find the people who need to hear it.

I found a note I had written to myself recently that just said, “Safety is conditional.” I don’t remember what it was that made me feel that so sharply, but I started to reflect on the role of safety and how we relate to others, or inhabit our environments or feel within our own bodies. Where do you feel the safest, or what does protecting yourself look like either personally or creatively?

In the same way that I’m learning to trust my gut and trust my instincts—trust my creative instincts—I’m also trying to protect all of those things. I am not really someone who is super well versed in having needs or knowing that I have the right to do so. So as I am fostering that process, I try to listen to my instincts and intuitions.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Laura Brown.

I have wanted to be a writer since I was 8 years old. And once I got to college, my sister, who was in publishing at the time, was like, “I don’t think you want to be a high school English teacher when you grow up. I think you should get an internship at the university press at your college.” So I did. I got an inside look at how books were made, and I was like, “This is something I can do while I write so that I won’t be a starving artist.” Because I was never going to be a starving artist. I just like eating. I knew that as a literary agent I would have a lot of freedom in my career, and that I eventually could even work for myself. I wouldn’t have to work in New York. I could just do anything I wanted. And that has turned out to be true.

Let’s talk about side hustles and the freedom that has allowed you. In addition to agenting, you have your writing and your newsletter. How do you juggle it all?

However I can. I’ve been an agent for almost 20 years so I can be choosier with the projects I take on because of where I am in my career. I have a lot of clients who are very well-established. I don’t have to hustle quite as much on my agent side, so I have the freedom to do the writing side as I see fit, whether that’s at 6:00 in the morning, or 6:00 in the evening, or 2:00 in the afternoon…

Does your boss have any issues with that? Or are you effectively an independent contractor, and as long as the work gets done, you can do whatever?

I’ve effectively always been an independent contractor, and Howard Morhaim has been my boss and mentor now for almost 20 years, and he’s not over my shoulder checking my work. He would be if there was a problem. But luckily, that hasn’t been the case in many, many years. And as long as my clients are happy and the money is coming in, for me and him and my clients, then it’s fine. We’re very close. It’s a wonderful relationship.

How do you manage when your main gig is commission-only? Have you kind of amassed enough of a client base that that part of it is fairly steady and you can agitate your side-hustles more?

It took about five years as a full-time, commission-only agent before what I was earning felt like a paycheck. Before that, it was just like, “Oh, maybe you get paid this week. Maybe you don’t,” depending on when the publishers’ checks come in, because I only get paid when my authors get paid. After a while, I sold more books. More books were out in the world earning royalties, and that kind of snowballs. Now it feels like a full-time paycheck sometimes. Some months are more robust than others. Nobody likes to send checks in December and January. So you’ve got to plan for that. That freedom means I can hustle wherever I want to and do things for free or not for free, or whatever I want on the creative side—but I also always have to have an eye on what’s happening two or three years down the line, because what I sell now pays off in a couple of years.

How did the early days of agenting when you weren’t earning a living wage jibe with your initial goals of not wanting to be a starving writer?

I did nothing but stress out about how I wasn’t writing anything. I stressed about not writing for a decade. I didn’t have the spoons to do anything except worry instead of write. And I didn’t have the maturity to go, “You could stop worrying and you could just write whatever you feel like.” I was worried about, “If I have one hour to write, I better write something that will eventually get published.” And that kind of stress just paralyzed me, and then I didn’t do anything for a long time.

In Write Through It, your book about navigating the publishing industry, you write that you have 4,717 unread queries. How do you even approach tackling something like that?

I have to look at one query at a time, because that query exists only within itself. It doesn’t exist in comparison to everything else. You don’t want to do what I call “the best of what’s around,” because the best of what’s around might not be salable. It might not be marketable. It might not be these other things. I work hard to try to just evaluate what’s right in front of me and to not evaluate it as whether something is good or bad, but whether I can sell it. Or, am I the person to sell it right now? I’m not the person to sell a lot of really good things.

Do you find that it takes the joy out of reading at all, or are you able to take off your agent’s hat when you’re reading for pleasure?

I always have an agent’s hat on, and I have figured out a way to enjoy it. There are certainly things that I can enjoy purely for pleasure, but I will always look at something and be like, “How did somebody make this? How did this story work? Why does this story work? Why do I like it? Why do I hate it and everybody else likes it? Why does this cover attract me?” I’m always kind of poking at it, and I find that enjoyable.

You’ve written several books before that were put in a drawer, and now you’ve got two books coming out, Write Through It and, in 2026, the picture book Pay Attention to Me. When it rains it pours, right?! So talk to me a little about that—how did you find the will to keep going?

It was not easy, and I had some dark nights of the soul. The book that didn’t sell right before Write Through It really threw me for a loop. It was an adult novel, and I love it. I worked really hard on it. My agent liked it. We sent it around, and it didn’t sell. There was definitely a point where I was like, “Maybe I am not a good writer.” And it’s funny because I was just talking about how I reject good things all the time.

But as a writer, I couldn’t put that hat on in that moment. I was like, “Maybe I just won’t ever publish a book. Maybe this dream is just not in the cards for me.” And it was really tough to face that. Instead of paralyzing me, that energized me, and I threw myself into more writing just to write anything. I had the newsletter in the works—which I had in the back of my mind thought, “Maybe this could be a book one day.”

After Write Through It sold maybe six months later, I was at lunch with an editor who I had known for years and I mentioned my picture book. She’s like, “You should have your agent send that to me.” I did and she bought it. I don’t think [the books] are related in any way except for timing and coincidence, but it did feel like I just needed to open the door, and everything came flooding in. I may never sell another book. That might be my future. But I’ll keep trying.

We’ve mentioned hats a couple of times, so what kinds of hats are you putting on for each aspect of your work? Are you able to easily slip between each or do you try to have days or blocks of time where you only work on one type of thing?

Logistically speaking, I usually have separate writing time. That’s usually siloed off because then I can turn off the notifications and the emails and I don’t have a call scheduled… I’ll just leave the house if it’s a weekend. The newsletter and book promo kind of comes in when I need to do it or when I can do it. I often write my newsletter the day before it publishes so I can let it marinate overnight, and then I post it in the morning. That’s integrated into my workday. My author experience has informed my agent experience, because I’m at the receiving end of a lot of the things that my clients are. I’m like, “Oh, that’s what that feels like. Oh, that’s what you’re hearing. That’s the question you want to ask in ways that I just wasn’t privy to before.” When I’m switching between the hats, I’m trying desperately to remember who I’m talking to. Am I talking to my reader? Am I talking to a contract negotiator? Am I talking to an editor, or my client, or am I talking to the picture book reader?

