Jasmin Iolani Hakes is the guest. Her debut novel, Hula, is out now from HarperVia.

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts! 

From the episode:

Brad Listi: There’s a ceremonial aspect to hula. And also it’s obviously movement, it’s dance. It’s also narrative. This is a storytelling medium. This is a way for Hawaiians to pass down stories about who they are and what they believe, and stories about Hawaiian cosmology. Right?

Jasmin Iolani Hakes: I mean, think about Greeks and Romans. It was epic poetry. That’s how you captured history. That’s before we could write these things down—that’s how they lived, was you tell the story. And so, these stories and these hulas, that’s why they talk about gods and goddesses and myths and legends, but they also talk about volcanic events and the mist and how that came to be, and why this ocean does this, and what these fish do. It’s knowledge.

Brad Listi: I found it poignant to be reading a novel about a culture that’s kind of fighting to survive, and to be reminded of the critical importance of narrative and storytelling to the survival of any group of people or culture. If you can’t tell these stories, if nobody knows these stories, and if nobody knows this language…

Jasmin Iolani Hakes: I grew up in such an interesting time, the 80s and 90s. I had one cousin—when I say cousin, friend-cousin, it’s all the families that are intermeshed—there was only one that when he had to call home to his mom, he would speak ʻŌlelo; he would speak Hawaiian. And everybody would hush to just listen to him because no one spoke Hawaiian, not fluently. You had pidgin, which is I guess my first language.

Brad Listi: And what do you mean by pidgin?

Jasmin Iolani Hakes: It’s kind of the linguistic mixed plate. It’s the Portuguese and the Filipino and the Japanese and the Chinese and all of these. It’s a Creole, it’s a dialect. And every island has a slightly nuanced difference. So if you’re a local, you can kind of tell, that guy’s from Maui, that guy is from Honolulu. They’re nuanced. But it very much is its own language. It has its own inflections and meanings. And so it was interesting to write it in pidgin, and I did that very deliberately.

Pidgin was something that you were very shamed if you spoke it to a certain extent. There’s still a lot of discrimination. You’re assumed to be illiterate or not educated. Unrefined. My mom was very shamed. Generations before her were very shamed for not speaking English-English. And so my mom was very strict about no pidgin in the house. It was a constant battle. Because she felt like it was going to be a handicap, a disadvantage.

There has been a renaissance that I’ve tried to highlight the coming of and the evolution of in Hula. But going back to being ʻŌlelo, that all started in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. That cultural revolution and renaissance was very much tied to the language itself, because you had to have a group of people come together and say, We’re going to create a curriculum on paper. It can’t just be passed down through songs and hulas. We’re going to create a curriculum on paper that actually teaches our youth the language.

And Hilo was one of the first places that had a charter school that was only taught in Hawaiian, only ʻŌlelo. It was a revolutionary thing because you had this very static language that had been kept alive only underground, so to speak, and so it had to be artificially fast forwarded, because there were no words for car and computer and internet and things like that. I can’t imagine the undertaking.

It was just kind of happening in my backyard, and now when I fly back, like a trip or two ago, there were two airline stewards and they were speaking to each other very casually in ʻŌlelo. It’s amazing to me how quick—just a couple of generations. Now all of my nieces and nephews are so far ahead of anything that me or my cousins or my generation had access to or an awareness. Because from language, now it’s cultural ways, and now part of their curriculum is being outside and being a part of Hawai’i, not just as a homogenous people, but as almost subjects of the kingdom. Multiple ethnicities coming together to perpetuate the ways of this kingdom, or these people, or this land.

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Jasmin Iolani Hakes was born and raised in Hilo, Hawai’i. Her essays have appeared in the Los Angeles Times and the Sacramento Bee. She is the recipient of the Best Fiction award from the Southern California Writers Conference, a Squaw Valley LoJo Foundation Scholarship, a Writing by Writers Emerging Voices fellowship, and a Hedgebrook residency. Dance has always been central to Jasmin’s life and creativity. She took her first hula class when she was four years old and danced for the esteemed Halau o Kekuhi and the Tahitian troupe Hei Tiare. She worked throughout college as a professional luau dancer. She lives in California.

Jim Ruland is the guest. His novel Make It Stop is out now from Rare Bird Books.

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts! 

From the episode:

Brad Listi: What about sobriety as it relates to creativity? I’m always interested in this when I speak with writers who have gone through a recovery process. We both know that this profession has a lot of strong ties to substance abuse. Some of it gets glorified. You talk about Kerouac or you talk about Hemingway. I think men in particular. There’s like a masculine, kind of macho thing that happened in the 20th century in particular, where I think it can become a problem when you internalize that. You almost feel like you have to be a boozer in order to be a writer, at least in an earlier stage of life.

