This passion for the genre of comedy that defined his formative years goes beyond the work he’s widely known for, which includes his prolific, oftentimes dark writing for McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and the stories he tells onstage at The Moth. In the thirteen years since he started seriously writing humor, Kennedy hasn’t really explored work with happy endings. His most frequent target is himself and the stories are somewhat bleak. Granted, in that same timeframe, he has written three books, numerous magazine articles, and a seemingly endless array of memorable humor pieces, all while hosting a popular weekly podcast and live storytelling events. His novel will be released in May. For many, that would be enough. But Kennedy has a defined goal (which is at odds with his nature): just keep moving forward.

I first became aware of Kennedy’s work in the early 2000s, while he was busy making a name for himself on the McSweeney’s website, banging out piece after hilarious piece. He easily ranked among the funniest writers out there, whether he was offering up his failed attempts at flirting, some new Jelly Belly recipes, intentionally bad stand-up comedy, or an advice column that promised to solve your “problems with paper” (generally by deviating into every other possible subject). And, while it’s tricky to choose a wholly representative piece, I would personally suggest that you read “Silly Things My 3-Year-Old Said That I’m Certain the Rest of the World Would Find Sweet and Cute,” right here, before we go any further…just so you know the mind we’re dealing with.

Around the same time that Kennedy discovered McSweeney’s, he was handed a postcard advertising The Moth, the true-life, no-notes storytelling series that originated in New York and is now staged around the world. Kennedy attended an early Moth performance and something clicked for him, he says. After cold-calling the organization’s offices, he began performing at Moth events in 2000. Fast-forward thirteen years and Kennedy is now the host of The Moth Podcast. He also emcees many of the live Moth StorySLAM events in New York and routinely travels with the show. The night before this interview, he’d been in Detroit, storytelling in front of two-thousand people.

As mentioned, Kennedy’s writing has also smoothly made the transition into book form. In 2003, he opened with the very funny Loser Goes First: My Thirty-Something Years of Dumb Luck and Minor Humiliation, a collection of essays detailing his “painfully awkward youth and painfully awkward adulthood.” A couple years later, Kennedy wrote Rock On: An Office Power Ballad, hilariously skewering his year-and-a-half at Atlantic Records, at just about the same time that the music industry was collapsing under its own hubris and inability to cope with the times. And Kennedy’s latest project is the aforementioned novel, American Spirit, described like this:

When Matthew, a forty-something media executive, finds his job, health, and marriage crumbling, he goes native: Lives in his car. Dips his toe in drug-running. Contemplates song lyrics. Takes a really good pottery class. Before long he’s on a stumbling, agonizingly funny vision quest that takes him from a strip-mall parking lot to Yellowstone National Park to a Bali medical clinic, from an unlikely romance with a Hollywood agent specializing in hot young vampire roles to extreme RVing with a disgraced Wall Street trader.

Kennedy admits that a handful of his real-life exploits ended up in the novel. More on that in a second.

I first met Kennedy when I worked at 826 Valencia, a nonprofit writing and educational center in San Francisco. He was on a panel I was hosting, where he helped teach fifty adults how to write humor. I remember him being incredibly funny about being funny—not an easy task. Relatedly, his expertise was featured in the 826 National guide to memoir-writing, The Autobiographer’s Handbook.

Kennedy continues to write for McSweeney’s and GQ Magazine, among other outlets, and, as reported, is now immersing himself in screenwriting, both for television and movies. For this interview, we talked by phone for about two-and-a-half hours. While he was on very little sleep, having just come off the road, Kennedy was lively and engaged. We laughed a lot, while covering a good amount of territory.

***

The Rumpus: Let’s talk about your new novel, American Spirit. What was it like to jump into a novel after all these years of writing nonfiction and essays and short humor?

Dan Kennedy: Pretty scary. I started this book before I started Rock On, and I just wrote twenty pages of it and was like, Oh, man, I’m in over my head. I can’t write this character. There’s no way I can write this character. Huh. All right. Better figure out something to do to eat. And so I put that in the drawer and wrote Rock On instead, because it was way more within my range at the time. I think it was 2006. Weirdly enough—five or six years later—pretty much all of the stuff that I was in over my head with, with that character, happened to me. And I was like, Oh. Okay. Wow.

Rumpus: So you had an idea for a guy whose world had collapsed and he needed to rebuild his life, and then you went through your own crises?

Kennedy: Yeah, put it this way: there was a chapter where this character [Matthew] is reading his own X-rays against the light in his kitchen and determines, even though he’s not a doctor, that he’s going to be dying in four months. And two scenes later, he’s waking up in an airport lounge in Taipei, trying to figure out what happened. And that all just seemed stupid and over-the-top. But then I was losing a lot of weight and reading my own X-rays by the kitchen light, going, “Oh my God, do you see that right there? That’s not normal. Look, it’s not on the other side.” And then waking up in an airport lounge in Taipei. The logical argument is just, well, you probably made a certain amount of stuff happen, didn’t you?

Rumpus: Is that what you think? That you made it happen? Did you figure out what that weight loss was coming from?

Kennedy: I had been eating less. It just kind of came down to, Well, you’re eating a lot less. I traveled a whole bunch in that particular year and usually, when I travel a lot, I just forget to eat a lot while I’m traveling, so…

Rumpus: Right. I think we’re the same, in some senses, jumping to the worst possible conclusion. Not too long ago, I had a day where my fingers were tingling and I Googled “tingly fingers,” and it indicated that I’d probably had a minor stroke. So I convinced myself that it was true.

Kennedy: Yeah, Google is the biggest symptom. It’s amazing what happens when you get on there. Just before I left town the other day, I was cold and literally Googled “constantly cold.” And I was trying to find what terrible thing was going wrong with me. And it was like, I just need to put on a fucking jacket. Really, my girlfriend was like, All you’ve been wearing is that T-shirt. No hat or anything. And I’m like, Oh. Okay. Let me get off Google here and go get my jacket.

Rumpus: Right. So when you’re reading your X-rays in the kitchen and trying to diagnose yourself, was she trying to talk some sense into you? Or were you pretty convinced that it was something bad?

Kennedy: Just go read this so-called novel. Oh man.

Rumpus: So a lot of your freakouts actually made it in there?

Kennedy: There was a slightly larger-scale version of what we’re talking about, where you’re convinced that something’s gone so terribly wrong and your doctor’s basically just like, “You’ve been eating not nearly enough food for about three months straight. And it looks like you might possibly have a kidney stone, as well. So that’s the dull pain and the weight loss. You really have to eat more than one meal a day when you’re traveling.” And I was like, “Oh. Can I just show you this one thing I saw on the films?” I actually referred to them as the “films,” instead of my X-rays. You know—technician by proxy.

Rumpus: He’s thinking, “Oh, the films. This guy definitely knows our jargon. I’d better take a closer look.”

Kennedy: Yeah, exactly. He’s like, “You know what? I wasn’t going to take him seriously, but I don’t know—apparently, he went to eight years of school, too.”

Rumpus: Right. “It seems like he’s been doing some research under a kitchen light.”

Kennedy: Yeah. And then, waking up in Taipei was just…I guess I won’t talk about what’s real, what’s not real, what was sublimated, how it was sublimated. But yeah, there was basically this assignment I took and I had to leave pretty late at night and make a weird connection up in Alaska to another plane. And then go down to the other side of the equator. And part of that was this three-hour layover in Taipei, where I just totally conked out in the airport lounge and just woke up, and I was like, “Holy shit, I’m in a Tarantino film. What happened? Am I doing drugs again?” Then it was like, “Oh right, the thing. I said yes to the thing I’m going to write about.”

Rumpus: Do you find that it’s interesting to write about somebody in the middle of a crisis? And that maybe you needed to create these things in your own life in order to know what it’s like to go through it? Obviously with the job at Atlantic Records [which Kennedy detailed in Rock On], the crisis was beyond your control. But in scenarios like waking up in Taipei and not knowing where you are, or by diagnosing yourself in your kitchen, you’re sort of manifesting problems that don’t actually exist.

Kennedy: Yeah, maybe. For a while there, I was taking writing assignments that were totally creating that sense of desperation and urgency, because I have a pretty comfortable middle-class life now. So there was definitely the types of writing assignments where it would be like, “Okay, a messenger is going to come to the door at 11:30 tonight. You’ll have a hard copy of the boarding pass. I’d like you to take that right away and go to JFK and then you’ll be in San Pedro Sula by 6 a.m., and then get down to Roatan by 10 a.m., and then by the time you finally pass out from the all-nighter, you’ll be waking up in the back of a gypsy cab at a roadblock with machine guns. Because these guys in camouflage with machine guns are convinced that there could be cocaine in this cab and maybe you have it.” It was a really weird period.

Rumpus: So the opening of the new novel is that a guy is fired from his job and he starts living in his car in an upper-class neighborhood. It seems like the theme of rebuilding your life continually pops up in your work. There’s also that theme of time passing, being ten years older and not having much to show for it.

Kennedy: How can you not be a little bit freaked out by years slipping by? When you’re little, summer is a lifetime. You get older and the scale of things changes. A year goes about as fast as summer break now. It just takes so long to put anything together.

I had a conversation with a handful of people recently, where you really look at life and what you’ve gotten done to a certain point. There’s a huge thing in America where, basically, your forties start at twenty-five. And people want to be famous by the time they’re thirty, and accomplished by the time they’re thirty-one. We all have these weird timelines, or drives, or whatever. If you really break down an average life, the first eighteen years are almost a write-off in terms of getting anything done, because you’re learning everything from how to walk, to what word to say for something to eat. You know? And so much of that time is a sort of a write-off. And then adolescence is just crazy time. At least from my adolescence, I would’ve been higher functioning if I was just on LSD every day. Hormones and indecision and uncertainty were harder to navigate than psychotropic drugs.

So you kind of have to write that stuff off. You can’t really find your work and find your stride and find your pace during those years, because you’re doing all this other stuff, and everything feels like the end of the world, and the future is totally uncertain, and you have no reference points. You start looking at how much time you’re wasting. Like, when does the show really start? The doors open around twenty-seven, twenty-eight, and the show really starts around thirty-four. You know? When you start looking at life that way, you’re like, Okay, and how long are we here? I have a couple of projects I’m really excited about, but they’re kind of hanging in the balance. Those kinds of things you tell your best friends about and maybe you’ll make ‘em happy twice: once when you give them the news, and once when you give them the news that it fell through. And I’m sitting there thinking, Oh, I hope that thing comes through, the thing that we’ve been talking about. That would be really exciting and cool. And then my next thought is basically, While we’re all figuring it out, another year is going to go by.

Rumpus: Right.

Kennedy: It’s just a different economy when all of a sudden, it’s not like, I’m just going to go to the lake and swim out to somebody’s houseboat and drink beer on top of it. It’ll figure itself out over the course of summer. Some nights, it’s like, Let’s all just take our time and see if we’re comfortable with the project. Because god knows, time’s not racing by or anything!

Rumpus: So you feel like a lot of time has already been wasted and things are suddenly more urgent.

Kennedy: Yeah. Kind of. I’m glad we kind of figured out a little bit about getting the hang of this stuff. How much of this can we make happen in six years? That’s really what we’re looking at.

Rumpus: And does this all tie into that story you told onstage at The Moth about your therapist dying, about getting the advice to always move forward, to always choose activities and say yes? Were you consciously trying to throw yourself into purely going for a while, just to see where it would lead?

Kennedy: Yeah, I think I probably was. Because what terrifies me—and this is something I was discussing with [Kennedy's former therapist] Milton during the period before he died—is my capacity to not take a step forward. Apparently, I just have some kind of low-grade mental disability of some sort. Just some garden variety, unflattering diagnosis, like not eating enough. I’m sure it’s like, Oh, you’re just not that smart. You don’t have to leave the apartment if you don’t have to that day. But it is rather unsettling that I will walk outside one day and be like, “Oh, weird. I guess I haven’t been outside since Monday. Fuck, that’s not super good, is it? Is that normal?” My sister has the same thing. We’d talk on the phone and she’d be like, “Oh my gosh. Apparently I just have no problem living amongst my litter of candy and fast food and watching really bad movies for ninety days.”

Rumpus: That’s so interesting, because it just seems like there’s a real dichotomy in you—you can do that thing where you stay inside for long periods of time, but then you’re also hyperaware of time passing.

Kennedy: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah! No, completely. Bizarrely. And I don’t know why. God, man, if I would’ve had me as a kid, if I was born even ten years later, I just would’ve been diagnosed out of whatever career I’ve made for myself. I would’ve been medicated right out of it. But I did have that time-passing-by thing from an early stage. I used to go catch tadpoles at a public park pond in Southern California, and put them in a little fishbowl and put them in my room, and I would just watch them turn into frogs and get sad.

Rumpus: Oh, man.

Kennedy: Yeah. If you walk into your kid’s bedroom—which, by the way, he hangs out in eighty percent of his time, staring out the window—you walk into the bedroom and he’s looking into a glass bowl, for hours on end, and you ask him what’s going on, and he looks at you and says he’s just kind of depressed because the legs are starting to come in now and it won’t be long. But god bless ‘em, they were just kind of like, “Eh, it’s all good. He’ll be fine.” They gave me, like, a Smothers Brothers record and some books to read.

Rumpus: So your early influences were tadpoles turning into frogs and the Smothers Brothers, basically?

Kennedy: Basically. And just wanting to talk to my dad about death, nonstop. And then listening to [Bill] Cosby or [George] Carlin.

Rumpus: Speaking of your dad—I forget where I read this, but was there a time that you found out your dad’s real name in the middle of a phone call from a stranger?

Kennedy: Yeah! Oh my god. I thought that was a family secret. That was a weird fucking day, too. It was late to find out my dad’s name. This guy called the house, and he was an insurance guy, and he was like, “Is Bill there?” And I was like, “Who?” And my dad’s name is Russ Kennedy. And he was like, “Is Bill there?” I’m like, “Well, no, there’s no Bill in our family. What’s the last name?” And he’s like, “Kennedy.” And I’m like, “Bill Kennedy, huh? Nope. You have the last name right, but there’s nobody in our family named Bill.” And then I hung up.

And then he dialed the number again in two seconds and I picked it up and he was like, “I’m calling for Bill Kennedy.” And I’m like, “Yeah, it’s Dan Kennedy again, we don’t have a Bill.” And he was like, “Are you sure, I just met with him the other day. His street address is blah blah blah.” So I say, “You’ve got our phone number. That’s our last name. That’s our address. But there’s no Bill here.” And the guy was just silent. I don’t know if he thought he was on the verge of belying some huge family secret.