How do you advise your clients and other writers to overcome that feeling of desperation to sell a book, any book?

You have to think about the day after the book comes out, and what your life will be like if you wrote this book that you don’t care about. You’ve got to talk about that book for a couple of years, and it will always be your first book. If that’s the case, it will always be on your track record. And if it does well, that’s great. But do you want to keep writing more of that kind of book? One published book does not open the door to all published books.

How do you advise other writers—especially people that don’t have a freelance or content writing background, which is constant rejection—to grow a thick skin?

It comes with practice, unfortunately. One of my suggestions is to submit a lot so that you get a lot of rejections and then you get more used to it. More submissions betters your chances of a yes. A lot of form rejections might say something like, “I didn’t have the vision for this,” or, “This is not a fit for my list right now,” or something like that. Those are just kind placeholders for, “I’m not the right agent for you.” They are not placeholders for, “This is the worst book I’ve ever read.” The rejections don’t mean that.

One quote I laughed at in Write Through It is, “I began to realize that I might never publish a book! Me! A literary agent with an MFA! With my own fancy agent!” It’s kind of the opposite of imposter syndrome. You know you had all the tools in your arsenal yet someone just wouldn’t give you a chance. What advice would you have for people who feel confident that they’re putting their best work forward and it’s just not happening for them?

Publishing is a retail industry. It’s not a meritocracy. The publishers buy books to sell in a store for people who will buy them, and your book might not fit that mold—either ever or right now—and you can’t do anything about that. You don’t know that two weeks before an editor saw your book, they bought another vampire book, and they can’t buy another vampire book right now. It’s not because you’ve missed the trend or your book isn’t good. You have absolutely no control over that timing. When I’m faced with that absolute lack of control, I kind of give it up. If I have no control, then I’m going to do whatever I want. I really encourage writers to do that, because then they’ve pleased and enriched themselves.

What about professional jealousy? That’s somewhat inextricable from the feeling of, “I have all of these things, I’m a better writer than that person, I’ve been published in more prestigious outlets—yet they got a book deal or a residency or a prize and I didn’t.” Can you talk a little about that?

I’ve had professional jealousy every moment of my professional life. There’s always been an agent who had the client I wanted, the success I wanted. That has been motivating. It’s just my personality. I’m motivated by that, and I’ve been able to kind of unpack why I want those things and work through it in therapy.

For writers, it’s eyes on your own page. That person’s deal is not your deal. And you might think that as soon as somebody hits the [bestseller] list, they automatically get a check for a million dollars. It’s publishing. That is literally not what happens. Luckily, I have the industry knowledge to know that, and I can just kind of wave that off.

Why do you need an agent? You go into why other writers need one in the book. But you already know all the ins and outs of deals and contracts.

The number one motivating factor for me getting an agent was that I did not want to call up people I knew in the industry and be like, “Hi, I wrote an amazing book. Would you like to read it?” Because that is awkward. That alone is worth 15% of my money to give to an agent. I also like the idea of not having to negotiate my own contracts and not talking about money. Being on a phone call or an email with an editor saying, “No, can I have more money for my book, please?” is a thing I would happily not do given the choice. I think that everybody is happier that I am not my own agent. Me, the editors, everybody. I need a team just like everybody else.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Scarlett Harris.

I’m part of a family of scientists, engineers, and doctors. I can see how my work is a bit confusing because I’m a creative director, a designer, and an illustrator. When I was working on a magazine cover, they’d ask, “Did you photograph it?” or, “Why isn’t your name credited?” They always want to make sure I was credited. They’re kind of over it now. Sometimes they will send me screenshots of editorial illustrations that they think are clever. They’re rarely clever, but I appreciate that they’re trying. [laughs]

What are some misconceptions about the role of a creative director?

That we have full creative agency and power over a project. Any creative director—whether at a magazine or an agency—knows there are so many people involved in every decision, from the initial brief to the size of a folio. If you’re lucky, you have a creative partner [in the form of] an editor or CMO [Chief Marketing Officer]. But often you’re working with non-creatives requiring negotiation, compromise, and collaboration. You have to find solutions based on what the client or company needs, so it’s not always your singular vision. I’ve redesigned magazines that I’d approach very differently if it were for myself. There is a misconception that creative direction always reflects the person behind it, which is simply not true.

For example, when building a website with a UX team for a big corporate client, I have to consider accessibility, audience, dimensions or formats, the CMS. There are many digital requirements beyond print, and I’ve been learning all of this slowly from UX designers who probably aren’t thrilled with every decision I make. It’s kismet when you work with a collaborator who understands you perfectly, and vice versa.

Who gave you your first chance to art direct?

My first job as an art director, rather than a designer, was at The Atlantic in DC, and I was hired by David Somerville. The person who really guided me through that role was Peter Mendelsund, who joined about a year into my time at The Atlantic. He asked me to move to New York and became an invaluable mentor. He’s taught me how to speak about design work, which is half the job anyways.

What was the moment when you realized you had found your voice as a designer?

I feel that way when I design magazines. What I’ve really learned, and that I carry with me to every job, is how to work with restraint and within limitations: to take a set of tools and defined boundaries and still create something new. How do you set up ten completely different book covers with the same two typefaces? That’s one of the most important skills as a designer: solving the puzzle.

At The Atlantic, there were three of us designing, and any colleague could guess which of us designed each feature. Our styles were so different; mine was a bit more maximalist. It was about finding your own voice within the constraints of the visual identity. Although, after some years working in the industry, I’m not sure we’re always meant to find our own voice within our design work.

How else would you go about making work then?

Sometimes design can be more of a trade. We have a prompt, a problem, a brief, and we use our skills to go from point A to point B. It’s important for designers to accept this. That said, you still bring yourself to the project. Our contribution is the way we problem solve, interpret, dissect, analyze, or interrogate a brief.

What’s harder, then: adapting to a brand’s existing voice or helping them find one?

That’s tough. Every job or project comes with positives and negatives. When you’re adapting to a brand’s existing voice, you have to really believe in what already exists. Or at least pretend that you do. On the flip side, when you’re helping a brand find their voice, there are a lot of layers, people, and policies to go through. But you get to start something from scratch, which is always fun!