I’m just curious to know about having the aspiration to write; as you said, filling your head with toxic ideas in your twenties, probably filling your head with other toxic things; and then getting to a place where you ultimately put all that stuff down. Maybe a good place to start is when did you get sober? And then if you could just talk a little bit about how it not only impacted your life, but how it in particular impacted your creative life.

Jim Ruland: Sure. I love this question. I got sober in 2009, so I think I just celebrated 14 years in February. You know, the benefits were right away. I was mainly an alcoholic, along with other things that would kind of help that going. But when I got sober, I was newly married, a fairly new parent, I had a job.

And I lost a close friend to addiction—I believe we talked about this actually the last time I was on—and that was a wakeup call. And so I was kind of a high bottom, because I didn’t lose all the things that it usually takes to kind of snap people out of their disease. But some very close to me lost everything, and thankfully that was enough.

The benefits to my creative life were immense because, one, it freed me from just all these lies that I was dragging around, trying to project this image of myself as a sane and sober person when I was just off the rails and riddled with secrets and drinking every chance that I got. And of course, people close to me knew that, but I had to lie and pretend like none of it was happening. And just to be relieved, put all that aside, was an immense relief. And now I just tell myself all the time, I got no shame about the things I used to do, and it feels great.

But one of the best things is that I learned early on that for me, and for many alcoholics, is that resentment is a one-way ticket to a relapse. That’s kind of what they teach you in the rooms, is that you’ve got to live a resentment-free life. You got to have gratitude for where you are. I never realized how much resentment is tied in with the arts.

Whether you’re a musician or a visual artist or a writer, there’s all this resentment about things that aren’t happening in your career, things that you’re not getting, awards, other people’s success. There’s a lot of resentment about all of those things. I wasn’t even really aware of what’s happening, and then once I just kind of cleared the decks of that resentment, I was able to just really be a happier person, but happy for all the success that other people are enjoying, and that I wasn’t turned inside out by these things.

And I wasn’t quite there yet because I didn’t have much of a career before I got sober, but I could see myself turning into this bitter older person who is just riddled with resentment about all the things that should have happened. That was who I was going to be. That was absolutely the course that I was on. And now it’s pretty great where I can just be concerned with my own work and not worry about outcomes, not worry about anything that happens. And when those great things happen to other people that I know or we’re in the same circle, I can be genuinely happy for those people.

*

Jim Ruland is the co-author of Do What You Want with Bad Religion, and My Damage with Keith Morris, the founding vocalist of Black Flag, Circle Jerks, and OFF! Ruland has been writing for punk zines such as Flipside and Razorcake for more than 25 years and his work has received awards from Reader’s Digest and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Bea Setton is the guest. Her debut novel, Berlin, is out now from Penguin Books.

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts! 

From the episode:

Brad Listi: To go back to this recurring phrase of how sharply observed this book is, you wrote a piece, I believe for Shondaland, where you broke down your method, which I don’t see very often. I wish I saw it more from writers. It would make for interesting conversation. But you talk about a kind of step by step process. And obviously this isn’t the entire thing, but it is something very related to how sharply observed this book is.

Another thing I kept saying to myself is like, Wow, Bea can write about anything and make it interesting. It doesn’t even have to be something super kinetic or sensational for me to be leaning in. She could be talking about the kitchen or what somebody’s having for breakfast. You’re very good at observing and finding new meanings in things that might not be immediately evident.

And then I read this piece in Shondaland where you’re breaking it down. And it makes it all kind of click into focus how you did it. For the benefit of listeners, let’s just go through this real quick. The first thing you advise people to do, if they wanted to follow your method, is you say, “Look at the thing you’re trying to describe. Really look.” So this isn’t a superficial looking. This is a deep looking.

Bea Setton: Yeah, really look at what’s in front of you. That’s seems straightforward, but it’s hard because we’re all so distracted. It takes a kind of discipline.

Brad Listi: And that’s also tied to what you were saying earlier about your philosophy training, where you spend five pages breaking down something that the ordinary person would spend five seconds breaking down. You have to kind of force yourself to keep sitting there and to keep looking and to keep thinking about it.

Bea Setton: Yeah. And stay with it. Be patient.

Brad Listi: So, number two, “Let your mind make all kinds of associations.”

Bea Setton: Yeah. The best descriptions for things are often things that are not directly related to the thing in front of you, and they kind of convey them better. One thing that I often think about is the idea of a moon—which is the example I gave in the essay—is like a knuckle. It’s not something we might ordinarily think, but for me it really works in terms of how white the moon can look, and it can look like the knuckle of a gripped hand. That’s not an ordinary association.

And so it’s that kind of thing where you really liberate your thoughts to make all kinds of associations that are not in the realm of the moon. Because we all know certain things that are associated with the moon. It’s always seen as something feminine, something beautiful, and those qualities might work, but I think it’s really disassociating from the common phrases around the thing you’re trying to describe to really see it afresh.

