Avsnitt
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Shane Anderson's book appeared in my store. I don't know how it came to me but as I was restacking on a glum June day, I found it, After the Oracle Or: How the Golden State Warriors' Four Core Values Can Change Your Life Like They Changed Mine (Deep Vellum, 2021). It's an unmistakably self-helpy title and I don't have any connection to basketball, but I was intrigued about the author. Shane and I both lived in Berlin for the same long stretch, give or take a year. We never met but we are contemporaries. I wanted to read about his life in this city. I wanted to see if his sentiments matched my own. As I read, I learned that they did and that he was sunk into a place of almost inescapable darkness. WARNING: THIS INTERVIEW & SHANE'S BOOK MENTIONS ATTEMPTED SUICIDE. Shane's rock bottom led him to a path of dedication to self improvement. He focused on the values of Joy, Mindfulness, Compassion and Competition which were also followed by his favorite basketball team. It sounds simple and hoaky but because of who Shane is--a sensitive writer, an intellectual contemporary who is laying bare his struggles and how he found an answer--I believe his book might be a lifeline for people who think they're too jaded for lifelines.
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Forrest Muelrath is having a moment with the release of his first book, a slim novella called The Valeries (Expat Press 2024). I read the interview Forrest did with Expat's founder and notable Self Exposure mention Manny Marrero, which I found edifying, and which deepened my understanding of both men. This interview is the Yang to that interview's Yin. It's spontaneous, unplanned, and full of human fallibility and abundant conversation about the literary use of incest. Enjoy!
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Saknas det avsnitt?
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Josh documents the recent reading at the KGB bar in NYC, organized by Pig Roast Publishing. We talk about meeting writers like Jesse Hilsson and Derek Maine IRL, about tone deaf moments, and episodes we're planning for the future.
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Brad Listi, best known as the host of the otherppl podcast, tried to write a few different books before he settled on the unique form of Be Brief and Tell Them Everything (Ig Publishing, 2022). It is a book written in defiance of the idea of writing the perfect book: a collection of punchy paragraphs; a document designed to release thoughts, impressions, loose recollections; a middle aged attempt to make sense of your life. That's a really hard sell for people who think of books and reading as an escape, or as a finely honed thing that requires certainty to sculpt. Brad's Book turned two a couple months ago and Brad himself will turn fifty on August 1st. I've been a fan for a long time and I was surprised and delighted that he was willing to come on my tiny podcast. We talk about work, about politics, about Gen X and autofiction.
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You'll either find this episode juicy or uncomfortable, probably both. At one point, a mother and her adult son come into my store while Kat and I are recording and, while browsing for vintage homeware, are forced to endure our deepest admissions about sexuality, gender, and whether we'll ever be happy. I know this is totally unprofessional. I know it's a mistake to record while the store is open and submit potential customers to this insanity, but the conversation I was having was so important and so life affirming, I just couldn't help it. Fucking Kat Giordano is a rockstar! Who can take their deepest, most muddled thoughts and transmute them into poetry like Kat? Who among us is nervy enough to ride that line between controlled prose and naked chaos? To make themselves look creepy and attention starved and disgustingly human? It's a great risk and a great honor to listen to Kat read from Thumbsucker (Malarkey Books (2024) and to trace their journey with non-binary identity. Kat and I are two gerbils in a world full of hamsters and it's absolutely wild to meet another gerbil because for a few minutes, you feel whole.
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I reached out to Tyler Dempsey of Another Fucking Writing Podcast and Tyler of LoFi Lit. We were moving in such similar circles and I wanted to officially give us a chat space to chum around, support each other, and complain about fucked up shit. The name I gave our chat is Filthy Headphones and Dead Air. We talked, early on, about the overlaps between our podcasts and how there’s room for all of us. Each of us is a brown soda: Dr. Pepper, Coke and root beer (I’m root beer). Particular flavors for particular moods and no one’s gonna turn down a cold brown soda? When it’s consistently been sweet and tangy and effervescent on the tongue! It’s nice to get to know writers but it’s nice to get to know your hosts as well. In the end, you come back for that interplay.
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It felt good to talk to Graham about his second book, I Have A Gun. It was lovely to have Derek there. The conversation went in weird directions. We talked about our racist grandparents. At times it felt like an impromptu support group and I know this is dangerous. Is it dangerous? Doesn't every practitioner of something painstaking want to talk to other people who do the same thing and bond over shared struggles? Graham's book is skillful at pulling the reader in and then antagonizing that same reader to push them away. I think all writers are capable of sycophancy and that we're equally, if not not more capable of retaliation and retribution. There's something about being gifted with language and observation that makes you a low-level sociopath and an outright psychopath if you're not careful. Derek DMd me after the talk with Graham and said, "I think that went well, what about you?" and I told him I don't even think of it on those terms. It's just a documentary project to me. But that's not entirely true. I live for a DM like that.