And then my parents were like, “Who was calling?” And I said, “Somebody looking for Bill Kennedy. I just told him we don’t know a Bill.” And my dad was looking at me and he said, “Well, if my name is William Russell Kennedy, would somebody maybe call me ‘Bill’ if they weren’t familiar with me?” And I was like, “Ohhhhhh! Seriously? Oh, right, right, right! Oh, weird! Okay, well…your insurance guy called and you need to get back to him.” And it was this major thing of not really quite looking at my dad in the same way after that. It was like, Bill, huh? Do you tell people you’re called Bill? Do you introduce yourself as Bill to some people?

Rumpus: Yeah, are you just Russ in the kitchen with me?

Kennedy: Yeah! Exactly. Who’s Russ? And who’s Bill? How many lives are you leading? Thank god I’ve been able to put something together because I was just on the fast-track for managing a drugstore in rural California.

Rumpus: So you feel like if you were brought up in the age of more rampant medications, they could’ve really diluted some of this stuff you were able to mine from your life and turn into humor?

Kennedy: There’s like seriously no question. My friends who are parents will talk about testing and syndromes and daydreaming and how they’re worried. I don’t even know what they would’ve done with me in today’s youth culture. Put me in a straightjacket, the hospital, I don’t know what. I definitely would’ve been medicated out of whatever it is I put together for myself.

Rumpus: I’ve noticed over the years that you have a ton of honesty in your writing, but that you oftentimes write pretending to be something you’re not.

Kennedy: Yeah, I’ve definitely got that. What’s the old line? “The biggest lie I tell is that everything’s just fine”? I think I got that. I grew up lower-middle-class and that was a big thing in the suburbs for middle-class and lower-middle-class. It’s like, “Everything’s fine. No need to look twice. We’re normal and everything is great. We are happy.” And I think I might have a bit of that—not knowing how to react honestly in certain situations. If I see somebody in the hallway, I generally don’t go, “Hey, how are you? How’s it going? You know what I like? Weather!” However people do that. I tend to think, Well, what would a person say? It just feels like a part you never quite got the script for. What do people say in the hallway? Do they just keep walking? Is it just people talking? Why don’t I say, “Hey!” No, don’t say, “Hey.” That’s weird. You never say, “Hey.” My first instinct is always try to fit in or something, but that’s starting to change. I’m starting to just not give a fuck, for lack of saying it in a more positive way. But I think you get a little bit older and you’re just kind of like, Oh, I get it. It’s a totally solo show? And we’re all going out at this point? Sweet. No, I really don’t want to go to fucking Thanksgiving with you. But I like you.

Rumpus: Right. So do you feel like, in writing, that’s where you get to be honest in a more blunt, straightforward way? I read something where you said that indulging in the “dark truth” is always funnier. Is it just easier to tell the truth while you’re writing, rather than walking down the hallway?

Kennedy: Yeah. But I’m not really convinced anyone reads it. I mean, even these books, I know people buy them. But do they really read every word? I think about that old saying: “The best place to hide a secret is in the middle of a book.” I think you could probably put your deepest, darkest, most honest thing in there and folks would still come up to you and go, “That was pretty funny! I like the part where you stumble in the hallway.”

In my first book, there’s a suicide letter, written out of spam e-mail headlines. I remember thinking, “What if I killed myself and what if the letter I left behind just copied and pasted all these weird-ass spam headlines—this weird poetry about why it’s impossible to go on. And just leave that behind.” Not that I’m suicidal, or that I’ve ever really seriously considered that. It’s really easy for me to hide behind a really downer, dour thing, but I’m the biggest, excited geek about being alive. My girlfriend is like, “Reel it in.” But I remember that being in there and I sort of thought, I don’t know, maybe that’s kinda screwed, because a lot of young people read this stuff and maybe that’s not so funny, or cool, or whatever. But then no one ever brought it up. You know? Every single person you talk to and every single interview you do is like, “Oh, that was funny. Hey, man, I can’t believe you fell off the window at your house. That was hilarious.” Which is cool. It’s fun. But you read a review that’s like, “It’s funny, but it’s too bad the guy can’t approach anything heavier than humor.” And you’re like, Definitely go to page 178. Because there’s a suicide letter.

Rumpus: Do reviewers actually miss that undercurrent? To me, it seems apparent in your writing that you’ve probably struggled with some degree of depression over the years.

Kennedy: Yeah. It’s probably true. I mean, I used to drink what they call “the alcohol.”

Rumpus: I’ve heard of it.

Kennedy: Yeah, it’s a beverage. And that doesn’t help with the depression. I’m not a super-depressed guy. I’m fond of pessimism. I find it funny. I think a pessimist is basically an optimist with a sense of humor and a heart. You know? I’m working on this script that definitely has this dour wit to it. And I’ve been on this bender of watching Sunset Boulevard and Barefoot in the Park and Philadelphia Story. The dialogue in those movies is so funny and so dark. I mean, the mother visiting Jane Fonda and Robert Redford in Barefoot in the Park—after doing the five-flight walk-up—her opening line is, “If the hardware store downstairs had been open, I would’ve bought something to kill myself with.” Jokes like that are awesome. And these days, it just seems like the cardinal sin in American culture is to play one dark note. It really is. Which is just bizarre to me. And a little bit scary. It’s a big thing in mainstream America. Always be happy, always be happy, always be happy. I think that freaks me out. There’s still points during the week where I will literally think, “That’s right, a lot of other people are on pills and wine and stuff to stay happy. Maybe that’s why that conversation with those three people felt weird. Because I’m not on anything and I’m also not drinking.”

It’s like when you graduate from high school or college, and somewhere in the back of your mind, you’re like, “Well, I guess they’re going to start shutting the high schools and colleges down because I’m done. No one’s ever gonna graduate in, like, 2010. What a weird year to graduate in.” You have that in the back of your mind—I kind of think that about drinking and drugs. I had a beer in August of ’99 and somewhere in the back of my mind, I’m like, “Oh, drinking kind of went out in the summer of ’99.” So then I will literally have a conversation with someone and halfway through the conversation be thinking, What a weird thing for that person to have said. I wonder what that means. What’s the subtext of that? And then I’ll be like, You idiot. That’s a drunk. You’re at a party. They’re drinking. Right, right, right. People do that.

Rumpus: I think that’s a really important thing to remember: that some people have their own hangups and they’re bringing those hangups to the conversation. It isn’t actually you in that case.

Kennedy: Yeah. It probably doesn’t help that…

Rumpus: …you’re analyzing it.

Kennedy: Or that I have lipstick smeared violently around my mouth, with a wig on crooked.

Rumpus: Right. So it’s funnier to talk about death and loneliness and depression and addiction because we never really talk about those things?

Kennedy: Yeah, I think so. And I really have fun with that stuff in writing. People have been disappointed in meeting me before, where it’s like, “Ooh, shoot. I was sort of hoping you’d look like a character out of a Nick Cave song, and live in a dark, tiny room, and you were seventy pounds.” But I say the kind of corny shit that could be in a Coldplay song. I literally look at my girlfriend and I go, “I am just so blown away with the fact that I get to be on Earth. That I get to see things. And see light. And just, like, get to be here.” She’ll just be like, “Oh. Well…good!”

Rumpus: So people must get the wrong idea if they’ve only read your books or your McSweeney’s stuff and expect you to be a guy who only ever talks about dark things. You’re not that guy.

Kennedy: No. It’s funny, if we go to the movies, we’re gonna go see whatever the big comedy is. I mean, my girlfriend is Scandinavian, so she’ll watch Scandinavian movies. You know? And I’ll just be like, “Okay, you watch that, I’m gonna go to the gym. But when I get back, we’re gonna watch Beverly Hills Cop again.”

Rumpus: That’s a common thing, though, right? I think I have an element of this too, where you don’t want to look at things that are going to bring you down. It’s so easy to feel depressed as it is.

Kennedy: Oh, yeah, I totally don’t. Although I will say that one time we went to a [British artist] Lucian Freud show and looked at Freud’s paintings, and they were all so sad that we were cracking up. And we were the only two people in the museum who were laughing. It was so bleak that it seemed like satire. And I will say that I got a real kick out of that. That was just fun. I think, at a certain age, I would’ve been thinking, I have to get out of here. It’s a cloudy day in London and we’re looking at these sad paintings and I feel like I’m gonna freak out. I think I definitely turned a corner somewhere where, if something is so sad, I’ll just crack up. I’ll just be like, Jesus. Really? You created that level of sadness? I mean, there’s so much sad stuff on Earth. You know? Just the fact, like, everyone you love is gonna be gone is enough. And then you spent how many years…what’s this one…it’s a starving dog on a shitty bed next to like a woman who looks lonely, with these weird, tiny breasts? It’s so nuts, it’s funny. It’s fun to crack up.

But then, you read something like Man’s Search for Meaning. You’re sitting there going, “There’s heavy stuff on Earth, and it’s just beautiful and heartbreaking. What are we doing and why are we like this to each other?” But I think that’s what cracks me up about someone saying, “I’m going to make some super-duper-duper sad paintings. Watch this one: I’m gonna start here with a starving…what should it be? Cute puppy, maybe? A starving cute puppy?” There’s something hilarious about that to me.

Rumpus: So you’re a fan of the big comedies like Beverly Hills Cop and you’re immersing yourself in classic comedies. Can you talk a bit about the screenwriting you’re doing now?

Kennedy: Occasionally people will call or e-mail and be like, “Would you be up for taking a meeting and talking?” And usually the general meeting is like, “Would you ever consider writing a comedy screenplay?” And I wonder how I got pegged as the weird Sleepy Hollow character who sits in a little garage, refusing to come down. Yes, let’s write a comedy! I grew up on this stuff. 

I was with a friend who wrote a few really huge comedies, and we were at a Yankees game and he just turned to me, wondering if I would ever reconsider. He was like, “Would you ever consider writing a mainstream comedy?” I was like, seriously? I guess to some end—maybe it’s the McSweeney’s stuff, or something—but I definitely went through this period where I was like, “I’ve been trying to do this work for a long time and now you guys are coming to me asking if I would ever consider it, or if I’m too cool for that.” It’s very strange.

Rumpus: I remember seeing something you said about humor needing “higher stakes.” Maybe that’s where these people are coming from, wondering if you’d ever write a farce or a madcap caper or something.

Kennedy: Maybe it is. At least, maybe that’s how they see the question they’re asking. But the truth is, what’s good comedy? Good comedy is about how something funny happened to you on the way to the club. Great comedy is about love and death. So I don’t know. I’ve watched the most mainstream comedies of the last twenty years and I still go, “Yep, love and death, there it is, right there.” I was watching Meet the Parents again yesterday, a favorite. And I was like, Fuck, this is huge: time is slipping away. I’m trying to learn how to love somebody by whatever standards are outside of my head. I’m a male nurse in a family of doctors. And every time I turn around, I’m offending one of these people who—more than ever—I need to befriend, so I can marry their daughter, the only person who has mattered to me.

I think it’s a hilarious movie and it’s one of my favorite comedies. But I don’t see that as not having a vein of darkness to it. It’s a classic. Every single solitary person has felt as alone as that character, while trying to maintain some sense of suburban civility at a family dinner. I see a lot of that stuff as windows start to close. You start trying to step up to the plate and not spend your life alone and you get in those situations where you’re like, Let’s face it—I’m a total alien, a complete mutant. And the harder I try, I push people away that I want to be close to. And I think you could point to ten really good mainstream American comedies that people would probably pretty easily just go, “Oh, yeah, that’s just a cute, breezy movie.” But what are the themes here?

Rumpus: Maybe people are just asking if you think you could write something with a happy ending.

Kennedy: Yeah. I’m not crazy about third acts that just bang you over the head, just clobber you and then play the hit single. But having said that, I like to see the guy get the girl. And I like to see everybody wanting to live happy. You know?

Rumpus: So you’re actively working on scripts now?

Kennedy: Yeah, I’m working on one script. And I just got an e-mail out of nowhere about this TV show I really like, so we’ll see what happens with that. But I hate to say it, because if we all had as much of that stuff happen…none of us would have the time to talk to each other.

Rumpus: You seem like a natural fit to scriptwriting for a lot of reasons. Something I’ve noticed about your writing is that you have such an amazing ear for dialogue. Many of your McSweeney’s pieces and some parts of your books are written in straight dialogue. Where does that come from?

Kennedy: I think it comes from growing up on TV and movies, and joking around with my sister. We would always just take a three-line exchange and repeat it and start cracking up. I think it probably comes from a suburban living room. I think a lot of those McSweeney’s pieces were sort of me, not knowing much about structure yet. Eight years ago, ten years ago, I didn’t know tons about structure, so I literally would just write dialogue scenes. Like: what if a guy was trying to write about sex for a magazine and he had to call four girls and they all went wrong. You know?

Rumpus: Right.

Kennedy: And I think I hadn’t yet learned to be like, Who’s that guy and why’s he trying to do that and what’s the bigger story? It’s not an act and it’s not a story. And I think all this time at The Moth has finally paid off in story arts and stuff like that. I’ve been telling stories and hosting shows with those guys for about thirteen years now, and I think it’s finally just hit this tipping point where I’m like, Oh, wow, well that didn’t take long. Just over a decade and now I get three-act structure. I think most people literally go to a six-month program at UCLA and they’re like, Yeah, I get it.

Rumpus: But there is something really appealing about those straight dialogue pieces, too. Like in your failing at flirting with the hot girl piece, where you can just see the flirting going downhill, instantly. We’ve all had that experience, so we all know the story. And maybe it’s just that the pieces are super bite-sized and readable, but there really is something enjoyable about the straight dialogue in those.

Kennedy: I think one of the best pieces of editorial feedback I ever got was basically, “Take out your description of everything. Get to the scene. Stop spoon-feeding us all of the peripheral observations. Just get to the funny.” I think it might’ve been one of the very first things I tried to submit to the McSweeney’s site, like ’99 or 2000. I had all of these parenthetical observations. And that one really stuck with me. It’s a little precious to be like, “Here’s what I notice about the office where the hot girl is sitting. Before we get to the funny part, allow me to paint a portrait.”

Rumpus: Just get to the funny.

Kennedy: Yeah. Don’t bore us, get to the chorus.

Rumpus: I read an interview where you said you didn’t write much humor until age twenty-six. Was that for McSweeney’s?