Brad Listi: Got it. And then the third thing is, you say simultaneously, try to think about the atmosphere you’re working to create. So if you’re looking at a thing, and you’re really looking at it, and you are making all kinds of associations, it’s not enough to just make all these associations and pick one. You’re saying that you have to also consider context, like what is the story you’re telling? What is the setting of the story? What is the atmosphere and the mood and the tone of the thing that you’re trying to create? And then how might you land on an association that best fits into that tapestry?

Bea Setton: Right. Let’s say you have a window, and you can see the darkness outside. You could see it as like—this is not good—but it could be a gasping darkness, or expelling something. Or you could see the window as giving shape to the darkness. And those two things both kind of work, but they’re very different in terms of that the first one is quite scary and the second one you’re implying something more cozy and familiar.

So obviously having the free associations is great, but then you have to be aware of the effects that you’re going to have. It can be super jarring if you read quite like a gothic description of a sunset, if it’s described as bloody in a super romantic context. That might work, but it doesn’t make sense here. And so also being attuned to the atmosphere that you’re trying to create. I think a lot of people do this naturally.

Brad Listi: The fourth thing is you say, “Write metaphorically and send it to your friends.” What do you mean by write metaphorically?

Bea Setton: I think that is the short and condensed version of saying, write the metaphor. I think people know what metaphoric writing means. It’s like stuff in poetry and stuff that there’s usually too much of in a lot of text. I have like four metaphors a page sometimes, and I’m like, This is too much. That’s what I mean by write metaphorically—don’t hesitate to over-embroider the language, especially at the beginning, and to use many, many adjectives, especially in that first part. And then you can pare it down.

The way I often think about it with metaphors or descriptions is like, you know when you’re trying to hang up a picture on a wall, and you have a hammer and a nail, and you’re looking for where you can put the hammer in, you have to go all over the wall in order to get to the hollow point. And so in terms of words, I say the same thing. Throw loads of words at the wall and one of them will hang correct. That’s what I meant in terms of metaphors.

Brad Listi: And this idea of sharing with friends—I just talked with Samantha Irby on this show not too long ago, and I was getting into how she does it. She’s a very funny writer and writes these personal essays that are super candid, and she has this great conversational voice on the page, in a way that is not entirely dissimilar to Daphne, your heroine or your anti-heroine.

One of the things Samantha Irby said, which sort of squares with how you wrote your book, is that she keeps a friend in mind as she’s writing, and she writes it as if she were telling her good friend a story. And it has to meet that standard. Like if I were telling this story to my best friend—or in your case, a collection of best friends, you have a whole group that you’re sending this thing to.

That to me seems like a really practical, useful, intelligent way to hone your narrative capability. That is what we should be doing, right? You want to treat the ultimate reader of your book like a friend. You hope to connect somehow on that level. There’s an intimacy between writer and reader, especially when there’s a good connection, when the work is really speaking to the reader, and maybe in particular when it’s written in the first person, you really do feel like, Wow, this person’s just talking to me.

I think that’s something that maybe is easy to get away from, but it’s a useful kind of North Star. What if I were telling this to my best friend? How would I keep them entertained? What would I have to say to cause them to lean in as opposed to rolling their eyes or whatever your best friend would do if you were failing to meet the mark.

Bea Setton: Totally. I mean, I think especially when it comes to things like if you’re thinking of writing something metaphoric, it has to be comprehensible. And I’m like, if my friend cannot understand it in a text, then it’s too complex or it’s not right, and I need to change it. I have that standard with writing because for me the most important thing in my writing is that it be entertaining. I would like it also to be true in some way, but mainly I want it to give people pleasure, and I know how beleaguered people are in terms of things competing for their attention span.

And so for me, in terms of sharing it with my friends, who are not necessarily literary people who spend a lot of time reading, it’s like, do they get it immediately? If not, I haven’t been precise enough or I haven’t captured the essence in a way that’s universally relatable and I need to rework it. It’s also that standard of are they getting it straight away in a short amount of time? If not, I rework it.

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Bea Setton was born in Paris to Franco-British parents and has lived in the US, Colombia, Belgium, Germany, and the UK. Currently residing in London, Setton holds an MPhil in Philosophy and Theology from Cambridge University and gives her time mentoring for Black Girls Writers. Her critical and creative writing has started popping up in popular outlets such as The Irish Times and Female First.

In the latest “Craftwork” episode, Declan Meade talks with Brad about starting and editing a literary magazine. He is the founding editor and publisher of The Stinging Fly, one of the world’s premiere literary magazines, based in Dublin, Ireland. You may have read about Declan and The Stinging Fly in the New York Times back in April 2023, in a feature story by Max Ufberg.

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts! 