So looking back on your experiences across editorial design, from working in-house to designing book covers, what’s one meaningful takeaway from each that’s stuck with you?

Book covers taught me how to pay attention to detail both in terms of the story and the design. What’s different between magazine work and book design is that with a book, you’re often condensing a 300-page story into a single cover; whereas editorial work might involve an 800- or 1,000-word essay that you need to visualize. It’s so difficult to capture the essence of an entire novel in one image—something really has to stand out. I’ve learned how to identify those details that set the tone of the book. It feels a bit daunting to fit an entire novel in a 6x9-inch rectangle. Sometimes it’s the most simple answer. For example, with Salman Rushdie’s Knife, it was obvious. I try not to overcomplicate things.

In contrast, editorial work gives you more breathing room. It taught me how to work with writers and respond to words visually. The editorial work I’m most proud of always involved close collaboration with the writer. Those projects turned out best because we poured so much into them. I loved working with Chase Hall on a special package for NYT Opinion after a shooting in Minneapolis. It was a huge collaboration between the editors, writers, and team to broach such a sensitive subject.

Branding work has taught me how to transform my design skills into multiple characters and different voices. I’ve done branding work for the world’s biggest auction house and a cannabis store down DeKalb Ave. [in Brooklyn], and both companies need the same level of strategy and problem solving. I’m continuing to learn the craft of storytelling and how to explore the full 360 degrees of an idea.

What about illustration?

I’ve gone through many phases with illustration work, improving in some areas and struggling in others. I’ve realized there are limits to how much I can and am willing to learn. I’d rather play up my strengths, which are rooted in collage and mixed media, and focused on abstraction and color.

What was the first illustration you were commissioned to do and what was the first one you commissioned someone to work on?

The first illustration I was ever commissioned to do was for a deck for a nonprofit in DC. It was not sexy. One of the first illustrations I ever commissioned was by Tyler Comrie.

What are some ways that you as a creative director bring out the nuance of a story or deepen the meaning of a work?

Every creative director has their own quirks. I like to do the opposite of what’s expected. Invert something, flip it on its head, pair something loud and soft. Why not?

How do you shift gears away from work without losing your eye?

I close my laptop. I’ll do something physical, even if only for 5 minutes between projects.

Do you also have a favorite shortcut—either literal or metaphorical—in your creative process? Something to get yourself started or to help when you’ve hit a creative block?

I make so many lists while designing, especially when I hit a roadblock with an illustration or idea. I jot down words or concepts that resonate with the piece, then look for connections within the list—sort of a verbal sketch.

If you had a creative manifesto, what would be its first line?

You know that meme that’s like, “IDK though, don’t listen to me”?

I don’t have any answers for people, and I don’t take myself too seriously. But I guess I would actually say to bring back ornament and design for design’s sake. Design can be more than functionality or efficiency.

I wanted to talk abou Acacia, a new magazine for writers, thinkers, and artists of the Muslim left. What’s the process like working on Acacia? How did it start?

Acacia is so special to me, and I’m incredibly grateful to be a part of this team. It’s the work I’m most proud of because I feel deeply connected not only to the design work, but also to the mission, the people, and the words. I had a meet-cute in the elevator with the editor-in-chief, Hira Ahmed. She mentioned she was starting a Muslim literary magazine, and I asked her, “Have you asked anyone to design it yet? Because I want to.” The rest is history.

We just finished issue 3 last week, so it’s just over a year old. We started in 2023, with the first issue coming out in the fall, and it publishes twice a year. The first issue of Acacia explored themes like reproductive justice, queer Muslim identity, cultural representation, and abolition, establishing a platform for leftist Muslim voices. The second issue focused on Palestine, connecting global liberation struggles through essays on student activism, genocide discourse, and cultural resistance. I work with many fine artists, rather than just illustrators and designers, which is new for me. We use existing artwork from artist portfolios and galleries, and there’s a lot more curation. It’s about finding something that pairs well with what already exists.

I’ve worked with so many Muslim artists and the magazine is overwhelmingly made by people of color, from diverse backgrounds—whether that’s race, gender, ethnicity, or sexual orientation. I have very few restrictions. Music to my ears.

What do you think it reveals about the future of political publishing in America?

It’s more important than ever, given the current climate, to have smaller, independent publications that push boundaries, question the status quo, and speak truth to power. These publications will leave behind the digital and material footprint that our children will learn from one day. I have so much respect for the editors leading these publications. They sacrifice so much. Running a small publication is no easy feat, and I admire editors who choose this path, when I’m sure it feels like a thankless job.

There’s this idea within journalism that we’re doing something for the greater good and that it all pays off in the end. I used to feel that way, too. But after a few years, I realized that’s not always the case, especially when it’s met with censorship, bureaucracy, and politics that don’t align with my values. I can’t accept politics I deem dangerous or unsafe for people who look like me, and so much of what we’ve seen in the past year and a half has been completely unacceptable. I’m proud to be part of something that challenges mainstream media: a publication that chooses their words and imagery carefully, fighting forces who are actively trying to suppress and silence us.

What resistance have you faced creatively and how did you navigate that pushback?

Over the years I’ve received pushback for focusing too much on race, religion, or ethnicity. It’s come up in various ways: whether it’s related to hiring practices, the art itself, or when something feels too provocative. I quickly realized that only one group is allowed to feel discomfort, while the other is protected from it.

I find myself grappling with this issue in my own work. I’ve designed many book covers for South Asians, Muslims, Black and Brown people. I love it and I’m proud. But at what point do I stop illustrating only our collective pain? How often do I get books that reflect our joy? Rarely. It’s exhausting and taxing to constantly find new ways to visually capture our community’s pain.

It’s almost like, why is there so much demand for this one kind of story.

Give me a Franzen or give me a Saunders, you know? [laughs]

What is a good way to respond when you get pushback?

It’s knowing when to pick your battles. I have pretty thick skin. I try not to take things too personally, but if I really disagree, I’ll push back with a solution.

Is there a concept or idea you feel like the design world hasn’t fully explored yet?

Mastering classic typography. We’re all trying to make something sexy or loud without a solid foundation. We all need to collectively focus on craft. Myself included! Every designer needs to sit there and typeset a 500-page book once a year. [laughs]

Do you usually listen to music when you work on projects, Arsh?

