Interviews

On “We Were Feminists Once”: An Interview with Andi Zeisler

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“The most common dissenting sentiment is, ‘Look, it’s fine that people are gonna come to [feminism] through pop culture, and you can’t say it’s less real than coming to it through feminist theory.’ I’ve definitely heard some frustration around that. I agree with that sentiment to some extent, but it still doesn’t absolve people of their individual ability to research feminism further—to do their own exploring—and it doesn’t mitigate the media’s role in the ways they’ve filtered and diluted feminism.”

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I Arrived in a Dress: An Interview with Mary-Kim Arnold

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“It seems to me that there are only two essential things we bring to our creative work: our tools–language or fabric or paper–and the truth of our own experience, our own psychic realities. For years, I tried to write in traditional narrative forms, but I struggled with moving a plot forward in time. As much as I wanted a kind of cohesive linearity, it was not something I could do. Both the truth of my experience–which is living between places and with rupture–and what I am interested in aesthetically is about resisting boundaries and creating some kind of meaning out of chaos, from fragments.”

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On “Sex Object: A Memoir”: An Interview with Jessica Valenti

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“For a long time, there’s been this notion that men’s memoirs are conveying universal experiences, whereas women’s stories are self-indulgent, salacious—just too much. You see it in reviews—if a woman writes about sex in any way, she’s looking for attention, whereas someone like Philip Roth is brave and amazing. That’s really coming to a head right now, so it’s been an interesting time to do this sort of writing and this sort of work. Which makes it exciting but also terrifying, because you’re basically girding yourself for what you know is going to be an inevitable response.”

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The Riches of Erasure: An Interview with Jenni B. Baker

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“David Foster Wallace isn’t going to create any more things, so I have to take my energy in a new direction and create my own work. Like anyone who experiences a loss, I work with what’s left — one of Wallace’s texts. Working via erasure allows me to commune with the original text and author in a way that work that was simply inspired by or dedicated to wouldn’t. I repeatedly handle the physical book as I create a digital scan of the text. I then work with one page at a time, interacting with the words on the page and slowly erasing text until what remains is part me, part Wallace. The process is one of remembering and reflecting; the final product, a memento.”

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On “The Red Parts: Autobiography of a Trial”: An Interview with Maggie Nelson

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“Well, you do an autopsy on something that’s dead, and I’m not sure our fascination with death is dead. Nor could it ever be, I don’t think. Why wouldn’t we be fascinated with death? That said, the book isn’t about ‘death’ in the abstract as much as about one particular species, i.e. spectacularized violence against women, which presents its own issues.”

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On “Desert Boys”: An Interview with Chris McCormick

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“I think most fiction is fundamentally about people who, in one way or another, are both insiders and outsiders at the same time. Kush—who’s half-Armenian and half-white—is destined for it. He’s got the privilege of access to this place, but feels othered by his bicultural life. I wanted a narrator who felt like a visitor in his own home. He can’t put his finger on why. He feels like he’s living in the wrong place, and then he thinks he was born at the wrong time in history: he listens to music from the 60s and 70s, he wishes he were alive during a more politically-engaged era, he believes he could’ve been a man of significance in a different set of circumstances.”

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On “The Refusal of Suitors”: An Interview with Ryo Yamaguchi

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“Above my desk is this line from Wallace Stevens: ‘In the world of words / Imagination is one of / The forces of nature.’ I think of the city that way—it’s a force of nature. It can enrapture you with its pulsing marquees or literally blow broken glass in your face. Where I live especially, the wind blows, and it’s either the smell of chocolate (from a nearby factory) or sewage. A stranger starts talking to you and you don’t know how to feel—you are guarded, but then you are friendly. You love this and you hate this. You are tired because it’s hard, and you feel strong because it is. And anxiety pulses beneath all of this, it (here we go with Heidegger) wakes you up to yourself, and in the very best situation, it makes you remember that you are the city.”

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On “Suburban Gospel”: An Interview with Mark Beaver

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“There’s a lot of male sexuality in this book, because I knew that if I was going to write about faith, I’d also have to write about the flesh—I think it would be dishonest to write about male adolescence without sexuality being an important component. So given my upbringing, that was the hardest part—it felt difficult, but necessary. When I was shopping the book around, one publisher told me he liked my book but wouldn’t be publishing it because female readers—the largest book-buying demographic—would find all the sexuality off-putting.”

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On “My Father, The Pornographer”: An Interview with Chris Offutt

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“When I first started [writing] fiction, I avoided sex scenes because there aren’t that many ways to write about sex, and I did not want to write pornographically like my dad, so I just sort of skipped over those parts. I eventually realized, this is a part of life, and I just have to figure out a way to write about it, so I use metaphor more to describe sex.”

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“Boy Erased”: An Interview with Garrard Conley

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“Initially, I was wary of speaking to congregations for fear that they wouldn’t like my politics, but now I can begin to see how this message is meant for the church, too. Of course I want people to admire my sentences and my book’s structure, but I really want to reach audiences that might be on the fence about LGBTQ issues (or at least people who have relatives that might be on the fence). I just love living in that in-between space. I like the hard struggle of being between audiences.”

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