His history is as authentic and roller-coaster wild as he is now generous and calm.

You grew up in Chicago, right?

Yeah, I grew up with my dad. He was a masters degree dropout, a socialist. He was in SDS [Students for a Democratic Society] in the 60s. I was born in San Diego and we moved back to Chicago when I was three. And my dad was this self-made intellectual guy. He was probably a teacher’s assistant or something when I was a little kid. He had a lot of different gigs, he eventually became a truck driver.

The idea of being a socialist even then was all about infiltrating the industrial workplace – this way of life. Like a lot of grandiose socialists, they thought they’d be the leaders of the revolution. It’s made me pretty bitter about the hardcore leftist scene these days, at least from growing up in that world.

Was he an artist at all?

He was too dogmatic, I think, to ever be an artist full time. There’s something about really dogmatic people, where being an artist isn’t really possible. Art has to transcend dogma. He was one of those guys where — things were very black and white. And art can’t really be expressed in black and white. But he did have dreams of being a poet. I remember his room was plastered with rejection notices…

So he was really trying to get his stuff published?

Yeah, he was trying to be a poet. But he ended up becoming a journalist. He’s a great journalist, he writes a lot of books now about the labor movement and labor unions in the United States and Latin America. Very academic stuff. Things you’d find in libraries, universities. He did a lot of things to help Teamsters and Teamsters unions.

When did you start playing music?

I started playing guitar when I dropped out of high school. I was a drama major in a fine arts program. I’d been totally obsessed with theater from the age of about 8 to about 13.

Where had you picked up the theater bug?

I just remember loving to make up stories with my friend, this kid Daryl who was basically like my brother. We’d make up stories, perform them for people. And then when I was old enough I would usher at theaters in Chicago. I bought a secondhand suit, auditioned for community theater shows.

What was the first play you ever saw?

I remember The Seagull. That was probably the first play I caught.

Was Steppenwolf around yet?

They’d just started right next door to my grammar school in a basement of a building called the Jane Adams Center. I remember seeing their hand-painted sign every day when I walked to school. Right around ’76, ’77. I also went to the Court Theater, the Goodman, a string of theaters on Lincoln Avenue in Chicago. I went to see plays at all those places before I dropped out of school.

Why’d you drop out?

To do drugs. Punk rock was happening, I was hanging around that scene. I liked my drama class but I didn’t go to any other class, and I got hardcore into drinking and drugs. Then I stole a car when I was 15 and drove across the country and wound up in Denver with a buddy of mine. We ditched the car in Trinidad, Colorado on the New Mexico border and slept under a bridge. We stayed in a hobo camp with these two guys Danny and Cody. We were going to hop a freight train, but it was freezing. It was November and we were freezing our asses off. Some hippie dude gave me some big bag of weed and I was trading that for, you know…money. Food. We stayed afloat for a couple weeks, but I decided to go back to Chicago.

To do what?

I got a job plastering and painting with a couple guys I knew. Started doing construction work. I went back to school again for a second or two. Went back to a little liberal arts school called Shimer College. They had this Great Books program — you start with the Greeks, work your way up to the present and western thought.

But you didn’t like it so much.

I couldn’t get into it. I remember a few one-liners, I think. Like, “The gods gave us a bit of paranoia so we could see a little bit of the truth.” That was Aristotle.

Do you remember if your aspirations were artistic at that point? Had music come into play?

I think I wanted to be a writer at that point. My first real hero in life was my grandpa, Jenks. He was a hobo during the depression. So he — he was a cowboy from Wyoming — he’d traveled all over the country, including Alaska on freight trains in the 1930s. And his life was the most exciting thing I’d ever heard of. I was obsessed with his stories. I was obsessed with winos and street characters and guys in my neighborhood, to be around their stories. I wanted to be like them. I wanted to get out there and do it. And then later, I’m playing guitar, those old blues guys. It was the same thing.

You wanted to be a singing, traveling hobo.

Yeah, basically. I read the beats, read Nelson Algren, a great Chicago writer. Jack London. Whoever. I was reading adventure stories. I thought, “I want to live the life these guys lived.”

Since I was a kid, I was obsessed with really sad music. I would sit alone and listen to it for hours and hours alone. I would go to the library and read books and listen to records, and then try to live out the life of the person I thought I should be. Based on the things I listened to and read.

That’s kind of what everyone does in high school, to some extent, right? Try to be the person they think they’d maybe like to be…

There’s something totally honest and pure about the desire — that actually does speak to who you are and what you need to do with your life. Often times I think we compare what we feel inside to what things look like out there, and we think we have to follow some set of rules. But it doesn’t ever work. If we try to fit into some pre-existing thing, it won’t work. Because there is no pre-existing Lucas, you know. So how does that work? Your own experience is completely bizarre, it makes no sense at all. But that’s what you have to learn to trust.

We start with some kind of delusion and we go from there. Some rock star or whoever. But no matter what we do, no matter which way we go, we figure it out.

So you left school to try out this adventurous life.

I was hanging around punk bands in Chicago when I was 14 or 15. I learned a few chords then from a few musicians. But meanwhile I’m listening to all these prewar-era blues musicians, and watching these street musicians who played on Maxwell street, this great open air market where all these blues guys got their start. And as I traveled, I’d meet street musicians in places like the bay area — this guy Johnny Guitar Knox. He was a heroin junkie, too. Like me, at the time. And then when I was back in Chicago, in my early 20s, I started to spend a lot of time with “Honeyboy” Edwards. He was good friends with Robert Johnson, one of the real original Delta [blues] guys.

How’d you get in his good graces?

I stole a record of his from a store. And I listened to it. I paid him back later, by the way. But I loved the way he sang and played. And then I saw his name in the paper, saw he was still alive, he was in his late 70s or so. He just died last year at 96.

This is more than 20 years ago when I first saw him play. I might have been underage and I snuck into a bar to hear him for the first time. And then I started playing gigs, too. There were only a few clubs where I could play that kind of music, really, this original style of blues, not that tourist style of blues. So in the black community it was still alive then, but it’s more or less not alive anymore in Chicago. I met those guys playing at this place called Mama Rosa’s Blues Lounge.

Were there any other white guys in their early 20s hanging around there?

No, not really. [Laughs.] Couple other guys who could play that stuff a little bit. I mean, I wasn’t very good, but I was so willing to be THE guy that I’d just show up and be the guy.

How’d you get the balls to do that?

I did a lot of heroin. That helped.

Right.

But I got to be really good friends with those guys. And this one guy I was closest with, Maxwell Street Jimmy Davis. He’d learned to play guitar from John Lee Hooker. And I would go to his place in these projects at Madison and Ashland and I would go visit him once every week or two and just hang out and drink. We’d get in the car and drive around, maybe set up on the street and play, make some money. We’d go into bars and ask to play a few songs in exchange for some drinks.

How old was he?

Late 60s, early 70s. I was in my 20s. He was a drunk, I was a drunk, it was a pretty good fit. Later on I took him to play a festival in Mississippi, he hadn’t been back there in years. We walked into a barbershop in Clarksdale to see this guy, “Wade, the singing blues barber.” We walked in and Wade just said, “Deacon Thompson!” And [Maxwell Street Jimmy Davis] looked at me and just said, “You don’t know nothing about that, boy. I was a deacon in the baptist church till my guitar started talkin about ‘baby, please don’t go.’” Like his guitar made him do it.

That’s amazing. Were you working at all during this time? Odd jobs?

Before I was a full blown drug addict, I’d do a lot of residential construction stuff. I did some industrial construction, too, in Gary, Indiana, with my uncle. We worked at an oil refinery. That was when I was 19.

Were you still enjoying your lifestyle of constantly moving around?

Like, where was the romance? Yeah, well, the romance was waning. The thing about drug addiction is, the romance starts to wain. You become so focused on the one thing that occupies all your time and energy. I mean, I had my first major heroin overdose when I was 22 in San Francisco. I was pronounced dead by the paramedics, but they tried everything and I finally came to. And I got clean for about a month. Around the first Gulf conflict. 1990, I guess? God, listen to that.

“Back in the first Gulf War…”

I sound like such an old man. But right, so in my 20s, I was taking a creative writing class at a community college, with the drummer from Green Day, actually. He was in that class. But I was clean for a month, and of course then a friend comes to town, we go have a drink… and then I’m just gone. We went on some road trip up to Seattle, I don’t even remember. I remember there was a moose in the road.

I had a similar fever dream involving a moose in the road. In Vermont. My freshman year of college.

It’s scary. They just kind of stand and look at you. You gotta wait it out. But yeah, so things went on like this for a while. I started working again and I’d practice guitar on my lunch breaks at the oil refinery. The other guys would go play dominos and I’d go play guitar. I’d practice every day for 2 hours.

You worked a lot of jobs like that.

Yeah, the thing about working a lot is you learn how to appreciate your free time. I had another job writing obituaries, one driving a MediCar – a non-emergency ambulance. Lots of weird little jobs.

Did you ever end up somewhere for a long period of time where you wanted to stick around?

Well, I started getting paid to play music. I had a girlfriend who I lived with in Chicago. But our drug addiction was going downhill. So I’d go play in the subway, make a few hundred bucks and go out a spend it. You could have somebody meet you down there.

When did you leave Chicago?

I caught my girlfriend in bed with someone else, so I left. I ended up in L.A. which was the last place in the world I ever thought I’d be. But I just ran out of road, you know? I ended up in this SRO hotel, got a room in exchange for playing once a week. A Welfare office, dope spot right there. All kind of cool. Free place to live, free booze and drugs. I started meeting these showbiz types who would hand me movie scripts and had some buddy who ran a record label or whatever.

How were you meeting these guys?

Playing shows, around town. There’s such a lack of authenticity in Los Angeles so someone new comes to town and people come to prey on them. Like they’re fresh meat. It was before the dot-com crash and there was still money. And I had a real daily drug habit at this point.

It hadn’t gotten any better?

It was the worst it ever was. I also started smoking crack because heroin didn’t do anything anymore and I wanted to feel something. I’d do both at the same time. My thing was to have as many balloons as I could get of heroin, a bunch of valium, some booze, and some crack rock. I’d have all that stuff there and that was the stuff that would save me for a while, save me from going insane. But then you feel like Plan B is going to have to come into affect soon. And plan B was suicide.

At the same time, I’d go play these private parties for showbiz people and make a lot of money. I’d have meetings with these record label guys and I’d hustle them for 20 bucks, whatever I could get out of them. I burned a lot of bridges.

Did you not care?

I cared, but I couldn’t care when I was dope sick. I was trying to work both ends. Like, “Yeah I’d love to talk about what I want to do for your label, but could I get 20 bucks right now?” I could never quite make it work.

So where did acting start to play into all this?

I met Steve Buscemi when I was out there. I crashed a movie premiere, “Escape from LA.” That’s kind of ironic. But I had a buddy who was good friends with Steve. And we went to this party and he was a really nice guy. And I invited him out to a gig at some sleazy Armenian coke bar I was playing at called the White Horse.

Perfect.

Yeah, right? But he was cool enough to come out. He was also trying to get a movie off the ground called Animal Factory. Steve was doing Con Air, working with all these ex-con actors. And he said he was doing this prison movie and, “I’d love to write a character based on you. Is that OK?” And I was like, “Hell yeah!” And it took 3 years for that movie to get made, but actually that’s when I got clean. I finally got clean.

What year was that, when it finally got made?

1999.

Had you caught the acting bug full on then?

Music was still my number one thing. I thought the movie was a happy fluke. Animal Factory wasn’t a big hit. It was big in France but did nothing here. But word of mouth spread a little. Casting directors, other actors start to hear about me and I got other work once in a while. The same casting director on Animal Factory cast Rambo so they remembered me for that.

Did you meet Stallone?

Yeah he came in to my audition and was like, “Hey, can you carry a 200-pound-man through the jungle?” And “Can you put on 15 pounds? Cause you’re gonna lose it in the jungle.”

“In the jungle.”

Right. So he puts me on a plane to Thailand, to the jungle. To shoot Rambo.

Were you making all your living off music before this?

I was, but barely. I could pay the rent. I wasn’t going out to eat much. I wasn’t touring yet at that point. But then I got hip to the Internet. Around 2002, 2003. And I started getting email from people who wanted me to come play in their towns. And it was kind of a burden in a way because I didn’t have a booking agent. I had a couple of big shot managers — one guy who managed Dr. John, The Gypsy Kings, couple big name acts. Another guy who managed…like Tom Petty, Billy Idol. Those guys both tried for a couple months to get something done. You know, they have an idea, they try it, it doesn’t work, see ya later.

Why didn’t it work?

One guy had me open for Dr. John a couple times. And from that I opened up for Ray Charles, Etta James. You know, I’ve had gigs playing for eight thousand people.

You would open for Ray Charles and you can’t use that to further your career?

Who you’ve opened for doesn’t really help anything. Pretty much any musician can write a biography and say, “I’ve shared the stage with so and so,” and it doesn’t really mean anything, except just to say you’ve had the experience. Plus at the same time the music business is going down, labels are going down, it’s harder and harder to get signed. It became clear that it’s becoming a do-it-yourself world.

So I did that for 5 years straight. Not non-stop but a few months out of each year.

Were you touring a lot?

Yeah, I started touring in Europe around that point. I’d filled in for somebody — I think Guy Davis — at this festival in Belgium. And that kind of got me known a bit over there. People started asking me to play other shows.

When did you stop working other jobs aside from music and acting?

Soon as I was smart enough to find girlfriends who made more money than I did. Just like every musician. Don’t you know that? [Laughs.] No, I would occasionally work when I had to. The last time I had a regular job was probably 2001. I was a delivery driver. And the funny thing was, I was dating a girl who was working for someone who always had to be at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills. And we got to live there for two months. And I had this shitty little car I’d bought for $500, I would come home from delivering whatever I was delivering in my uniform, and I’d come home and get greeted by the staff and order up food from room service, then go upstairs and go swimming with Sting, you know, or Liam Neeson.

It was really strange.

L.A is a weird place, huh?

I think of it as kind of a constant pyramid scheme. Like, will we buy into each other’s shit?

Now, with Ghost Brothers, your life has come back around in a weird way. Back to doing theater, which you loved when you were little.

I feel like I’ve come full circle. I feel like having this job was getting paid to have acting lessons. You know, I’ve done a couple dozen films, but I’ve learned so much from doing this. Creating a character in this way and sustaining it over a long period of time. I keep learning more and more every night.

Do you want to keep acting? Is that as important to you now as music?

Well I still don’t have an agent. Laura, [the casting director for Ghost Brothers], she just found me somehow through word of mouth. She’d brought me in for another show a few years before and she remembered me. But that’s kind of how things have panned out. I’d had a few meetings like ten years ago with agents [in L.A] and the way they treated me, I don’t know…I just thought, “fuck these people.”

That can happen with those meetings.

A few years ago I was living with the actress Melissa Leo in New Orleans. She was shooting Treme and I rented the downstairs of this house. And this casting director there had brought me in for a few things and I ended up getting a couple movie gigs. I just kept getting lucky.

When you get acting gigs that go on for a few months at a time, I can’t really hide from the fact that I’m a semi-professional actor.

So will music fall back a little?

I want to tour less. I want to have a home life.

Some artists would probably kill to have your past. It’s almost quintessential in a way, you couldn’t have written it any more authentic. Do you look back and regret any of it?

I don’t regret a thing. But I do wish I hadn’t wasted my 20s. I could have, I don’t know, at least been nicer to people if nothing else. But I think it happened the only way it could have happened. And I came out really lucky every time. I should have died. I crashed so many cars, so many overdoses, I fell off a roof one time. I’ve been shot at. I’ve had so many bad situations and I just feel really lucky to be alive.

Not to mention I’ve found a way to go out and do what I do and connect with people.

Interview by Lucas Kavner

Photo by William Claxton

In May 2010, Lucas and I posted our first Days of Yore interview to a Tumblr we had created after a beer-spiked walk in Williamsburg in which we got each other worked up about how much we really wanted to hear the stories of famous artists’ early days – what they were like when they were struggling like us. The founding of The Days of Yore was in some ways a means of self-preservation. We needed the inspiration and the gritty tales to hold on to just as much as it turned out you, the readers out there, were yearning for them to not only entertain you, but also to prop you up on poor Ramen-filled afternoons.

Editor and Co-Founder

The Days of Yore spoke with Harmer over the phone from his home in Seattle. He was gracious, funny, and delightfully easy to talk to.

You were born on an army base in Germany. Did you stay there for a long time?

My father was an officer in the army, he was a Lieutenant Colonel when he retired, and we moved around a lot because of that. I was born in Germany and was there for maybe two years, at most. From there we skipped around. We lived in Japan, in Kansas, just lots of places before we finally settled in the Northwest where I went to high school and, after that, to college.

When you moved back to the States you lived in Puyallup, in Washington State. I read somewhere that you thought Puyallup was an oppressive environment to grow up in. Why?

I knew a lot of people who were dreaming of getting out of there. And the options for fun and exploring things were very limited. Puyallup is probably most known for being the town in the state of Washington that churns out big football players. And I had no interest in football. [Laughs.]