Yeah, I listen to straight-up Qawwali and zone out.

Has there been a project that you haven’t had a chance to execute yet but you can’t stop thinking about?

I’m obsessed with choking posters in restaurants. I came across this one at Zooba recently by Jessica Walsh and it is so good.

In December, I spent a month in India and worked on a design project for myself. It felt so good. It’s important for designers to push themselves outside of their daily work. I worked on a few textile projects in Jaipur, taking some of my more abstract and geometric collage work and turning it into something tangible.

I want to use my hands more, screens less. It was amazing to see something I typically create on a screen come to life as physical material. I learned a lot in the process about what worked and what didn’t. I met so many artisans. They reminded me of the importance of detail and craft. The time and energy the blockprinters put into every hand press, wash, stamp, and stitch— it was quite humbling. I sorted through fabrics for what felt like forever, picked stitches, dyes. I watched indigo being dyed in live time and dabu block prints being pressed. I saw my designs stuffed with cotton and hung to dry. The entire process was incredibly re-energizing.

People always talk about projects that are successes, but I think we should be more open about when we mess up. What was something that you messed up on and owned it?

So many of my mistakes have happened when I felt imposter syndrome, had a scarcity mindset, was overworking, or saying yes to projects when I really wanted to say no. Honestly, learning when to leave a project or when to say no has taught me major lessons. I’m still learning. But I’ve found that working through personal challenges has ultimately helped me avoid mistakes. It’s made such a big difference to question myself and ask why I’m taking on a project. That clarity is crucial. I mess up less when I follow my gut. That said, I still mess up all the time.

If you could art direct any historical movement or publication, which one would it be?

The Kama Sutra, but don’t tell my mom.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Somnath Bhatt.

I’ve had a YouTube channel for about 10 years where I don’t have a ton of followers, and I don’t want to have a ton of followers. I’m very honest. Usually I’m crying. I would so much rather have a really small community of people who are willing to listen to me than have a large community of people who just want to walk by.

So many times I’m on shows with comedians who have a big following and I see their set and it’s not a cohesive set. It’s a compilation of everything that they’ve posted online. If I was an audience member and I paid money to be there, I’m not seeing a private piece of work. I don’t feel like I’m in on a secret.

For me, there’s no joke on the internet right now on my Instagram that I also perform on stage. If you want to see that and you want to experience the wonder of that, come to a show, come experience live art. It’s really disappointing to me to see so many comedians with a big following… They get this Disney FastPass into bigger shows, into opening for bigger comedians, and I’d say 75% of the time it’s well deserved. It’s well deserved, they’ve put in the work, they’re great comedians, and other times they’re just on the internet using trigger words, but they’re not an experienced comedian with a well-crafted set.

When it comes to posting things online, if I can be as vulnerable and as genuine as possible, I am going to attract those people. I don’t want to attract people who don’t have those same values. If I want to attract people that are also going to be honest and vulnerable with me, it is my responsibility to be honest and vulnerable. I also feel like I am somebody who is very willing to share nitty-gritty stuff on the internet.

Recently I spoke to an old friend who said she’s not interested in getting bigger; she’s interested in refining what she does. She was calling it “horizontal growth.” Staying where you are, but finding a way to flourish in that space. Or, there’s this TCI interview with Justin Vernon, where he says, basically, “The goal is not always constant maximization, you don’t always need to scale up.” Essentially, “Not everybody needs to be Walmart.”

We live in a time where folks are also often told they need to focus on one endeavor, if they plan to grow it. Always this need to grow… I think it’s interesting that, as a comedian, you have an Instagram and website for your visual art, too.

I have a poster in my room that I’ve made that says, “Never niche down.” The internet wants you to niche down, but your brain and your body and your soul don’t want you to. Something that I’ve noticed, you watch these big comedians on Netflix, after a few specials, their whole set becomes about them being a comedian. They start chasing their own tail. It’s so important to me that, no matter how big I get with comedy, I’m always pursuing something else. That way I have something to talk about. I have other experiences to talk about.

How much time do you spend working on your comedy versus working on your art?

It’s always shifting. I’m always trying to follow my joy. I’m never trying to push through creative burnout. This last week I’ve been preparing for an art festival and all my brain is focusing is on that, and so I haven’t been going to open mics, but then there could be a week where I’m feeling a little burnt out on art, and so then I’ll shift all my energy towards comedy. I am not a writer. I do not write any of my jokes. They are all figured out on stage via just talking, and I record them, and then I figure out what I liked, what the audience responded to, and I basically just, over time, memorize that.

I don’t write jokes. The only thing that I write are my raps. Obviously, I sit down and I produce the music for that, and that’s a whole thing. But all my jokes and all my stories and all my silly skits and stuff, I do all that on stage. Every time you see a joke from me—and my parents can attest to this—there’s a couple bits that I do that I’ve been doing for a few years, and every single time I do it, it’s different, because it’s not written down.

In terms of managing my time, I try not to put boundaries on it. I try not to put like, okay, 9:00 to 5:00 I work on art, and then 5:00 to 10:00, I work on comedy, because creativity can’t follow a time schedule. An insurance office can, an accountant can, but my brain is a lava lamp. I try to just follow where I’m at in the moment and trust that that’s where the best work will come from.

The writer Eileen Myles said this thing to me once: creativity can strike at any time; you just have to be receptive to it when it hits. You said you don’t deal with the creative block—I’ve always found that useful, too. Essentially, you pivot. If you’re blocked somewhere, you pivot to one of your other outlets.

I’m always pivoting and I’m always doing what sounds good and what sounds exciting in the moment, and trusting that, with the other thing that doesn’t sound exciting, it’ll come back. But if I’m not feeling interested in painting, then why would I force myself to paint? If I’ve got a really good idea for a dance routine, then I’m going to focus on that. That’s where your best work is going to come from. Something I’m always reminding myself, I’ve been a creative person since I was born ,and that is not going to change. The outlet will change. It would be weird if the outlet didn’t change, at least for me.

Some people, they are born a natural, they draw and they draw forever, but clearly that is not what’s happening in my life. I do a gajillion different things, and so I’m always telling myself to just love what you love right now and love it as hard as possible because there will come a day when you’ll love something else more. Don’t try to constrain your love for something right now. Right now, I’m really into comedy and I’m really into painting my furniture and painting big paintings, but two years ago, I was really into photography. As long as you’re doing what you love at every second, the bricks will lay themselves on the path. If you try to force a path or, “No, I’m a comedian, I have to do comedy,” then you’re making a shitty path. Follow what sounds good right now. I’m very aware that comedy is a really good performing outlet for me right now, but the second it’s not fun, I’ll move on. I’m not tied to it.