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If you've only encountered Uzodinma Okehi through his recent Twitter persona, you might characterize him as a pest. He's a frequent poster, but he's known more for his replies and responses, which sometimes seem to take indie lit writers and presses to task for being precious, disingenuous, or faux humble. It's a tightrope to walk, especially because Uzo is part of that world, and guilty of many of the same faux pas. This sentiment, of being among but also being outside, is a major theme in Uzo's book House of Hunger, which he self published as part of a series that traces the character Blue Okoye (a stand in for Uzo himself). This book rocked my world. In less than 100 pages, it captures the alienation of being at college in Iowa City in the 90s. The bleakness of the place, the grayness, and also the alienation of being black and artistic in a school where popularity generally belongs to white jocks and their Coors Light looking girlfriends. Outside of the themes of alienation and belonging, the stylistic choices in this book are sharp and choppy, lending a racing, countdown feeling to the reader. Check out Uzo's book here:
https://www.bokoye.com/
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Michael Wheaton and I talk about weed. We talk about using it as a tool for our writing and our parenting, and moreover, we talk about featuring this part of ourselves in our writing. Both of us have young children, but they won’t be young forever. Soon they will piece together what that smell was wafting through their childhood. In a way, this conversation and Michael’s latest book, Home Movies (Bunny Press 2024), is an attempt to practice how we respond to them. It’s a delicate balance between wanting to feel legitimate, to not feel like a criminal, while granting that weed is a filter that can distance you from the people you love the most.
https://bunnypresse.org/product/bunny05-michael-wheaton-home-movies-print-chapbook/
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It’s remarkable ZH Gill is among us at all, let alone producing heartfelt and hilarious prose about his, shall we say, misadventures. ZH goes into depth about his struggles with mental health, his time in a psych ward as a teen, his terrible depression at 19, and his manic jag at Oberlin which almost ended in marriage. What a beautiful person. What a big hearted baby bear. ZH talks about the people he loves with zero irony and makes you want to be among them. His chapbook and his stories in Hobart are so good and it’s clear he’s got a lot more in him. I can’t wait to say I knew him when. Now, for the love of Red Vines, can someone please get him a PDF of his story in Animal Blood volume 4!
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Jesse is back to talk more in depth about our connection to one another. Jesse edited my forthcoming book from Pig Roast Publishing, The Bottomfeeder, and we talk about that experience and my anxiety about releasing such a personal book in the future. It's good to have friends you can count on and Jesse is an earnestly supportive member of our scene. He's also an incredible writer with a savant-like ability to dip in and out of genres. His latest book, The Tattletales, is a noir detective thriller that drives like a dream, but we mostly reference his first crime novel, Blood Trip, because it made his home life awkward when he released it. Blood Trip, released shortly after his ex-wife remarried, is a book about a divorced dad who stages the kidnapping of his daughter and the murder of her stepfather. Carla and her partner Hilda Hoy are also in the store and chime in about whether I'll be cancelled for writing openly about being a mom who smokes pot.
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If you're listening to this episode, it's likely not the first time you've heard an interview with Kat Giordano. About to release their 4th book (a collection of poems called Thumbsucker, with Malarkey Books) Giordano is indisputably a part of the outsider/indie lit scene. And yet… and yet they feel outside of the outsiders. Part of that comes from being non-binary. Part of that comes from decades of social anxiety. Part of that comes from being opinionated in ways that diverge from the party line – and yes, even outsider literature has a clear party line.
If the social scene doesn't represent you. If you can't wrap it around you like a cum stained blanket and feel its musty comfort, then you have to be a writer first. Kat is very much a writer first and the books they've produced are an invitation for readers to witness the ugliest, horniest, neediest moments of their life. But the work is more than just prurient and confessional. Kat's a gifted and careful writer who continues to produce work that is seldom reflected elsewhere. In this episode, we focus on Kat's 2020 autofictional novel, The Fountain (Thirty West), which is an account of a specific sort of depression that hits in your early 20s.
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Josh and I have our first 1 on 1 conversation and it could not have gone better. We talk about the genre of autofiction from a lot of different perspectives. Josh is an obsessive reader and writer of autofiction. He's working on an extended project called Autoportrait, which is made up of a mountain of seemingly unrelated declarative sentences about his life. The cumulative effect is sort of magical. Josh didn't develop this style on his own. He found a book called Autoportrait by the French writer Édouard Levé and felt compelled to try out the form himself. Throughout our conversation, we consider the important role French writers of the 80s and 90s play in defining the genre. We talk about the alternative journalism and zine culture roots of autofiction in writers like Hunter S. Thompson, Eve Babbitz and Lisa Crystal Carver as well. And we talk about proto-autofiction coming from unexpected places; The Diary of Anne Frank and Notes From the Underground. We discuss the way women are ghettoized by the term Memoir, the explosion of recovery memoirs, and how James Frey would have been saved by defining himself as an autofiction writer. We talk about the most important works in recent history with writers like Tao Lin and Shelia Heti. We talk about where it's all going and how the use of other platforms will become offshoots of autofictional writing. This is by no means a complete picture but I think it might be the deepest one in existence so far.