I found myself in this small group of friends, going to Seattle to go record shopping. I was in bands all throughout high school so I was playing in people’s garages all over town, wherever we could make noise. But then always getting shut down because of noise. We could never have concerts.

Were you always interested in music?

My parents were always putting on music, so music was a part of our home life. But early, early on I got really interested in learning how to play. I wanted to know how to make so many of the sounds that I was hearing on albums.

One of my favorite songs when I as in fourth grade was “Shout”, by Tears For Fears. There’s this synch solo in the middle of that song that I loved. I didn’t really know anything about synthesizing when I was that young, so I thought that someone was playing a flute solo. So I marched off to school and told my band teacher that I wanted to learn how to play the flute because I wanted to learn how to play that passage. The teacher said that she didn’t have any room for a flute player, but she needed a clarinet player. So I played clarinet until about eighth grade.

Wow, you really got sucked in!

I did! Seventh or eighth grade was when there were a couple of local punk bands that would play and once in a while I saw one band called The Yellow Pages that I just thought was the coolest band of all time. I realized pretty quickly that playing clarinet was not the way I wanted to express myself, and guitar was. So I put the clarinet down and started playing guitar. I played electric guitar in bands throughout high school. We were in high school when the Seattle music scene exploded.

And all of a sudden you weren’t so far off the map anymore.

Exactly. That was a game changer for me. Suddenly I realized that people could make a living doing this, they could do this with their lives! You can be from Seattle and be in a big band and do stuff—who knew?! I didn’t think that was possible.

I didn’t decide at that point that that was what I wanted to do with my life, but it suddenly legitimized all of my garage band dreaming. It sort of turned a time waster into a legitimate hobby! [Laughs.]

Did your family see it the same way?

My mom was always supportive. My dad always sort of ignored it, thought it was just one of those things that I did. He eventually came back around, but not until Death Cab started doing a lot better. Then he could finally understand. But I’m not going to throw my dad under the bus by any stretch – both my parents have always been supportive. It’s just that my mom always encouraged me to explore my artistic and creative sides a lot more. I thank her for that, for sure.

But, again, there were not a lot of options of places to play, or things to do anywhere, really, until the Seattle stuff started happening. And then bands like Seaweed came up, and they were from Tacoma, the next biggest city close to us. That was, like, unheard of – that a band from Tacoma could get a record deal? And play shows? Oh wow! It was getting close to home. So that was pretty exciting.

You went to college in Washington State as well. Did you still play music?

I did play music in college. I played guitar for a little while. And then…I’ve told this story and it sounds like I’m making it up and I need to try to tell it with the least amount of embellishment possible. Because it’s the truth. So: I was living off campus, I was trying to play guitar in a band, and it wasn’t really working out. One night, I had a dream that I had it all wrong. In my dream, these guys were telling me that I was wrong, I was totally wrong. I needed to not play guitar, I should be playing bass guitar. I woke up in the morning thinking this really weird dream had said that these guitar parts I’d been writing could be more interesting bass lines than they were guitar parts.

And it all kind of comes back around. Because while I was in college, I was still playing in bands on the side but mainly I was involved in the administrative side of music. I booked concerts for the campus, I was doing arts promotion around concerts and lectures, I worked as the program director for the college radio station, and was a DJ there at the same time. I was thinking more that I would be involved in music on the business side than the actual playing side. In fact, that is how I met Ben [Gibbard], who is the singer in Death Cab. I booked his college band at the campus a couple of times and when they came to play we sort of struck up a friendship. Then we ended up becoming roommates and friends well before we were ever playing music together.

You and Ben were roommates in college?

Yes. He was still in his band, called Pinwheel, and I started playing in this band called Eureka Farm, with our drummer now, Jason [McGerr], and this other guy, Arman. When we first started, Ben was our drummer and Arman and I were both playing guitar. But I was playing a guitar through a processor that made it kind of generate a low octave note, so it sounded more like a bass…

You were still avoiding the bas, but you couldn’t quite do it!

[Laughs.] It’s funny. Because we went to record a bunch of stuff in a recording studio, and when it came time for me to record my part on this guitar through the octave pedal thing, we figured out that it didn’t work. The guitar just wasn’t that cool sounding. And I remember that I said, “Well, I have this old bass at home, let me go get it.” I went home and brought it back to the studio and recorded all those lines on the bass and it sounded great. At that point it just clicked. As soon as we started recording with it, I was like, “This is right, this is totally right.” And then I never looked back.

I still have guitars and strum on guitars. But I am very much a failed guitar player that loves playing the bass.

You were roommates and jamming together, but how did Death Cab become Death Cab in the very beginning?

In the very beginning, I was roommates with Ben. I played for a brief moment in this band with him called Eureka Farm. Ben was doing double duty at the time – he was in Eureka Farm and in his band, Pinwheel. And then he quit Eureka Farm because he just wanted to focus on Pinwheel. And then Jason McGerr came in and he was our drummer [in Eureka Farm] and we made one album with him for Loosegroove Records, which was a record label that Stone Gossard from Pearl Jam had in Seattle for a while. He put out a first Eureka Farm album.

Ben came to me and said, “Hey, we’ve always talked about playing music together, we’re friends, I’m putting together this band thing, do you want to play bass on it?” And I said, “Absolutely.” And that was the formation of Death Cab, instantly.

Good thing you didn’t go off to Seattle and quit school…

Yeah! Years later, our drummer in Death Cab wasn’t working out. And Jason had long been out of Eureka farm and there was an opening to invite him back and play music with us, so he joined us right before we made Transatlanticism, he made Transatlanticism with us all the way on. I’ve played music with Jason and everyone in the band for a long time. We go back as friends much longer than we go back as a band— and we still go back as a band fourteen years.

You’d played together for a while in different constellations. Did you have a shared aesthetic right away or was that something you had to work out?

We did actually! It’s really strange…I don’t know how to explain it. I’ve played in so many bands and every band I’ve been in on some levels didn’t work. It was always kind of difficult getting people on the same page aesthetically or… there was almost some level of disconnect, fundamentally, with every other band that I’ve ever tried to be in. And something about playing in Death Cab, right away, just clicked. Almost within the first bars of us playing the first song at the very first practice, I remember that we all kind of looked up at each other, and every single one of us felt it. We were like, “This is different. This is way cool! This is really going to work somehow.”

We just kind of rode – and we are still kind of riding – the feeling of what happens when these four guys pick up their instruments and just start playing them together. We’ve been lucky. We’ve been working hard too, but it does feel like luck that I was able to find these guys to play music with.

First there was the dream that led you to sell your guitar and buy the bass, and then things with the band just clicked. You seem like a pretty intuitive person.

Sometimes you just kind of have to be. Life has told me over and over again through the lessons I’ve learned that you really have to trust your gut. It hasn’t been flawless, sometimes you go with your gut and it’s not that great. But more often than not, my instincts, my intuition around situations, has been clear. I just need to be in a place where I can hear it and listen to it. If there has ever been a problem, it’s mostly been because I’ve pushed it aside.

Making music is such a strange thing to do. On some level it feels really straightforward and mechanical, but so much of it is just about a magic, and an unexplained thing that happens.

You formed the band, you liked playing music together. But you probably had to have other jobs to support yourself in the beginning, right?

In college, I would spend the summers as a garbage man for the city. I shouldn’t say garbage man – I worked in the recycling and compost department. I would ride on the back of garbage trucks and pick up people’s lawn clippings all summer long and take them to the dump, or do the recycling stuff as well. That was hard work, manual labor stuff. But it was fun. It paid great. At the end of the summer, I would have enough for school, to live off of, and a little extra to spend on music gear. I did that in the summers and during the school year I was booking concerts or working for the radio station on campus, and that paid a little bit.

Right after school ended and the band started— it pretty much started in my final year— we were broke. That was all there was to it! [Laughs.] There wasn’t a lot of glory for a few years. There was a lot of strained…I wouldn’t say strained relationships with friends, more with family…You know, you want your loved ones to succeed and go off in the world and be able to take care of themselves, and then they finish school and they’re suddenly playing in a rock band? Sleeping on floors? My family was a little worried about me for a while.

That must have amplified any doubts you had on your own.

Right at the end of school, even as exciting as the band was, I was still thinking, “I don’t know…trying to chase a dream like this, is it worth it? What am I doing? Should I get a job?” There are all these big life questions in front of you and I had taken the GREs and put a lot of applications together because I wanted to go to graduate programs in literature and I was thinking that maybe I’d become a professor someday, that seemed right.

I had this mentor in college who I would speak to about life and he was advising me in my application process to grad school. I went to him and said, “I’m really nervous about the future, I don’t know what to do. Should I be in a band or follow this grad school thing?” And he said, “Well, you’ve got two options in front of you. You can spend the rest of your twenties with your friends, driving around in a van, or you can spend the rest of your twenties in a library with your nose in a book. Which one seems more appealing to you?”

[Laughs.] Seems like he had an idea of what you should do if he put it that way…

Maybe yeah, when he did put it that way! I think he was just trying not to sugarcoat the grad school experience for me. But at the same time I don’t think he realized that was what I needed to hear in order to say, “Driving around with my friends in a van sounds pretty exciting right now, I’ll do that.” I committed to that. And two or three years into doing that, we were touring a lot. The profile of the band was steadily growing, we were playing slightly bigger shows all the time. But we would still come home and have jobs.

What kinds of jobs did you have?

They were all pretty crappy jobs – I shouldn’t say that, they were all just minimum wage stuff. A couple of friends of mine owned a record store in Seattle called Sonic Boom and they were awesome enough to let me have my job when I came back from tours. Touring is a huge challenge. As opposed to if I was working on my novel, I could have a nine to five and then we working on my novel at dawn or late or whatever. The fact that we would always have to leave during these big chunks of time— we either had to find employers who were cool with us doing that, and would hold our positions until we got back, which is a pretty tall order for most businesses, or, we would just have to find crap jobs where it didn’t matter when we quit. Thankfully, at Sonic Boom they were okay with me sort of coming and going, which was awesome. That definitely kept me afloat.

But nothing really exciting, or romantic, or sexy as jobs. It was a struggle. We were all just doing what we could do in-between tours to pay the rent. It was tough. It wasn’t until maybe five years of being a band that we were able to quit our day jobs and just live on the tour money between tours. Even then, it still took a while for us to build up to where I could identify it as a career and say, “This is how I make my living.”

Did you have any point during those first five years when you thought, “Crap, forget about this. I should do something else.”

Absolutely. I think that is a normal response. You have that doubt and then you push through the doubt. There’s that real palpable sense that you are just hanging on the edge of a cliff, where you just think, “Any minute now, I’m going to run out of strength, or something environmental is going to knock me off the edge of this thing.” At the same time, there is no place else to go. You are right on the edge there.

It’s hard to look back and think what I would be doing if I wasn’t doing this, ‘cause I’ve really always wanted to do this. And I’ve never really wanted to do anything else.

That’s probably why you ended up doing it. Because you wanted it so much.

That’s true.

Otherwise, it’s a long time to stick it out.

[Laughs.] It is a long time.

It’s tough, following a dream, being broke, while your friends who did other things are living stable lives with more external markers of success.

Yes. I graduated from college in 1997, so that was also the tech boom, that was when the internet bubble was going on. My mom would send me these clips like, “Here’s a story about a couple of twenty-two year olds who came up with a great idea and now they own an island!” And I was like, “I’m twenty-two, and I’m flat broke. I’ve got big ideas and big dreams, but I’m nowhere close to buying my family a fleet of BMWs.” You know? There were a lot of those stories going around! I remember thinking a lot about that. It added to the pressure. Like, “What are you doing with your ideas? People are making millions off their ideas right now! How come you’re not figuring that out?” I was faced with a lot of challenges, I guess, to hold on to my little piece of the dream. My mom was sending me these articles all the time. She was doing it to lift me up, but at the same time it….

It wasn’t what you needed to hear.

[Laughs.] No, it’s not what I needed to hear!

I am not at the point now where I feel like I have to pull a plug on everything and go to law school or something. I’ve sort of crossed over that point of no return. But there is still a lot of concern and conversation about staying relevant, working at what you do and trying to make it better each time. You don’t want to stagnate.

Where did you live during those early band years?

We were living in Seattle, small apartments dotted around. But mostly we lived on the road. I would say I was away from Seattle more than I was at home during that time. There was a time when I was on the road for over 200 days in one year. Again, if we stopped, it just meant we had to have a job! [Laughs.]

Any time we were on the road, we were kind of dreaming of being at home. And when we were at home we were always dreaming of being on the road. There was never a peace. It was just about finding a balance between real life and creative band life. Which we didn’t have in the beginning at all – it was all band, all the time.

How do you learn to find a balance? I guess in the beginning it has to be all band all the time?

Exactly. There needs to be a time when bands are practicing every day. We were all living in the same house! And we were playing music, and then we all went into a van to go on tour….I mean, we were spending so much time together. That was absolutely necessary in the beginning.

You asked, how do you learn to find the balance, but really it’s just time. We never had a program or a map, there certainly wasn’t a handbook. We would just watch a lot of music documentaries and learn about other bands…

Really, you did?

Oh yeah! We still do. To see how inter-band dynamics work out. We read stories about other bands and you pick up some really good ideas, but you also pick up warning signs.

It’s like the band is a marriage, and you did preemptive marriage counseling.

[Laughs.] Yes! In so many ways, it is like a marriage. How do you find balance? Through communication. I use the same terms to describe relationships that I do my life in the band. It all holds, for sure.

When did you begin to feel that things were changing? That you were really starting to go somewhere?

There was never a moment, a lighting bolt, that made me feel like: “Now I see, now it’s possible.” I mean, in some ways, I still don’t feel like it’s possible. In some ways I still feel like we’re living kind of tour to tour, album to album. But I have enough of a sense of where we’ve been, of what we’ve accomplished. I mean, I have done more in this band than I ever even dreamed was possible I would ever do in music, ever. So, there’s that.

We’ve always been a slow and steady, gradual in some way. And I’ve always liked that, to be honest. It has always been sort of manageable— every step of the way around success we’ve been able to get our heads wrapped around – where we are at, what we need, what’s working and what’s not working – before the next thing is sort of thrust on us.

Now, with over a decade together as a band, how have your work habits changed? How has the lifestyle changed?

Obviously there are a lot of cosmetic changes to our lives— we don’t all live in the same house any longer. We are able to hire a full crew of people who work for us and do a great job keeping our shows running smoothly. There are a lot of extra hands on deck.

But when you get down to it, we are still just four guys trying to figure out how to pay the rent. And I think we’ll always be that way. We always feel like we’re a little bit on the fringe. I know we’ve been successful, but we’ve never had the same spotlight on us as some other bands in our genre have had. And I think that is okay. I think the best way to put it is that the people we are have remained intact from when we met as a band to playing music today.

Do you have any advice for young musicians?

So much of starting a band has changed with the internet and technology, I wouldn’t even know how to advise all that stuff. The only advice that I give to young bands that I feel like holds is: Get in a van and go on tour. You’ll figure it out real quick. Whether or not it’s a lifestyle that you love and can’t wait to do or if you just want to go for a little while and then aren’t interested any longer, or you go out and you hate it. Touring, it’s a physical and emotional exercise. It really challenges all those facets of a person. It really does demand a lot of the people in that arrangement. So, go to figure out what you’re made of in that situation as a band, and as an individual.

People can make music in all kinds of new and innovative ways, they can market their music in new ways, but there will never be a substitution for living on top of each other in a van and barreling down the road. And trying, night after night, to play music for people who may not even be interested in what you are playing.

Is there anything you would tell your younger self, something that you think Young Nick should have known?

I would try to be more reassuring and supportive about sticking to your guns. Tell him to not be so worried about everything. Have a little more fun. Coming out of college, I was always so worried about everything. What was the future going to hold? I was always very angsty about that kind of stuff and that added to a lot of my doubt about whether or not I should be doing this or something else.

So, I would tell my younger self, or anybody young: Trust your instincts and trust your gut. I feel like if there was anything I needed to hear when I was young, it was someone telling me: Doubts are natural, doubts are normal. Stick to your guns.

Interview by Astri von Arbin Ahlander

Images courtesy of the artist

This interview took place on a lazy Friday at the decidedly debonair artist’s studio in Harlem.

Were you a scribbling kid?

I scribbled, but I also used to run into a lot of problems in school because I didn’t pay attention in class at all. I was always hanging out with the bad kids. Although I was smart enough not to get too caught up. But the only classes where I actually paid attention were the arts and crafts classes.

Were you doing art at home too?

Not until my teenage years and then I started scribbling a lot more. I started doing graffiti, actually. That was very popular at the time – we’re talking the 80’s now. Rap music had come out, and break dancing had come out, and all of us just jumped into that as an art form. So I was breaking, I was DJing, I wasn’t rapping, but I was doing graffiti. I used to do graffiti on jeans. I would be in the back of the class and some girl would give me her jacket and I had my pens while the class was going on, she’d give me fifteen dollars and have an original artwork on her jacket….things like that.