From the episode:

Brad Listi: What about for people listening who might want to submit, but also people who might have an interest in starting their own magazine? I’d be interested to hear you talk about the editorial process when somebody gets a yes, and what in general the editorial process entails at the Stinging Fly. I have to believe that it’s lovely to get a story where you feel like it’s almost all done. And usually I think when a writer is in command of the work, there usually isn’t a ton to do. But are there instances where the work is like 75 percent of the way there, and in the editorial process you get the rest of the way? What does it look like for somebody who gets a yes to work with you in an editorial capacity?

Declan Meade: I would say that in my experience, most of the work that we publish would probably be 80 to 90 percent there. I would say if it’s any less than that, like if it’s 60 to 70 percent there, I’d be saying to them, “I think you need to do another run of this yourself. Come back to us with it.” We could be very excited by work we read that is 60 to 70 percent there, but we would probably pass it back to the author to have another go. Or we’d have a conversation with them and see where they are in their thinking of the piece—if they have ideas about how they could develop this and that, if they might be a person who needs mentoring as well.

But then the 80 to 90 percent ready, that’s going to be less about the story needs something some major work done, we just need to do several rounds of line edits on this and then a copy of that to proof. It would be just suggestions that we’re making. I mean, that’s certainly how I operate. I hope at that stage you’d have a Google Doc or Word document that you are passing back and forth with comments on them and queries of the text. It can also help to show the writer the text and layers because their attitude might change once they see it as well. We do occasionally encounter a writer who says, I don’t want to be edited. It’s very few, but I’d say possibly one hand that I can count them all in 25 years.

There have been those writers where we’ve had to let the story go because we think they just don’t want to be edited. But for the most part, it’s a process where we are making suggestions and they come back to us with responses, and I feel like I have a very light editorial touch outside myself in terms of, you know, I don’t want to turn the piece into something that doesn’t sound like this writer has written it. I want, first of all, to tune in to what the writer is trying to do. And then I’m kind of suggesting points where I’ve been taken out of the story for whatever reason, and has the author considered this before this?

Sometimes it’s something they’re aware of, that they tried to fix themselves or maybe hope they might get away with or that they have tried to fix but they couldn’t figure it out. So then we can talk a bit about that, to try and come up with something. I love line edits myself. It really is, I think, about tuning into what the person is trying to do and of following the sentence and taking out any interference. So I still get to do that when we’re publishing books.

*

The Stinging Fly Magazine was founded in 1997 by Declan Meade and Aoife Kavanaugh. The first issue appeared in March 1998 and the magazine now publishes twice annually, working to give new and emerging writers an opportunity to be read, with a special emphasis on the short story form. Since its founding, The Stinging Fly has expanded its operations to include an independent press, writing courses, and an online platform. The magazine is celebrating 25 years of existence. Over the decades it has featured some of the best new writing from Ireland and around the world, offering readers an eclectic mix of fiction, nonfiction and poetry.

In the latest “Craftwork” episode, a deep-dive conversation about the horror genre with author and story expert John Truby. His latest book, The Anatomy of Genres: How Story Forms Explain the Way the World Works, is available from Picador.

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts! 

From the episode:

Brad Listi: What we’re touching on is something that you repeatedly say throughout this book and in this chapter in particular—that for horror stories to become transcendent, they tend to become internal and deeply human and very character concerned. It’s not just about the the horrible monster or the special effects or hitting those tropes. It’s when you create a real dimensional hero or heroine who’s dealing with real, relatable human challenges.

John Truby: Right. And this is the key to transcending, right there, is what you do with the main character. The first half of every chapter, I go through the 15 to 20 plot beats in sequence that you have to be able to hit in order to tell that story properly. The second half of each chapter, I go through the thematic elements. And what is theme? Theme is really how the main character goes through character change or fails to go through character change over the course of the story. In going through and being forced to go through these plot beats, what is the character change that they are pressured into making?

That’s why the key to transcending horror is don’t just have the character be a victim. The main character in horror is typically the lowest character you can have, which is a victim. You don’t want to do that. You want to give them some agency. This is a person who is dealing with severe mental problems. And then the question is, how do they handle it? Now, yes, it is negative. And this is one of the few forms where the character does not go through character change. Not that the writer forgot to do it. It’s a cautionary tale. They were unable to make that change.

But this is why stories like Get Out, one of the best, most transcendent horror stories in many years, was so great—because they gave the character some agency. It didn’t end in total defeat. And in horror, the typical ending isn’t just one defeat. It’s a second defeat that is an eternal recurrence. In other words, we know as the audience, this is going to happen forever. This is never going to get solved. The problem is, that’s a very depressing ending. That is a very depressing form in terms of what is the ability of a human being to get better and to grow in some way?