Kennedy: Yeah. I mean, I remember it was just a weird time. I lost my dot-com job, I stopped drinking, and my girlfriend and I broke up. So it was like, I really gotta find an outlet. “What am I going to do from 6 p.m. to 2 a.m. in the apartment?” I must’ve seemed institutionalized to those guys, or something. They must’ve thought I was in jail. I was sending them, like, nine things a day. It was the end of 1999, I think, and I had somewhere to put my energy.

Rumpus: And did McSweeney’s lead to other things like The Moth? Was that the progression?

Kennedy: It was weird. Everybody was kind of linked to everybody at that point. The second date that I had with my girlfriend, she showed up at my apartment with a postcard for The Moth. And then another person that I think I met through The Moth was like, “You should check out this McSweeney’s website.” Everybody was weirdly interconnected.

Rumpus: I don’t know if this is still how you feel about it, but I was rereading some old interviews with you, and in one you said that you had never been able to necessarily crack McSweeney’s editorial code. I thought that was really fascinating because, to a lot of people, you’re the gold standard. Whether or not it was a goal, I feel like you’re a guy who has set the direction of a lot of humor on that site. Do you still feel the same way about the editorial code? Are you still trying to figure out what they want?

Kennedy: Well, it’s funny, I think the only reason I ever got stuff on there is because it’s the only place I didn’t try to figure out. Like, I tried to crack it for a little bit and I had tons of stuff rejected. Dozens and dozens and dozens of things. And then I think I got to that point where I just literally had nothing going on in my life. And it was just like such a country song: my girlfriend’s gone, she took the furniture because it was hers, I’m gonna stop drinking and I don’t have a job anymore. And I’m living in downtown New York.

Rumpus: Right.

Kennedy: And I was sending in so much stuff and it must’ve been all getting rejected, I think. And then, I don’t know—something happened. But the short answer is: I still feel that way. I don’t know what the code is. And I never do. For a while at GQ, they were calling me with assignments and sending me all over…and sometimes I would totally stick it and it was just hilarious, how quickly it would run. And other times, it would be two years of just going, “I don’t understand. I don’t understand what you want.” Anytime I stop to try to figure out the house voice of something, I’m just dead in the water. And for some reason, I just got lucky with the McSweeney’s site and never stopped to try and figure out what it is. And if I could do that with everything, I probably would be a lot better off. But when I was writing the HBO pilot for my last book, I definitely fell down that rabbit hole of, What do they want? What do they want? What’s HBO? What are they looking for here? Once you go down that slope—I don’t know about you or anybody else—but I’m dead in the water. As soon as I go down that hole of, Let me try to figure out what they want. I’m sure there are better writers or more astute writers who can go, “Let’s take a minute and try to figure out what they want,” and just nail it. You know? I’ve never been that guy.

Rumpus: Well, it’s also a way of not being super derivative, right? Like, if you’re trying to appeal to what you think the HBO voice is, you’re probably going to end up writing an HBO show that’s already been written.

Kennedy: It’s precisely what you end up writing. And then you end up with a huge conference room looking at you going, “We’ve done this show twice. It was a huge hit for us each time. Once it was called Sex and the City, once it was called Entourage.” And you think, Wow, I really should’ve done what I do. There’s no shortage of the thing that you’re decoding. Maybe the reason that they came to you is that you have another code.

Rumpus: So what’s the status on that show?

Kennedy: It’s one of the more expensive paperweights that a TV channel has ever bought.

Rumpus: Is that paperweight paying your rent now, at least?

Kennedy: Yeah. Obviously, I would’ve been much more thrilled had it been made. But I got to write with a really great guy that I really enjoyed working with, Brian Burns, who is Edward Burns’s brother, who was a producer on Entourage. It was great. I had a lot of fun goofing around with him, and I learned a lot about writing from him in terms of scripts and pace and all that stuff.

Rumpus: I would imagine that all of this helped in your ongoing scriptwriting projects. Does it seem easier now?

Kennedy: It totally does. It seems to be a whole different world. Again, it’s just as simple as, do what you do. It sounds so corny. It sounds like an apron in SkyMall or something—but just don’t try to be anybody but yourself.

Rumpus: Right. By the way, my favorite thing in SkyMall is a little transparent bubble that you put in the middle of the fence, allowing your dog to peer through and see the neighborhood.

Kennedy: That’s such a compassionate item.

Rumpus: Oh, it’s great. It’s for dogs who don’t get to roam too much, but they can look out through the fence.

Kennedy: So sweet. What makes it even more compassionate is that it’s totally in a landscape of self-centered indulgent items, like, how would you like a chair that massages you and prepares a drink at the end of a long, hard day? It’s all these completely stupid, office-based alpha-male, hedonistic items, for the most part. And then, Here’s something that lets a creature see more of the world. Here’s the ultimate heartstring-puller on page whatever.

Rumpus: Have you ever ordered anything out of SkyMall?

Kennedy: No, I haven’t ordered anything, but I’ve always taken great comfort in catalogue copy. With the Internet and everything, I guess it’s more of a thing of the past in a lot of ways. But growing up, I could read catalogue copy forever. Doesn’t catalogue copy make it seem like your wildest dreams are just around the corner? It’s like, I should get a professional-sized popcorn trolley. I have no idea the life that awaits me.

Rumpus: Totally. The girl who got away ten years ago will realize that you have that trolley, which means that you’re really doing really well for yourself. And then maybe she’ll come back.

Kennedy: Yeah. Exactly. It’s like poetry for that American delusion. I was talking with somebody after this Moth show in Detroit last night, about that idea that, in America, you might accidentally wake up wealthy. You’ve been told that for so long. It’s hilarious. The myth since the Industrial Revolution hasn’t been, Do something you’re really good at, something that is really valued at a high amount of pay, and get good at that thing. That hasn’t been the message so much as, Do anything, even if it’s completely menial and dead-end. As long as your misery is at a certain level, you might wind up living on the hill. The most backwards thinking. But catalogue copy reminds me of poetry for that myth. You know? I’m sure I buy into it, too. Like, should I get an electric necktie carousel? I mean, what if I do end up in a life where I have to choose quality neckwear and a large assortment that I don’t have time to manually go through?

Rumpus: It’s like that final thing that you need to actually be happy. It’s amazing that it still works that way. But that’s all you’ll need, that one little thing. It’s kind of like that one pill that will finally make you feel normal.

Kennedy: Yeah. I think it is a big missing piece thing.

Rumpus: You’re right, though. Catalogue copy really is very comforting.

Kennedy: And I don’t know where that comes from. But it does have sort of a mild narcotic feel, right? It’s like someone telling you, “Don’t worry, this world’s not gonna eat you alive. The future holds nothing but comfortable, luxurious surprises.”

Rumpus: Right! I  mean, I see that in your parodies of those things, too. It keeps popping up in your work. It’s almost like you have a deep appreciation for that type of writing.

Kennedy: I do. How can you not be kind of a little bit secretly in love with the idea that maybe there is an item that can take away pain? Maybe it’s as simple as a cone for your dog to see stuff, or a popcorn trolley. Somewhere in my heart—and it’s a pretty simple heart—I thought, No, I didn’t feel any pain over my divorce. I have a towel-warmer.

Rumpus: I had an ex-girlfriend get me a machine where you put tap water into it and you push down twice and it fills with Co2 and makes carbonated water on the spot. And then we broke up. And I was like, Well, at least I got this sparkling water machine.

Kennedy: Did you find it an exemption from pain at all?

Rumpus: It was a good distraction, at least. Also, it really works.

Kennedy: That’s awesome. I find that so comforting. It’s really strange. I definitely have that part of me where I’ll often think, What are the most painful things that are going to happen to me in this life? Just make sure that you’re in a first-class seat when you go down. It doesn’t even fucking matter. You know? Like, your father died but no worries! You’re in international first-class! No, it’s still going to be one of the hardest days of your life.

Rumpus: You’ll just have a good place to sit for it.

Kennedy: Yeah, but there’s definitely this part of me that’s like, Would it be as difficult in a good car service?

Rumpus: I think this all nicely ties into your job at Atlantic Records. I’d imagine that there’s something comforting about going to work in a luxurious high rise and working for a record company. Kind of like catalogue copy. There must’ve been something so fun about pretending to be something you’re not for a while, in that it seems different than a typical freelance writer’s day-to-day life, writing in squalor.

Kennedy: Hugely. I mean, it’s again that little piece of me that’s like, Listen, there’s something good here that’s gonna make everything okay. As long as we’re in here, nothing painful can happen. Because look! There’s an espresso machine! And lots of fancy tables and stuff, a cool view, this is happy times! Nothing bad can happen in here!

Rumpus: And it’s not the real world’s problems. The biggest problem is trying to figure out what to write for Phil Collin’s 25th anniversary [an assignment that Kennedy was given and he wrote about, hilariously, in Rock On].

Kennedy: Yeah. But when people say, “It’s cool that you realized it’s not for you.” It’s like, dude, I don’t have any willpower. Are you serious? I’d still be there. I’d be fat, I’d be happy, I’d be saying, “I should try to write a book someday.” I mean, the only thing that saved me is that they laid off 1,100 people. Do you ever think I would’ve walked into my awesome, cool, gorgeous boss’s corner office and said, “Listen, I kind of want to get out there and just try to do my creative things now”? There’s just no way. I would’ve been like, “No, I don’t think I need to go out there and do that. I think we got cool stuff, here. Free things. And neat food. And we all do our fun stuff. We have that meeting where you can see Central Park. That’s neat. I don’t really need to do creative things that much.” When I was walking out the door with a box full of stuff, I was like, Yeah, that’s cool, because it’s time for me to get out and do my creative stuff, anyway!

Rumpus: How long were you there?

Kennedy: A year-and-a-half. I mean, that’s when I was on staff. But I freelanced for Motown and PolyGram and Atlantic since ’98, or something crazy.

Rumpus: So, when things crashed down around you, that’s when you thought you might have a good book on your hands.

Kennedy: Oh, yeah. I’ve said it before, but I got into writing out of financial necessity, which is the biggest irony in the world. But I wrote the first book because I lost my dot-com job and I was like, I need to figure out how to get a check. And I had just done my first show at The Moth. And I was like, Well, I met some people who asked if I ever write this stuff. Maybe I should try to write it down, these stories. That’s the easy version. Of course, it was a year of trying to figure out how the hell to make it work, and I finally fell in it. And then the same thing — when I got laid off at the record company, I knew how long my severance would last and the first thing on my mind was, What happens on this day? When [the severance runs] out? I need to think of something right now. I’ve always just had that sort of blue-collar hustle, or whatever you call it. Even just growing up in the suburbs, I was always the kid who found a way to [say], “How can we make enough money to go to the beach and have lunch after we’re at the beach all day? There’s gotta be some way to do it.” Some hustle.

And so I still think like that. In New York, where it’s so expensive, if I lost my day job at the record company, what’s my go-to plan? All that writing stuff kind of worked. And I’ve said this before, but it’s kind of a weird sadness [about the record industry]. This stuff’s disappearing. I just felt this weird need to record it. This is a really important signpost in American popular culture and I don’t know if people in their living rooms realize it, but this stuff’s just going away. They’re going to make the studio where Stevie Wonder recorded Songs in the Key of Life into condos. You know? And they did. Let’s try to get as much of this stuff on paper as we can.

Rumpus: You did a really great job showing how long people can lie to themselves and others about how things are apparently just fine.

Kennedy: Yeah. Which is weird, too. I had a meeting at Sony Music recently, and I haven’t been up to anybody’s offices since 2004. I had this meeting about a TV show. They’re a music company. And we’re both sitting there going, “Is this right? We’re at a music company. Okay. This is about that TV thing, right?” But I have a friend up there who’s one of the cooler guys I met when I was working in the record business, and I was going up into the Sky Lobby at 550 Madison [the Sony Tower], and I just got up there…and it’s been awhile since I’ve been in those settings and it’s just like, Man! You still have a three-story ceiling on the marble lobby with Mies van der Rohe chairs, and this is amazing. This business made enough cash in its peak that it’s still got enough reserves to be coasting through a decade of diminishing returns. To still have a lobby like this that you have to take an elevator to get to. That’s the only structural thing that that elevator services: Sky Lobby. It’s amazing.

And then I read, two weeks after that meeting, that Sony Japan is selling that building for $700 million. They’re selling 550 Madison. I don’t know—it’s definitely this pang of sadness, of like, God, man. Really? I don’t know. I don’t have a tongue-in-cheek, ironic-guy stance on this thing falling apart anymore. And now it’s actually gotten to the point where I actually have this soft spot where I’m like, Man, don’t sell the buildings now.

Rumpus: Isn’t there a part of you that thinks they just didn’t get it? They still have the elevator to the Sky Lobby. You’d think they could cut back, even just a little bit, and put that money somewhere else. It’s interesting that the old guard is changing and they’ll not recognize it until the building is sold.

Kennedy: Pretty much. But I mean, in fairness, if you or I had a decade-and-a-half of a two-thousand percent profit-margin, or whatever it was, I think we’d probably make damn sure that that’s never going to happen again. As a matter of fact, I would just say, hang on to whatever you have. And if this thing’s sinking, we’ll get off once the water’s up to our chin. Because if there’s one chance in hell that we can ever ride that wave again, let’s try to do it. I’m sure that’s what that business was thinking.

Rumpus: And you get used to a certain way of life that’s probably difficult to give up.

Kennedy: It must be an amazing feeling to hit something out of the park that huge. And just be like, “Oh my gosh, we’re selling these things for $18.99 each? And people will buy it to get two singles? Really? And they’ll buy ten million of them? Wow.” Jesus, that must’ve been a heady thing to have been a part of. How do you walk away from that after the fact? You or I, it’s probably easy to go, “Okay, this isn’t working or that’s not working, let’s branch into that.” But when you’re coming from that era, that’s when you’re just like, I made $180 million gross per release. I don’t know…

Rumpus: Let’s talk more about your involvement with The Moth. I read an interview where you said you just lucked into it. Didn’t you call them out of the blue and the executive director called you right back, even though she was basically calling nobody back?