What do you consider a successful set versus one where maybe you think, “Oh, that didn’t work”? Or, maybe it just wasn’t what you hoped it would be…

That’s a great question. An unsuccessful set for me is a set where maybe mentally I’m not super present or the audience is really distracting. I have a really hard time with doing shows at venues where people are eating and everyone’s having conversations and I want to try to figure out what people are saying. Any show where I’ve got to rely on jokes that I’ve been doing for years and I’ve got to just let a script come out of my mouth, those are the worst sets.

Sets where I can be super present on stage, and I’m riffing a lot, I feel really silly, I have a lot of energy, or a set where I don’t get through all my material, that is the best set, because that means that I was crafting in the moment, and that’s where I think I’m the funniest.

I’m not a huge fan of standup comedy. It’s rare for me to see a standup routine from somebody and I’m pissing my pants laughing, because it feels like comedians are trying to trick you. They’re like, “Ha. I set you up and now you’re laughing.” But something I’m always trying to remember is the funniest person you know is not a standup comedian. The funniest person you know is your cousin or your friend or your coworker that makes you crouch over laughing at work or at a dinner or whatever. I’m always trying to recreate that feeling. That’s how I want people to laugh.

Usually, people come up to me after a show and they’re like, “I was in tears laughing,” and I’m like, “Perfect.” But in order to do that, you have to be really present. You have to create a connection with the audience where they feel like they’re friends with you, so they have permission to laugh at you [as though] you guys are friends and you’re in it together, and not on stage like, “Hi, I’m a comedian. I’m better than you, and here’s a setup for this punchline, and here’s a really smart punchline.” I don’t like this dynamic where I am bigger or better. I am just a girl. We’re there to laugh together, I’m just doing most of the talking.

You were saying before, you don’t necessarily push through creative blocks, but have you ever had points where you reached a dry period where you just don’t do comedy or don’t make art?

I definitely go through that. And those times can be hard because making things is so…that’s who I am. I grew up with parents who were architects. My parents are very creative people. My sibling is a musician in New York. It was very confusing to me to go over to my friend’s houses, and I’d be like, “What are you working on?” And they’d be like, “What do you mean? I’m watching Disney Channel.” I’m like, “No, but what project are you working on?” It was weird for me that other people weren’t always creating.

I always had a project going on. At one point, I was really into sewing backpacks. Another point, I was really into drawing ice cream cones, and I grew up a violinist. Now, when I’m at a point where there’s careers involved, it can get a little tricky when I need to take a break. The last few weeks, I’ve been so committed to comedy stuff and some of this art stuff that when, at the end of the day, it’s time for me to take a break, I’m like, well, “This is usually when I would go make something.”

It’s like, what do I do? I can’t go for another walk. What do people do? And my boyfriend was like, “Well, people usually watch TV or go to a friend’s house or something,” and I’m like, “But I need to be making something.”

I’m trying to figure out how to battle those spells. Even if I’m on the couch and depressed and I don’t know what to do, naturally, 30 minutes later, I’ve got a crayon in my hands. It’s just there’s an innate need to create, whether it’s as big as a film or it’s little as writing “hello” a whole bunch of times on a piece of paper.

Do you have a goal of where you’d want to be with your creative work in a few years, or are you just taking it as it comes and seeing what happens?

I am taking it as it comes. Sometimes I have to look at myself in the mirror and go, “Jasmine, you’re 23 years old, chill. Chill.” I don’t think it’s crazy for me to say that I know myself pretty well, there is so much for me to discover, and again, as long as I’m doing what I love, the right path will make itself. People always say to me, they’re like, with comedy, “I’ll see you on Netflix.” I’m like, “Well, but if that’s not what’s meant to happen, then I don’t want to do that.” I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t maybe a little bit want to be on SNL, I think I would crush it on SNL, but that’s the only thing I maybe daydream about.

Other things with comedy, I’d love to have a bigger, more curated show that combines a bit more mediums to it. I’d love to tour around and do theater shows with more visual elements, maybe more projections. I’d love for it to be more of a proper theater show, and I do think that’s possible. I think, if I put the pedal to the metal, I could do that in the next six months.

It really saddens me when I hear people be like, “I want to do this thing, but I got to wait until I have more more money. I need better equipment. I need this. I need that.” Bullshit. If you’re excited about a big thing now, do it now. Do it scared. It will never be the right time, so why not now? It will never be the right time. Creative excitement has a time limit. And if you miss that window, it’s over, babe. You’ve moved on to the next idea. Take advantage of your excitement for something right now and do it however you can, and that way you’ll be way more ready for the next thing.

I sell a print that says that, “It will never be the right time, so why not now?” My passion for it is huge. Or when people say, “Oh, I want to tour for comedy, but I need a gajillion followers. Oh, I need a bigger following. I need a manager.” No. I was like, “I’m going on tour in Phoenix and Austin and I’m going to message as many people as I can, and I’m going to show up professionally, and I can tell people I’m a professional comedian and I’m just going to do it now, because this is what I want to do now.” Take yourself seriously.

There was this interview we had on TCI with Henry Rollins a long time ago, and he basically said, “You don’t want to be the person who’s like, ‘I never got to hike that mountain I wanted to hike,’ or, “I never got to write the novel,” because it wasn’t the right time.. the fact is, it’s never the right time.” I’ve never regretted starting a project. It might not be the perfect thing, but you got to just get off the couch and do the thing, or it’ll pass by and then you’ll have a life of things that pass by that you never actually did.

If you don’t do those bigger projects, then you might not discover the next thing.

When I was a senior in college, I made a feature length film about my experience with loneliness after COVID. I shot the whole thing myself, and it’s been recognized by the National Alliance on Mental Illness as a resource for teens dealing with depression. My professors were really hesitant about me making it. They were like, “Jasmine, this is a big project. You have nine weeks. Are you sure you can do this? Do you have the right equipment?” And I was like, “I don’t have the right equipment, but I’ve got a fucking dream. And I know that, in a year, I might not really be into this and I’m going to regret not making this project.”