Biddybyebye, 2006, plastic and metal, 24in x 41in, courtesy of Mary Goldman Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

I started doing all the graffiti stuff in high school and I was, literally, sneaking out of the house and practicing graffiti somewhere in the neighborhood. I got busted once. That was a big issue of course. I had to cover that wall up.

Then I started going to a place called Pan Pacific Park and some train yards that are near the west side of LA. I’d go there to practice. There would be other kids there. I’d go with a crew and everyone was up there spraying until the cops came. Finally, I got nabbed by the cops while I was hitting up some place in an arcade and, obviously, got in a lot of trouble there. So I stopped. At least doing it outdoors. And I joined the AP art classes in school. I started doing oil painting.

That seems like an important shift. You could have gone either way there, right? So, what made you stop doing the graffiti?

I got busted! [Laughs.]

But a lot of people don’t stop there.

Well, I just got interested in other things, too. I mean, I would always hit up and tag and make little pieces in my notebook – I still do that today when I’m in faculty meetings – but as far as taking it out and doing it on walls, I became a little less interested in that.

And I was learning more about art and art history. And oil painting was just really attractive to me. That held my attention for many years. I used to stay after class – me and three other kids – and we would hang out with the art teacher and do art, every day, during breaks. It was a lot of fun.

Did you have any early exhibitions?

In my senior year I was asked to do an exhibition in the lobby of the school. I showed ten oil paintings that I had been working on.

Do you remember what that felt like, having your work exhibited for the first time in that kind of public way?

I remember feeling a lot of pride, that people could come in there and that I had done that. I guess it was sort of an extension of the graffiti thing. They’re still on walls and people are still going to see them, but they’re indoors.

Om II, 2001, colored sand poured loose on the floor, 11ft x 9ft, courtesy the artist and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA

No, they weren’t. But I was getting in a lot of trouble. I could have gone in any direction so when I got into art – you know I was staying up in my room at night, painting, and drawing and all that – I think my dad at some point was like, “Listen, he’s really into this thing. And if he doesn’t channel all that energy into something positive, who knows what’s going to happen.” Because of the neighborhood we lived in. It wasn’t a bad neighborhood at all; it was a black middle class neighborhood. But it was in a black enclave of various demographics of people. Helicopters were flying over the house at night. I had a lot of friends who got killed. I knew a lot of gangsters. So…they had genuine concern.

So, it was a huge deal. Not just how my family looked at it and what it meant in terms of what I was doing, but as an experience for me as a young man to travel to the East Coast, and to be recognized for doing something.

Was that your first exposure to other like-minded artsy types?

Well, I think it really started to take more effect when I went to college in Atlanta, to Morehouse. It is an all-black male university with a female school across the street, and a co-ed school down the way….you know, six all-black universities in one area.

What made you decide to go to Morehouse? Did they have a strong art program?

They didn’t even have an art program.

Both my sister and brother have said that, had they had a chance to do it again, they probably would have done the same.

Shake (Installation view from The Cartographer's Conundrum)", 2012, 2 channel color video with sound. trt 16min.

I had to take all of my art classes across the street at Spelman, which was the all-girls school. It sort of goes to show how conservative the school was, they didn’t really think that art was for men to be taking at that level – not to be majoring in for sure. Men should be focusing more on business, pre-med, law, that kind of thing.

So, I went to Spelman to take most of my classes. And, for some reason, I wanted to go to Italy for my junior year. I forget where that idea came from. I went to Florence.

Well, that is where all the art students go! Doesn’t seem so strange.

Yes, but I mean, why in Atlanta did I get the idea to go? Because no one was really doing that kind of thing.

There wasn’t an established study-abroad program?

No! There was no established exchange. But I had the privilege of going to London and Barcelona in my mid-teens. So, my first trip abroad was when I was fifteen, and I got the travel bug right then.

What was your experience in Italy like?

Fantastic. I was going to all the small museums all throughout Tuscany. Learning the language, hanging out a lot of course, traveling on a Eurail pass – I did that whole thing.

What did you do after graduating college?

I moved to Japan.

Wow. How did that decision come about?

The same thing. I got the bug. I had lived out of the country for a year and I was thinking: What’s next?!

I found out about the JET program, which is a Japanese Exchange in Teaching where they send native English speakers to Japan to team-teach with Japanese speakers. I applied and got it and went over there.

So you were teaching English. What was that like?

I loved it. I loved Japan. I had such a good time there. I think I was well prepared to be in a place like that because I already felt a little bit like an outsider in the U.S. Marginalized in some way. In my program, there were kids from the U.S. but also from Australia and England, New Zealand, and Canada. They would get freaked out. All of a sudden they didn’t have access to certain things or they didn’t have the same kind of entitlements that they were used to. They had to be humble, because to not be humble in that society is looked down upon. I was totally different. I felt like I had been out of place in America for my whole life. I have always had to know how to be able to switch, to figure out a place. So I got there and I flourished.

I was there for two and half years. I started to study the language and practice it a lot, and had a lot of Japanese friends. I could go days without speaking English, and it allowed me to see so many more layers of that society.

Installation view from The Cartographer's Conundrum, 2012, Mass MoCA, North Adams, MA

Asia has a whole different visual language and tradition, so that must have been interesting for you as an artist, especially after doing the archetypal Western experience in Italy. You were teaching, but were you able to also pursue your own artwork?

I did a lot of art while I was there. And I hung out a lot. I guess it was strange, but I was young. I had time. I didn’t have to sleep that much.

Artistically, there is a sensibility that I found in the East and particularly in Japan: the use of space, an economy of references, and economy of imagery. A balance, a compositional genius. I connected with it very, very quickly.

After your time in Japan did you think it was time to go to art school?

There was a little time in-between. I moved back to LA and considered myself a painter at that point. I was doing these linear, abstracted, graphic looking paintings that were very much influenced by what I had seen in Japan.

I was in LA and didn’t have any clue what to do in terms of the art world. I had a little studio that I made in my parents’ garage. And I was doing these painting. The only art outlet that I had was showing at the African Arts Fair at the local mall. You know, friends of the family would come by and say, “That’s great!” And then keep on walking. [Laughs.] I didn’t sell a thing at any of those.

Installation view from The Cartographer's Conundrum, 2012, Mass MoCA, North Adams, MA

Did you get a job?

Yeah. Oh shit! [Laughs.] If we are going to talk about jobs, I haven’t told you about my high school job yet!

So, tell me!

Oh man, my high school job…I worked at this place, it was a driving school. You know how people get tickets or DUIs? They have to go to school. So I was a receptionist at this school, fielded calls and that whole thing. But there were five, maybe seven schools operating from the exact same place. With totally different names. Each phone had a different name for which one it was. And these are phones. This isn’t some digital shit. And I would be answering them all at once, “Hello, this is Cooking driving school!” “This is Magic driving school.” “Hello, this is Comic driving school.” It was crazy.

And they were themed driving schools, no kidding. At the cooking driving school there was a guy cooking and you would have a gourmet meal while you were doing the lessons. Then they had a singles one where singles would come and people were trying to meet people.

Great pick-up stop. Plenty of eligible DUIers.

This is LA! At least they didn’t serve drinks. There was the magician’s one.

No way!

The teachers were doing magic tricks while they were teaching the driving lessons.

This isn’t true. This is crazy.

[Laughs.] It is true! I was in high school.

Yeah, you’re in high school thinking: this is what the real world is like?

It was ridiculous. I knew it was ridiculous then, too.

Installation view from The Cartographer's Conundrum, 2012, Mass MoCA, North Adams, MA

Let’s go back to LA, to the job you got after you returned from Japan.

I was a job replacement specialist for the UAW. I was trying to place people who were victims of downsizing, businesses going under. Oh, it was so depressing. We had men coming in – largely men, middle-aged – and these cats are getting put back out there. There is a whole new generation out there, who have computer skills, who will work for less, all that.

At that job replacement agency I was working with this guy who I would never hang out with otherwise. And the shit we would do just to get through the day…

Like what?

Oh my God…! Sometimes we would have to go on-site at places to try to recruit people. Where are people who are out of work right now hanging out so that we can give them some options? So we might be at the DMV or whatever. But sometimes we would get really creative and we would go to the racetrack [chokes up laughing]. We would take a lunch break and go and have drinks…Oh my God, I used to play hooky from work. Wow, this is horrible. Oh my God, driving around south central LA, stopping off at his baby’s mama’s house to watch TV and have her cook us lunch…And then go back to the job. It was just bizarre.

It was totally surreal at the time, too. I was thinking, “What the hell am I doing here?” But it was better than being at the office. Three things I hated were: sitting at the office, the Sizzlers downstairs – where everyone had lunch everyday – and traffic on the freeways trying to get home. While wearing a suit!

Did you take the job as your money-making gig with the plan to work on your art in your spare time?

That was what I was thinking. But it was just so soul-draining. In fact, the first time I had dreads was in college and then I got rid of them. But by the first week in this job, I was like, “Oh God, this is what it is like being out there doing these kinds of jobs?” And I started to grow my hair out again right there on the spot! [Laughs.]

After that I went to a post bac program in Baltimore.

Why a post bac program?

Because I didn’t know anything about the contemporary art world. I didn’t know how to talk about my work on that level. I didn’t know any of the processes to showing.

Quilt #8 (The Cartographer’s Conundrum), 2012, Fabric treated acrylic, spray paint, cotton, silkscreen on repurposed 1850’s quilt, 78” x 69”

At that point, you must have known that the goal was to go to art school.

Oh yeah. What happened was that when I was in LA, I was showing in these local malls. But there was also a network of black artists who were inviting me to be in shows. Like Varnette Honeywood, who I met because she went to Spelman and was very involved in the school. Her art was on the walls on the set of The Cosby Show. She is a very, very well known black artist.

One of the reasons I went to a black school was that I wanted to build a network. And that is what I did. Then Varnette introduced to me Leslie King Hammond, who is at Maryland Institute of Art, and we started talking. She said I should apply there and do a post-bac program. Then I went out there and did it.

After the post bac you went to graduate school in Chicago. What was that like?

Well, Chicago is a real city and they have a real art scene. There is no faking around there. Also, because it is in the Midwest, it doesn’t have the pretenses that New York or Los Angeles do. It was very straightforward.

Did you start to show your work?

I started showing pretty quickly. Nothing big. But I remember it being exciting. There was not really a gap between graduating and getting into that, so I was lucky that way.

You went to Skowhegan during the summer between your first and second year of grad school. What was Skowhegan like?

Some people hate it, some people love it. I loved it. But a lot depends on the collective vibe of the people there. And that is why it is so powerful. You are there for two months. And there are a lot of strong personalities, a lot of egos, a lot of networks, a lot of careerists. But, at the end of the day, all the artists there are very, very talented. That is a great equalizer. Like, here is this kid who hasn’t even gone to graduate school and he is making the baddest shit out there. That can happen there.

You do a great deal of collaborative work. Did that process of collaboration begin at Skowhegan?

Yes, at Skowhegan. Exactly. The piece I did for the Whitney Biennial in 2002 was from an idea and a collaborator from Skowhegan: Jennifer Zackin. In fact, we also went to the Art Institute of Chicago together.

What did you do when you finished graduate school?

I did residencies, mostly. I got to New York doing the Studio Museum residency and the P.S. 1 residency. I slept on the floor of my studio most of the time. And sometimes at my sister’s place, because she lived here [in New York]. I slept on her floor until I could get some financial thing going.

Or until she had enough of you…

[Laughs.] Yeah. To make money, I started bartending. I was doing a lot of music at that time too, so there would be music gigs here and there. I was doing a bunch of art jobs and piecing together checks. And then finally I got a job as the Co-Director of the outreach program at Cooper Union. That was a good gig. Better hours, better pay, no benefits yet though.

Death Star, 2006, Acrylic and mirrored Mylar on archival paper, 30"x40"

Looking back, who did you spend time with?

Some of my grad school friends, but ironically, a lot of my high school friends who had come out from LA. They all moved here. They are all in finance! The majority of the guys that I roll with are in finance.

When you are struggling on an artistic path and your old friends are in much more lucrative careers, it can get weird when you socialize because you can’t necessarily do the things they do. Did you ever experience that?

Yeah. That was the moment when that was the weirdest. But we were close and we ran hard – through high school, college, one of them was my college roommate that I had known since I was eight. You know. We have years. So it wasn’t as awkward as it could have been. Also, I had something I could bring to the table too. I was the arty dude so I knew about all the cool underground stuff that they didn’t know about.

But that was the time when the bottles thing had just started in New York. I would go places with these guys and they would just order in bottles of stuff. And I was like, “Are you kidding me?!” [Laughs.] That was weird. In fact, there was a point when I stopped going because I thought it got weird.

Oh, I know what you’re talking about. But there is also this element of: These people that you grow up with are making it according to the common idea of success that society has. What am I doing? Should I be doing something more like what they’re doing?

Yeah. I mean, I thought about it, but it was always very brief, it was always over in a minute or so. Because I’ve been doing what I’m doing for so long. And the way that it came into my life – I just have to believe that that is what I’m supposed to do.

So you always had faith that you had made the right choice?

What else am I going to do? Anything else would bore me to death.

That kind of conviction demands a certain bit of daring, and maybe a little bit of insanity too.

You have to work very, very hard for what you want to do. That in itself is maybe the job: working to make sure that you can do only what you want to do.

What is your idea of success?

I think I’m sort of doing it right now. I mean, there are certainly things I want to do and want to achieve, places I want to take the work, for sure. But I sort of see that on the horizon.

For me it always, always, always comes back to the work. That is the only thing that is real in all of this. Because anything that comes from it comes from the work itself. So that is what your main relationship is with. No matter how many outside influences try to make you think differently. This is the only shit that counts.

They Wants to Join You, 2002, steel sign, paint, magnetic plastic letters, 42.1875 x 25 inches

Is there anything you would tell your younger self that you think would have benefitted you to know at the time?

Don’t ever forget any of these moments, because it all adds up to something. Everything that happens is worth it, if you know what to do with it.

You teach now. What do you look for in your students?

Students who aren’t too easily self-satisfied, too self-congratulatory. I think some people compensate for all the doubt going around with extroverted displays of confidence. Also, I think they should be fearless. Really fearless. I don’t think they should be openly careerist. They are stunting their growth if they’re thinking about all that market shit.

Any advice you’d give your students?

Stop doing all those drugs. Get some sleep. At least sometimes. It is good for you. Figure out your voice. I know that is what everyone is trying to do, but don’t let other voices convolute your own voice.

But I wouldn’t want to give a student too much advice. Part of it is that they have to figure it out themselves.

What is the best advice you ever received?

I had just finished doing a lecture for class as a visiting artist at a school. My friend who had brought me there to speak, Terry Adkins, said, “Man, you know your stuff too well. You need to forget that shit.” Basically, he meant that I know too well what I’m doing, I need to not know what I’m doing.

I’m still working on that.

Interview by Astri von Arbin Ahlander

Images courtesy of the artist

Astri
DoY Editor

Thomas Roma, photographer

I ended up with a job on Wall Street, on the floor of the American Stock Exchange. (…) I did very well and I loved every minute of it. This was 1967 to 1971. So, I was a trader during the best years on Wall Street. Enormous camaraderie, collegiality, it was a wonderful experience.

That was the beginning. I found it extremely satisfying to look at the world and have it become this other thing, this photograph, that was related to the thing I saw but was also something else that didn’t exist before I made it. That was really fascinating to me because on Wall Street I was well compensated and really creative, but at the end of the day, a bell rings and then there is nothing. Whatever beautiful thing you did, whatever the performance was, whatever connection you made, it was gone forever. (…) With photography, I could actually make something. The performance led to something. I was actually changing the world in a substantial way. It was real.

E.L. Doctorow, writer

You worked in publishing for a long time. When did you move from your role as editor to being a writer full-time?

When I was writing The Book of Daniel. I was the Editor-in-Chief of the Dial Press at the time. It was an exciting job – I was editing James Baldwin, Norman Mailer. Putting out books against the Vietnam War. But I had gone about halfway through The Book of Daniel and I realized I had reached the point where it needed my total attention. I couldn’t expect to write this book as it demanded to be written while keeping my job.

So we consulted the I Ching. Do you know what the I Ching is? It’s an ancient Chinese book of divination. It supposedly can read your future. You have to understand, this was the 1960’s. You threw some sticks down and they arranged themselves so as to direct you to a passage [in the book] that would pertain. We didn’t bother with all that, we were only half serious, and it was just as good to open the book randomly to any page. And the I Ching said, “You will cross a great water.” And my wife said, “That’s the Mississippi, let’s go.”

[Laughs.] And so you did!

We put the three children and our bags and baggage in our car and drove across the country. To my first teaching job.

And what I discovered was that you could teach in the afternoon and the evening and for the first time in your life, you could get up in the morning and do your own work. That’s any writer’s idea of success.

George Saunders, writer

You graduated from the Colorado School of Mines with a B.S. in geophysical engineering. What kind of jobs were you working in the seven years between graduating from Colorado SofM and getting your MFA in fiction from Syracuse?