Kennedy: Yeah, well, it’s the second date I had with my girlfriend. She showed up with this postcard and asked, “Have you heard of this?” And I said no. It was just starting out, I think. And it was at this club on 14th. We walked in and watched this thing and I was naive enough to be like, “I’d like to call those guys on the phone and say that I’d like to try it.” I’m just some guy who worked at a dot-com job. So I just called them up and they had just gotten an office in Tribeca at that point—and I called them and was like, “Yeah, I’d like to try it. I’d like to try the thing you do.” And they’re like, “Well, who are you calling for?” They asked if I wanted to leave a message for the executive director. And at the time there were four people who worked in the office—it wasn’t what it is today. And I think the first mainstage show I did, in like ’99 or 2000, there were maybe seventy-five people there. Last night in Detroit, there were 2000.

Rumpus: Wow.

Kennedy: So, it wasn’t this thing they do all over the country and all over the world. Anyway, it was like a week and they didn’t call back, so I followed up. I was so naïve and weird. It just gets back to that thing of: how many years do you write off to learn how things work in the world? And so I would literally follow up and be like, “Hi, it’s me calling.” And they’d be like, “Who are you again?” And I’d be like, “My name’s Dan.” And then I got a call back, two weeks later or something, and it was the executive director. And one thing led to another and I sort of found myself doing this. And I found out years later that she said at the time, they were getting really, really popular. She would have tons of messages to return. She would have forty, fifty, eighty, one hundred messages a day to return. And she’s talking to her therapist and saying, “It’s overwhelming, and I can’t do a good job at it, and I’m starting to get popular, and we’re in a few magazines and everyone’s wanting to book a show, and I have a hundred messages I haven’t even returned.” And her therapist said, “Just take one call a day and return it and it will make you feel better. You don’t have to be a perfectionist and return them all in a day. Just do one little step per day.” So the one call she returned that day was mine.

Rumpus: That’s insane.

Kennedy: Just that dumb of luck. Now it’s thirteen years later and you’re doing a gig in the south of France and you’re going, Man, it’s fucking weird that she picked that one to return that day because her therapist told her to try it.

Rumpus: It’s amazing. So, with The Moth, was it a good fit for you because of the community and also because of the instant reaction that you’ll get from an audience, that you might not get when you’re writing for the page?

Kennedy: Yeah, I think both of those things. I think it was right around that time where I was just changing up a lot of stuff in my life. And New York City’s a really big city, too, and somehow just right off the bat, The Moth became…I probably don’t make friends that easily, and suddenly I had a community. It’s like the only family I have here, really. All my family’s out West, in California. And every day, it’s just amazing that I’ve met people like this all over the world. It’s pretty cool to be that far from your little apartment and have someone that you feel that close to.

Rumpus: And you said it helped you learn structure. What are your favorite Moth stories, in terms of what they do?

Kennedy: They have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Especially through hosting for the last eight or nine years—I listen to ten stories a night at every show. And even if I’m on the bill at a mainstage, telling a story, I’m still sitting down and listening to everybody else’s story, so you just reach this weird point where you realize…there was a week, not too long ago, where I realized between Seattle, Portland, Cambridge, Boston, and Seattle again, and then doing the podcast, I had listened to forty stories or something. It was like, wow, something is definitely starting to sink in about how a story works. How it works or doesn’t work. A beginning, a middle and an end, all the basic stuff that you’ve heard—but to have a front row seat to watching it work beautifully, or not work, that many times in a given month, has been a really great lesson. And also being on stage and feeling where it works and doesn’t work has been incredible.

But the biggest thing that happened to me at The Moth was the first time I ever told a story about some huge failures in my twenties, about going to Austin and trying to be a singer/songwriter and having it just blow up in my face. I couldn’t really play guitar or write a song—that was kind of the hugest problem there. And I just remember telling it onstage that night and it was getting so many laughs, and I remember thinking that it seemed like this kind of alchemy that could save your life. You could take the things that you were most ashamed of, the things you feel like the biggest loser about, and say them out loud to a bunch of people and hear people laugh. It’s kind of like rehab. There’s definitely this process of: you share the shame, you hear people laughing and identifying, and you leave that night feeling better and not so bad about yourself. And I was like, Oh, maybe I’m not such a lost cause.

Rumpus: I know that The Moth is noteless. Did you have to cultivate a good memory like you cultivated good storytelling techniques?

Kennedy: We do it in day-to-day life. When something happens in your day-to-day life that you find hilarious, or strange, or compelling, or transformative, or whatever it is, you’ll tell your girlfriend, or you’ll tell your best friend, or you’ll tell two people at work and then you’ll do that story, kind of note-for-note, the same way. If you have six friends, you can’t wait to tell all six friends about it. Have you ever noticed that thing in families—where you’ve eaten what you’re gonna eat, you’re done with dessert, you’re having coffee and everyone tells their stories? “Remember the time Dad thought he was lighting the fireworks in the street?” There’s always these greatest hits in groups of friends or family.

Rumpus: What advice would you give to somebody who’s going to present a story for The Moth?

Kennedy: I think the biggest thing is: just try to do the thing you do. When it feels like you just bumped into two friends at a bar or cafe and you have to tell them about something, I think that’s when you’re in the right area. When it feels like you’re hanging around a dinner table an hour after you’ve finished dessert with people you love, that’s probably when you’re in the right area. Tone-wise, feelings-wise. I think the worst thing you can do onstage is just kind of become the medium, the flourish of like, “Allow me to hold my hands aloft to emphasize a tale for you.” It’s just so bad.

And there’s two kisses of death: a lot of times, I see somebody go up and just sort of close their eyes and take a minute to get into a place and then open their eyes and deliver the first line. That’s always an “oh-no-no-no-no-no-just-be-yourself” type of moment. Or the other one is if they come up, and the first thing they do is take the mic off the stand and do that breezy thing where they lean on the mic stand and sort of bob their head with the microphone at chest level to start the story in a laissez-faire sort of fashion. That’s always another “oh-no.” So actually, at a certain point, five or six years ago, we used gaffer tape to tape the mic to the stand. For a while, I would announce it at the start of every show: “Remember, please keep the mic on the stand and please don’t take it off, because we’re trying to record for the radio show and the podcast, and just be yourself and stand and tell a story.” And then it just occurred to us that people would still occasionally do it. And then usually performers who were just showing up to, like, There’s a thing in town that I need to do and get on my resume. So it just to occurred to us to put four feet of gaffer tape around the mic. That saves an announcement. Perfect.

Rumpus: And what about the writing aspect of it, people specifically writing stories for The Moth? Do you encourage them to not write down every single word? Just make an overview, basically?

Kennedy: It’s people like Maggie Cino and Sarah Jenness and Catherine Burns who are really the directors when it comes to the creative side of that. But every time I work with someone on a story, it’s never, “Write this out.” It’s about, “Drop on by and we’ll run it through.” Or, “Give us a call and we’ll run it through, once.” I think that’s the biggest thing, that it should feel like one of those moments where you step out to go get coffee and this hilarious thing happens, and that first person that you have to call and be like, “Oh my god, guess what just happened. I was walking down 4th Street and all of a sudden…” You know, that’s the moment right there. Not so much like, “Allow me to craft a story about a guy I bumped into on 4th Street. Darkness was there. I am walking.”

Rumpus: I would imagine you’ve heard your fair share of that over the years. People just trying way too hard.

Kennedy: I mean, we’re all the biggest dorks at The Moth. It’s not like we’re the cool kids and we know anything that someone doesn’t know. So that’s why I think it’s particularly disenchanting. It’s not, We’re too cool for school and you’re doing it wrong. It’s more like, No, you don’t have to be like that. We’re all just hanging out. Tell your funny thing! Just be you.

Rumpus: Let’s talk about your workday. Have you set up a routine, a place where you go? Do you have certain hours that you work, or is it just all over the place?

Kennedy: It’s all over the place. I tried a lot of that stuff over twelve or thirteen years. I used to keep a space downtown, a desk over at The Writer’s Room, which is kind of like the Grotto. I tried that approach for a while, and it was pretty cool for a bit, and I think it probably jumpstarted some productivity. The ritual. Then it started feeling too cramped and dull and strange and like an office job or something. Then I tried just going through the thing of when you have a couple hours to kill in a hotel on the road, just find a pad of paper and start working on it there. And everything in between.

But you know, when I’m on it, I’m really on it. Like right now, I’m working on this script—I’m on it. I know where I have to be, by what date. I don’t care where it happens. There’s a laptop in the three or four places I could wind up sitting on my ass, killing time in this apartment. So I’m a little less like, “I have to sit in my area and do my thing.” Just open one of these things and start getting stuff down. And there’s pads of paper, and there’s slips, and there’s one big chalkboard wall here that’s got a handful of riffs that will occur to you at three in the morning when you wake up to get a drink of water. I’m just always trying to grab whatever’s around. My life is kind of erratic. I mean, I have weird little OCD rituals that I can’t live without. It’s like, No I have to wake up and walk over and get my coffee at that place. And on Sunday, we buy one of these. That’s what we do. But when it comes to writing, there’s always those writers, right? There’s always those writers who are like, It’s real simple.

Rumpus: Like John Grisham. Grisham was on NPR a while ago saying, “Yeah, I try to write a novel every six months.”

Kennedy: But just because you can, should you? I’m sure he’s a nice guy, or whatever, but I don’t know. Maybe we all could be writing a novel every month. But is that really a good idea? I don’t know.

Rumpus: Do you have any of that impulse in you at all? Where things need to get done and you can’t move on to other things until they’re finished? That impulse that makes some writers stay at their desk until they have their five-thousand words, precisely ordered?

Kennedy: I remember one time when I had to drop something in the mail on a Sunday. My friend and I were hanging out, and he was like, “Why don’t you just do it tomorrow? On Monday?” And I was like, “No, I have to do it right now.” And he said, “Well, if you do it tomorrow, you can get going right now and still make it to the show.” And I was like, “I have to do one thing! I have to drop it in the mail and I need to do it today. Okay?” And he was like, “I…guess. If that makes you feel better. It’s literally not going anywhere until tomorrow, but if you are literally going to feel better, like you did something that had to be done and all of a sudden, things are right in your world because you dropped something over at the post office in the mail on a Sunday, so it can just sit there for twenty-four hours, then I guess let’s do it.”

I remember thinking that that was the biggest insight for me. And I think that’s how I feel about…I guess, if  you want to get those three-thousand words by the time you have your fourth cup of coffee and then you go out into the world, you know—terrific, if that makes you feel better. Of course, they may or may not go anywhere. Maybe there are people who are so gifted and feel the urgency of having that sort of laid out in front of them. But I definitely have to back my way into it.

Rumpus: Do you know what you’re going to be working on that day? Like, when you sit down at one of your numerous open laptops in your apartment, do you say, “Today is a scriptwriting day”? Or are you working on a script and all of a sudden you’re writing a McSweeney’s piece?

Kennedy: Almost every one of those McSweeney’s pieces comes from—I’m supposed to be doing something else and, a lot of times, it comes from, like, I’m feeling kind of sad and weird and I want to write something weird and funny, so I don’t feel sad. Or it comes from having to blow off steam because you’re doing that thing, you’re trying to be that person who shows up and gets X amount of work done by X hour, and you realize you literally spent the last two-and-a-half hours staring at Twitter and seeing if there’s any cool, old Jeeps on eBay. You know? And you’re like, Okay, it’s now one o’clock. You’ve been sitting in this chair in the kitchen for three hours now. And at that point, it’s just fun to remember what makes it fun and to go, “What if somebody had to give a thank you speech to a poetry class, but it’s really kind of fucking bitter.” And you just think, Yeah, let’s do that. That’s the moment you unplug the laptop and take it off the charger and move it over to the couch and get a snack from the kitchen. Like, all of a sudden, it becomes fun. Ten seconds ago, you were the Nicolas Cage character in Adaptation, sitting in a chair, staring at a screen, going, “I’m going bald. Maybe I should just quit trying to fool everybody. Who am I fooling? I need to lose weight.” You know, you’re doing that for three hours, and then the second you have this thing of, I just want to fuck around for a minute and do something that’s fun, even though I probably shouldn’t right now. That’s when it becomes…like, oh, now you’re picking up the computer and going over to the couch instead of at the table. Now you’re going into the kitchen, making another cup of coffee. Now you’re kind of excited. You know?

Rumpus: Yeah. And it’ll be fun and funny and you’ll have an audience. Also, you’ll probably get through the piece that day, right? With the longer stuff, everything about that is the opposite.

Kennedy: Yeah. And first and foremost, it just makes you feel better. Don’t you have to do that? You have to remind yourself of that thing of, I remember when this was fun. Remember the thing that got you into it. Those days where you would cut school and just write insane, weird shit and give it to your friends, and you guys would crack up. You know what I mean? That’s really where it started: where you get to the point where you have a script that’s due by a certain time—that’s not to say that’s not fun and that’s not exciting, because it is—but at the same point, I have to sit in this chair like a studious, industrious person for three hours, and I’m getting absolutely nothing done. What if I kind of cut class and write some smart-ass thing over here on the side? And then you come back to it and you’re stoked. You’re like, Now I totally can face this act break and figure out where I’m going again.

Rumpus: It’s almost like you just have to be flexible and patient and if it’s not coming, do something else and eventually it’ll work out.

Kennedy: Yeah, or do that thing where you go, No dammit. You will come now. You will come and there, I have fulfilled my goal and I’m off to Whole Foods. Yay!

Rumpus: It sounds like it’s still fun. It definitely seems like you’ve found something that you really enjoy, in all its different forms.

Kennedy: Yeah. It still feels like a secret. That’s been one of my biggest problems. It still feels like something I’m not really allowed to be doing. It takes me so long to get things done, but I still think I have this idea like, I don’t think we’re allowed to be doing this funny, smart-ass stuff. I don’t think we’re allowed to make smart-ass stuff, because we’re gonna get kicked out of class. I think work is supposed to be somewhat miserable, so this probably isn’t work.

Rumpus: Right. Yet they’re publishing it and encouraging you to do more.

Kennedy: Yes. Hmm.

Rumpus: And do you know immediately when a humor piece is working? Do you ever make yourself laugh with this stuff?

Kennedy: The only time it sucks is when you’re trying to settle a score. Just forget it, if that’s what’s going on. If I’m using my writing as Yelp, essentially, then it sucks, every time. Thank god I’m smart enough to…I’ll be writing and be like, “Ha ha ha, this will be really funny.” Then it’s like, Eh, maybe put that in a folder because you’re just being a dick about what happened to you over at the store. You know? There have definitely been a couple things like that, where I’m trying to settle some petty score with a friend. You’re like, That’s cool. I’ll just write a fictionalized humor piece called, “He Is a Jerk Because He Controls All the Plans No Matter What We’re Doing and No Matter How Many of Our Friends Are Involved.” It just sucks. But other than that, if that’s not happening, then it’s fine.