This is one reason why transcendent horror is either combined with myth, which is the religion story, or it is combined with science fiction, which then takes our attention from the individual in the story to human beings as an entire race of beings, and can we solve the problem of what it means to be human in time? It’s very challenging to transcend the horror form.

*

John Truby is the founder and director of Truby’s Writers Studio. Over the past 30 years, he has taught more than 50 thousand students worldwide, including novelists, screenwriters, and TV writers. Together, these writers have generated more than 15 billion dollars at the box office.  Truby has an ongoing program where he works with students who are actively creating shows, movies, and novel series. He regularly applies his genre techniques in story consulting work with major studios including Disney, Sony Pictures, Fox, HBO, the BBC, Canal Plus, Globo, and AMC. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Leslie, and their two cats, Tink and Peanut. For story software and courses, please visit Truby.com.

Ivy Pochoda is the guest. Her new novel, Sing Her Down, is out now from MCD Books.

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts! 

From the episode:

Brad Listi: As I was reading, another thing that was occurring to me is that I have not seen stories where women are perpetrators of violence very often. I was searching my brain. I couldn’t think of one.

Ivy Pochoda: Well, there are ones. You will see it in different aspects of crime fiction, like domestic violence and domestic drama and psychological thriller, where a woman’s had enough or has amnesia and killed a bunch of people that she doesn’t remember. Or you see it in Gillian Flynn’s books—and I really like Gillian Flynn—but it doesn’t feel real to me. Those don’t feel like good reasons to be violent. They feel like book reasons or sensational reasons.

I, too, hadn’t read a lot about violent women. But I realized when I had, their violence was always excused by some action perpetrated upon them by a man. So when we talk about violent women, we are very comfortable with their violence if it’s like Thelma and Louise, who have been wronged by their husbands; or Aileen Wuornos—who’s not a fictional character, who’s a real person—who is a prostitute, who was abused; or a woman in a psychological thriller who has a vendetta against something that happened to her in her past that caused a split personality, and a split personality is off doing horrific deeds but meanwhile she’s at home making cake. I’ve read that book like three times. That book exists and it keeps coming out.

When we read about violent men, we don’t have these excuses for them as much. So I really wanted to write a book that was about violent women, and I wanted to write it like Cormac McCarthy might write about violent men. He doesn’t really excuse their behavior, he just lets them go for it. You haven’t read it because I don’t think it’s really been written.

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Ivy Pochoda’s other books include the acclaimed novels Wonder Valley, Visitation Street, and These Women. She won the 2018 Strand Critics Award for Best Novel and the Prix Page/America in France, and has been a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Edgar Award, the Macavity Award, and the International Thriller Writers Award. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the Los Angeles Times, among other publications.

Anne Elizabeth Moore is the guest. Her new essay collection, Body Horror: Capitalism, Fear, Misogyny, Jokes, is out now from The Feminist Press. It is the official May pick of the Otherppl Book Club.

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts! 

From the episode:

Brad Listi: One of the ways that this book is structured—or one of the ways that all of these different essays hold together—is that it moves deftly from the outside in and then back again. So we’re talking about, for example, the garment industry and clothing and labor conditions in Cambodia, then we’re talking about models doing that work, and that work is very concerned with surfaces. And then there are portrayals of women in horror films, and the ways in which those films teach us about how the body can go wrong.

And then there are essays in this book about the body going wrong, and they’re concerned with your struggles with autoimmune disease and disability. And then things get very internal, and the body horror that you’re experiencing is very much something that’s on the inside and is unseen and not very well understood by even doctors.

Along with those concerns, you do this wonderful job of diving into history again and illuminating for me somebody who is just not on my radar: Paul Ehrlich, Nobel Laureate, inventor of chemotherapy, and a guy who existed on—this is my favorite thing—he existed on like soda water and cigars. Like literally that was it. So one of these great doctors who smoked like a chimney, drank water, and was phenomenally unhealthy.

Anne Elizabeth Moore: Constantly was testing his own drugs on himself and then getting sick from them.

Brad Listi: Strange guy, too. I want to say somebody wrote a biography of him who worked for him, right? It was his assistant or something.

Anne Elizabeth Moore: Martha Marquardt. His, like, nursemaid. She was technically his secretary but 100 percent took care of him, body and soul. She maybe had some Stendhal syndrome because she just really thought he was the greatest, most genius person in the world, and there’s no indication that he ever said a kind word to her or ever gave her a place to sit or was ever aware of her as a human in his life at all. So, yeah, her biography was fascinating.

Brad Listi: Other things that are fascinating—and I imagine as you were writing this were probably exciting to you—is this weird synchronicity that Paul Ehrlich married into a textile family.  So here we have this guy who you’re writing about primarily because of his connection to autoimmune disease, and then finding out that he also has some sort of connection to the garment industry. Time is a flat circle. It’s all connected.