If you're interested in listening to Josh read chapters from his Autoportrait, you can find those episodes of Misery Loves Company here:
Chapter 1 + 2: https://youtu.be/G8mVEWCFGYs?si=rPhaVCtFoZSFen-r&t=1866
Chapter 3 + 4: https://youtu.be/E9qyRd3xYng?si=UdBMM87jv1f4452G&t=2031
Chapter 5 + 6: https://t.co/LsKMfmpNVY
Chapter 7 + 8: https://youtu.be/elh0GFSkpsc?si=jjUln0cajs0SBFEv&t=1940
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This is an important episode. Derek sings a heartbreaking Jawbreaker song at the top. We talk about Blake Butler and his book, Molly. We talk about memory and how hard it is to conjure images when you think in language. We talk about our old faces and dumpy keisters. We talk about losing people and being constantly on the verge of loss. We are writers. We are parents. We are friends.
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This episode can be played as a drinking game. Every time Rudy and I find a pop culture intersection, you drink. I would never play it because I think all games are pointless. I also think most of our listeners are drinking just fine without a gaming element. But I leave the choice up to you.
Rudy Johnson is a quiet legend of our scene. He’s collaborated with his childhood friend, William Duryea, on many literary projects, most famously on the online journal Misery Tourism and the coinciding live virtual reading series, Misery Loves Company. Rudy and I met during the short lived but much loved reign of Last Estate, which he also co-led with William. We worked on art and layout together. It was so easy to work with him. He kept his camera off and he became, for me, a consistently kind Eeyore voice in the gloomy winter. When you view his sub-stack, which you should, it’s clear that, despite his common name, there is only one Rudy Johnson. I like to imagine him in a room with 100 Rudy Johnsons, even 100 black Rudy Johnsons from New York. What would they make of him? I believe they’d find him odd and delightful. Rudy, my friend, I hope the Ketamine helps.
https://substack.com/@lynchpoet
https://youtube.com/@Miserytourism
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Early on in this conversation, I noticed I was breathing like an athlete and wondered, in some remote part of my mind, why the adrenaline and ragged nerves? Possibly it was the fact that we were back. Carla was back in the store with me and we had the TASCAM out and the headphones on. The guest, Nathaniel Duggan, wrote a book that seemed to me to be as good as any poetry book that ever won an award, and Josh was coming back for the episode, which made it feel like the early days (also known as 4 episodes ago). I read over the bleak poems throughout Black Friday. What a perfect collection for the day! Poems filled with unmoored hopelessness and capitulation to the industrial machine. Poems written by a brilliant 29 year old who has already failed as an adult, by most metrics. He has no buying power despite having had every privilege. He has no property or family of his own. His poems are about not meeting the demands of modern society. Of pausing too long during a greasy lunch to write a poem on your phone, which casts you even farther away from the GOAL of locking it down and making money. Death Egg sold 200 copies so far. We talked about this. We talked about how indie art won't change your life financially. This theme comes up a lot in the 10 episodes of Self Exposure. It's meant to be a sign of the meaninglessness of striving for and reaching an audience of any significance. I have come to see this crumb sweeping attitude as understandable. Expectations are emotional and having expectations that are too high will lead to more personal misery. Sometimes there's an opposite impulse at play. I've seen bluster about being the "best" writer or "best" indie press, and it's a quiet claim, like the time I was in the Netherlands and biked past a restaurant sign that said, "The best bolognese in Rotterdam." The space that contains these episode notes will likely be missed by most who listen to the podcast, but nonetheless, I am ready to proclaim that Death Egg is the best bolognese in Rotterdam. That Self Exposure is the best indie-lit podcast, and that I am the best auto-fiction writer in Berlin. Take that Lauren Oyler! My pecs just got hard. I'm into strength now. Join my army.
