Interviews

“Now we’re both feeling shame, and I’ve panicked and stolen a Faulkner word. Maybe this is how poetry happens.”

“By pushing sentences, words, ideas, images, around on a page…we are trying to cut through the chatter, to recognize what is true.”

“We all want to write the perfect novel. And then our own imperfect, messy, inadequate selves get in the way.”

“Throughout the book there is a current of humor, of the bizarre, perhaps even the magical.”

“Keep your butt in the chair. I’ve received plenty of advice over the years, but I think this has been the most helpful. And stay away from adjectives.”

“I like going to a show where everyone is into the music…Everyone’s on the same page for whatever, how long, twenty minutes. That feeling’s pretty cool.”

“I always start with the notion that I am going to write a short story. I don’t mind writing a novel, but I never set out to write one.”

“Having two parents who don’t love each other is like having your blood and your skin not get along.”

“Literature took me…to places where people overcome their limitations, and to places where they don’t. The latter may be the most important way literature engages us, reminding us of our common humanity.”

Historian and publisher of the renascent Baffler magazine, John H. Summers has not exactly taken a direct route to heading a publication whose significance he compares to Dwight Macdonald’s mid-century journal, Politics.

“Certain books tell us that we are not alone. And that can be life-saving.”

“Writing, for me, is the daily practice of empathy. Reading should be a practice of empathizing too. Each time we step into another person’s world view, we broaden who we are as people.”

“I made the 4 Loko 2 Kayla CD-R as sort of a tour supplement to the Milo tape and put it on the internet for free. I think that was the best thing I could have done.”