Anne Elizabeth Moore: In my research process, those are the moments that I’m like, Oh, yeah, now I’m definitely doing this. Where you’re just like, Oh, of course, the way that he is going to think about medicine is directly related to the fact that he thinks garments just appear on the table in the form of table linens, and he’s not aware that his wife went through this whole crazy system and owns all these garment factories. I’m all about those minor moments that build out to this larger picture of the world.

Brad Listi: But this is not preconceived. This is stuff that you’re stumbling into. And it has that affirmative effect, where it’s like, Okay, I’m on the right track.

Anne Elizabeth Moore: Yeah. But there are, of course, hundreds of other things that I stumble into that don’t end up doing that. I’m reading and researching and thinking and asking questions and Googling weird word combinations constantly. And so there are hundreds of ways that all of these essays could have gone had they elicited more of those humor moments for me. Because when you combine two bad things together, it’s funny, I guess.

Brad Listi: Speaking of which, you mentioned weird word combinations in Google. What did you say at the top of the conversation, like capitalism bullshit or something?

Anne Elizabeth Moore: Bullshit democracy.

Brad Listi: Oh, bullshit democracy. Is this something that you do on the regular? Just to try to generate ideas or to find things online that might help you?

Anne Elizabeth Moore: It’s not a regular practice, but remember when the internet was new and people were like, You can look things up! You just type words in! I remember I was at dinner with this guy named Michael Gerald, who’s now an entertainment lawyer but at the time he was the frontman for this band called Killdozer. He and his partner would update me every time we hung out with them on the status of their internet search for the phrase “Hitler jokes.”

And I was always following in my mind the trajectory, both of Hitler jokes, but also this idea that you could watch how a culture shifts if you just followed certain bizarre combinations of things and how many people were engaged in thinking about them. Because now Google Hitler jokes, it’s not funny anymore. But mid-1990s, it was something else.

Brad Listi: So it’s devolved. We’re in a process of devolution.

Anne Elizabeth Moore: Yes, in case you hadn’t noticed, things are devolving.

Brad Listi: Yeah. I get that. That seems like one of the markers. If the Hitler jokes are getting evil then we’re not in a good time.

Anne Elizabeth Moore: I think that’s true of most kinds of comedy. If the jokes stop being funny, then things are getting bad.

*

Anne Elizabeth Moore was born in Winner, SD. She is the author of Unmarketable (2007), the Eisner Award-winning Sweet Little Cunt (2018), Gentrifier: A Memoir (2021), which was an NPR Best Book of the Year, and others. She is the founding editor of Houghton Mifflin’s Best American Comics and the former editor of Punk Planet, The Comics Journal, and the Chicago Reader. She has received support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the Ragdale Foundation. She is a Fulbright Senior Scholar, has taught in the Visual Critical Studies department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and was the 2019 Mackey Chair of Creative Writing at Beloit College. She lives in the Catskills with her ineffective feline personal assistants, Taku and Captain America.

Samantha Irby is the guest. Her new book, Quietly Hostile, is out now from Vintage.

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From the episode:

Samantha Irby: I have two secrets that I’m going to tell to your audience for how to do what I do.

Brad Listi: I can’t wait.

Samantha Irby: I don’t know if this will help anyone else. First, I always have the ending. Always. I always know. Maybe sometimes even the final sentence is written in my notes, but I know where I’m going. For me, it’s always easier to write to a destination. Or even if I know the end, I can work on the outline backwards and be like, okay, well I want to talk about this thing before that, but then this has to come way before that—and then just piece it together that way. But truly if I don’t have an ending, I can’t write it.

I had started an essay for this collection about starting therapy, because I had started cognitive behavioral therapy a while before I started writing the book. And I couldn’t because I’m not done with therapy. I’m not cured. I didn’t have anything final to say about it. I didn’t have an ending. And I do have like 500 words of the beginning, but I couldn’t land the plane. I didn’t know how I was going to do it, so I pushed that to the side. So that’s one thing that helps me.

And then the other thing, this isn’t really a secret, but my tone is always the same in my head, right? Like, it’s always me writing. I have ways that I say things, you know, bits, the whole thing. But one thing that helps me for it to feel conversational—because that’s how I want it to feel, I do want you to be like, “My old friend Sam! Look at this scamp, she’s so funny.”—I’ll think of one of my best friends and write it as if I’m telling it to them. Like, how would I tell this to Ian? How would I tell this to Jessie? And in my head, I picture them and write to them. That really helps it feel conversational.

Brad Listi: That makes a lot of sense. Something I would add, and you can disagree with me if I’m wrong, is that when I’m reading your work, one of the things that occurred to me—because I was like, How is she so consistently funny? How did she arrive at this voice that feels casual and intimate but also literary? And then when you add it all up and it goes over well. One of the things that occurs to me is, this is not shtick. Like, she means this stuff.