That film needed to be made and I needed to make it.vIt wasn’t like, “Oh, well, I can’t make a film because I don’t have a crew,” or, “I don’t have the right camera,” or, “I don’t have the right lens.” You know what I mean? The art will speak for itself.

I produced all the music for it. I wrote the songs for it. I produced music for it. It’s like, “But I don’t have a recording studio,” “I don’t have this, I don’t have that.” Okay, but you have your brain and you have a dream, use what’s around you. It’s something that I’m deeply passionate about.

Because I made my film, I really fell in love with composition and photography. After I made that film, my graduation present to myself was I finally bought a better camera. Because I did that big project, I found something else. Because I made my YouTube channel when I was 10 years old, that’s how I found I loved making thumbnails, and I was like, “I want to be a graphic designer.” And because I did dance in high school, and I was dance captain in high school, that’s where I determined that I was funny and that that’s how I got the attention of people, and then I discovered comedy. It’s like, that’s how growth happens.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Brandon Stosuy.

Growing up in the ’90s in New Jersey, my relationship with it is complicated. I think not just because of the music, but also the drug culture that seems to surround some of the scenes that perpetuate it. I’m not anti-drug. That’s a whole other conversation. But I saw, at a very young age, pros and cons of it all. I won’t name names. I won’t point fingers. I’m one of five kids. I’m the only one that didn’t really sign on to the parking lot culture that I think you know what I’m talking about.

I came into being a musician later in life. I was a choir kid, I was in theater, I played guitar, but I wasn’t trying to be in a band. I didn’t have the confidence to say, “I’m an artist” or anything like that in my teenage years. But I enjoyed it. I loved Ween and wrote silly songs about what I saw, not knowing anything about the future, of course—who knows that? I loved to sing and I had a couple friends who I would play guitar with, never thinking that it would be a career. I didn’t even really have a band until my 30s; I was solo up until then. My idea of a jam was a never-ending jam and being the last person in the corner with a guitar. But now, having had a deeper relationship with music and other musicians, that feeling has evolved for me.

How did it feel to settle in with the band? Was there an element of letting go?

Letting go is definitely a huge part of it. It was empowering to learn how to not feel like I had to steer the ship and to lean into each other’s ideas. I know this is not a new idea to anyone who has ever had a band; I’m having this connection and realization later in life. There’s a part of it that I’m a little embarrassed about. In my late teens, early 20s, I came out of a pretty traumatic relationship with someone who told me that anyone that would want to play with me just wanted to get into my pants. He was also very abusive, so I’ve carried those co-existingly throughout my life. My writing has stemmed from a place of healing and getting over that period of my life. It’s been a series of different ways of letting other people in, to support me and help me convey my ideas [that come] from a place I was trying to protect for so long. Having a band represents my healing process: trusting people and letting go in this way, and feeling seen by everyone I’m in the room with and letting them see me.

What did you hear in early demos that made you think, “This is working, let’s keep going”?

Everyone had their own space. I’m used to playing guitar or keys, and singing and building the demo up myself before I share it with anyone. Starting from the ground up, it’s a matter of listening and patience and knowing when to lean in and hang back. Before I knew we were writing songs, I loved it as this sonic trust fall… I’m curious what happens without forcing it to be something. There’s a lot of patience and support without the stacking of ideas… I had a lot more freedom to sing because I didn’t have to play the whole time. Everyone got to develop parts and have more movements, in a way.

You also chose to get everyone together in a communal space as opposed to a formal rehearsal studio.

I thought it would be enlightening for everyone to come and reconnect as people after Covid. To meet each other, have discourse, and have a bit of a literal band camp—to have breakfast, lunch, dinner together. The house and studio were separate. This studio, Gatos Trail in Yucca Valley, was amazing, and we were able to get to know each other in this very real way, and then go to a space where we could be in the room together and hash out songs without it feeling like we’re on the clock. After a week of going through all the songs, we had an extra two hours at the end. I was tired of hearing my own voice and was very inspired by the palette we had been honing, and I asked if we could just jam. We wrote two songs right away in that environment.

It’s so important to carve out space for the people that are choosing to be a part of your universe.

They’re giving up their life for you. I know it sounds dramatic, but it’s real. That’s why I called the band The Attachment Theory. You leave friends and your family behind and you become each other’s chosen family. You’re basically saying, “If there’s anything I’d rather do than be home and feel safe, it’s be with you.” We’re artists, and this is part of the deal. Home is everywhere, your community is everywhere, and you’re nurturing this thing. But I still feel like there’s an element of being a traveling shoe salesman. I mean that in a positive way. We believe in this and we’re nurturing a community, but it’s not like it’s getting any easier. I don’t have to tell you that.

You have an extensive backlog of ideas. How do you know when to revisit one of them?

I tend to write in my writing space, where I’m able to record enough. If I’m traveling and I have an instrument or a melodic idea, I try to get it down enough, or I’m like, “Okay, I want to pursue this when I get to a place where I can pursue this.” Most of the time, I’m feeling something deeply and I hit record, and I write a stream of consciousness to get the feeling out. Depending on the situation—if it’s days, weeks, months later—I’ll try to listen back to it with some perspective, to try to analyze what it was I was feeling. I’ll write anywhere from one to ten fragments that can be from 2 to 15 minutes long, just to get an overall feeling out… One thing I want to be better at is having more of a narrative in my writing. It’s rarely where my inspiration comes from. I’ve had writing exercises where I learned how to do that better, but most of my songs are more feelings and unfinished thoughts, ideas.

Do you feel internal or external pressure to stay creative?

I feel lucky that I don’t feel the pressure from my orbit. In my 40s, as a mom pursuing music, my concern has never been my relevance. I was a late bloomer from the get-go. My first album came out in 2009. I was late to everything. So I’ve always been behind the curve, as far as the industry is concerned. I have an understanding of that, but it hasn’t been a concern of mine.

My husband is a manager and he works with younger artists, and I understand the pressures of singles and the streaming platforms, and he helps me try to stay engaged on social media in a way that I probably wouldn’t… I feel grateful that I work with a label that is album-centric and we can focus on the record and focus on a campaign. I’m not pressured. It’s, “You tell us when you’re ready and let’s figure out the best timing for that.” [My label] Jagjaguwar has been supportive whenever I want to do something. I like to write with other people and sharpen a different tool in my belt; I think it’s always a good thing to experiment with other people and try new things. You make things according to who you’re surrounded with. Then I find the right time to put things out. But I don’t like putting too much out or putting too much on my calendar. I have an 8-year-old kid and I’m 44, and it’s just more complicated. I’d rather feel more invested when I’m ready.