Rumpus: In both of your nonfiction books, short humor pieces will appear in the middle of stories or between chapters. I find that really cool and fun to read and it’s a nice break from the longer chapters. Does that come from your extensive background of writing short pieces for the Internet?

Kennedy: I think it became a habit over the years of writing on the McSweeney’s site and stuff like that. Now I hear certain things, or look at a really bad menu or something, and I’ll go, “Could there possibly be any less attractive options for food on this menu? Well, what would those be? Less attractive options for lunch on this menu.” I think it’s a nervous tic. So if you’re writing a story, like in Rock On, I’d just get to those points where it’s like, What other lame things could they possibly be telling us right now? And then you list them out. What would that list be?

Rumpus: So overall, it sounds like things are going really well.

Kennedy: Uh, I think so. I don’t know. Yeah. I’m always the last to know and I never believe it, anyway.

Rumpus: Right. And saying it’s going well is always one of those things you don’t want to say out loud.

Kennedy: Yeah, exactly. You know you’re going to be a Paul Giamatti character in two weeks, remembering when you said it was going great. “Remember when I was talking with Jory and I was like, ‘Things are really awesome!’ Now I’m just soaking wet from the rain and I’m just sitting in this Chinese place, watching that girl regard me with disdain.”

Rumpus: Right. Maybe I’ll check back in two weeks to see if you need any assistance. So, after we get off the phone, what will you do? Am I calling right in the middle of a workday? Or is this a non-writing day?

Kennedy: Yeah, this is one of those got-back-into-town-early-in-the-morning-and-came-to-the-apartment-and-eat-candy days. I spend entirely too much time in my day-to-day life going, Fuck it, this is what people do, right? I mean, I’m doing what people do.

Rumpus: Justifying everything. I’m the same way. Right before this interview, I went downstairs to a café and bought a bag of Snackimals, which is a cookie that they mostly sell to four-year-olds. And I just sat there and stared out the window and ate the cookies and thought, It’s completely fine that I’m the only adult in this building eating Snackimals right now.

Kennedy: That’s so much smarter than me. I had lunch with a friend and I fully just took a hard left and went down the old, You know, let’s get some cake. I talk to Jory in twenty minutes…let’s get some fucking carrot cake and maybe a chocolate chip cookie. Or maybe both kinds of cake that they make there. Those are both good. But my idea of being responsible is that I turned it into two packs of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and a Ritter Sport.

Rumpus: That’s the great thing about deciding you’re going to eat cake—whatever you get that’s not cake is going to be better for you and you’ll ultimately feel better about yourself.

Kennedy: You’re right. It’s not even a dessert. It’s just a massive justification tool. I don’t even like cake. I’d just like to be able to stab a homeless person and go, Well, at least I didn’t eat cake.

Rumpus: Yeah, I think my rule of thumb with cake is generally wait until after 5 p.m. or so.

Kennedy: But see, they say that’s actually the first sign of the problem, living like you’re living. Instead of the way I do it, which I don’t think about it. You’ve already got a system and rules and shit. That’s like those people who go to a casino and they’re like, “I never take out more than $500 before 7 p.m.” Once all that shit starts, you’re already on the wrong path.

Rumpus: I hear you. So, other than your obvious problems with cake, it seems like things are going well. You have a novel and books and you’re working on a script and you have tons of great work online. Do you feel like you’re becoming more ambitious with what you want to tackle next? Do you have more novels in you? Or are you always trying to vary it up and see how many different types of mediums you can write in?

Kennedy: I don’t know. I’m kind of honestly a little bit surprised by it all. If I had a plan, that would be terrific. I’m not against having a plan. I’m open to having a plan. I don’t seem to have one. But none of this stuff is what I planned, you know. If I would’ve got what I wanted, I would’ve been so sorry by now. I just wanted to be the keyboard player in Billy Idol’s band, or something.

Rumpus: Right.

Kennedy: You know, I still do stuff where I’m like, How did I end up doing this? Why are young people asking me for advice? Why am I standing in a little corridor in a back of a theater, having someone go, “How do I get to do this?” Do what? Seriously, I just patched this stuff together out of tape and wire.

The biggest thing I think, as much as I’ve loved comedy and movies and TV, I’ve somehow not done a ton of that stuff. I’ve somehow been slow to getting around to doing it. So that’s why, between now and when the book is out, I want to focus on doing more live stuff and, just continue talking with these folks who are cool enough to have called from out West. And try to be a bit more honest and show up and try to do work. I think I’ve always felt like I’d be made fun of, or something, if I did admit that I don’t watch Swedish art films. I love Ghostbusters, I love Fletch, I love Meet the Parents, I love Starsky & Hutch, I love Wedding Crashers, and I think I’ve always felt like everyone in this sort of dot-org/podcast/dot-net scene would like make fun of me for loving that stuff, so I think I’ve kept it under my hat for a long time. So I’m trying to be a little more honest about that stuff now. It kind of feels like when I hid Purple Rain behind the Nick Cave records forever, and all of a sudden, I was so bitter at that turn that alternative rock made at one point where it was cool to like pop music. I was upset with myself for having hidden them. And there were three by Genesis or a Rush album in my stacks of stuff when it was cool to be listening to Sonic Youth. I would’ve been mortified. And so, I just felt like I hid that part of myself, musically. So when it became cool for people to be like, “Oh yeah, I totally like Rush!” And I was like, “What? A guy from The Pixies said we could like that?” So I’m trying to do that with writing now, just be open and talking to people who are interested in having me work on that stuff, and not feel bashful about it. Still, you can hear the trepidation in my voice when I’m like, “Sorry if it’s not cool, but I like it.”

Rumpus: And you’ll just keep moving forward.

Kennedy: Move forward. Yeah. I would love to always be writing stuff on the McSweeney’s site. And I love writing books and I want to do that. But also, I’ve completely hidden this other stuff under the bed and I’m slowly starting to suspect that hasn’t been necessary.

Rumpus: Well, this will be the peg of this whole interview, then—the stuff that you’ve been hiding under the bed is finally coming out.

Kennedy: Excellent.

***

Subscribe to The Moth Podcast here.

Read Dan Kennedy’s McSweeney’s Internet Tendency writing here.

Pre-order American Spirit here.

***

First and second photographs of Dan Kennedy © 2013 and 2009 by Maria Lilja.

Third photograph of Dan Kennedy, at The Moth © by Allison Evans.

Fourth photograph of Dan Kennedy © 2010 by Bao Nguyen

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• The Rumpus Interview with Peter Aguero
• Notable New York: 5/20-5/26
• The Rumpus Interview with Sandra Bernhard

Cartoonist Natalie Dee’s eponymous website, NatalieDee.Com, has consistently ranked among the most highly trafficked comic sites on the Internet since its debut. Her comic panels are equally hilarious and dark, featuring all manner of talking creatures, personified objects, and, occasionally, a likeness of Natalie herself.

Characters are often despondent, depressed, and brutally honest about life and, equally as often, death. The style is bright and lively, an appealing and deliberate contrast to the nihilistic tone.

Natalie Dee—”Dee” is a pen name—grew up in Marion, Ohio, a gifted artist from the start. She concedes, however, that paper was scarce in her home, an overlooked, unnecessary expenditure, so Natalie often resorted to tearing end-pages out of books on which to draw. Her single-parent family struggled financially throughout her childhood, so Natalie worked assorted jobs, beginning at age eleven. These formative experiences—having to work during school vacations, while her friends were out playing—strongly influenced her work ethic into adulthood. In a stroke of prescience, Natalie was hired as a graphic designer for an apparel company when she was just fifteen, where she first got to experiment with Photoshop, the program she now uses to create her comics. She also gained experience designing t-shirts, which would come in handy later on.

At first, her website was just a hobby, something to update whenever she could get online. (She was an online personality, in fact, since before she owned a computer. She would hand-draw comics and physically mail them away to be scanned in.) As her site gained traction, though, Natalie quit her day job and invested in the venture full-time. These days, it’s her livelihood. By 2003, NatalieDee.com was being updated on weekdays. It progressed to daily updates—that is, seven days a week—in 2005, a relentless work schedule that the artist imposed on herself. Trace it back to that work ethic. She has created around 3,000 comics thus far, generally working two months in advance, and has never missed a deadline, even when she had complications with her pregnancy in 2008, nearly dying in the hospital.

Because of her desire to take full advantage of her unique situation of being able to work from home—and to satisfy an admittedly short attention span—Natalie immersed herself in a number of side projects, unwilling and/or unable to focus on just one thing. She collaborates on a second comic called Married to the Sea, started a cosmetics business, pens a blog, and has written a regular advice column, all the while releasing a consistently funny, extremely popular daily comic. She has an extensive fan-base that circulates her work around the Internet and also helps her keep track of copycats. (Natalie Dee and I were first in touch in 2007—as it happens, we both make t-shirts and sell them online, and we discovered that an Australian company had been ripping us off. We became online commiserates in our battle against Australia.)

Natalie’s comics look like this:

And this:

And this:

As mentioned, there are thousands more where that came from. A few will be scattered throughout this interview…and the rest you can peruse in your leisure.

It’s difficult to write a full bio of Natalie Dee without mentioning her husband Drew, an equally prolific cartoonist and web presence, best known for his daily comic Toothpaste For Dinner. Natalie and Drew formed the company Sharing Machine, an umbrella to their numerous products, including their bread and butter: t-shirts. Over the years, Natalie estimates that the two of them personally shipped upwards of 100,000 shirts featuring their designs to every country that receives mail, sometimes hundreds of shirts in a day. Only recently did they employ a warehouse to stock and ship for them, having run out of storage space in their house with the addition of a daughter.

For this interview, I spoke to Natalie Dee by phone for nearly three hours. She opened by telling me that she wasn’t a huge fan of interviews and preferred to do them—if she had to—by e-mail. But it didn’t take long for her to open up, as you’ll see. She came across as funny, quick, outspoken, thoughtful and opinionated. When I first started transcribing this piece, I designated laughter throughout our conversation with the ubiquitous[laughter] brackets, but quickly realized that I would have to add those brackets every tenth line or so. And so [laughter] was, regrettably, omitted. For the record: Natalie Dee likes to laugh and it’s contagious.

She can also rant with the best of them, whether she’s talking about her aforementioned work ethic, the state of the Internet, her struggles with chronic depression, occasionally creepy fans, being a female cartoonist in a profession dominated by men, or the world at large. She’s a force. Talking to her makes you want to work harder. She’s a great, inspiring conversationalist with a unconventional story.

Natalie Dee: In terms of just being prolific…previously, I had a job doing work with people who had worker’s comp injuries and pharmaceutical stuff, and I was doing my site and it was not as often as I do now. At some point, I quit my job because my site was doing okay. I mean, it wasn’t enough for me to live off of at that point, but it was okay enough that I could quit my job and look for a new job. So, once I quit my job, I just started treating my site like it was my job. I just kind of thought to myself that if I was expecting to make enough money making comics to hold me over to my next job, that I should put more into it. And the more I put into it, the more successful it was. I think that a lot of people see me posting every day as something that is Herculean, but I think that’s kind of the standard when it comes to comics. Anybody who makes comics, who doesn’t do it online, I think they do it at the same clip. Right?

Rumpus: Newspaper comics that are published seven days a week, that kind of thing.

Dee: Yeah. And so I just kind of look at it like it’s my job. I treat it like it’s my job. I probably have closer to 3,000 at this point.

Rumpus: I tried to count them, but I only got back so far.

Dee: There’s a lot of them. I mean, I have a lot on there and I think that having that many on there kind of gives me more room to do different stuff. By the same token, it kind of makes the topics a little more sporadic, just because there’s so much.

Rumpus: Do you look back on them at all?

Dee: I do. I will look back at recent months when I’m working to make sure that I’m not repeating myself too much. And I will look back on previous years to see if there was anything that I did that maybe, in hindsight, I didn’t go all the way with. So I’ll kind of revisit them, just in the interest of being consistent. I think that a lot of times when I look back on them, though, I have a strange relationship with them. I think other people look at it and see what’s on the site, but when I look at it, I’m usually looking at it through a lens of the stuff that was going on at the time. I can look at it and tell if I was having a particularly shitty time, or if other stuff was going on. So I kind of view it through a more critical lens. I can see when I wasn’t paying attention. I have a tendency to look at stuff like that.

Rumpus: Are you saying that when you look at a particular comic, it’ll remind you of where you were and what you were thinking when you wrote it? Or are you talking specifically about the comics where you’ve inserted yourself into the panels?

Dee: There’s this series—maybe in the beginning of 2008, end of 2007—where it’s probably one of my favorite times of the comic. The comics, in that particular era, I thought were good when I made them and when I go back to them, I still think they’re good. But the time directly after that, between the summer and fall of 2008, I can tell that it’s not how I would’ve wanted it to be, necessarily. That was when I was pregnant and I wasn’t telling anybody about it. I was really sick and having all kinds of problems, and trying to work up enough back-catalogue so I would be able to take leave. So I can see, looking at it, that it’s not quite as on-point as I would’ve liked. That’s when I go back and see if there’s anything that I didn’t go all the way with. I will look back there and see if I had any ideas that just kind of farted out, instead of getting my full attention. It goes both ways.

Rumpus: I remember reading in an interview you said you wish people would notice how much work you put into your comics. Do you still feel that way?

Dee: I don’t feel put upon by people not noticing it, because obviously they’re not viewing it in the same way that I am. I would prefer if what I liked about what I do was more similar to what other people liked about it, but I am not going to complain, because I understand that my situation in being able to make the kind of art I do and make a living at it is so lucky and it’s such a privilege that I’m not going to complain about why people like my stuff.

Rumpus: In terms of cartoonists, do you feel like women are still in the minority? You’re a really prominent cartoonist, but the field seems kind of dominated by guys, right?

Dee: I will tell you a story, Jory, and you are going to hate it.

Rumpus: Oh really?

Dee: Are you ready for it?

Rumpus: I’m ready.

Dee: Okay. Here’s my story with comics: I was raised by a single mother, and so I never had any ideas in my head about stuff that women could or couldn’t do. Like, if women can’t do something, that means that it’s not gonna get done and they’re fucked, right? If you can’t do it yourself, you’re fucked. I could do anything. There’s nothing I couldn’t do, and I dare anybody to tell me I can’t do it.