I think that maybe somebody sitting down with the aspiration to write funny might make the error of being like, I’m just going to look for the joke and put on a funny air. The reason I think your work goes over well is that however funny it is, whatever postures you might be falling into or bits that you might be doing, at the heart of the work, you mean it. It’s authentic. It’s not just you looking for a joke, it’s you looking for a joke in the course of authentically exploring how you think and feel.

Samantha Irby: Yes.

Brad Listi: It’s an important distinction, right?

Samantha Irby: Yes. And honestly, this is on my mind ’cause you would not believe how many people ask why I don’t do standup. But what we’re talking about is the reason I don’t do standup. If I feel it and believe it, then I’m going to say it. And I don’t ever want anyone to be like, Oh, is she creating a character? I don’t want that. And you know why? I wish I could be like, Oh, I have a ton of artistic integrity. Which I obviously do. But it’s a trap!

If you’re anyone other than yourself, you can’t meet people, you can’t go on tour, you can’t do an interview, because then it’s just work to keep this persona going. I gotta remember like, what did I say? What do I believe? Hmm, okay, to this person, I hate men. Let me make sure I talk about how much I hate men.

That makes life hard for me. People get uncomfortable with how self-deprecating I am, and I’m always the villain of my own story. At the heart, it’s about how I messed something up or felt something wrong or interpreted something in the worst way. We all know writers who feel like they are on top of a mountain reading their words from a golden scroll handed down by Jesus himself. And it’s like, I was eating Panera when I wrote this. You know what I mean? I’m not going to put on airs! That’s crazy.

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Samantha Irby is the bestselling author of the essay collection Quietly Hostile, available from Vintage. Irby’s other books include Meaty, Wow, No Thank You, and We Are Never Meeting in Real Life. She also writes for television, having worked on shows like Shrill, And Just Like That, and Tuca & Bertie. She blogs at Bitches Gotta Eat and lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

Isabella Hammad is the guest. Her new book, Enter Ghost, is out now from Grove Press.

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From the episode:

Brad Listi: Let’s talk about the title of your novel, which is drawn from Hamlet and I think a stage direction, when King Hamlet is commanding his son to seek justice. It’s interesting to me, as you said earlier, that Hamlet came to you later in the process, because it seems so central to the book. How late?

Isabella Hammad: I mean, maybe not that late. Before I started writing, but in the conception period of the book, I thought, maybe I’ll do an Arabic play, maybe I’ll write my own play. I knew I wanted to do theater before I knew I wanted to do Hamlet, basically. But the working title until the very end was something else, which was vetoed by all the people I work with. I knew it would be vetoed, but I was still attached to it for the time being.

Brad Listi: What was it?

Isabella Hammad: Go Bid the Soldiers Shoot, which is the actual last line of the play. Everyone thinks it’s “then the rest is silence.” But it’s in fact, Fortinbras is about to invade. The play really ends with this incipient invasion scene. And I thought that was kind of an interesting title.

I think Enter Ghost is probably is a more salable title in the end, so I agreed.

Brad Listi: Well, yeah, I liked it. There’s so many different resonances between the title and things that happened in the book. I think it’s a good choice.

Sonia plays in the play Gertrude. And for people who either have never read Hamlet or people who haven’t read it in a long time—which describes me, so I was brushing up on my Hamlet—Gertrude is?

Isabella Hammad: The mother of Hamlet.

Brad Listi: And so why that role for Sonia? That seems like a deliberate choice.

Isabella Hammad: Sonia is 38, so one of the things she’s confronting in her career as an actor in London is that she’s no longer the ingenue and that possibly the window for hitting it big time in her field might be closing. That’s not always the case, obviously, for actresses. But it is a consideration. So she’s not playing Ophelia, she’s playing the mother character. So that’s one one element there.

Another element is that she’s also confronting the specter of motherhood, the role of the mother in general. Not being a mother herself, she then plays one. And her relationship with Wael, who’s the pop star playing Hamlet, becomes a kind of maternal relation as well. So there are these ghosts of motherhood that are brought out by playing this role.

Gertrude also is a very ambiguous character in the play. It’s uncertain whether or not she knows what happened to her husband, and she’s the victim of a lot of projection by Hamlet onto her. She doesn’t actually say very much. So there’s also some interesting elements to the character itself.

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Isabella Hammad was born in London. Her writing has appeared in Conjunctions, The Paris Review, The New York Times and elsewhere. She was awarded the 2018 Plimpton Prize for Fiction and a 2019 O. Henry Prize. Her first novel The Parisian (2019) won a Palestine Book Award, the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Betty Trask Award from the Society of Authors in the UK. She was a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree, and has received literary fellowships from MacDowell and the Lannan Foundation. She is currently a fellow at the Columbia University Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris.