I worked as a geophysicist in Sumatra, then came home and roamed around for a few years. I worked in a slaughterhouse, as a doorman in Beverly Hills (very uplifting), as a roofer. I played in bands, worked in a convenience store, was a barback at a dance club, worked as a groundsman – a little bit of everything, really. While I was farting around in this Kerouac phase, the oil business went bust, and my credentials, such as they were, got a little dusty. So by the end of this period I had more or less dissipated my college degree.

Was there a specific inspiration for deciding to get an MFA? How did you come to make that decision?

Actually, I was at this wild(ish) party in Amarillo, Texas, and staggered away from the main festivities, and found a People magazine on a table. In there was an article about Jay McInerney and Ray Carver. It was the first time I’d ever heard of an MFA program, and at that point, starved as I was for positive attention, it looked pretty good to me. I was getting kind of scared, actually: I could see myself sinking down into a life where no money meant no writing. And I had also just started to get a inkling that my “native talent” wasn’t all that impressive, and that a lot of real work would be involved in ever writing something decent. So the panic was comprised of that realization, plus the realization that, as I got older, time would become harder and harder to come by, especially if (as I was beginning to) I ever wanted to have a family.

James Franco, actor, writer, director, etc.

I always felt like my artistic development was slow, you know? I felt like all these other people had great taste, and knew what they liked. Other actors, other artists.
I remember when I was at UCLA, I was like, “Why do these other people get to be the art students?” ‘Cause I had wanted to go to art school too, but my parents didn’t want me to go. And the directing students too. Those were the people I was really resentful of. I was like, “Why do they get to direct the movies?”

After the first time I made a NYU film [later in film grad school], we had to show them to the faculty and get reviewed, and it was like…really such an amazing moment, because it was just like— [Tears up.] I get emotional about this because people were looking at me like, “You’re a director now.” You know what I mean? It’s a great moment of taking on a new identity. Because you know that you’ve put in a certain amount of work and it’s not just dreamland anymore.

William Finnegan, writer

I grew up in Los Angeles, which came to seem like a toxic place, a place that required escaping. So my friends and I mythologized the Road, and we all lit out early. I had hitchhiked through fifteen or twenty countries before I turned eighteen. I seemed to be always going coast to coast for some urgent reason, always on no money at all. And it continued after college. I probably spent most of my twenties overseas. When I was twenty-five, I took my railroad savings and left for the South Pacific. I was gone nearly four years.

That was when I decided it was time to start making a living from writing. No more job jobs. I traveled north through Africa, made my way to Europe. By the time I got to the U.S., I was broke again. Also really sick of being a foreigner. So I went back to live with my parents in L.A. I was twenty-nine. I turned thirty there. That was some pretty humble pie. But I stuck to my little private vow. I started making money from writing, got out of L.A., and, except for a little college teaching and public speaking, have been writing for a living since.

Carrie Moyer, painter

I had a lot of ideas and judgments about what the art world was. Some of them were true and some of them weren’t. It was not helpful. It made me opt out for a little while. I was confused. On one hand, I felt like this was a higher calling—I’m saying all this stuff in quotes, of course—and yet, what if it only gives you pleasure, personally? What’s the point? What is it going to do for the world?

What do you mean when you say that you “opted out”?

I thought I needed to learn how to do something useful. And I didn’t think I had the personality to promote myself, even though I didn’t know what that meant. Also, I was incredibly impatient. I decided to go back to school and learn computer animation, because that was a new field then. I was working at—it wasn’t an ad agency, but it was like that.

Painting felt irrelevant at the time. The people painting were all neo-Expressionists like Julian Schnabel. Why would you want to be that? I was very involved with identity politics and feminism, and the people expressing those ideas in art were not doing it through painting. It was Barbara Kruger or Silence Equals Death, the people who designed the ACT UP logo, and a lot of street-based interventions. Painting felt even more like a bourgeois pursuit, like I was disconnected from my time.

Timothy Donnelly, writer

How did you end up being the Poetry Editor at the Boston Review?

The Boston Review was always a great magazine, but it was much more local in its scope back in the 90’s, at least in terms of its poetry. All the editors lived in the Boston area. The Boston scene was really strongly represented in terms of the books that were reviewed and in terms of the reviewers. The Editor-in-Chief, Joshua Cohen, wanted to shake things up a little, get national with it. He contacted a number of his contributing editors and asked if they knew anyone who was really hungry and wanted to take this on. Lucie Brock-Broido suggested that he interview the poet Mary Jo Bang and myself. We were in the same year at Columbia. Josh met with us and he liked the idea of going with us as a team. We ended up working together for about eight years, before Mary Jo decided she had been doing enough.

The funny thing is that one night, maybe in my second year of classes, Mary Jo and the poet and currently an editor at BOMB, Mónica de la Torre, and I were down in the West village and we went to a psychic, on a goof. The psychic said to me, “You know someone else who was just here.” And I said, “Yes, I do.” She said, “You and the older one, you have a business venture that is going to be coming your way.” And this is even before we had talked to Lucie about this. She said, “It is going to be very lucrative for you both and you both have to work at this together. A lot of success will come from this. I see you traveling somewhere that begins, C-A…” And I said, “California?” And she said, “No, no. Not California. I see you looking at large pieces of paper. And you are talking about the paper…” Then maybe two weeks after that Lucie called and said she had recommended Mary Jo and me as a team for the Boston Review and that we had to come up to Cambridge and interview.

Will Cotton, painter

It was the mid 90’s. My wife at the time and I were living in a loft space and we realized that we had to meet people. We realized the art world thing is about knowing people. I thought: “There is no way this is going to happen unless I meet the New York art world.” We made a very conscious effort to do that in two ways. One was just going to all the openings. That’s not the easiest way to meet people, but at least it inserts you into the scene and lets you know what art is happening out there. That is huge.

So, being social, deliberately, definitely did a lot for me.

Deborah Eisenberg, writer

I never would have dreamed of trying to write, because I knew I wasn’t going to be good at it, and it was just too mortifying. (…) I had not really understood that everybody learns to write, nobody is born to write. I think everybody who writes learns how to do it. You can’t learn to be a great writer, but you can’t write without learning how to do it. But I thought either you could do it or you couldn’t do it and I knew I couldn’t do it. And it was true. I couldn’t write because I had never done it.

Anyhow I wrote it again over many months and he said, “Great, you’ve done it, you’ve written a story.”

Julia Alvarez, writer

After a few years at Middlebury [College] I was coming up for tenure. My chair met with me and said that I had great student evaluations and I was liked by the department, but I needed a book. I had had a poetry book when I was thirty-four, Grove Press. I think they did like 700 copies, it never went anywhere. And now I needed another book. I was panicked.

When I came up for tenure, I didn’t even have the book yet, but I had the contract. So I got tenure. I thought: “Phew! My tenure book. I made it.” And then the book [How the García Girls Lost Their Accents] did so well!

Marina Abramovic, performance artist

In ’71 there was a very important visit of Richard Demarco. He was the guy who was doing the Edinburgh Festival. He went to all the Eastern European countries to look for interesting artists for his festival. He went to Bulgaria, to Romania, to Poland, Czechoslovakia, and he came to Yugoslavia. When he came, he was an official guest, so they took him to all the official studios.

And not to yours.

Definitely the official never even mentioned that there was such a thing as the Student Cultural Center. He [Demarco] was there for three days and he looked at everything. He was bored and he wasn’t interested in any of this stuff, you know, social realist stuff. So, he was leaving and that afternoon someone told him, “Oh, but you know, there is this interesting group of artists in the Student Cultural Center.” And he said he wanted to meet us. It was already like ten or eleven in the evening and he was leaving the next morning. I remember at like midnight, we arrived with our little photographs to his hotel room to show to him what we were doing. And he said, “Oh God, this is what I want.”

It was the first time that we saw that we are not alone, there is a family out there that is also doing crazy stuff. It was an incredible experience.

Jaimy Gordon, writer

I didn’t really see it coming, but all of a sudden I started to feel like, Wow, I missed it; I missed the boat. I thought I was going to be a writer whom people would remember. That at least was the promise I made to myself. Because I did feel— even when I was nineteen and first started writing that story I told you about— that I had something special on the sentence level. That I had a gift and that it was my obligation and privilege to use it. And then I was getting into my late fifties, getting close to sixty, and I thought, Wow, I have to face it: Maybe it’s not going to happen. In fact, it’s more likely that it’s not going to happen than that it does if it hasn’t happened yet.

I became a finalist for the National Book Award, all that had changed overnight. Someone would want my papers, someone would be interested in the rather raggedy shape of my life, the interesting story of a genuine writer who amounted to something.

The Days of Yore sipped hot apple cider with Moyer at an outdoor café on an unseasonably warm winter afternoon in New York City. She was generous with her stories and her friendly, crooked smile.

When you were a child, did you have an idea of what an artist was?

I did, because I had a mother who wanted me to be an artist.

Really? That’s not always so common.

She was very romantic about artists, and she did certain things to facilitate that. My parents were working class, but she would buy these big rolls of paper for us to draw on. Instead of toys, she’d give us art supplies.

Carrie Moyer, "The Tiger's Wife," 2011. Acrylic on canvas. 60 x 48 inches

I was always the kid who was good at art, definitely. I won little grade-school prizes, stuff like that. My parents were hippies when I was a child, so they wanted us to do Something Else.

That is interesting, because many people that I speak with experience resistance from home, or some form of family discomfort about their decisions to be alternative, which inevitably going down an artistic path can be. But you almost had a pressure to go there!

Well, as I grew up my parents—especially my mother—didn’t understand that nobody wants to be a starving artist. She had a romantic idea about what it would be. When I graduated from art school and I told her I was going to learn word processing because I thought that would be a good way to support my studio, she got very upset. She was like, “Don’t go into office work! Just eat pasta every night!” She thought I was going to become a secretary.

She didn’t understand the actual reality of choosing an artist’s life. But you did?

I did, because I was an art student in New York, and you get sophisticated very quickly here. If you want to do this, you learn what’s going on and how it’s going to work. I knew that was a job I could do to support myself.

Let’s go back a little. When you graduated from high school, you went to college and majored in art?

I had a full scholarship to Bennington College. I was a dancer then, and that was one of the places where modern dance got its legs in the United States. But I was in a very bad car accident at Bennington and couldn’t dance at that time, so I went back to visual art.

Dance had been your focus?

Yeah. I always tell this story about how I decided not to learn to drive because I knew I would move to New York. We lived in a small town in Oregon, and getting your driver’s license was your badge of honor; it was going to be the way you escaped your parents. But I was like, “No, I’m moving to New York, so I don’t need to know how to drive.” I still don’t know how to drive.

Very shortly thereafter, I focused on visual art. I lived in New York with my girlfriend, and we were very broke, and I went to the Art Students’ League and—

This was after college?

No, I went to Bennington for a year, I was in a car accident, and then I dropped out.

And then you moved to New York.

Yes. And I just lived with my girlfriend in this funny—I don’t think they exist anymore, but they were called SROs, Single Room Occupancy. It would be where old women might live.

I spoke with another artist who lived in one of those. It was run by nuns, and it was all women and you had to check in on a curfew.

Yeah. So my girlfriend and I shared a room. They just thought we were nice young ladies. We were on this floor with ten elderly women or women who didn’t have a lot of money. It was a safe place to live, and yes, you did have to check in. It was partially because my girlfriend was from New York but her parents were shocked and kind of homophobic, so we arrived here and didn’t know what was going on.

Your girlfriend came from Bennington as well, and dropped out with you?

Yes. We were both in this car accident. That’s how we met. We were both students at the school, and we were in a car accident together, not knowing each other. We were driving to town in the same car and both of our best friends were killed in this accident, and then we became girlfriends. It was very emotional, obviously, traumatic. Not to be a downer. But when you’re that age, everything is very difficult. In my life, it felt like everything was very [makes a growling, small roaring noise]. One of those cosmic times.

I’d say that situation was objectively very difficult. It’s not a whiny teen thing—it’s a big event.

Yeah, it makes you grow up fast.

Carrie Moyer, "Down Underneath," 2011. Acrylic on canvas. 54 x 72 inches

There was about a year in between. I was going to the Art Students League and taking drawing classes, because I wanted to go to art school but didn’t know if I could get in.

You arrive in New York as a 19-year-old, and the only thing you know about it is what you’ve read. The Art Students League was where the artists went in, like, the ‘40s. Now it’s this weird anachronistic thing. Their relationship to the art world is nominal. But it was still good. It’s all part of it.

How did you support yourself at that time? Did you have a job?

I worked at Barnes & Noble. I was a clerk. Part-time. I have had a million shitty jobs. A million. But that one wasn’t so bad, because we were surrounded by books. I have to admit: I did some minor shoplifting as an employee of Barnes & Noble. So I had a really nice book collection by the end of it. I worked in the art section, so I was looking at art books all day.

And then you decided to go back to school, to Pratt?

I applied to Pratt and Parsons and decided on Pratt. I went there for four years. But because I was in this car accident and had gone to Bennington for a year, I felt like I was 97, even though I was only about a year older than my peers. And I think going to school in New York is so different than going to school elsewhere. I just started teaching at Hunter, but I’ve also been teaching at RISD for four years, on a little tiny campus where everyone knows each other. If you go to school in New York, you might know your classmates but not socialize with them. It’s a gigantic city and everybody’s too cool for school.

But I went to Pratt for four years, and it was great; I loved it. Spending all of my time learning how to make art seemed luxurious to me in a way that I hadn’t imagined. The foundation year there was based on Bauhaus stuff, all this traditional, modernist stuff. This was a long time ago, the early ‘80s. In retrospect, it’s probably not the best art school ever, but I didn’t know that, so it was a mind-blowing experience.

When you finished, there were many years between Pratt and going on to graduate work. Did you set out to navigate the New York art scene? What was your first move?

I left school thinking I wanted to be a painter, to show my work and be part of the discourse. But I also had a lot of fear about how to do that and what it meant. This was ’86 or something like that, when there was a huge boom in the art market. The East Village thing was coming up. There was—and I think there still is—this idea that there’s art, and then there’s money, and it’s dirty to mix them. Even though we need to make money to live on. It took me a long time to sort that out mentally.

Because you began from a purist place?

Totally. I had these idealistic parents and very traditional ideas about what art is: that it’s not touched by commerce, that it’s where all the free people live, it’s somehow not part of the world yet commenting on the world. It’s completely nonsensical. And coming from a working-class family, I had a lot of class issues around how the art world works.

I’ve taught for a long time now, and I think this is a valid trajectory to go through mentally: What is the function of this thing that we’re doing? We’re living in a culture that valorizes and also punishes you for being an artist. At least for the first twenty-five years, if you have the stomach to stand it. It’s hard to come to terms with that.

What do you mean when you say that you “opted out”?

I thought I needed to learn how to do something useful. And I didn’t think I had the personality to promote myself, even though I didn’t know what that meant. Also, I was incredibly impatient. I decided to go back to school and learn computer animation, because that was a new field then. I was working at—it wasn’t an ad agency, but it was like that. I learned this program that was one of the first standalone digital production software packages, before Macintosh. So, I did that.

How did you navigate that place of saying, “I don’t want to commit to making art because what if Saatchi buys it, yet I’m willing to work for an ad agency?” These are the contradictions I find fascinating.

That’s a smart question, but I don’t know. I guess I come from a family where the most obvious thing to do when you don’t know what to do is work. So this was learning how to do something so I could have some kind of job.

It was a graphic design job?

This was the Dark Ages of desktop publishing; we don’t even call it desktop publishing anymore. This was the early ‘90s or late ‘80s, when it started to become obvious that this stuff was going to change the world of print. Because I was an artist, had gone to art school and knew word processing, I got trained in this graphic software that other people in the company were not being trained to use. I thought it was interesting. It was new, and it wasn’t painting.

Painting felt irrelevant at the time. The people painting were all neo-Expressionists like Julian Schnabel. Why would you want to be that? I was very involved with identity politics and feminism, and the people expressing those ideas in art were not doing it through painting. It was Barbara Kruger or Silence Equals Death, the people who designed the ACT UP logo, and a lot of street-based interventions. Painting felt even more like a bourgeois pursuit, like I was disconnected from my time.

Carrie Moyer, "Frilly Dollop," 2011. Acrylic on canvas. 72 x 72 inches

I was doing other stuff. I started doing agitprop and taking advantage of my access to multimillion-dollar equipment. It was always collaborative. I formed this thing called Dyke Action Machine with one other person. Since we had access to all this equipment and knew people in the business, two of us were able to make campaigns that looked very high-end. It sounds hokey now, but at the time it felt radical, because people were taking control of a process that nobody had really had access to previously.

So you were doing this in secret. Did it ever come out at work?

I don’t know if they ever knew about it. There used to be this saying in ACT UP: because a lot of the people who designed the graphics for them also worked at, like, Avon and Vidal Sassoon, there was a joke that all the graphics in New York, whether they were underground or in magazines, were being made by the same people.