Have you found your stride with balancing motherhood and your career?

I definitely haven’t figured it out, and I’m also learning that you can’t separate those things. I do feel like a crazy person going from having this performance on a theater stage and then going and chaperoning a class trip. But I know those things coincide. This is going to sound funny, but my kid is so supportive of me. Every time he’s come to the studio, we have talks about, “You know when I make a record, what happens,” and he’s like, “Oh, well, you go on tour.” “Yeah, but what’s that mean?” He’s like, “That means you’re gone.” And I’m like, “Yeah, but now you’re in real school.” The last two tours I did, it was COVID or just past COVID, where it was easier to take him. With this album, I’m more invested. I want to show the band I’m going to work this one harder for all of us, but that means more touring. My kid was so sweet, he just said, “Mom, you can’t stop singing.”

Oh my god.

Yeah. Talk about making me cry and fall on my knees. We’re going to be touring this year and next year. It’s going to be the most I’ve been gone. He understands time and space in a way where he didn’t before and you just can’t separate those things.

Years ago you got some important advice from Nick Cave about live performance and looking people in the eye. What impact has this had for you on stage?

When I walk out on stage, it takes the first three songs to shake my nerves, and usually my nerves make me teary. So the first one to three songs, I’m mostly closing my eyes and getting past the tears to the point where I can open my eyes. I try to focus on an audience member. If I can find that, great; if not, I can turn to my band and reconnect with my band. That settles me in this other way, and then I can turn back to the audience and have moments where I feel like I’m having conversations directly with them. You can’t control chemistry. You can’t control the energy of a room. You have to perform no matter what. I still believe in that part of it. Some of it can be acting. But some of it is, “How do I wield this energy to all of our benefits, and get through it to be able to do my job?” Sometimes it’s funny, sometimes it’s sad.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Jeffrey Silverstein.

I’ve been making art my whole life. My mom noticed that I was a very visual and creative person, and throughout my childhood and stuff, I was involved in as many artistic classes or community opportunities as possible, and then leading into high school and stuff, it became very prominent that that was what I wanted to eventually make my end goal with being full-time doing something in the arts, graduated and decided that college did not make any sense to me. My first job was at Baskin Robbins and with what money I had, I wanted to buy myself a little plug-in tablet and challenge myself to learn how to draw digitally, to connect with people over social media, connect with my community. I’m from Boise, Idaho, so it was a pretty small place.

I challenged myself to draw something new every single day for a new year in the hope that I would learn how to draw digitally. I did that pretty much for about five years. That’s how I really developed my style. I’ve always loved cartoony illustrative characters and monsters or humanoid characters, cats wearing shoes and stuff. It’s always been so true to me. I feel like I’m a reflection of my work, very bubbly and colorful and silly. I never take anything seriously so I like that to reflect in my work.

I’ve been full-time now for almost six years, and it’s been really cool to be able to not only share my work with the world, but work on amazing client-based projects and again, work within my community and do things personally and professionally.

You’ve had huge clients from PBR to smaller brands like NOOWORKS, designing everything from merchandising to clothing. Do you have a different process when you work on something really big or a different process when it comes to the medium?

It’s always been different. Especially self-taught, you’re finding your way through the weeds a little bit. From a very early time when I started taking on clients, it was a little bit more stressful where my process is literally starting with a sketch and then going from there. My process itself is always just throwing out a bunch of ideas, sketching an entire giant page full of things, and picking and choosing, collaging from there, to then hopefully finalize a design to then share with the client I’m working with.

But the more serious corporate client type things, usually people are coming to me with some kind of idea in mind. It’s really cool because then I’m able to transform these ideas into my world and give my spin and make it more vibrant, psychedelic and playful rather than it being so literal.

Do you feel like you’ve worked better with more or less constraints?

Less constraints are great. It depends on the brand. Usually there’s so much play with certain clients that reach out to me, and usually they’re very open-minded to either giving me a really loose idea, even if it is very serious or to the point. The problem happens when people are like, “Hey, you sent this idea but I actually want to go in a completely different direction, so let’s take a complete left turn and then have you draw all of these different things rather than what you started with.” That’s a little bit more difficult.

Are you pretty good at scrapping your work and killing your darlings or do you still feel very attached? I know working in illustration and design, there’s a lot of projects and ideas that don’t see the light of day.

The great thing about scrapping things or having things be put to the side, it’s all still things that belong to me. I never have to sell myself or my work, which is really nice. And so even if something doesn’t work for one particular client, it’s really nice to be able to go back into that sketchbook or reflect on that design and then absorb it for my own use. Because I’m always reinventing ideas and developing characters more and more throughout the time that I draw.

I love that. How did you discover this style? You said it’s always existed within you—what was it about this particular psychedelic ’70s kind of vibe that you really stuck with?

I have such a deep appreciation for nostalgia. Even though I never lived in this time, there’s so much to build off of the colors and the shapes of all of that, everything that was built in the ’60s and ’70s by artists creating styles. I’ve always felt very strongly about the colors, the characters. I love cats, so you’ll see a lot of that in my work. I love being outside at the park, so lots of trees and flowers and butterflies and kind of details like that. The style became more refined throughout the time that I spent doing this sort of 365 project and accepting more work from clients.

It’s always just been something that feels natural and otherworldly to me. When I sit down to draw something, I already feel like the design is on the paper before I even put pen to the paper. I’m able to see it, so it’s really fun to me. But the cartoony style, again, it’s just kind of who I feel like I am as a person reflected in my work. I love how playful and expansive the world can become. And it’s all at my fingertips, I don’t have to work under somebody else’s ideas or motivations.

You’ve kind of described the sculptor seeing the statue within this piece of marble with the way that you see it. You said that you’ve always been a creative person, but are you a “trusting your instincts” kind of artist, or has it taken time to listen to your gut?

It’s a little bit of both. It felt very natural to me to work in this style throughout high school even. It’s fun to go back in those really, really old sketchbooks and see all of the stuff I was making back then. Even if it wasn’t the exact same thing that I’m making right now, I can still see so much of the character world building and the colors and the playfulness of it.