So, when I was younger, there was a comic book store in the city that I lived in. And my friend’s parents owned the comic book store. Her mom was always the one at the comic book store. I would go and hang out with her mom. I just loved her, I thought she was great. I would go down there all the time after school. It was a small town and no one cared about indie comics, but she would always get stuff for me, because she knew that I liked it. And so I was always on top of all the comics, which was great. It was my jam. And I was able to get what I wanted instead of having to read kiddie superhero shit. And so that was my exposure to comics. It wasn’t threatening, because it was just me and my friend’s mom. And we would sit there and talk about comics. And she would order stuff and say, “I thought you’d like this.” And I’d get it and bring it home and read it. And I’d come back and she’d find something else that she thought I would like.

So then I moved from Marion to Columbus, and I was still into comics. There’s a lot more comic book stores here, but it wasn’t women who were working at the comic book stores. It didn’t even occur to me that I’d go to a comic book store and just feel gross, but you could feel people staring at you. It’s sick. This was in the late ’90s/early 2000s. I could feel people staring at me. I’d go through the door and a door chime would ring when you’d walk in, and you could almost hear everyone’s whiplash. “Oh, there’s a chick in the comic book store!” And after a few times, it just made me feel so gross that I stopped. I just didn’t do it. I was tired of guys looking over my shoulder and seeing what I was getting. “You’re getting what I’m getting!” Or being judgmental about what I was getting. So I stopped going to the comic book store. I’d do other stuff. You know, I’d order stuff online if I wanted to read comics.

Rumpus: Wow.

Dee: I started doing my own stuff, and it wasn’t comics necessarily. I was drawing pictures. And it was like cutesy stuff, when I first started out, it was real cutesy stuff. It was one-shot, one-panel comics. Right? And it kind of evolved into something where it resembled comics.

So, I had a Wikipedia page. Toothpaste For Dinner had a Wikipedia page. Married to the Sea had a Wikipedia page. Drew’s defunct industrial act had a page…and my Wikipedia page got deleted because I wasn’t notable. They put me as a footnote on the Married to the Sea Wikipedia page, even though I was getting more traffic than any of those sites. And nobody ever said anything, no one ever mentioned me. At the height of my site—I was probably one of the top five [web cartoonists online] in terms of traffic—and no one would even acknowledge that I was there.

Rumpus: That’s insane.

Dee: And I don’t care, really. You know what I’m saying? I’m making a living. I have a house. I’m doing my thing. I know I don’t need other people’s approval. But it is definitely a bro scene. They definitely don’t want chicks coming to the party. If you’ve read other interviews with me, I’ve mentioned it before. It is definitely a clubhouse and they’re all in there talking about which Legend of Zelda cartoon they’re going to draw tomorrow. You know the bullshit those dudes do, right? “I made a comic about a video game with Chewbacca in it!” You didn’t fucking make Chewbacca! Quit drawing Star Wars comics! Anyway, they’re like, “No girls.” Periodically there will come a girl who’s doing webcomics, but either she can’t hang, she gets overwhelmed and she can’t update regularly, or she immediately gets into this tokenism, where she goes and tries to rub elbows with these dudes and they just tokenize her. They’re like, “Here’s the girl webcomic.” It’s embarrassing. I don’t want any part of it.

And I think, to a certain extent, I’ve had issues with people objectifying me. I’m not, like, anything special. But I have had people saying gross shit about me. I’ve had people e-mailing me about my tits. Gross stuff. The only time I’ve ever seen another comic mention me is when some dude made a comic and the gist of the comic was, “Webcomics don’t look how they draw themselves to look, so-and-so draws himself like this but he looks like this! And Natalie Dee draws herself like a stick figure, but she’s a fox.” For years, I never posted pics of myself anywhere, and people would say things like, “Oh, she doesn’t post pics because she’s fat and she’s ugly and she probably is covered in zits and real nasty.” Then, when I did post a pic, it was a flood of people saying really disgusting things to me and accusing me of being a cam-whore and all that. There’s no way to have it be okay.

Rumpus: I don’t know about the fans, but do you feel like the other web cartoonists use you as a target because they’re not happy that you’re simply funnier than they are? Do you feel like that’s an issue?

Dee: It might be an issue. I don’t sit around thinking I’m great. In general, I’m like, “I suck.” You know? But I think there’s probably a level of honesty and a level of humor in my stuff that they can’t get to because they’re trying so hard to not be honest about themselves. And they will never get over the hump, as long as they can’t be honest about themselves. And maybe that threatens them. Maybe the amount of traffic I get without involving myself with the scene threatens them. I don’t know. Maybe it’s that most of the people making comics are on that weird nerd shit, where all they talk about is fucking video games and shit like that, and there aren’t female characters that aren’t inserted in a really sloppy, heavy-handed way. Like, they’ve never drawn anything in great detail in their comics, right? They don’t have fucking any handle on perspective or anything, but when they have a female character, her tits are fucking perfect. They’re suddenly the Rembrandt of titties. She’s still all fucking wall-eyed and shit, and she’s just in the panel to roll her eyes and be like, “Oh, you guys are crazy!” and then fucking get out. Right? That’s the female character they have. Maybe they’re mad about the traffic I get because I’m not threatening to women, and there’s more women online than men.

Rumpus: Do you feel like that has driven you? That you had to prove yourself a little more because of that whole scene? Do you feel like that’s made you even more adamant about, This is what I do, this is my work ethic, I’m going to kill it every day.

Dee: Well, my work ethic is always the same, regardless. I don’t see myself as being in competition with people. They are not making my site, and I’m not gonna be threatened by them doing their site well. It doesn’t affect my work ethic, because I’m not in competition. Like, I’m not going to be mad at you for getting a manager position at Subway when I’m still frying fries at McDonald’s. It’s not the same thing, we’re not working at the same place, and so there’s no reason for competition. So I don’t think about them. I don’t participate. I don’t do anything, except mind my own business.

Rumpus: It sounds really annoying, honestly. Because for the most part your site is entirely content. Nobody’s even in the same room. It’s crazy there’s still that gender discrepancy.

Dee: Well, my site isn’t about being a chick. I don’t talk about chick shit. You know? I am a lady and I have lady friends and we do lady shit, but that’s not all I have going for me. I’m not sitting here thinking about my period all the fucking time. I’m not Cathy.

If anyone ever tells you there’s not sexism in comics, they’re lying to you. Because that’s the only place I’ve ever experienced sexism in my entire life. [On Wikipedia] they put me as a footnote in Married to the Sea. I’m not “notable.” I don’t care, I don’t make money off a Wikipedia page. But it just really illustrated to me how people feel about it. I think it’s kind of played into stuff I’m doing on the side, because I’m doing my blog about cosmetics and stuff. And people initially—if they think about it—they’re like, “Why would you do that? That’s just dumb chick stuff.” But I wanted to have something where it was a woman writing about women’s interests and not making it stupid. Because you have a choice when you’re a lady: you can either be smart and homely, or you can take care of yourself and be fancy and dumb. That’s the choice. But that whole thing lit a fire under my ass and—as I get older—I just get fancier and fancier. Because I’m like, You know what? If it bothers them, I want them to fuckin’ know a girl brought it. If you think I can’t do it, I’m going to make sure you know I did it. I’m not going to go up in some fucking corduroys and some kind of fucking homely, mousy haircut because it’s not threatening or whatever. If it’s going to be an issue, I’m going to make sure you know that I’m a bad bitch. Too bad.

Rumpus: You’ve said that your site is about holding up a mirror to society and showing how disappointing it is. Do you still feel that way?

Dee: Oh yeah, absolutely, absolutely, I still feel that way. Because I think that everything when I first started, it was fun; the first comics on my site aren’t even comics. There weren’t webcomics. No one was talking about webcomics. There wasn’t MySpace. Not even blogs. I remember making comics so long ago where I was making of fun of people calling these things “blogs” because I thought the word was so dumb. Because it was new. So, I think I got into it at a time when it was different. Aside from that, as my site was picking up steam and I was starting to focus more on it, it seemed like the United States in general was taking a really shitty, dark turn. It was right after 9/11 and all this other stuff. And all of the blind patriotism was going on. And we’re invading Iraq. And I’m sitting there trying to work and watching Nick Berg get his head cut off.

I think that that kind of real heavy, dark negativity kind of influenced my site in a way. It was an issue for me then, to get into a jokey mindset when all that ill stuff was happening, so I had to find a way to make it work. I mean, I was not raised in an environment where everything was cool. You know? And I think my upbringing was a lot different than a lot of Internet college-educated liberals and so I think I came into it, anyway, with a little bit more realism than a lot of people my age have toward stuff in general. I am liberal, I am a Democrat, but I can see stuff that they do that is the same as the stuff right-wing people do. I don’t think anybody is perfect. And so I think I’m able to hand it out everywhere. Just like, liberals talking about Republicans hating blacks and hating women. But at the same time, a lot of the liberal media will talk about people in a way that’s really classist. I don’t put blinders up just because I feel like I’m a part of something.

Rumpus: I remember you said that being on the Internet, you don’t have to worry about getting approval from some editor somewhere, or worry about distributing your stuff. It’s immediately global.

Dee: Oh, yeah, absolutely. There’s a lot of stuff that I’ve made that no editor in the world would touch with a ten-foot pole. I’ve done spec work, though. I will be honest: I really like doing spec work. I like just making bullshit and squaring it up, slapping a logo on it and then dusting my hands off. I’ve joked with Drew before that if I didn’t do this anymore, I might work for Valpak, in Columbus, and just make all those shitty coupons. Because I mean, it is what it is. What’s the difference between me drawing something and me making a car wash coupon? There is no difference. More people would probably see the car wash coupon and it would actually be useful in some way.

Rumpus: You’d still get to see it published and distributed and read.

Dee: Yeah, making it is making it. I mean, I have done a lot. I’ve worked since I was eleven and I’ve done work that was really horrible. Like, when I was in middle school, I had to go get documents, because I was too young to work, but I had to go and work in the summertime. Everyone would leave on the last day of school and I would come back, the next day, and clean all the graffiti up and scrub the desks and wax everything. And I was eleven or twelve years old, and my hands were petrified with wax and my knuckles are cracking and bleeding and shit. That is way worse than making comics. You know what I’m saying? And coming back the first day of school, after you’re done cleaning the whole thing, and seeing your friend walk down the hallway with a pencil and just dragging a pencil on the wall the whole way down. I mean, I’m not going to complain about making art for a living. It’s probably part of the reason I’m so prolific. If I’m not sweating, I’m not convinced I’m working enough.

Rumpus: You were always really enterprising, huh? Were you always hitting the pavement and getting products out?

Dee: Yeah. I started working when I was really young because I had a lot of sisters. My mom was single. So it was kind of expected that once we were able to work, we had to take care of ourselves. And so I was always working. I was cleaning the school and working at restaurants and working at the library and making t-shirts and watching people’s kids and…everything. Like, I always, always, always worked.

Rumpus: After all that work, it seems like it would take a huge amount of confidence to finally quit those day jobs and just make art for a living.

Dee: Well, I didn’t quit my job thinking that I was going to make a living off my website. It was just a happy coincidence that when I invested more time into it, things started taking off in a way that I was able to procrastinate on finding a new job, longer and longer and longer. And even now, it’s been a really long time that I’ve been working online and making my living online, but I don’t feel entitled to it. I keep good track of what’s going on and, if I have to get a job, I’m not going to be sad about it. Because who else got to do what I got to do? I don’t feel entitled to anything.

Rumpus: So you come from pretty humble roots.

Dee: Oh, absolutely. I mean, I grew up in Marion, Ohio, which is north of Columbus, but it’s a really small town. No one is educated, no one has money. It’s a very Appalachian scene. There was a business there called the Power Shovel, which was a factory that made giant diggers and crawlers, those big trucks that take the shuttle to the launch pad. But when they opened, there wasn’t a ton of people in Marion to work there. And so, a lot of people came up from Appalachia to work there. Then the Power Shovel closed and now they are on some Rust Belt shit.

So the scene is rough. Only ten percent of people there have a college degree, and a quarter of them live in poverty, and everyone is blue collar. Or not even blue collar. Like, no collar. I was not originally from Marion, but I grew up there, so a lot of my friends are from there, and I graduated high school there. So I’m used to working-class people. And I think that feeds into me thinking that a lot of people online are kind of frivolous, or something. And Drew, also, his family is Appalachian. So we both know what it is actually like to work. When I see somebody who has a webcomic and I go to their site and their site says, “I had to go to the dentist today. No comic,” it definitely colors how I feel about their work ethic. And there are definitely people who are like, “Oh, I don’t have a new comic. I couldn’t think of anything.” Fucking do your fucking comic. No one gets to do comics. No one gets to do comics! Just shut the fuck up and do your comic. There’s no excuse. There’s no excuse. If people want to come to my site and look at my comics, there is always a comic. If I know I have to go to the doctor tomorrow, I’m going to make sure I already have tomorrow’s comic done. I’m going to go and I’m not even going to tell anybody about it, because it’s not people’s business, and they don’t care if I need to get a rash checked out or something.

Rumpus: Right. Like when you were pregnant.

Dee: Oh yeah. And you know what—I almost died when I had my daughter. I was in the hospital for a week. I had preeclampsia really bad. I was going into organ failure. I had an emergency C-section where I got cut twice, in the shape of an anchor, and my daughter was premature, and I didn’t miss a goddamn comic. Not even fucking one. No one even knew I was fucking pregnant. Because I wasn’t trying to take this project I had for so many years and turn it into a mommy blog. I have a daughter and I love her and I take care of her, but she’s not content for my site. And so I don’t want people to think about it like that. So I didn’t say anything. I didn’t tell anybody I was pregnant, and I never missed a fucking comic. Not one. Not one.

Rumpus: When you were pregnant, how long did it take to make a backlog? Are you always working four-to-six weeks ahead?

Dee: I work pretty far ahead. And I just did double-time. And obviously, I didn’t work as far in advance as I would have liked, because I didn’t know I was going to get so sick, and I didn’t know my daughter was going to be premature. I thought I was going to have another couple months to do more comics. As soon as I found out I was pregnant, I started double-timing it, because I knew I was not going to be up to it.