That’s funny, compared to today, or even just a few years after that, when there were ‘zines on every corner and production stuff happening all the time. So you said you’ve had hundreds of shitty jobs, but this one was a good job, right?

It was a good job. Some other jobs that I had were not. I cleaned houses for wealthy people, like someone who had a hundred orchids, and each plant had its own humidifier and you had to clean the humidifiers. Or someone who was bulimic. Imagine cleaning their house. Or certain kinds of bachelors who’d never cleaned for three years. That was the job I had right out of Pratt, before I learned to type. Typing changed my life.

Typing meant you didn’t have to clean disgusting bachelor pads anymore!

Right. But I needed a job and didn’t know how to do anything. That’s the thing: you graduate from art school and you actually have no marketable skills. It’s a shock. You’re like, “Well, I can match these color values…”

When did you start to feel the calling of painting again?

I decided that I didn’t want everything to be mass-produced. I needed to make something by hand, very anti-new-media, very low-tech. I wanted to make a separation between this form of communication that was very fast and of the moment, and something I viewed as being—not old-fashioned, not traditional; I almost want to say meaningful. One day I woke up and thought, “I need a studio. I can’t have everything I make disappear or be able to change a hundred times.” That’s something you can’t do with a painting, because if you change it a hundred times you ruin it.

Getting a studio in New York, even though real estate was cheaper then, was a commitment. What did you do?

Doing freelance graphic production ended up being a smart thing to do. It was totally lucrative then. Now there are so many people who do it that it’s like being a photographer—what’s photography when everybody’s a photographer? At that time, you could work at that 15 hours a week and be fine, as long as you lived frugally.

So you rented a studio.

Yes. Well, at first I converted my living room to my studio, which didn’t work that well, and then eventually I got a studio.

Where were you living at the time, and where was your studio?

I lived in the East Village, and my studio was at the Lorimer Street station [in Williamsburg], behind Kellogg’s Diner. It was nothing like it is now.

Once I started painting again, I picked up on the things that I’d abandoned. I applied to Skowhegan, which is this fancy art camp—

You went to Skowhegan before graduate school? I was just talking to an artist who was telling me how special Skowhegan is compared to art school, because it’s a democratization of the artists—there can be some super talented person who hasn’t gone to school there, along with people from grad school or mid-career artists. It’s a very specific environment.

It was. It’s hard to get into, so prior to quitting painting I had tried two times and not gotten in. You want to go as an undergrad because your school pays for it, but when I came back to painting and applied and got in, it was intense.

I realized this is what is required if you really think you have something to say. It’s not only about making great art and being committed to your work. It’s also about having an intellectual presence in the world in some way. It’s not about staying in your studio and hoping someone finds you.

This is the other thing that I wanted to ask you about: navigating what is, after all, a very political and hierarchical and layered and complicated world. You had felt as though you weren’t in it—did this experience change that?

It changed me a lot. First of all, I realized this was something I had to do. I quit and then came back and didn’t know if I could do this—but there’s always this secret part of you that’s like, “I’m going to kick butt.” It’s taken me a long time.

The thing is, I went to Skowhegan, came back, and was like, “Alright. I have to go to graduate school. For myself.” I mean, I’d had work included in somewhat important shows about queer identity. There was a show at the museum at U.C. Berkeley called In A Different Light. It was one of the first shows that had identifiable queer content, and the work had gotten reproduced and a lot of good things had happened to me.

Before Skowhegan.

Sort of in conjunction with it. And still I was a split personality; it felt like it must be a mistake.

I’ve always wondered about that feeling of being a fraud. Apparently there’s a whole school of thought about that. There are so many of us who are always wondering, “When will I be found out?”

Or thinking someone is going to say, “You only know how to do one thing, and we’re not interested in that thing anymore.”

Carrie Moyer, "Belladonna," 2011. Acrylic on canvas. 40 x 28 inches

A lot of the stuff that I had done for Dyke Action Machine, posters and agitprop – people started showing them as soon as I made them. Not only were they on the streets in New York, but people wrote stuff on them, they were in magazines. I think the first show that I was in after I went back to painting was at ABC No Rio, which was this famous place on the Lower East. It was a show called No More Nice Girls. I might have seen a poster for it or something, and I sent them an image. It was real old school.

Do you remember what it felt like to have your work on the wall, being seen?

It was pretty great, and I don’t think that I totally grasped it. It was gritty, this total dump, almost like having a painting in a squat. But it’s the typical New York story where now that it’s in the past, people think of it fondly.

I thought it was amazing, but I am one of those people who will do something and then forget about it and be like, “Alright, what’s the next thing I want to do?” I want to move forward, but there’s also something frightening about enjoying success. It doesn’t really make sense, and I’ve spent many, many, many hours with my therapist discussing it. It’s getting better. But I can’t just sit around and enjoy it. I’ll be like, “What’s the next thing?” I won’t read my own reviews for months afterward. Sometimes I’ll have my girlfriend, Sheila, read them to me. It’s kind of stupid, actually, to behave that way, but whatever.

It’s not that unusual a way of reacting to success, I think. But let’s go back to right after Skowhegan, when you’d set your sights on graduate school.

Bard was the only school I applied to, because I had a life in New York and had built up a collection of freelance production contacts. I couldn’t see going someplace else for two years. I wanted to be here, and I was starting to show a little bit, but I had a lot of other interests that weren’t being satisfied by this discourse around political art. I wanted to make art about other things, I wanted to read stuff, I wanted to be around people who were really good artists and have conversations with them. It was less about meeting people to help my career than about growing as an artist.

I worked hard to make myself a student. Instead of viewing everybody as a stepping stone, I was looking to people who could give me some ideas.

Was graduate school what you hoped it would be?

Bard is a brilliant program, like this secret trove of the coolest artists in New York.

So many people that I’ve interviewed have—without my realizing it beforehand—had Bard connections: Lisa Sanditz, Tim Davis, Sigrid Sandström, Daniel Mendelsohn, all these people. It seems like such a hub of ideas.

It embodies some kind of quintessentially New York art culture. A lot of people who teach in Bard’s MFA program there also teach at Columbia, but Bard is a third the price. It’s like this secret society: you go up there for the whole summer, you go back to your own life—

It’s a summer program?

Yes. It’s three summers. The students tend to be a little bit older, they’ve already started their careers, and it’s a different level, like going to camp with really cool people. It was hard but wonderful. The best school experience I’ve ever had.

And I did make very long connections. People I’m still friends with. In fact, one of the founders of the gallery that I work with was my next door studio neighbor. And because I was older, I knew some of the faculty, too. There was more overlap between faculty and students than at other schools. It was the right environment for me.

And then during the rest of the year, you were able to still have your New York life and freelance gigs? Did you also become more serious about studio time?

The thing about Bard was that I would go there for three months, and when I got home I’d have to freelance 24 hours a day for two or three months to catch up. My goal has always been to reserve three or four days for the studio. I don’t have weekends; I work every day, unless I’m teaching. That started at that time.

So during graduate school was when you started to cement your work habits?

Yeah. I was fortunate enough to have freelance jobs that allowed me to make my own schedule. I was a perma-lancer, so I wouldn’t get laid off but I could take a month off. So I went to a lot of residencies at that time, too, besides going to Bard, as a way of being able to work every day.

Looking back, is there something that you think would have benefitted your younger self, something you wish you could whisper in her ear now?

A million things. One of them is: don’t be so impatient, even though it’s profoundly uncomfortable. One of the things that fucked me up as a young artist is that at Pratt, I had teachers who were extremely dogmatic about studio practice. They would say, “If you don’t go to your studio every day, you’re never going to make it.” Well, that’s just not possible, but because I wanted it so much, I took it to heart. I would say, “What am I doing? I haven’t been to my studio in a week.” And I tend to make snap decisions, so instead of floating along for a couple of years, I said, “I guess I’m not cut out for this.” So I would say to my younger self: no snap judgments. That’s where the patience comes in.

The other part is building community for your work. If your practice is more traditional, you’re spending a lot of time alone. It’s very competitive, and there aren’t that many things for people to apply to. It’s almost a necessity that you have people to talk to about what’s going on—not only what’s going on in the studio, but in your life experiences.

A community of people who are going through the same things and can be sounding boards for each other.

Yeah. Also, my main life mantra is: figure out the way to work as little as possible and make the most amount of money.

You did the New York young artist thing at a time when it was more feasible, economically.

Often I say to my students, “Go to New Orleans. Go to—” I don’t know where. But go with ten people, and come back in three years. Go somewhere cheap. But then, I don’t know if I would have done that.

Do you think it’s important to be in New York?

I think the odds are so stacked against people here. There’s something like a half a million painters in New York.

Daunting.

And it’s so punishing to live here in terms of the economy, if you don’t come from money. You have to set a timeline for yourself: “In five years, I need to be able to be in my studio for half of my time.” You have to set up something so that you don’t get sucked into the black hole of This Is Never Going To Happen. I don’t know if New York is the right place anymore. I’m teaching at Hunter now, and these kids are tough: much more sophisticated about how things work than I was when I went to Pratt. It’s interesting watching them negotiate this.

For me, it’s less about getting the first couple of shows than it is about building a long career. How do you make sure that you can do this for the rest of your life? How do you build something that you can keep a sustained interest in? In grad school, people learn how to talk about their work, and it works well: a lot of people show in those first couple of years out of grad school, when they’re new and nobody knows them and they’re on it. Then you have to keep it going.

What was the best advice that was ever given to you?

Hmm. I’m not a good person to ask about that. I know that people helped me a lot and gave me good advice, but I never digested it. I always felt like nobody was helping me, which was not true. I had a hard time hearing it. I think people always want a mentor, but some people make themselves open to it, and some people don’t. I didn’t.

Do you regret that?

I do regret it. A lot of older artists know how hard this is and are willing to talk to younger artists or help them, even. And I think people did that for me—I just sort of ate it up and forgot about it. You have to be ready to hear the advice.

Your mother wanted you to be an artist. How do your parents look at your career at this point?

They’re very proud of me, and probably a little bit incredulous. Looking at it now, twenty years later, I think my mother was being unreasonably idealistic. Her ideas had no grounding in anything except for having read Allen Ginsberg. The world isn’t like that any more. It’s funny, I think they’re kind of shocked at how long it actually took. They’re proud, but they’re also like, “Man, you are persistent.”

Since the first time that you gave up painting and then came back to it, have there been other moments when you felt you should be doing something more stable or predictable?

No. When I went to grad school, I knew I’d found the thing that I could be very interested in for a long time. There’s no end here that I’m going to run up against and say, “Okay, I know everything I could want to know about this.” That feels resolved for me: this is what I’m going to do forever.

That question, “Is this what I should be doing?” takes a long time for most people to figure out.

Yeah. When I first started teaching, about ten years ago, I was like, “Wow, I do know something about painting. I’m not a fake!” And it keeps unwinding. At the risk of sounding like a cheerleader for art, it goes very deep. There’s no lack of either artists from the past or contemporary artists to be in a dialogue with.

My girlfriend jokes that I could have been a great creative director for a design firm, and we could be living in Chelsea in a huge loft. The things you didn’t choose to do are often interesting to think about.

No regrets, though?

God, no. The whole thing just keeps unfolding in this interesting way.

It’s hard, and people need to know that, to choose it consciously. Take your poison. People know that. Their teachers are always saying shit like that to them, but they don’t really know it. The world is filled with artists. We don’t need any more unless you’re completely committed to it. There are enough mediocre artists. But there is room for more really brilliant people who can do the thing that we want art to do for us, which is to give us some insight that we didn’t see before.

Photo by Sue Schaffner

Though he died in Idaho in 1961, he met The Days of Yore at a diner on the Upper West Side of New York City in 2012 for an interview.

I’m not sure you’re allowed to smoke in here.

I’m aware of the rules.

You’re already on your ninth cigarette and we’ve been here three minutes.

I’m all out. Is there a place around here to get more?

We just sat down. Do you want to eat first?

[Hemingway stands and leaves the diner. We walk to a nearby bodega.]

So, growing up, were your parents involved in writing in any way?

My father was a doctor and my mother sang songs. She sang for a living. They wrote grocery lists and minimal essays. They did not write in that sense of the word. My father taught me to hunt. My mother taught me to sing. I enjoyed both.

Can you sing something for me now?

Don’t belittle this.

Sorry. Do you remember the first thing you ever wrote?

I wrote a monologue about the tree outside my childhood home.

From the perspective of the tree?

Oh, it was a sure-footed tree. Strong. It never wavered and I liked that. I used to look at the tree from my window and wonder things. And when my father and I would come back from fishing or hunting there it was. Rooted there. I thought a lot about that tree. The way it stood its ground.

Do you know if that tree is still standing?

I am not God.

You also wrote for your high school newspaper, correct?

Writing is not the word to use. Childish scribbles from the mind of a fool. Words were committed to a page. They were printed. That much is true.

What kind of books were you reading at this point?

The backs of high school women.

Ha. Was your goal to be a reporter?

Goals. No. I did things because I felt inclined to do them. Nothing more than that. Why does a stream have a current? Because it flows. You go where you go. That is the direction I took.

Got it. What happened after high school? Did you get a job?

[Hemingway purchases another pack of cigarettes. Then he punches the bodega employee between the eyes.]

Woah, Jesus! Why did you do that?

Sometimes a man looks at you askew. What was your question?

I asked about what you did after high school. Should we get him some ice?

I was a newspaper reporter. In Kansas City. I reported on backwards businessmen and homeownership. Nothing special. I was good but I only lasted a short while. The war started, you know.

You wrote a lot during the war, right?

You think I’m going to talk about the goddamned war with you?

Yes?

No.

Okay.

Do you want to head up to a burlesque show?

What? Right now?

There’s one in the area. At a club above a Persian restaurant I like. This girl called Silence performs a revue. Her body is strong, but she’s made of fragile stuff. She sings about deserts and dances to Sade. I know her mother. You’ll enjoy it.

[Hemingway hails a cab.]

You were still a reporter when you moved to Paris, right? Were you writing novels yet?

Look at the city pass by there. [He pauses for three minutes.] I remember being young. The unreasonable nature of things. Bewildering truths never seemed to clear. I moved to Paris with a girl. A woman. That much is true. Novels? Not yet. Not quite.

But you were meeting a lot of writers then. And artists. Did they inspire you to want to switch from journalism to the more creative side?

[To the cab driver.] Stop here.

[The cab stops at a corner of office buildings in the Financial District.]

Is this where the show is?

I need to go inside this building and retrieve something from a man. Then we’ll continue.

I needed to retrieve this box.

What’s in it?

Everything. And nothing.

No, but seriously. Why did you just go into that building?

I could stand for a drink. What about you? [To the cabdriver.] Take us uptown.

I thought we were seeing a burlesque show.

Ezra Pound used to dance. Did you know that? People think of him so sternly. Think poets were so stern and serious, but Pound loved to dance. He would move from side to side. He would take over a room. I hated to dance. I hated seeing people loose like that. Perhaps I was a frigid man, even in my prime. That could be true.

What was the first story you published?

You are so concerned with plot details. What about the feelings? That was all my life was then. A host of emotion. We lived our lives that way. That is how we moved and operated. If a timeline was made, I would have burned it. Somehow we made money and we wrote. We fought. We slept with each other and denied love.

Were you making any money?

We were making enough to live. Isn’t that all there is?

Was it hard to transition from fact-based journalism to creative fiction?

Fiction is facts. Facts are fiction. I need you to get out of this cab.

Wait, what? Right now?

Yes.

Did I do something?

[No response.]

OK. I mean…that’s fine. I’ll just get out here.

So long.

[I get out of the cab in Washington Heights. I get on the subway.]

Interview by Lucas Kavner

Photo be Yousuf Karsh

Happy April Fools Week.

Orlean is also a master of the 140-character narrative. An avid Twitterer, this interview came about when she characteristically responded to a fan tweet from The Days of Yore.

What was growing up in Cleveland, Ohio like? Were books a big presence in your childhood home?

I grew up in a suburb that placed a very high value on education and on social responsibility – it was an unusual community and a wonderful place to grow up. I probably dreamed of living somewhere more exciting but I realize now it was an exceptional environment. Books were important to me – we went to the library several times a week, and my parents encouraged us to read as much as possible.

What did you want to be when you grew up?

I wanted to be a writer from almost the minute I could imagine “being” anything. I didn’t know what that meant, in practical terms, and I didn’t know anyone who was a writer, professionally, but I knew I wanted to tell stories and see them published.

Did you write in college?

I wrote a lot in college, but most of it was literary criticism and analysis for classes, or – surprisingly enough! – poetry. I wrote a lot of poetry, both on my own and in classes and workshops. I shared that with my fellow students but didn’t make an effort to publish it elsewhere.

What happened after your college graduation, what was the next step for you? What kind of jobs did you have?

I moved to Oregon after college, and lucked into a job at a tiny new start-up magazine. I still can’t believe I got the job, but I begged and wheedled my way into it. After that, all my jobs were writing jobs, and I learned how to write by doing it. I had great editors, and they served as teachers – since I really had no idea how to write journalism.