Death Egg by Nathaniel Duggan
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The best food novel I've read this year is Ric Royer's Niagara Falls, NY. It's much more than that. It's also a novel about coming home to a desolate place during the pandemic, regaining personal momentum, and it's a book about the history of Niagara Falls, specifically the utopian dreamers that tried to form it and failed. But the food is what sticks for me. It's the greasy junk food of depression and if you've ever shoveled fries into your mouth to blot out the world, you will understand the mastery of Royer's portrayal. Oily sausage links sit unrefrigerated in a car trunk, along with Tim Hortons doughnuts, and Arby's roast beef. The final chapter of the novel is a symphony of take-out Chinese dishes, surreally spread out (ala Beauty and the Beast) around Royer delivering him enough nourishment to finally move on. I didn't know Royer before reading his book but I want to know him. Speaking with him, I was drawn to his soft voice and considerate tone. His gentleness is present throughout our conversation, which ranges from cancellation to suicide to the beauty of post-industrial wastelands. I read this book while I was working on my own manuscript and it made me want more for myself and for the book I am writing. I've come to see this podcast as an attempt to form a supportive community amongst indie-outsider writers. No one is getting rich here so, for me, the point is to be guided and inspired by old voices and new voices in the scene. Niagara Falls, NY inspired me. It's a great book.
More info about Ric at http://www.ricroyer.com/
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D’urban Moffer is much more than a writer, though he is that as well. His book, American Kashayas is available from Expat Press. I’ve not read it personally, but he describes it as thick, 500 pages.
I know D’urban has another “real” name and that he lives with his partner in Ohio. When I saw him perform in Chicago, and I use the word perform instead of read on purpose, he wore an elaborate mask and costume. He was thrilling to watch. A real carnival barker in a time of mousy blahness.
D’urban and I were supposed to eat a steak together in Chicago. We wanted to do it right: spend at least 100 bucks and suck down some good wine with America’s prized beef. But due to a missed flight, that never happened. I see this sprawling conversation os a sort of conciliation prize for the steak we never ate.
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A few days before my conversation with the filmmaker Malcolm Macmaster, I had a crisis of confidence concerning my little corner of the indie lit scene. I watched two episodes of the superb Misery Loves Company reading series, one devoted to Pig Roast Publishing, the other to Back Patio Press. I went in thinking, these are my people, but slowly I felt something in me grow morose and then rage filled. Every talented reader /writer was a straight white dude. My podcast cohosts were straight white dudes too. To utter this feels like I’m breaking a code. Transgressive writing is too busy exploring the depths of inner psyche and Taco-Bell wrappers to concern itself with representation. If you’re good enough , it doesn’t matter what you identify as. If you’re good enough, you’ll rise to prominence. On my hand, I can count the writers who have defied the white male stereotype of the scene. One of them is dead. Am I worthy of being published? Am I good enough? If the arbiters of taste are chronically online men who mainly know other chronically online men, would I even make sense to them? I hate that I’m asking these questions of myself but I also find I’m at a dramatic stage in defining my identity. I don’t feel like “woman” describes me anymore. I have no idea what that means for my future. It’s not exciting to feel this way, it’s a knot in my throat that won’t go away. For almost two hours, talking with Malcolm, I felt lighter. I felt wise and confident. It was a beautiful conversation. At the same time, I think of all of you, the dudes of indie lit, and I think you’re gonna turn this episode off. Without Josh and Derek to prop me up, there’s no draw. I hope I’m wrong. I hope, as ever, for belonging and respect and the chance to share my voice.
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Jesse Hilsson noticed my presence when I joined the scene. He was the first person to DM with me and, because of his encyclopedic memory, he was able to fill me in.
Imagine me as Donny, the character Steve Buscemi plays in The Big Lebowski. There was a permanent duh on my face, which the internet concealed, but Jesse could sense it and he reached out.
I became aware of Caleb through his misanthropic substack, Middle American Literature. Every week a new essay about the same themes: the banality of work, the low level torture of wasting away your hours in a service job. It’s a subtle and gritty portrait that hits the same marks and this repetition, this drudgery, makes the portrait richer.
Caleb and I became friends and started working together. Caleb and I worked on the piece I read at the Chicago Expat reading together. Caleb also endured a hellish bus ride from Indiana to meet me in Chicago for the reading.
I’m pretty sure none of this comes across in our conversation. I apologize. I wanted sparkling intimacy, groundbreaking insights, but our combined depressive energy, along with our need to rehash the drama spawned by the last episode, created a conversation with clipped wings.
Still, at a muted volume, this episode served up its own grace. Caleb read a story from his new collection, Novelty, and he did a good job. It’s the first time anyone has read their work on the podcast.
The Simpsons are big for me right now. This is a Simpsons episode where Lenny & Carl hang out with Selma.
Relevant links:
Jesse’s Substack - https://cholorohemoglobin.substack.com
Caleb’s substack - https://middleamericanliterature.substack.com
Jesse’s books - https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/22163637.Jesse_Hilson.
Caleb’s books - https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/21528153.Caleb_Caudell
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