So, I had, like, six weeks extra. I had the month that I had just taken care of and then I had six weeks extra. And so my daughter was born in the beginning of October, and I had to go back to making comics in November. I had it dropped in my lap that I wasn’t going to have as much time as I had thought. I only had a couple weeks after I was discharged before I had to start making comics again, so that was really hard. And that’s what I’m thinking about when I was talking about looking back on my stuff and seeing that some stuff isn’t as good as I would’ve liked. I can see where I was not mentally there, I was not firing on all my cylinders. But I still went. I still fucking did my shit. People who wanted to read my site wanted to read my site, not hear me moan and call it off for a month.

It’s just—I don’t understand people with no work ethic when they have such an amazing opportunity to do something that is fun, that they love. Go make those goddamn comics.

Rumpus: I don’t know if this is accurate, but I would imagine that you’re the only one who noticed a discrepancy in the quality of the comics at that time. You’re your harshest critic, right? Did anybody else notice?

Dee: Oh, no, I don’t think that they would. I mean, I was telling you before—what I like most about my stuff is different than what other people like. And so I don’t think that people notice when there’s a discrepancy, but I notice when there’s not as many that month that I liked. I’ve had people write me and say, “You’re on a roll!” when I definitely was not feeling like I was on a roll, and I’ve had people write me and tell me I’m slipping when I am making a ton of stuff that I’m really digging.

Rumpus: Going back to that period at the beginning of 2008 that you were happy with: what appealed to you about that period, versus the next phase where you were just trying to build up a backlog?

Dee: The stuff I like is weird and dark, and the stuff other people like has a sillier slant to it. I know that you do stuff online, so maybe you feel the same way about this—I have my ideas of what I like the most about what I do. And when I look back at the stuff that I like the most, it is not the stuff that other people like. I have to kind of balance it, in order to make myself happy, but then also not make people drop me.

Rumpus: And can you say what it is that you like about it, exactly?

Dee: Well my experience is in art. When I was a kid, I was real involved in art stuff. I went to college for art stuff, and then I think I got kind of disillusioned with some things and kind of divorced myself from fine arts and professional arts, just because I am a little bit misanthropic and I don’t like a lot of the snootiness that goes around with it. And so when I started my comic, it wasn’t something that I was doing with an eye towards it being professional. I was dating someone and we just drew pictures, and I put them online because it just seemed like somewhere to me, like a shoebox to put ‘em in. And so, when I first started out, I didn’t have any grand designs. It was just something I was doing for fun. And I ended up getting into a situation where people liked it a whole lot, so I kept on doing it. But stylistically, it maybe wasn’t something I would have done originally.

So when I think about what I like the most—and most of them are from the last five years or so—I’ve been a little bit more comfortable with the style that I started with, but also kind of having a lot more drawing in it. There’s a little bit more attention to detail. I will spend considerably more time on some pieces. If you look over my comics, sometimes the drawing is pretty quick. But other ones I draw, I will spend a really long time on it. I personally like the ones where it is a little bit more detailed, because I think the kind of childish drawing quality, combined with elements that are a lot more realistic. Like, I really get down and draw it to the very, very tiniest detail. I like that. And so that’s the stuff I like the most. But people usually like the shit jokes the best.

Rumpus: And when did you start occasionally inserting yourself as the protagonist? Was that something you were doing pretty early on?

Dee: I think that the protagonist in my comic is loosely based off of me, but is not me. Like, it’s as much me as anything else I write. Obviously, I can’t completely get out of my head, so there’s always going to be a little bit of me in anything I do. It was always like a very slight me quality to the character. I started really clearly trying to make myself a different character, when people started to blur the line a little bit too much, or they didn’t really understand that I wasn’t the same person that was on my site. People have ideas about how I am that aren’t accurate. And they talk to me in a way like they think I’m a cartoon. That’s not really the case. I make comics, but that is not my whole life. So now, when I am making a comic that is definitely about me, I make it look more like me. It’s just a way of further marking the difference between what people see on a regular basis and how that is a character that I made. And I’m somebody different than that.

Rumpus: Right. And it sounds like, based on what I’ve read and what you’ve told me, that there’s a part of you that really enjoys not sharing everything about your life, keeping some of your life to yourself.

Dee: Absolutely. You know, I’m not like a hermit or cagey or anything, but when I first started out, I had a few things happen to me—in terms of my privacy—before I was even popular at all, that really kind of shook me up a little bit too much to be comfortable sharing too much about myself. Like, I got married when I was really young. When I got married, no one was looking at my site. But I mentioned getting married, and someone wrote me and told me all the personal information about myself, because he heard me say I had got married, and he went through the Franklin County records and went through all the marriage licenses until he found someone named Natalie who had gotten married in the last week. He was like, “Your name is blah blah blah and you married this guy,” and it was creepy as fuck.

I’ve had stuff like that happen a few times, to the point where I’m like, “You know, I have a pen name and that’s fine.” And initially, I had the pen name because everybody had fake names that they were using on the Internet. No one used their real name, because no one knew what was going on. Everybody had, like, AOL handles and shit. So my name on my site—my maiden name started with a D. When I was younger, people would call me that, if there were other girls named Natalie in my school or wherever, so they wouldn’t confuse me with some other Natalie. I picked that for my pen name/site name because I thought it was funny, calling myself that, since of course there were other Natalie’s online.

After I got married, my last name didn’t even start with a D anymore, so it’s like an extra layer of disguise. I’m fine with that, and I’m fine with people not knowing my real name. When I wasn’t even popular at all and I wasn’t making a living and people didn’t care who I was, there were still people who were really fucking creepy. It’s not that I don’t trust people. Once I’ve talk to people in real life or become online pals, I don’t care. My online friends—I have no problem telling them what my name is, they mail me stuff to my house, I’m not weird about it. I don’t care if you know what my name is, because I know your name and if you started being weird, I could be like “Whoa, Jory’s being weird,” and I could take care of myself because it’s not me versus some anonymous weirdo. But if I don’t know people, they have no reason to know my personal information.

Rumpus: Do folks in your real life—your neighbors and people you encounter where you live—do they know what you do and do they get it? Or do you feel like you keep that part of you separate from the people that you see in real life?

Dee: I used to keep it more separate, because it was something I did casually. Once you do it as your main job, it’s really hard to not tell anyone about it. People in my neighborhood don’t bug me, because I just think the vibe in my neighborhood is different for whatever reason, and it’s part of the reason that I decided to live here. People leave me alone. Like, my particular street is middle-class, but there are areas in my neighborhood that are considerably fancier. Eric Clapton owns a house a few blocks over from me.

People don’t care about me, and people don’t care what I’m doing. I’m just that lady who is weird, but pretty nice to chat with in line at the market. I like this neighborhood. But there are certain parts in town where I can’t even go, because people get in my grill. And I realize that part of that is my own fault because I am kind of eccentric and people kind of know how I am and and see someone weird and do the math. There are certain areas in Columbus where I know that I will get hassled if I go, so I don’t like going there very often. Drew, just a couple weeks ago, had gone to a neighborhood in Columbus to meet Kris [Wilson] from [webcomic] Cyanide & Happiness, because he was in town and, on the way back, Drew stopped to get custard or something. He was in line at the custard place and three different people went up to him. I have a fucking shitty station wagon with no A.C. I don’t make enough money to want to be all “jazz hands” all the time, in case someone sees me.

Rumpus: Yeah. I would imagine that the longer you’re online and the more and more people who see your stuff, it becomes harder and harder to completely separate it, right?

Dee: Oh yeah, and like I said, I’ve been doing this as my only job for such a long time, so I meet new people and they’re all, “So what do you do?” And what am I gonna tell them? Sometimes I’ll say I have an online store, because I want to keep it real vague, you know? I have an online store. And they’re like, “Oh, what’s your store? What do you sell?” And I’m like, “Oh god. I sell t-shirts with stuff I’ve made on them.” And they’re like, “Oh, what do you make?” And they poke me until I have to tell them and then their iPhones come out.

Rumpus: And you have to stand there, watching them look at your stuff.

Dee: Yeah, and it’s awkward as hell. And it’s like, I know you wouldn’t like it, then it’s awkward forever after that. And my family, obviously, they all know what I do. But my family is like the total opposite of me. They could not be any more different than I am. And so I don’t even think they care, really.

Rumpus: You don’t think they check the site?

Dee: They might. But they don’t seem to be affected by it at all. My sister modeled t-shirts for me. But they don’t care. I’m just as weird as I’ve ever been. My sisters and I have nothing in common at all.

Rumpus: Switching subjects, what’s your writing process like? Do you carry around a little notebook? Or is there a routine where you always sit down at a certain time?

Dee: When I do my comics, I know I have to do them, and so I will sit down and do them. I know people are like, “I don’t feel like it, I don’t have any ideas.” But sitting down and starting to work will always give you ideas. Sometimes, if I have an idea and I’m not working, I have that little note app in my phone, that thing with the Post-It notes. I’ll make a little note with that, or on some scrap paper at my desk. But I usually like the drawing-pictures part. So, a lot of the time, I will draw something that I want to draw, and then think about what I want to write on it as I’m drawing it.

Rumpus: Oh, I wondered about that, whether you just picked an object and then figured out what funny thing the object would say.

Dee: Yeah, I do that a lot and, I mean, when the joke is more specific, it’s usually something that came to me before the drawing did. But a lot of times, I will draw something that I wanted to draw, I thought would be funny to draw, or I thought would be enjoyable to draw. Then, as I’m drawing, I will think about what I’m drawing and then come up with something.

Rumpus: And do you have a quota? Are you trying to do one drawing per day, or is it more like a long-term weekly or monthly thing?

Dee: I try to work monthly. I don’t do it all in one day. I have a file on my computer where I store all of the stuff for next month. And so I am always working ahead of time. That also makes it easier for me to make sure that it goes together. You know what I’m saying? It flows better. And then, right before the month changes, we have this proprietary thing on our site, where I will load up all of my comics and then it updates for me. It updates at the same time every day because, if it was up to me, I would sleep through it.

Rumpus: So when you go into the office, the first thing you’ll do is just basically think, What do I want to draw today?

Dee: I will think about what I have to do this month. I have a lot of things that I’m doing in addition to my comics that don’t necessarily have to do with my comics. After I upload my comics for the month, I will spend a few work days doing other stuff, just so I can clear my mind and not think about it for a minute. It’s really hard to get ideas if you’re just constantly thinking about it. And so, at the beginning of the month, I’ll work on other stuff. And when I come into the office, I come and I sit and I drink coffee and think about what I have to do. And if I have to do comics, then I figure out how many comics I want to do, and I open up that many files in Photoshop and get cracking on it, and if I have something else to do, then I might do that instead.

Rumpus: And your workday: is it all over the place, or is it pretty consistent? Are you in the office for a certain number of hours?

Dee: It used to be more sporadic and I would work whenever I felt like it, but now we have someone who comes over and takes care of my daughter, and so I work when she’s there.

Rumpus: Are there days where you just bang them out and other days where you’re kind of like, Oh boy, I haven’t even finished one yet?

Dee: Hell yeah. I mean, sometimes I’ll sit down and I will really fucking crank them out. I’ll do a lot. But other days, I’ll be like, I need some comics today, and I’ll sit, and I’ll…get hung up on one that is detailed and I’ll spend a few hours doing it and my hand hurts and I don’t want to do any more. It just depends.

That is a benefit of working so far in advance: you have a lot more time to be flexible with what you’re getting done on a daily basis. If I had to do comics every day, and I was just posting them every single day, I’m sure it would be really taxing and it would be easy for me to be a puss about it and call it off, you know? But I could call off three days in a row and no one would know.

Rumpus: Totally. But is there ever a time where you’re like, I’ve just thought of the perfect idea for tomorrow and I’m going to do it right now and get this thing online, ASAP?

Dee: Oh yeah, sometimes I’ll do that and I’ll be like, I have one that’s just for tomorrow. Or there’s something that happens at the beginning of the month and I know we’re not going to update until two days afterwards, and I’ll send that up the line and rearrange things so comics that are time-sensitive happen when they need to.

Rumpus: Right.

Dee: It just depends. A lot of times, it doesn’t really matter what day it is. But when it does, I will always shuffle the deck and make sure it happens when I want it to. I try to be timely. If there’s something that’s a hot topic, I’ll switch things around so I’m not making a joke about last month’s news. I try and keep an eye on what’s going to be going on next month, too, so I plan for seasonal topics and things you can expect, like it being sweltering in July, or Halloween, or the next apocalypse prediction.

Rumpus: And what about your theme weeks? I really love them. Like your Daughters Say Crazy Shit series. It seems like every once in a while, you’ll come out with a different series. Does that help you come up with ideas?

Dee: I started doing themes because I would think about something I wanted to do, and I would get more than one idea about it. And so when I do a theme week, it’s not really so much of trying to dump out a whole bunch. It’s more like I group them all together, so they are a part of a set, instead of people being like, Oh, is she doing another one about worms? If I want to do a whole bunch about worms, I’ll put them all in the same week and say, Oh, it’s “Worm Week!” Sometimes I’ll do a theme week and sometimes I won’t. It just depends on what kind of ideas I’m coming up with that month. Sometimes I think I’ll do a theme week, and I can only think of three of them. When that happens, I’ll scatter them out. But when I do something like that I try to do them under the same heading so you can tell they belong together and it’s not accidental.

Rumpus: The headings of your comics are always funny. The titles play off the comics. Do you write the titles first and then the comics come after that? Or the other way around?

Dee: Yeah, I write the titles when I save the files.

Rumpus: Were they always titled? Or were they untitled in the beginning?

Dee: No, I think that they were always titled. It’s just that the titles evolved, because as I made more and more comics, I couldn’t keep calling them things like “Socks,” because then I’d accidentally erase the old file with the same name. I started making them more declarative, so it’s really hard to have the same title twice.

Rumpus: So it’s a way to both be doubly funny, with an extra joke, and to also archive them?

Dee: Yeah. It kind of started off like that, but then it evolved into a way of clarifying the joke for someone who might be simple. Or adding another element to the joke. Just kind of tying it up and sending it off.

Rumpus: And what about your style for drawing people—was that always the same? Looking back to 2002, it seems pretty consistent.

Dee: Yeah, in terms of my site, I think it’s always been pretty much the same. But it kind of started off as—like I said—I think it was me doodling stuff for fun, just ’cause I got some markers or something. And it wasn’t something I was doing on purpose. Prior to that, I was always into comics and always into art and stuff like that, and I used to draw people and it was different. It was a totally different style. I think that my other styles of drawing, in the past, there’s definitely influences and that’s probably why I opted not to use them.

Rumpus: Who was influencing you?