I worked as a waitress in college, and then when I first moved to Portland, I got another waitressing job to pay the rent while I was waiting for my big break as a writer. I worked at a seafood restaurant called the Rusty Anchor or something like that.

I want to hear more about that first writing job.

This was a little start-up magazine called Paper Rose, and I was hired as a writer, which was astonishing since I was so inexperienced. But the staff was all made up of people like me: right out of college, incredibly excited to write, and learning as we went along. We immediately became a family – most of us had just moved to Portland, so we really banded together socially as well as professionally. The office was in an old house, and it was very casual – more like a college paper than a real-world magazine. I was learning with each story how to report, how to write, and how to come up with ideas.

What was the living like for you in the years before publication and literary recognition?

I was quite broke when I started my writing career. I made less money than I had made as a waitress, so it was scary. Fortunately, I was living in Portland, Oregon, which at that time was very cheap; I shared an apartment with my boyfriend and later, with my boyfriend and my sister. We ate a lot of Kraft Macaroni ‘n Cheese and scavenged some of our household decor – I was very proud of our coffee table, which was a discarded telephone wire spool. I shopped at Goodwill for a lot of my clothes.

I do remember one day seeing my bank balance at zero and having a knot in my stomach – but I just pushed on, and did what I had to do.

Is there anything you would tell yourself at that age, looking back with the wisdom and experience you have now?

Have more fun! I was very driven when I was first starting out, and I rushed through those years of carefree post-college life. I wish I had savored it more. But that’s the nature of hindsight.

Would you say that there was a point in time when you started taking your writing more seriously than before, a moment where you decided to commit to it in a new way?

Not really – I’ve always had the same seriousness about it.

When was the first time you were published?

The very first time, I guess, was a book review in my college paper, and I was thrilled – it was a sort of out-of-body experience. In fact, for years, each time I saw my work in print, I was just as exhilarated and amazed as that first time.

How did your family feel about your choice to pursue writing?

They were skeptical and concerned that I’d just scrape along and have no real means of supporting myself. For years my father insisted that I go to law school, even after I’d been writing for major publications and had a book contract. He just never trusted it as a profession.

How do they feel now? Are they still concerned? I spoke with E.L. Doctorow who said something similar. Until the end, his mother could never stop being concerned about him and kept calling to ask if he was really getting by, long after he had become a hugely successful writer.

I think parents are always concerned, no matter what you do and no matter how successful you might be, but especially in a profession like writing, where success seems so subjective and so fleeting. My parents weren’t actively worried once I was at The New Yorker, but I think they always had a bit of parental concern about how stable a writing career could be.

Did you ever feel like, what am I doing?! I should do something more stable and practical with my life!

Yes! Sometimes I yearn for a job that’s very normal – where I’d punch in each morning, work for a few hours, and then go home and have nothing on my mind connected to work until the next day. A regular job, that is.

Yes, sigh. But have you ever felt like giving up?

Happy to say I’ve never felt like giving up – I’ve certainly lost faith in stories that weren’t going well, and grew tired of books I was working on, but I never thought that I wanted to give up being a writer. It just seemed like something that I am rather than something I choose to do.

What about early triumphs you recall?

Breaking into national magazines really made me feel like this idea of being a writer might actually work out. I wrote a story for the Village Voice, which was one of the first times I had approached a bigger publication, and it ended up as their cover story and got a lot of attention. I felt like I had just won the lottery. I think from that point on, I felt a kind of determination and confidence that buoyed me through the rest of my career.

And getting a piece in The New Yorker for the first time is certainly the ultimate sense of triumph – one that I literally couldn’t believe. It was such a dream of mine, and seemed so unattainable, and then there it was: my story, in that unmistakable New Yorker font, in that magazine. I floated for days – weeks! – after that. That marked the real moment that I felt I was on my way somewhere, no matter what ups and downs I might still encounter.

For many young writers, The New Yorker is a kind of Holy Grail. You are a staff writer there now and have been for many years. But it sounds like you idealized that publication a bit too, before you wrote for it. I read somewhere that what you wanted to do when you were younger was be “someone who wrote long stories about interesting things, rather than news stories about short-lived events.” The New Yorker seems to me to be one of the last places where, truly, long stories about interesting things are still able to thrive.

I absolutely idealized The New Yorker before I got my foot in the door, and to my surprise and delight, that idealized version of it was and remains mostly true. It’s been a place that has allowed me tremendous freedom to pursue those stories about interesting things – without regard to their ‘newsworthiness’. The place has changed over the years in many ways, but never in that fundamental way. It really is that place.

You have a son. Did your writing habits change significantly after you became a mother?

Having a kid changes everything, and especially writing habits, since I work at home and have hours that don’t conform to a regular schedule. It’s been a huge challenge reporting and writing since my son was born – and it’s changed as he’s changed. He’s now in school, so that has made it easier in some ways, harder in others.

Did what you write about change after your son was born?

I don’t write about different subjects. I don’t have plans to write a parenting blog or write about having a child. That just doesn’t interest me. But it’s possible that I’ll come across stories because I have a kid that I might not have thought of otherwise, and there are some stories that for practical reasons I won’t do, because I have responsibilities at home that control my time and flexibility.

Do you find that you have faced specific challenges as a writer because you are a woman?

No – except for the challenges I’d face in everyday life as a woman. For instance, there are places I’d be reluctant to travel alone as a woman. But I don’t feel it’s affected my work otherwise, and in some cases I think women have a great advantage – people are sometimes more open to a woman than they might be to a male reporter.

Adaptation, the movie based on your book The Orchid Thief, is a favorite of mine, and is in fact my fiancé’s favorite movie of all time. When I told him I would be interviewing you, the first thing he said was: “Tell her she’s so cool for being okay with the way that book was re-imagined as a film.” I wonder, what was your initial reaction to Charlie Kaufman’s adaptation of your book and of your character? What did it feel like to see yourself, but not yourself, on screen in this hugely popular film? Having yourself played by Meryl Streep can’t hurt!

Tell your fiancé thanks! I did have to take quite a leap to allow the movie to be made, but I’m really glad I did. It was very strange – indescribably so – to see myself portrayed in a film, and especially in such a cracked, crazy way, and by someone as universally iconic as Meryl Streep. It’s impossible to describe. It’s just like going to the moon, I guess. Sometimes I still find it astonishing.

Any advice for young writers?

Write, write, write, and then read. Then read some more. Then sit down and write more. And love writing with all your heart, and that will make it sing.

Interview by Astri von Arbin Ahlander

Photo by Gaspar Tringale

On a break from multiple appearances at this year’s AWP conference in Chicago, Strayed spoke with The Days of Yore over lunch at a busy diner. We found her to be animated, funny, and quietly authoritative. We were also delighted to discover that when she’s not writing essays or fiction, or reasoning out your private dilemmas as Sugar, she’s secretly inventing the gadgets you’ve always wanted, like a diary with a key that actually works.

What first compelled you to write things down?

My love of books from a young age. I remember my early reading experiences as epiphanies; I remember reading and feeling the need to close my eyes because it was amazing to me that you could make images and feelings with words. It was powerful, not in a way of controlling but of moving, and I wanted to do that.

So those things influenced me: my mother reading to me, and how riveted I was. I started writing stories as soon as I could write. Remember those diaries with the little key? And the key would never really work? I got my daughter one for Christmas, and it’s the same damn thing. We’ve got all this technology, and we still can’t make a diary with a key that works.

We should market one together. We could make a lot of money.

Girls across the land would thank us! The way to become rich is not to write, but to do something like that. When I was a waitress in the early nineties, when there was a lot more smoking, I worked in this French bar in Portland and thought of a hat with a big bubble on top. A tube would connect the bubble to your arm. You’re holding a cigarette, it sucks the smoke up, and then you have this bubble-of-smoke hat. Granted, people wouldn’t want to wear it. Maybe it’s not as good an idea as the diary lock. It was inspired by those frat-boy beer hats, you know the ones?

Yes! Now, if you could make a beer hat that was also a smoke-absorbing hat—

We could call it Frat Party.

You need to patent that. So is it safe to say that if you hadn’t been a writer you would have been an inventor?

Absolutely. Well, no. But think about what that is: it’s like creating stories. What do you need and how are you going to solve that problem?

What else did you want to be when you were growing up?

There was a tiny window in maybe third grade when I wanted to be a country-western singer. I wasn’t exposed to much country-western music. I just had this idea of myself with a guitar.

What’s true is that I have always wanted to be a writer. But for a long time, I didn’t realize that I could be a writer. I remember thinking that I needed to be a journalist. Not that there’s anything wrong with being a journalist, but I grew up working class, and it was always: How will you make money doing that? Nobody was going to pay me to write a collection of short stories. It wasn’t until a couple of years into college, where my professors were writers, that I understood how they put that together financially.

What other jobs did you work in the meantime, before or during or after college?

When I first came out of college, I worked as a political activist for the National Abortion Rights Action League. It was rewarding, but ultimately, it was the thing I cared about second-most. It kept me from my writing. I gave that up and became a waitress. All through my twenties, I was a waitress, and I would save up money, apply to residencies, then quit my job so I could go three months to Wyoming or wherever. I got a lot of writing done in those bursts. I didn’t have to save a ton; I lived simply. I had student loan bills, but I could live off of a small amount. It’s different now. I have kids and stuff.

The theme was always service. That was the hardest thing about being a waitress: it made sense financially, because I could make the most money in a short period of time, but I felt useless bringing people food. It didn’t seem to matter.

Did you work long hours when you were waiting tables? How did you balance that with writing?

Yes. The theory of waiting tables is that it’s a job you don’t bring home, so you’re going to write in your off-time. Of course, what happens is you get off at one a.m., you’re sleeping with the cook, you’re drinking, you get home at four in the morning and wake up at noon. You go have coffee, you’re shopping for thrift store dresses because you need something cute to wear to work at five, and it’s like, “Well, I was going to write today, but I didn’t.” Those days were the story of my twenties in a lot of ways, but it later contributed to my writing.

It was out of that place that I decided to go get my MFA. I had just turned thirty, and I said, “I have to do something.” Waitressing and writing was sort of working, and I was sort of publishing; it wasn’t that I had no identity as a writer. It was that I couldn’t finish a book. I needed that shelter of time, so I decided to apply to MFA programs and go to Syracuse.

Why Syracuse?

I applied only to places that would offer full funding. Syracuse was not at the top of my list. A number of programs accepted me, including the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. They gave me a full fellowship. That’s one of those things I look back on: Should I have done that? Other writers would say, “Of course, you’ve got to go to Iowa.” Even Iowa was like, “Of course you’re coming to Iowa!” To this day, I receive alumni materials from them, like they cannot accept that I didn’t go there. [Laughs.]

I think that ultimately, if I had brought in a story at Iowa and they said, “I can’t believe she got the fellowship; she’s not that good,” I would have agreed with them, because that’s the voice in my head, too. I would have been self-conscious and second-guessing. Whereas at Syracuse, we were all funded, we all felt like shit together, and it was a great experience. Good, bad, ugly, hard, beautiful, all those things.

What did you do right after the MFA?

I finished my MFA in the spring of 2002. I finished my book in August of 2003. My husband’s a documentary filmmaker, and when I graduated, we were going to go back to Portland, where he’d been doing work. At the last minute, he got offered this job in Massachusetts, four hours from Syracuse. I had packed the boxes, we had a U-Haul rented to Portland, and we just switched it and moved to Massachusetts, where he worked for this documentary series as a filmmaker and producer.

I had also applied to a residency called the Sacatar Institute, on this island off the coast of Brazil. These wealthy Americans own it, and they support artists from all over the world. You get to work for two months, they feed you, you have a maid, and you’re in this big house with all these other artists. I was going there to finish Torch, and the week before I went, I found out that I was pregnant. I wanted to be; my husband and I had been trying to conceive. I thought, “Women are pregnant all over the world. I’ll be fine,” and then I went and immediately became incredibly ill. The only things I wanted to eat were pretzels and pickles, but they were giving me fish with the head and tail on, deep-fried in oil. Even if you’re not pregnant, that’s a bit challenging. I was so sick, but I decided, “I cannot leave this island until I finish Torch.” We were maxed out on our credit cards, and they fly you there, they pay for everything. I didn’t stay the full two months. I just wrote like a motherfucker, not to quote myself, and worked and worked and worked until I finished the book. I flew out of Brazil the next day, got to Massachusetts, bought pickles and pretzels, and sent the book to my agent.

So you already had representation at the time that you finished your first book. How did you meet your agent?

I’d gotten an agent the month before Brazil, when I started publishing work: my first two essays, “The Love of My Life” and “Heroin/e,” which both ended up in Best American Essays, and short stories, too. Agents started contacting me, but I would take their name, have a conversation, then say that I didn’t want to show them my work until I had a book done. Graduate school fucked me up in that regard. I would be writing and thinking, “Sal’s going to hate this, Chris is going to love this.” I was never right about what they loved and hated, but there was this sense of judgment and who I might please and disappoint. That year after graduate school, I had to get all the fingerprints off of my manuscript and be with myself. I didn’t want an agent. I just wanted to write the book that I needed to write.

This one agent kept calling, and I liked her. I said, “You can read the first half, and if you like that, we’ll pursue this.” And she did. When I got back from Brazil, I sent the whole book to her. She had minor suggestions, and within a day I changed them and she sent it out. I had previously met Janet Silver, who was the head of house at Houghton-Mifflin, at Bread Loaf [Writers’ Conference] when I was there. She said, “When your novel’s done, send it to me.” I liked Janet, and told my agent to send it to her first. My agent, Laurie Fox, took it to Janet and within a week, Janet bought the book. It was fast: once I finished it, that all happened within a month. I flew back from Brazil on October 12th, and on November 14th we settled the deal.

You said that for a while you were able to live cheaply. How’d you do it?

I lived in little tiny apartments or with other people. I drove a junker car. My husband and I still have one car, a 2004 Honda. I spent my money on travel and writing. Well, and thrift store dresses and cool boots. Okay. But even now, these Harley Davidson motorcycle boots I’m wearing today are my favorites and I love them, and they were twenty-five dollars at a thrift store. [Laughs.] You’ve got to do the right kind of shopping. That’s my main advice to young writers.

What did you eat when you were living on the cheap?

This was another benefit of being a waitress: I would eat at the restaurant. I’d have toast or whatever at home, and then I’d go to the restaurant.

What was your undergrad experience like?

Because I grew up way in the country, in this tiny town of forty people an hour and a half west of Duluth, I was too intimidated to go to the University of Minnesota. I wanted to go to the Twin Cities, but it seemed far. So I applied to this small Catholic college, the absolute wrong place for me to be, but the brochure had a pretty picture on the cover. When they let me in, the letter said one of the benefits was that if you went there, your mom, dad, and grandparents could all attend for free. What they assumed, of course, was that your mom would take one French class. My mom always wanted to go to school and never got to because she had three kids by the age of twenty-six and struggled financially. She said, jokingly, “Maybe I should go, too.”

One thing led to another. My mom was my hero, and I loved her and wanted to help her, but I also wanted to go to college by myself. We made this arrangement: I would live in the dorm as a normal student, and she would drive to campus and stay with friends. The rule was that if she saw me on campus, she could not address me or show any recognition unless I acknowledged her first. [Laughs.] So if I said, “Hi, Mom,” she could talk to me, but sometimes I would see her and just walk by. Isn’t that evil?

Did your mom take a full course load?

She went full-time. At the end of one year, I transferred to the U in Minneapolis, and my mom transferred to the U in Duluth, so then we went to the same college in different cities. We were about to graduate—it was our senior year—when suddenly my mom got this bad cold that wouldn’t go away. She died seven weeks later, the Monday of our spring break. Her funeral was that Friday, and I went back to school on Monday.

Six years later, I called them up and said, “I need to take a class.” They let me do it by correspondence. I took Introduction to Latin and got my degree. My mom got hers, too—the University granted it to her posthumously, and I went to her graduation. She beat me—she got her degree in ’91 and I got mine in ’97.

What was your artistic community like before graduate school?

Over the years, I’ve had different friends and groups that I would exchange work with, but really, graduate school was when I found a community focused on the literary arts. Before that, as a waitress—and this was a beautiful thing I loved—I was always with other artists: writers, dancers, painters, sculptors, jewelry makers, all kinds of artists who couldn’t make their living with their art and needed to wait tables. There was a culture of the artist’s life and struggle. I was always going to performances and gallery openings by coworkers, but most were dancers and painters, so I felt a little isolated. I had writer friends I would correspond with in different cities.

But it wasn’t until graduate school that I experienced the rigorous examination peers can give you, for better or for worse. While what happened in graduate school was positive, its negative effect was too many fingerprints on my pages. It took me several years after I finished to want to share my work with other writers. I had to get my own voice in my head. A few years after Torch came out, I was invited to join this wonderful writers’ group in Portland, so now I do that.

Your Portland writing group includes Chuck Palahniuk and Lidia Yuknavitch, doesn’t it?