Dave Eggers is the guest. His new all-ages novel The Eyes and the Impossible, is available from McSweeney’s and Knopf Books for Young Readers. Illustrations by Shawn Harris.

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From the episode:

Brad Listi: There’s an incredible diversity to the work that you’ve done as a writer and an artist through the years. You’ve obviously written adult fiction. You’ve written children’s books. This is an all ages book. You’ve done journalism work. A nonfiction book. Oral history. Screenwriting.

I’m curious to know about that part of it for you, because I think there is a school of thought that might posit that one should focus on something and just lock in and do that thing over and over again, which is what a lot of writers do. If they write literary fiction, they’re novelists. That’s it. They don’t even write story collections. They just do novels.

You have a more diversified output, and I’m wondering how you experience that. You must feel like it gives you something rather than takes something away. But I think there might be people out there who are like, is this a wise path? Is it distracting at times? Do you find yourself starting things and not finishing things? Do you ever feel like you’ve lost the thread and you’re overextended?

Dave Eggers: Well, I think that you’re talking about freedom, right? And this is the major theme of this book, is that if you are beholden as an artist to some perception of, well, what’s the right way to go through a short life in a universe perhaps without meaning, and if you’re going to say, well, the right way is to write variations on the same novel every four years until I’m dead, that’s a very sad, sad way to go through life.

And if that is someone’s way and they want to do it that way—and I do know artists that are very methodical and they’re very happy with their method, with it being every once a decade you put out a work of art, whether it’s a book or an opera or something. If that is your way and if that is the way that you feel most happy and—to use a terrible word—fulfilled, then great.

But when I hear or or feel like somebody is going through their life as an artist in a way because they think that that is the right way or that they will be perceived as having done it the right way or the most appropriate way for them, that is a tragedy. To be given the gift of writing or creating for a living and then to cage yourself within the boundaries of what’s deemed acceptable is just the worst tragedy of all.

I feel every day so lucky to be able to do this, to be able to get up in the morning and create stuff and think about wooden covers for a book about a dog at a park. I mean, it’s just ludicrous luck. And I think that the best way to honor that luck is to do anything you want to do. And if it ends up being not a total success however you judge it, then that’s fine.

But in a short life—and I’m exquisitely aware of how short life can be—I want to do anything I want to do. So if tomorrow somebody pulled up in front of the office here at 849 Valencia and said, Hey, do you want to go on a cross-country trip in a car shaped like a banana, and we’re going to visit all of the national parks that have waterfalls and we’re going to adopt a bobcat and name them Steve—if I felt like doing that that day, then certainly I would. That’s such a weird example. I don’t know why I was thinking about that. Weirdly, my daughter and I were in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, where I went to school, and the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile and the Planters Peanut mobile were both on the same street at the same time, waiting one after another in traffic. It was the most incredible thing. So it’s on my mind.

But I do know what you’re saying. When I was a very young writer in my twenties, I did sometimes look at older artists and say, well, I love your prose, why are you writing screenplays? I don’t think that’s cool. But I think generally that is the mindset of very early twenties. There’s a certain amount of ignorance, there’s a certain amount of cynicism, there’s a certain amount of wrongheadedness. And I think that sort of self-enforced adherence to what’s cool or what’s acceptable is so contrary to the entire idea of being an artist, which is about living fully freely.

That’s when any kind of incursion into that freedom, any kind of encroachment of that freedom, is really upsetting to me. And we’re seeing more of it now, whether it’s banning books on the right or whether it’s censoring books on the left, like they did with Roald Dahl—these are all encroachments into freedom. And we have to remember that the freedom of the artist has to be absolute. Otherwise there’s no art, because then we’re just writing pamphlets or it’s state-sponsored creation. It’s the same thing as under the Soviets, where we’re in service to some political message. The artist must be absolutely untethered. And whether or not that art is good or bad or whatever, that’s fine. But there can be no rules about creation. We might not love every last thing that this artist does, but they have to be completely untethered.

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Dave Eggers is the author of many books, including bestsellers The Every, The Monk of Mokha, The Circle, A Hologram for the King, and A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. His work has been nominated for the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is the founder of McSweeney’s, an independent publishing company based in San Francisco, and cofounder of 826 National, a network of educational centers around the country offering free tutoring to kids of all backgrounds. He lives in Northern California with his family.

Shawn Harris is the author/illustrator of Have You Ever Seen a Flower?, which won a Caldecott Honor Award. He is the illustrator of Her Right Foot by Dave Eggers, which received seven starred reviews, was an Orbis Pictus Award Honor Book, an ALA Notable, and a PW Best Book of the Year. His other picture books include Eggers’s What Can a Citizen Do (a Time Magazine Best Children’s Book), Everyone’s Awake by Colin Meloy, and A Polar Bear in the Snow by Mac Barnett.