But I’ve wanted to be more open-minded. I’ve wanted to be expansive into different mediums and stuff, so I never hold myself back. Expanding and being open-minded is also really good for the creative process for me.

What are some of those things that you want to experiment with that you haven’t yet, and what are some of those things that you have?

I love still life drawing. I don’t do enough of that. Sometimes you get so stuck in the creative process of drawing these five things over and over again just in different environments and obviously that’s a style for a particular artist. But it’s kind of fun when somebody else gets to control that aspect of things, and you’re able to look at something and imagine it in your own style. And maybe a new character or a new way of drawing even a box or a building comes out of that. I’ve definitely been more interested in developing a human character to live in my world at some point. Because right now I’ve had so much fun creating these cat and dog characters that wear go-go boots and clothes.

Sometimes you get bored drawing on your iPad all day. So I like to pick up new things constantly. Right now I’m embroidering. It’s really fun to take denim and put janky, little embroidery pieces all over your jackets and jeans. It always inspires new ideas.

Yeah, I feel working with your hands is always a nice break from the more digital parts of your job. So that’s really lovely. Outside of your creative practices, how else do you refill your cup?

That’s also a really good question. It’s something I notice a lot of illustrators don’t spend a lot of time worrying about because we’re constantly so absorbed by working. I’ve had to literally put a stop on myself and be like, “Hey, so today you’re not working. What are you going to do?” I love going on walks. I go to coffee shops. I love going to cat and dog rescues and hanging out with animals all the time. Of course, spending time with friends. I have a lot of artist friends and we love to randomly pick a place and go and sit at the park for an afternoon and just decompress and not do work.

I’ve always been very active and I love being outside. I’m a very social and lively person outside of sitting at my desk, but sometimes it’s really hard to find that kind of work and life balance when you are your own boss.

When you’re your own boss and no one’s telling you you have to work certain hours, how do you create that sort of structure for yourself? What are some of the benefits and the perils of freelance life?

Before I was full time, I was doing lots of customer service jobs, so I am trying to tap back into that part of my life where I was working three or four days a week and then having this free time to myself. Obviously the positives of being full-time freelance is that it’s really cool that people reach out to you and are interested in your particular style. I no longer have to worry about working with people’s very specific ideas and having to refine myself to a very sharp edge that doesn’t feel like myself.

The negatives: You can work whenever you want, but you could also just spend a week not doing anything and then feel really stressed the next week about deadlines. Finding that kind of balance between feeling happy when you are taking time off and not feeling like you’re missing out on doing the work, giving yourself that break is really important. My routine is very morning based, so if anybody’s bothering me about doing chores or stuff in the morning, I’m like, absolutely not. This is my peaceful moment with my cup of coffee, my cat, and my sketchbook.

It’s so important to protect your peace. How do your clients find you generally? Is it through social media? Word of mouth?

I spread myself pretty evenly over social media. I’m not as present on TikTok, which is nice for me because I don’t have to worry about being a part of yet another algorithm. I would hope that people find me through my website but it’s always Instagram. A lot of creative directors find artists through Instagram when they’re creating moodboards. That creates an environment for me to exist in where I can create whatever I want to on any given day and share it with Instagram. And maybe that just fits perfectly with what this future client is looking for. It’s a perfect synergy. I don’t have to worry about what people are wanting to trend or be popular at that very moment. I can just create work that feels really good to me, and it’s really nice when people resonate with that.

Do you have a healthy relationship with social media or does it bring you anxiety?

I like to think that I have a pretty healthy relationship with Instagram, but more recently, at this moment in politics, it’s really hard to not see what’s happening. I don’t check the news personally, but it finds its way creeping into Instagram. I always try to make it a very even balance where I only use it when I’m really interested in seeing what my friends are up to and then having a really solid period in the day where there’s just absolutely no presence of looking at Instagram particularly at all. But you have to be really kind to yourself. I talk to my boyfriend about this a lot. You have to always meet yourself where you’re at. If what feels good to you is scrolling on Instagram for an hour out of the day, as long as you can pull yourself out of it and do something that’s healthier for the brain afterwards.

But it’s also really hard because when you use Instagram as a freelancer. You’re constantly seeing new brands, new companies pop up. The way I find clients, I’ll just go on their page, maybe I’ll follow them or interact or send a cold call email. So it’s almost like a double-edged sword if you’re not spending time on social media. They’re potentially missing out on connecting with future clients or making yourself more visible by liking, commenting and posting all the time. But I have found that with the steady momentum with my career over the years, it’s been nice to take more of a backseat to constantly scrolling on social media. It’s been driving itself, people find me naturally, and that feels really good.

It’s really interesting what you said feeding the algorithm earlier with regards to TikTok. It’s like you have to engage with it, otherwise you will be punished by the algorithm. Double-edged sword is a perfect way of describing that.

I noticed that if I want to look at artistic things, then I really only allow myself the time to really engage with those moments in my life. But at the same time, when you have art museums and art events going on, especially living in LA, it makes it that much easier to disconnect and really feel like I’m living in the moment.

So what was the transition like going from Idaho to Los Angeles?

It’s something I’ve always wanted to do. I honestly never thought that I would’ve moved from Idaho because it’s so cozy there. I lived there my entire young life with my mom, and she’s basically the other half of my business; she helps me pack and ship all of my stuff.

My boyfriend and I have been together for a long time and we’ve always imagined this life that we could have being here. And thankfully, this is another tidbit with social media— I’ve made all of my real life friends through using Instagram. I felt very fortunate to have just this built-in wonderful community of friends that are all also friends in real life. People are able to tell me about all of the fun things happening around town. I live near my friends. And so that’s what made it easier to make that transition.

At the same time, Boise has always been my home, and it will forever be a place that helped me become the person I am today, creatively and in my personal life. I go back often. It’s honestly really nice to feel like I can just hop on a plane, and it’s very cheap to fly from a small airport down here. I get to go visit family, friends all the time and it’s almost as if I never left.

There’s something very California retro about your aesthetic, so I think it’s a very natural marriage. What is one thing that you wish that people knew about Idaho that most people don’t know about?

This is so surface level, but we’re not all just potatoes. Idaho is a beautiful place. I think it’s very underrated. Almost completely untouched. There’s beautiful hiking. There’s places to feel like you’re in an urban living area, but also you can escape that almost immediately. And it’s really a utopia.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Jun Chou.