Yeah, and Monica Drake—there are nine of us. It’s a very meaningful community to me. Then there’s a national community of friends—people can slam Facebook and Twitter all they want, but it’s been wonderful in community-building for writers. It’s our water cooler. I’m connected with people who I would have never met in real life, and with old graduate schoolmates, too. It’s wonderful that you can go online and feel that you’re not alone.

Portland has such a strong literary community, but do you feel that you could live and write anywhere?

I feel lucky to have such a great community in Portland, but I could live anywhere and write, because you go to that really private place when you’re working. Now that I have kids, I can’t do the residency thing. I can do a week, but it’s hard to find a residency that will let you go for that short a time. What I’ve done in Portland a couple times is just checked into a hotel for a few days. Not some lovely place, just a room that I’m alone in, and that’s all I need to write. It’s lovely to sit by the ocean in a Brazilian paradise, but I don’t think that really contributes to the writing, because I go to such a deep personal place.

Do you have any personal rituals or superstitions around your writing? Anything that you do to get yourself started?

A lot of times, I’ll read poetry for a while. I write realistic prose, but language is important to me, the rhythm that I hear in the work. Poetry helps me kick into that. I’m not a fussy person. I don’t have to have things a certain way. I just need to be alone and not interrupted.

I used to be a runner, and when I was training for a half-marathon, I reached this point where I could not go on but had to keep going. It was literally a matter of just allowing your body to move over the ground. As a writer, that means covering the page, even if you don’t know where it’s going or why you’re telling this story. That gets you moving, and then you’ve gotten somewhere instead of being parked on the empty page.

You mentioned working up against a deadline on the Sugar columns. What’s your process in coming up with your responses to the problems posed by your “Dear Sugar” letter writers?

One of the things that makes me happiest about that column is that I come up with the answers by writing. Especially in the columns where I tell a story about my life: I ponder the question and, for whatever reason, that thing from my life keeps emerging in reference to this letter. Oftentimes I don’t understand why. Sometimes I write that story and nothing happens; it’s the wrong story, and I have to put it in my scrap pile and make use of it somewhere else. But most of the time as I’m writing, I figure out the connection. Something intuitive manifests itself into an insight or a deeper or more expanded way to think about a situation. It’s trusting story.

I’m not a therapist, and when I first began, I thought, “I am not qualified.” Then I realized that maybe more than anyone, storytellers in the culture are qualified because we’re trying to reveal the truths, contradictions, undercurrents, and the mysterious inner-workings of the most important things in our lives. Love, relationships, loss, the questions of youth and of old age, the wounds of childhood and the fears of adulthood: that’s what the entire literary history is about. In the advice column, this is gathered into the very particular form of a letter to one person, saying, “Here’s what I think you should do,” but really trying to offer something more.

Let’s back up for a minute. Can you talk about how you wound up taking on the mantle of Sugar in the first place?

Steve Almond emailed me and said, “Hey, I write this column called ‘Dear Sugar,’ and I know you’ve read it.” I had written Sugar a fan letter, actually. Steve wrote the introduction to Tiny Beautiful Things, and in it he tells the story of how I had written what he says is the only fan letter he ever received as Sugar—which I don’t believe. He didn’t reply, so I give him shit about it. He gets one fan letter and doesn’t write back? I mean, come on.

I was scared because Steve is so funny, and funny is not my thing on the page. But I liked the idea of challenging myself. My first idea was to be this smartass, snarky, mean-funny kind of person, and then I realized that no way in hell could I do that. I decided to just make it mine and try to build a following by making it regular. Steve’s columns were funny and beautiful, but a column would go up, and I would love it, and then it would be months before another went up. He didn’t have a schedule. I’m a Virgo, so I impose Virgo rules. I decided to do it every week, and I did. Two or three weeks into it, a column got seven comments, which was a big deal. [Laughs.] And it grew. People got addicted to checking it every Thursday. Then it took on a life of its own, and it took over my life. I had to do
Wild revisions—the thing that I got paid to do, and that was being published as a book with my name on it—but I was spending my days writing this little column that I got nothing for. I loved doing it, so I came to a peace with it.

You came out publicly as Sugar on Valentine’s Day. What’s it like now, the secret being out, versus being anonymous?

The anonymity thing started not to work. People who read my work would email me and say, “You have to be Sugar.” Book reviewers reading Wild were putting it together. When I first took the gig, Steve Almond and Steve Elliott and Isaac Fitzgerald and I emailed back and forth about whether it should be Sugar or Cheryl. I wanted to be anonymous for a while, but I also wanted to someday say that this was my column. Valentine’s Day seemed like the right moment. So many people knew—a couple hundred, an inner circle—but thousands of readers didn’t know. And I was starting to feel oppressed by the cloak. Do you know how many conversations I’ve had where I had to pretend that this whole part of me didn’t exist? I’d be like, “I’m really busy.” “With what?” “Oh, just things.” I was like the dude who has a secret family across town—I’m so glad we can all live in one house now! I feel whole.

Did you ever have conversations with friends or colleagues who talked about Sugar with you but didn’t know that you were Sugar? What was that like?

Maddening. Tortuous to the writer’s ego. Friends would post Sugar columns to my Facebook page and say, “Cheryl, you have to read this.” People who know me know that I’m the kind of person who would like Sugar, because we write, like, a lot of the same kinds of things. [Laughs.] I wouldn’t know how to respond, so I’d say, “Oh, thanks, I’m busy now, I’ll read it later.” One time I was in a café in Portland and got to talking with this woman and she said, “You just have to read this column. It’s called Sugar.” I wanted to stab myself in the eye with a fork.

Sometimes I told my own secret. Maybe it was ego; I needed to be able to say, “I wrote that.” Then at times I would freak out and think, “Everyone knows! I have to be quiet about it!”

How did you know Steve Almond before he asked you to take over as Sugar?

We were on the faculty together at a conference called Writers at Work in Salt Lake City. My son was two and my daughter was six or eight months old, so they had to come with me because I was nursing, and my husband had to come with me to look after them, so I had this entourage—which was unlike any of the entourages I had imagined back in the Days of Yore! They traveled all over the country with me on my book tour for Torch. I would get off the elevator in the hotel after my reading and hear my daughter screaming at the end of the hall. I would let down and be running toward her. It was intense.

So, at this conference Steve was teaching, too, and he was with his wife, Erin, who was pregnant with their first child. I did the thing you’re not supposed to do: I went into graphic detail with Erin about the natural births of my gigantic children. She was traumatized, but Steve forgave me and we became friends.

Did Erin have a natural birth after that?

[Laughs.] No, she never intended to. Me, I gave birth in a teepee to an eleven-pound baby.

Did you really give birth in a teepee?

I did not give birth in a teepee. But I did not give birth in a hospital. And my first child was eleven pounds.

Was it hard to write after you had children?

It was incredibly hard. I was thirty-five when my son was born, and I had just turned thirty-seven when my daughter was born. It is the defining challenge of any woman writer’s life who is also a mother, that balance. What mothering requires of you is both the opposite of what writing requires and also what it demands. It’s a creative and exhausting endeavor to do either thing. As a writer, you need solitude, uninterrupted time, and the ability to think—and you can only think if you have slept.

My kids hindered my ability to move freely as a professional, but they also made me a better writer. There’s a whole dimension of the world that I can write about having experienced being a mother. But there’s also guilt. Right now I’m in Chicago, my kids are in Portland, and I’m not going to go home until Monday.

What do your kids think about having a writer for a mom?

Two days before I left, we drove by Powell’s Books, and they have my name up on the marquee because I’m reading there on March 21st. My son said, “I love having a famous mom, but famous moms have to work all the time. I’d rather have a mom who didn’t have to work all the time.” Right now I’m working all the time, but at the end of August, after Tiny Beautiful Things, things are going to chill way out. I’ll have things to do, but it’s not going to be crazy. We will downshift back to regular life.

After I had my son, for a while I didn’t give a shit about writing. There was some natural drug that went into my head that said, “The absolute only thing that matters is this child.” He was my whole reason, even though I had never been a baby person. I had no idea I would love them like that. And I know, it’s totally cliché.

No, no. It’s such a bizarre, awesome, human thing to have an experience where you care so much about something that it changes your behavior.

Would I have a book out sooner if I didn’t have kids? Absolutely. I would have written a book faster after Torch. A lot of Wild was written with my baby in a sling, and it was like running through thick sludge. But that’s okay. If my book came out last year or the year before compared to now, it wouldn’t really matter.

Life happens as it needs to, and I have no regrets. I really wanted to publish a novel in my twenties, but that’s a dream. It happens for some people. I’m grateful it didn’t happen for me; it would have been a lesser work because I was a lesser writer. Writing is not something to rush.

You’re 43 now. If you could go back to your 33-year-old self and your 23-year-old self, what advice would you give them?

The arrogance of youth propels many writers. Even though there was a part of me that was full of self-loathing and doubt and fear and anxiety, there was also a grandiose part that said, “You will be the one who writes The Great American Novel by 27, and everyone will think it’s great!” I think I would go back in time and give myself a message about patience, humility, and the importance of listening—not just in a literal way but a grand scope way, to understand that all those days of sleeping with the cooks and shopping for thrift store dresses, all the things one has to do to live a life and grow up, those things will to contribute to that book. I would say, “It’s going to be okay. It’s also going to take some time. You have a lot to learn, and it’s okay that you don’t know it. You can’t force yourself and you can’t hurry into it.”

And I don’t read my reviews on Amazon or anything. That’s stepping-back and knowing oneself. I can do that at 43 in a way I couldn’t have before, because what’s about me is the writing, and what’s not about me is everything else that happens around the book. You have to have a buffer between you and those things, and at 23 and 33, I don’t remember there being a buffer.

There are always so many more opportunities to learn how not to take things personally.

Always! The writing is what’s important: do your best, speak your truth, and don’t get overly tied to it. George Saunders would always say to disregard the praise as much as you disregard the criticism. Don’t believe your own press; it will wreck you. That’s a difficult thing.

Even praise can wreck you if you’re not okay with it. If you write something that you hate and people say nice things about it, you’re like, “Don’t insult me!” [Laughs.] You need that separation.

Yeah. And when Torch came out, it was so terrifying, the reviews. I remember feeling really glad that I had two little babies at that time, because that was my life on the ground level: no matter what anyone said about my book, I had these two beautiful children who would smile at me.

It’s funny, though: the very first time my son said “Mommy” was when People magazine reviewed Torch, and it was sitting on our coffee table. He was doing his baby thing, and it opened to a picture of me and he said, “Ma-ma! Ma-ma!” I laughed so hard.

And now you’re in Vogue.

Have you seen the photo in Vogue? They came to Portland and dressed me and made me look all pretty and took pictures of me, and I’m sure there are some lovely pictures somewhere, but they Photoshopped the shit out of me. I guess I didn’t fit their standard of appearance. The one saving grace is that I asked my kids, “Who is this?” and they recognized me. I was so glad.

I saw that Jezebel had a piece about the Photoshopping. But the essay is wonderful, and that’s what matters.

The book is better. They take all these pieces from the book and pile them together; it’s a bit painful. But I’m seriously grateful to Vogue. As my husband said, they made me look like an anorexic Fox News broadcaster, but that’s okay.

What’s funny is that it’s contrary to everything I’ve written about being authentic. They Photoshopped the wrong person. I feel that they missed an opportunity to have a real woman. I wasn’t in there to be a fashion model; I was in there because I wrote something that they wanted to publish. I did wonder when Vogue took the first serial and said they were going to do a photo shoot. I wondered if they had found images of me to make sure that I was passable raw material for their Photoshopping. I have a friend who’s obese—would they not take her piece?

I don’t know. Some women’s magazines want to see pictures of people before they’ll agree to bring a pitch to their meeting.

That’s so sad. We all grew up steeped in that crap, and I keep thinking maybe the next generation will be better—but it’s only gotten worse. I had tons of pressure to be pretty, and I think your generation had even more. There are more parts of the body, now. When I was growing up, you would never know anyone who’d had plastic surgery. It was what movie stars did. Now two of my best friends had boob jobs last year. I don’t say that judgmentally; it’s just that it’s come to us in a way that it didn’t before. It becomes the standard and the norm.

It’s like the whole pubic hair thing, too. I mean, it used to be when I was growing up that you just had your thing. In the Days of Yore.

Ah, bush in the Days of Yore.

Yes. This is the main thing that I want in this interview, is to say that in the Days of Yore, girls, there was bush, and it was fun.

…Who knew we would land here, in this conversation?

[Laughs.] We started out talking about inventions—

We’ve gone from my brilliant smoking hat to my really dense bush. [Laughs.]

It has been a wide-ranging conversation.

The Wild bush. [Laughs.] What else is there? Anything else you guys would like to know about me gynecologically, or—?

Actually, it’s a bit of a non sequitur, but I wanted to ask you about handling rejection. Did you ever get rejected—

Never. I have never been rejected. [Laughs.] No, I’m teasing. Jesus!

Even within the experience of acceptance, there’s rejection. With my editor for Wild, there’s been, “This scene is not working, Cheryl,” or “You come off like a braggart and an asshole in this scene.” Well, she didn’t say it that crassly. You have to take that criticism and lick your wounds and keep going. You learn to accept it. So yeah, I was rejected a lot, and still am and will be. I’m sure there’s a lot of rejection still awaiting me.

You’ve said that writing fearlessly is writing in the presence of fear. But what do you do with the fear while you’re trying to work in its presence?

When I feel afraid, that’s an indication that I’ve tapped into something worth writing about. Whenever my writing has made me cry or ask, “Can I really say that?” that has always been the material that readers respond to most passionately. You can recognize when a writer has told you something true—and I don’t mean true in a literal, nonfiction way. Look at Mary Gaitskill’s fiction. You feel that human character on the page because Mary has crafted and revealed that spirit in a way that most of us don’t dare to on a regular basis. To do that, you welcome fear into the room. You welcome sorrow into the room. You go deep into those places.

That’s one of the interesting things about the Sugar column. A lot of the letters are people writing to me about the thing they’re ashamed of or fear. That’s so compelling to readers. I understand that people get something out of what I write, but if I decided to publish a hundred letters and not answer any of them, a hundred weeks in a row, everyone would still want to read the letter. To see: what is this person saying about their life, and where do I sit in relation to that? Am I judgmental of it? Do I identify with it? Do I think it’s creepy or funny or insufferable? We all have an opinion on that letter when we read it.

It must have been odd for some people in your life to find out that you had this alter ego as Sugar.

It’s like that with any writer, though. That’s what’s disturbing about, say, your parent reading your book. You show them a different side of yourself. They have judgments of you that they don’t want you to exceed too much; they want you to be that person who doesn’t have striped hair, or who graduated from college on time. When they see you in a new light, they don’t always like it. Your book shows them your inner self, your spirit, the nasty thoughts in your head, whatever is in there. It’s scary for them, but it can also be wonderfully bonding. Have you ever read a professor’s book and felt closer to them? You feel that you know them in a new way. Or maybe someone is really introverted, and you read their book and they have all of this life inside of them, they’re outlandish, and you’re like, “Wow! That’s you on the inside!”

Have people who’ve read your work told you that you’re different in person than they expected you to be?

Not with Sugar. But you know how I said that the essay “The Love of My Life” is taught a lot? Sometimes if I go into a college classroom, especially undergraduate, students have expectations based on reading that essay. I went to speak at a class at American University in D.C. one time. The professor, Richard McCann, stepped out into the hall before inviting me in. He had this worried look. I said, “Do they all think I’m a slut?” He said, “Yeah.” [Laughs.] So then I go into the room and I can tell they’re all surprised. I was on tour for Torch, I was plump from having kids, and I just looked like a mom. They expected me to come swooping in wearing a black cape and smoking a cigarette.

I know it’s a sad essay about hard things, but I’m actually a pretty happy person. Even if you met me when I was 22 or 23, you would have experienced me as a fun, cheerful person. It’s not that I’ve misrepresented myself on the page; it’s just that the page is the internal struggle.

It was probably a good experience for those students to have those judgments and then meet you and see, oh, she’s just like us. We were judging this person based on something we’ve read, which is only—

Ten pages of text. Yeah. And we all do it. The same way we think that 50-year-old women don’t have sex, and then you hit fifty and you’re like, “Wait a minute! I’m still me, having sex.” Or I remember going to a bar once and seeing my English teacher drinking a martini. I was like, “She drinks?” Which is absurd. Of course she drinks. We put teachers up in this different place. We do that with writers, too. I think we can’t help that we do it, but it’s important to remember.

A lot of people say to Sugar, “I just want you to be my best friend.” But I don’t just sit around and spout Sugar columns to you as your friend. I’m a person who is annoying and all these other things, like every person. I’m not just the great Sugar Mama all of the time. Only this little part of the time. It’s different being my friend than reading my column.

Interview by H. Henderson and Kassi Underwood.

Photo by Joni Kabana.

He is an expert storyteller, a highly regarded teacher and speaker, and one of the most thoughtful people you could hope to have a conversation with on a winter afternoon. The Days of Yore met with Baxter in a coffeehouse in Minneapolis’s warehouse district, across the river a ways from where he teaches creative writing at the University of Minnesota. We sat near a window, through which Baxter occasionally inspected the street as he paused to reflect on a question or comment on a passing car.

Let’s start off with failure. Specifically, early failures and what comes out of them. You’ve said that in your twenties and early thirties, you completed three novels before ever publishing one.

Three or four, depending on what you count. One of them I revised so much, it really qualifies as a different book, but it still didn’t sell. My first book wasn’t accepted until I was thirty-seven years old.

Those early books didn’t sell as novels, but you later salvaged parts of them in stories?

I did. But that’s the second act, the part I didn’t know was coming.

What did you learn to do in that first act of attempts that put you in motion toward such a lovely and successful second act?

One of the things I did was stop writing novels, because each novel was taking a year or two out of my life. I discovered that if you make a big mistake writing a novel, chances are you’re going to go weeks or months or maybe even finish the novel without realizing the mistake that you’ve made. If you make a mistake writing a story, you’re not going to lose a year of your life and you may well be able to figure out what the mistake is right away.

I had to teach myself a lot of this because I hadn’t been in a creative writing program. What I had been in was a Ph.D. program, and that’s very different. There’s another part to your question, though, and that is: What keeps you going when everybody tells you that they hate your work?

Right. So what did keep you going, when even people who were supposed to be aligned with you—like your first agent—told you they hated your work? Was there a point when you thought you might stop writing?

Sure. I was a teacher, and I thought I could go on teaching. I was writing criticism, and I thought I could go on doing that, even though in those days, I didn’t much enjoy it. I do enjoy it now, but I didn’t then. But I had this kind of irrational conviction that I was—that I could be, wanted to be—a fiction writer. I couldn’t think of anything else that I wanted to do more than that. And I thought I could actually be good at it. Or that I was good at it. I didn’t believe it when people told me the stuff was no good. My second novel, even my wife didn’t finish it.

Didn’t finish it? Ouch.

So you have to be a little crazy. I used to tell my graduate students that you have to cultivate a certain kind of “fuck you” attitude. “You don’t like it? Fuck you. This is what I do.” Sooner or later, if nobody ever likes it, you don’t continue. There’s a point where depression and despair will become stronger than you are. I was getting pretty close to that point. But then I wrote a story that channeled a lot of these feelings. It was called “Harmony of the World”, and that story had a bit of a life. I thought, “Well, maybe I should be writing stories,” so that’s what I did. But I was really burned, and it was hard to go back to writing novels. To me, it feels like a cursed genre.

In your story “Poor Devil”, which came out in 2005, the narrator receives these hateful postcards from a stranger, telling him that his work and life are a disaster and that he should be remorseful. In your essay “Full of It,” in the anthology Letters to a Fiction Writer, you mention that there had been a real-life postcard writer who sent you similar anonymous messages earlier in your career. Had you somehow steeled yourself against that kind of irrational anonymous criticism, and how?

That guy. There were only one or two postcards. This was when I was working in Detroit, and Detroit has a lot of crazy people in it, and he was one of them, the postcard writer, Karl Wenclas. But the real topic of your question is: What do you do when the world seems against you?

You have to get out of your head the angry, hostile people in the world, and you have to try to imagine somebody who’s actually going to like what you write. That’s what I started to do. Who might like this? What would a sympathetic audience member look like? I tried to picture that person. I’d sit down at the typewriter—I really was working at a typewriter in those days—and I would try to hold in my head somebody who was reading it and who was interested in what I was writing.

What sort of creative community did you have around you at that time?

I didn’t have one.

Not at all?

Not much. When I was working in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, I had a friend in Michigan named Janet Kauffman, and she lived on a farm in Jackson and was teaching at a community college. Her stories were appearing in The New Yorker, and Gordon Lish was her editor at Knopf. She writes very differently than I do, but we were showing each other our work. I can’t remember showing it to many other people. After my first book, Harmony of the World, appeared, I finally had an agent. But that was 1984, two or three years after my first story came out. So the answer to your question about community is, more or less, that I didn’t have one.

How did you get an agent?

It was through Janet. Janet and Jim Shepard, whom I also knew because he had spent a year in Ann Arbor, Michigan, though I think we only met once or twice when he was there. But my agent and Janet’s agent was the same person. She and Jim recommended me to her.

A minute ago, you said that you learned earlier in your career that you could figure out your mistakes more quickly in a story than a novel. How do you know when you’ve made a mistake in your writing? Can you share a wrong turn that you made in one of your stories or novels, and the way that you corrected course?

Of course, you don’t always know when you’ve made a mistake. That’s why it takes so long to discover it. I wrote a chapter for the Feast of Love that I dropped because the tone was all wrong; it was too somber, too early in the book. The tone is often the hardest feature of a piece of writing to modulate properly.

In your family, what did people do for work?

On my father’s side, my great-grandfather emigrated from Wales to Wisconsin and was a farmer, and my grandfather grew up on the farm and went to Ripon College and Williams College and then worked in insurance. That’s what my father did, too. My mother’s family were mostly farmers and lawyers.

Did your mother work?

Not much. When she got out of college, she worked as a librarian on a trans-Atlantic ocean liner.

A librarian on a trans-Atlantic ocean liner! Fantastic. I didn’t know that was a job.

Yeah, all those ocean liners had little libraries. People would come in, seasick, and she would give them a book. And she worked in commercials and continuity down at WCCO Radio for a while. But all the time I was growing up, she never did a lick of work except for, you know, the real work of raising us.

Were your parents supportive of your being a writer?

They weren’t hostile to the idea of my writing. I published these little poetry books in the ‘70s, and they were okay with that. My mother did worry that I was going to rent an upstairs garret and sit up there and write and eat cottage cheese and ketchup. She worried about that terribly and was amazed when I was actually hired somewhere. But if you’re talking about encouragement from family members, absolutely not. My sister-in-law said, “Why do you write about these terrible people with pathetic little lives?”

What about your siblings?

I have a brother. I had another brother who passed away. That brother, Tom, was supportive, but then he would say things like, “Why don’t you ever write a book that people actually want to read?” [Laughs.]

[Laughs.] Did you say, “Good idea, I’m trying to”?

[Laughs.] Yeah, “I would like to.” No, he always thought I should write bestsellers. I don’t feel sorry for myself or feel as if I was unlucky. This is just the way it played out.

You mentioned that your mother worried that you would eat cottage cheese and ketchup. What did you subsist on early in your career? How did you pay the bills?

I was teaching at Wayne State in Detroit. I was an assistant professor there. So we were broke much of the time. My wife’s parents and my parents would help with the mortgage and the taxes. We got by. It was okay.

Did you have housing provided by the university, or what sorts of places were you living in?

Wayne State didn’t have anything like that. I had a rental in Ann Arbor when I met my wife, and later we got a mortgage to buy a house. I think we borrowed some money from my stepfather, or he may have given us a gift to help us buy a house, just a little place. Basically, we supported ourselves with my teaching and, in those days, my wife was working in a psychiatric hospital.

It shouldn’t matter to a writer what it is that you do to earn money, to feed yourself. I mean, somebody who works in a coffeehouse is probably better when she gets off work than someone who works as an editor or an assistant to an editor. Because in those jobs, during the day you’ve been reading other people’s work, and often you come home and you have to still go on reading other people’s work. It gets to be 5 or 6 p.m. and you have a good case of word-nausea. All of the energy you would have for your own work is gone. I don’t recommend that people get jobs in publishing houses. I think that’s a terrible thing for a writer to do.

How does teaching writing differ from that?

It doesn’t differ that much.

You work with grad students now, but early in your career, you taught for one year at public school—

I taught fourth grade.

How did that come about?

The government wanted me in Vietnam, and I thought it was a terrible war. I thought it was unjust, imperialistic madness. In those days, if you were willing to teach public school in a state with a teacher shortage, you would get what was called an occupational deferment. That’s what I got. My classmate, or almost classmate, Tim O’Brien—we both went to Macalester at the same time—he went off to Vietnam. And look what happened.

But that’s why I taught elementary school. And I was living in the middle of nowhere; the school was in rural Michigan. It ended up being a great gift. The story “Gryphon” wouldn’t exist if I hadn’t done that. The Saul and Patsy book wouldn’t exist if I hadn’t done that. Life happens to you, and you store up these things. It becomes part of what you write about.

In the essay “Full of It,” you wrote about characters becoming internalized and then pushing out of you through sort of an extrusion process. Was that something that occurred early on for you? How did it begin to happen?

I don’t think so. I remember as a young writer, writing those first bad novels and first stories, being very excited by the idea of a story or the idea of a character. I would think, “I want to write a story about this sort of person,” but in those days I don’t think I had internalized characters. I just loved spinning out stories.

This particular process really didn’t begin to come home to me until I wrote The Feast of Love, which has a lot of first-person narrators. What I discovered about all those first-person narrators was that if I was going to make them sound different from one another, they had to be here. [Points to himself.] They had to be inside, and I had to squeeze them out the way you squeeze toothpaste out of the tube. I would think, “We have to get back to Chloe,” or “We have to get back to Bradley, or to Harry Ginsberg,” and I would just sit there until I heard that voice. Then I would start.

Did you write the chapters of The Feast of Love in the order they appear?

Mmm-hmm. Yes. I had no idea what was going to happen. I didn’t know that Oscar was going to die until Chloe put her head down on his chest and heard his heart. I was in terrible trouble with the plot, because it was just a collection of episodes. When I realized that Oscar was going to die, I was very happy, because it meant I would have a through-line, that all of these people were going to have to cluster around Chloe to start looking after her.

I talk to my students a lot about writing stories in which time is going to run out. If your characters have all the time in the world to do what they need to do, it reduces the urgency in the narrative. But if there’s a clock ticking and they have to do something by a certain time, it produces a sense of urgency. Hamlet and Macbeth and King Lear all begin with a request moment. Somebody says to somebody else, “There’s something I want you to do—” and often that comes with a deadline: “—And I want you to do it by tomorrow.”

Speaking loosely of time, how did you—and how do you—manage to find time and solitude to write?

Often when you’re in your twenties and thirties, maybe even your early forties, you have enough energy for that. You make time. You get up earlier, you stay up later. You just do it. It’s when you get into your forties that you have to start being careful about not agreeing to do too many other things, because you’re not going to have that kind of energy. You have to stop being agreeable.

It’s not a bad idea to learn to be disagreeable in your twenties and thirties, so that you get used to the idea that some people are not going to think that you’re nice. When somebody asks you to do something, you say, “No, I can’t do it.” “Why can’t you do it?” “I’m writing.” “Well,” they’ll say, “That’s not very nice.” And you just have to say, “Too bad. I’m sorry. That’s what I do.”

Have there been periods when you couldn’t write at all, either because of circumstance or because you felt blocked?

Sure. Oh yeah. You go through dry periods, and you think either it’s your fault or it’s the fault of the life you’re living. You also think, “I need to go out in the world and see more than I have. I need to have more to write about than I’ve got.” And any one of those things may be true. I think, though, that sometimes those feelings can arise simply because there’s a voice in your head that says, “You can’t do it.” It’s a very punishing voice.

The internalized postcard-writer voice?

The internalized bad parent. The internalized authority figure. The internalized superego. Call it anything you want to. It’s constantly saying to you, “Who do you think you are? Where do you get this idea that you’re a real writer?” You have to fight that. It takes so much energy to fight it. It’s an ongoing battle.

That’s when you bring out the fuck-you battle hymn that you’ve hopefully written for yourself?

Exactly. Or you try to imagine a better audience, as I did, or you think, “This isn’t about me; this is about the story I’m telling. This is not an ego battle. This is my effort to tell the story of these characters at this point in cultural history.” And also, yeah, fuck you. I’ve always been prone to those voices, and most of the writers I know suffer from them. People with many published books worry, “Is my work any good?” or, “I’m not famous enough,” or, “I haven’t gotten enough reviews.” It never goes away.

And what happens when you do begin to publish widely and get reviews and win awards? You’ve won a number of significant awards, some of them in fairly rapid succession. Does that both stoke the arrogance and amp up the insecurity? Like, “Oh God, now I have to keep this up?”

You’ve answered the question. You have to remember, also, that American culture is very competitive and fashion-conscious. It’s not much interested in what happened a few years ago; it’s interested in what’s happening now. People are thrown on the heap all the time, so you have to cultivate an inner security, to say, “This is what I do.” Somebody is always going to do better than you’re doing. But why should that matter?

If you’re living in someplace like New York, it’s wonderful because there are a lot of writers around, but it can also be hard because everybody is so conscious of who’s doing well and who’s not and where everybody is on the food chain. You have to learn not to pay attention to that.

You’ve lived in the Midwest pretty much your entire life. How has that affected your sensibility and your practice as a writer? Did you think of going elsewhere?

Oh, sure. I thought of moving to the coasts, to New York or San Francisco. But this life suits me. The pace is a little slower, a little quieter. It’s not a big project just to get your clothes to the laundry. And it’s easy enough to get to New York if there’s a show you want to see at the Museum of Modern Art or whatever. I write reviews for The New York Review of Books. I get to the city.

For somebody like me, it’s better to be away from New York, but I think it’s often good for people in their twenties, thirties, and early forties to be there. Most of my graduate students go to Chicago or New York after they leave the program here, and when they start to have families or partners, the hard decisions begin about whether they’re going to stay.

What is the hardest decision you’ve had to make as a writer?

That’s a good question. [A pause.] I think I’ve simply had to decide whether I would write about the things that I cared about, or the things that I thought other people cared about. In a sense, it’s a decision about what kind of materials you’re going to stick to, or whether—in a small or big way—you’re going to try to sell out and try to write something that’s going to get a big audience. A lot of my friends have written thrillers in an effort to get a bigger audience. Some of my students have published books of stories or novels and haven’t been happy about the way they’ve sold, and they’ve gone to work in the television industry.

There may be other decisions that have been tougher. To some degree, I’ve also had to decide whether I should keep writing when I didn’t have any particularly good ideas. There are some writers who say, “You’ve got to sit down at the desk every day and put in two or three hours. You’re a writer; you should write.” Dick Bausch says this. I don’t do that.

When do you write?

When I have an idea, or a set of situations or characters that I care about and want to write about. When I’m feeling jazzed up. It used to feel as if I had this kind of burning that I had to get out.

And now it feels different?

You get older. It doesn’t burn so much. There’s a story of mine called “The Cures for Love” that I thought about for a long time. Ovid, the classical poet, wrote a book, The Cures for Love, saying, “You’ve had a bad love relationship? Well, here’s the cure for it.” I thought, “How do I use that in a story? How do you cure yourself of a relationship, and how can you turn that into a story?” I carried it around for a while, and finally when I was ready, I wrote it.

What do people not ask you that you feel they ought to?

As a writer, if you go into an undergraduate class or even a high school class, kids will ask, “Why do you write?” It seems puzzling to them, as if you had been given an assignment. Whenever they ask that, I say, “It just seems perfectly natural to me. It always has.” As an activity, it seems like something I’m suited for, the way it seems natural to a musician to play the piano. Nobody has ever said, “Does it seem natural to you to write?” because, I think, for most people it doesn’t.

We’re in a culture where a lot of people don’t even like to read, so it seems even weirder to them that somebody would not only want to write, but feel comfortable doing it. But that’s the other thing that sustains you in your twenties and thirties, that feeling of, “This is something I can do, something I’m really good at.” Even if a publisher doesn’t buy it or you don’t land an agent right away, you still think, “Well, I think I’m good at this.”

We started out talking about early failures and what came out of them. I want to end by asking about your first successes. How did they affect you?

They made me happy.

[Laughs.] Okay! Well, then we’re done here!

[Laughs.] They made me happy! Somebody gave me awards, somebody liked my work, great! You go on for a few days, maybe a week or two, and you think, “Somebody liked what I did!”

It’s almost better to get letters. Somebody writes to you and says, “I read something of yours and I really liked it.” That counts for a lot, that somebody would take the trouble of reading something and write to you about it. I just got an email today from a musician and writer named Richard Hell.

You’re kidding.

No, I’m not kidding. You know this guy?

Well, not personally. But yeah.

I did a review on Don DeLillo, which The New York Review of Books published. It took me forever to write, but I’ve gotten a lot of nice feedback from it. This morning there was an email from Richard Hell, who said that the review reduced him to tears. And he said that he had published a couple of novels, but he didn’t mention his—

His punk rock stardom?

[Laughs.] His punk rock stardom. But I wrote back and said, “Well, of course I know who you are!” And then I wrote about some of the things that he had written to me about in the review. It’s nice when people do that.

I have a friend who is such an admirer of your books that—and you have to trust me that this is a compliment—she named her dog Baxter.

Well, don’t tell her this, but that’s not the first time that’s happened. There’s at least one other Baxter dog that I know.

It’s an odd accolade.

It’s all very nice, but it’s better for you as a writer if you can let things kind of flow through you. Don’t be overpowered by worries, and don’t get blocked by your ego.

Interview by H. Henderson

Photo by Keri Pickett