Dee: I think that probably in terms of how I kind of learned how to draw in general, on my own, there’s stuff you learn in school and stuff you learn on your own. I used to read a lot of indie comics and Slave Labor stuff and I think that in terms of comics I always enjoyed and comic artists who I think are really great, my favorite is Evan Dorkin. His main comics are really good, but something I think is probably real influential — in hindsight, I can see it as influential — was Dork. I liked that a whole lot, because it was a collection of his single-shot stuff and he would just compile ‘em seasonally or whatever. But then, as it progressed, toward the end, it had a real autobiographical bent to it and it was really dark. It was like really, really super dark. And there’s just something I liked about that. I think that something that is important about making stuff is being able to be self-deprecating and acknowledging negative stuff about yourself. There’s a lot of comics online where I’m not feeling it, because they are incapable of seeing themselves in a light that isn’t like this super-dude, awesome-guy thing they’re trying to get the Internet to think of them like that. You know what I’m saying? I don’t ever pretend to be anything that I’m not. Because it’s just exhausting.

Rumpus: I think it really shines through. You genuinely say in your comics that sometimes you deal with depression, for instance. That’s stood out to me. Is it cathartic to work that issue into your comics?

Dee: I think that in terms of talking about depression and other problems I’ve had—at this point, I wouldn’t even consider it a problem. It’s just something that’s ongoing: I have chronic depression. I’ve had depression since I was a kid. And I also have ADD. And that contributed to my chronic depression. I’m never gonna not have it. But I’m not like Morrissey. I’m not crying in my bedroom. It’s so internalized and it’s such a part of my personality, it kind of manifests more as a nihilistic attitude. But I like being honest about it because I think that there’s a lot of people who just don’t say stuff like that to their friends, or don’t say stuff to, like…whoever. And I think it’s refreshing to have someone talk about it like it’s not something they’re ashamed of, and to make other people feel better about it. Because I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with it. I don’t feel that there’s anything wrong with me. It’s part of my personality. But I’m chronically depressed. I’m not going to make comics where I’m saying, Everything’s great, everything’s cool, and I’m cool, and you’re cool! No, if everything’s cool then nobody’s cool. Right?

Rumpus: Doesn’t one of your comics basically say, If you like everybody, you don’t like anybody?

Dee: Yeah, exactly. That’s what I always say. My daughter is walking around the house like, “I love everybody!” And I’m like, “If you love everybody, you don’t love anybody. You just gotta shake that off, sister.”

Rumpus: You don’t see a lot of comics talking about funerals, as you’ve done. There was that one where you had a woman in a coffin and you had some guy giving a bland eulogy about how the woman was really good at Bejeweled. I don’t know if that was supposed to be autobiographical, or a random woman.

Dee: That was actually autobiographical. I whoop a donkey’s ass at Bejeweled.

Rumpus: I mean, that’s something you don’t see everyday in comics—not only somebody in a coffin, but somebody just giving the most surface, unemotional eulogy for the poor woman. And I remember a comic you did that talks about a solitary march to the grave. I think there really is something very appealing about combining the imagery that you create with those super-dark themes.

Dee: Well, yeah, and like I said, there are certain things that I really enjoy. I really enjoy being totally honest, because I’m sure that I’m not the only one who thinks that way. You know? And I think I like talking about it because it kind of does make people squirm a little bit, because people don’t like to think about it. They don’t want to talk about it or be reminded. I like the combination of the kind of simple, childish style with the dark themes.

Rumpus: Do you know where your humor comes from?

Dee: I don’t know. I think my humor is probably more of a gallows humor than anything else. I wasn’t, like, totally fucked when I was a kid. But shit happens. And I think my sense of humor kind of comes from trying to find humor in stuff that maybe isn’t that great, you know? I mean, aside from the obvious disadvantages of poverty, there’s a level of brutality on a day-to-day basis that people who have had a nicer row to hoe maybe don’t understand. [In Marion] kids were always getting fucked up and stuff. I’ve known all kinds of people who’ve died huffing freon in the parking lot, or killed themselves, or died of cancer from living too close to the toxic waste dump, or wrecked their cars or O.D.’d. I just think it’s real precious when people think that there’s a certain idealized way that the world is. How do you think it’s like that? I’m intimately aware of how shitty things can be, I’ve actually seen what happens to people who were unlucky enough to be dealt a cruddy hand, you know?

And that kind of goes back to the nihilistic, depressive spin I put on everything. I’m too exposed to stuff to not notice things now. Just because shit is depressing or horrible, doesn’t mean you can’t laugh about it with blood in your mouth. If you can’t make light of the horrible stuff that happens all the time, you’re never going to laugh at anything. You know, like, “George just got hit by a train, where’s that weed?”

Rumpus: Right. And just because things have gotten better for you, doesn’t mean you don’t remember what it was like.

Dee: You know what—I think things have gotten better for me, but, if anything, it kind of makes things worse for me, because it kind of makes things seem capricious, or maybe unfair. I don’t think I’m better than anybody else, so I don’t think it’s necessarily fair that other people I’ve known in my life, who are as smart as me, or as funny as me, or as hard-working as me, are not in the same situation that I am. I think it was very lucky that I ended up in the position that I’m in. I think it was just a function of me being in the right place at the right time. We had a collection [of comics] online when people started being online. And so we were there already. We got in not knowing what was there and then it was just a happy coincidence that the Internet turned into something different. We are hard workers and so we were able to respond to the increase in traffic and interest and business by working harder. But it was luck and I know it was luck and it also plays into the thing of having a good work ethic, just because I don’t take it for granted.

I don’t think that I deserve it. I don’t think that people need to kiss my ass. I don’t think that people need to suck up everything I make. There is no artist, anywhere, who has it how I have it. I’m so fortunate. If people are going to pay attention to what I’m doing, why would I sit there and not work? There’s a level of entitlement where people take things for granted and are like, “I’m just not going to today.” Just fucking work! No one gets to do this! If you’re doing something you love, it shouldn’t be a big deal to fucking go to work. Go to work!

Rumpus: Something that I was thinking, when I was looking back through your stuff, is that you seem like such a perfect fit for the Internet and vice-versa. It’s such a great example of something coming together so perfectly.

Dee: Well, thank you. I mean, I think it’s funny seeing what I’m doing now, in comparison the stuff that I was doing when I was younger, because when I was younger, there wasn’t really a slot that my skills would fit into. But I do agree that it’s definitely a uniquely Internet kind of thing.

Rumpus: Are you feeling like you’ve sort of experimented with different techniques that you can really do on the Internet, as the comic has progressed? One of the things I noticed you doing, in more recent years, is incorporating actual photos of things into your drawings.

Dee: Yeah, yeah. I mean, a lot of times I do that because I like the way it looks, too. I think the contrast looks cool. But it’s just something I’ve started doing recently, to try out new stuff. And I kind of started off not putting details in at all, then I got more detailed. Then I started doing more of a thing where I would render out textures myself, and work them up to have a weird, more realistic vibe to it. Lately, I’ve been doing photos. But a lot of times, I’ll use photos when I need people to recognize what it is, immediately. Like a lot of times, I’ll use a can of soda. People know what it is and I’m not going to spend a half hour drawing it. I like how it looks. The style of drawing I do is obviously not realistic at all, and it is kind of projecting them into a situation that is more realistic.

Rumpus: And what about your more gruesome stuff?

Dee: Oh yeah! And when I do that stuff—most of the time when I do the really gory stuff—I do all of that by hand. But that’s just my own personal aesthetic. I’m a pretty unapologetic metalhead, so I like kind of injecting the horror elements into it. That’s something that I would probably say is one of the things that I like doing on my site, gore and stuff. The pictures I have for my Facebook group—the one with the nesting doll—that was one of my favorite ones I’ve done. I took a really long time doing that, and no one gives a shit about that one. But I’m gonna keep it up there, because I like it.

Rumpus: Are you self-taught with Photoshop?

Dee: Yes. I had a job doing Photoshop before I had used Photoshop, really. There was a company that makes t-shirts for anybody and everybody. They had a lot of business, considering that it was such a small town. I’m not even really sure why they hired me. I was fifteen. I got hired to do graphics for this company. That’s where I learned to how to do Photoshop. No one taught me how to use Photoshop. They taught me how to fire up a file, and then they were like, “Do it.” And so the first files took me a really long time to do.

Rumpus: So you were just thrown into it.

Dee: Yeah, I was thrown into it, and it was also where I started drawing pictures in Photoshop. That was probably the place where I first started doing doodles that were kind of primordial versions of what I’m doing now. I was working in Photoshop and kind of hacking it out.

When I was a kid, I was poor. I liked drawing pictures, and I was good from a really young age. When I was in first grade, I started going to the art college on weekends, on scholarship. Doing art was always my thing, but my family was always poor, so I didn’t have stuff like…paper. There’s actually a part in Drew’s novel where the guy is talking about the first page and the last page of a book is free paper. You just rip them out. That’s what I used to do—rip out the first page and last page of the book, because it was free paper. But I started doing stuff in Photoshop, and I was working and doing all this stuff with fonts and stuff like that…and I was like, Couldn’t I just draw pictures with this? And so when I was on lunch, I would fuck around with it.

Rumpus: And did it immediately feel like a good fit, like, Oh, this is it?

Dee: It was awkward at first, but I think I got it at a point when I was kind of young. And so it was easy for me to train myself into doing it. I didn’t have a computer for a really long time. When I started doing Photoshop, it was such a long time ago, we’d save stuff on these massive Syquests, since computers had no memory, and Photoshop would grind forever whenever you had to do anything. So it wasn’t particularly elegant. The technology was intriguing, but I wasn’t like Princess Jasmine on the rug with Aladdin or anything. But I could make it work because you use the materials that you have access to. I didn’t have a computer at any time in high school, or in college, and I didn’t have a computer until my website was well on its way, when I was in my early twenties. So when I got back to Photoshop, it was a lot better.

Rumpus: That’s amazing that you didn’t have a computer while your site was up-and-running. People associate you so fully with the Internet.

Dee: Oh, yeah, people probably assume a lot about me, just because I’ve been on the Internet for such a long time. But I didn’t have a computer for a really long time, and some of the first computer files that are on my website where I drew pictures, I did not use a Wacom pen or a mouse. I had a keyboard with the nubby clit-mouse in the middle. I always called it the clit-mouse. I know that’s not what it’s called. You have your finger on it …

Rumpus: Those things are terrible.

Dee: Yeah, I drew on those. That’s what I started off with. Then eventually I got a Wacom tablet and was like, This is like the future.

Rumpus: That must’ve been a million times easier.

Dee: Oh yeah. But I mean, you use whatever you have, if you want to do it. People always come to me and they’re like, “How can I make money doing what you’re doing?” And I say, “Don’t try to make money. Do it because you like it.” I did it regardless. I did it for a really long time before anyone gave two fucks about me.

Rumpus: Is that what you tell people who ask how you end up working for yourself? Is that the advice you give them?

Dee: I try not to give people advice, because I know it’s so uncommon to be able to do something like this. My thoughts on it are: do something you like, because you like to do it, not because you have expectations of what’s going to happen with it. If you don’t like what you’re doing, then that’s just stupid. When people write to me and they’re like, “I want to do webcomics. How can I do a webcomic?”, one of the first things I say to them is, if you’re making comics, you need to sit down and do 300 of them. If you can’t do 300 of ‘em, how are you going to do two or three or four or five or ten years of your comic? If you can’t do it, then don’t do it. And, like I said, you have to do it because you like it, not because you expect something from it.

The way things are now, the Internet is changing in a way that is not good for people who create content, so you can’t expect that that is going to happen for you. You have to do it because you love it. If you don’t love it enough to do it, whether people are paying you enough—or paying you at all—then you don’t love it enough to take it as far as you’d need to in order to make it a thing. If you don’t love it enough to do it 500 times, then fucking don’t do it ten times and quit when you don’t immediately get high-fives from everyone who looks at the Internet.

The Internet is changing now where people don’t care about where the stuff came from. People want to go look at it at BuzzFeed, or they want to go look at it at Reddit, or 9Gag. Anywhere but going to the website. They want people to spoon-feed them. And so if you’re thinking that you’re going to get online now and make content and be in the same situation as anybody who makes content for a living, you’re wrong. It’s just not the same as it used to be. People don’t go look at a comic because they like the comic. They look at a comic and then they scroll farther down the page and look at a different comic, then they scroll farther down the page and look at a picture of a cat. It’s just different.

So my advice is: you have to do it a lot, do it because you like it, and don’t quit your job until you’re already making as much on your site as you’re making at your job. People are in a hurry to quit. If you love it, then it’s not a big deal that you’re doing it full-time on the side, right? If you love it, then it doesn’t make a difference that you have to do it in addition to your job. I just think that this situation with the content and aggregators and stuff is going to make it very, very hard. And, like I said, the only reason I was able to make it is that it just wasn’t a thing when I started. There are a lot more people making content now, and it’s harder to get that initial burst of traffic.

Rumpus: Speaking of which, do you have a concept of how many people are reading your stuff each day? Or is that not something that you’re paying super close attention to?

Dee: You know, I used to pay closer attention to it, but I feel like I have a better relationship with my website when I don’t pay attention to how many people are looking at it, when I don’t pay attention to the demographics of the people who are looking at it. And I never, ever, ever, ever, ever read people talking about what I have done, because I didn’t care when I made it, so I can’t care now. It doesn’t make me mad. It’s just like, you didn’t get it! You didn’t even get it. You didn’t get it, and now you’re getting all huffy and pedantic and condescending about nothing, when all you’ve done all day is sit on the computer with your thumb up your butt.

Rumpus: And why take the time to write about it when you don’t understand it?

Dee: Why do you even care? That’s the other thing. Why do you care? You decided to look at my site, and you didn’t have to pay for anything. If you didn’t like it, put the pretzel back and order something else. It’s no skin off your ass. I’m sitting here minding my own business. But what are they gonna do? They have the keyboard right there. They’re just typing to hear the clicks. “Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap.”

Rumpus: Can you tell me a little bit about how certain comics become t-shirts? What’s your process for choosing them?

Dee: Usually I keep an eye on what my readers seem to dig. A lot of times, what my readers like won’t really translate to shirts, so what I’ll do is just pick out what I like that will translate to something that someone will wear around and will look good on a shirt. But the most popular [comics are] nonsensical. It’s not gonna be a good shirt. I will pick according to that kind of stuff, and I take it pretty seriously. This is as close to being Karl Lagerfeld as I’m going to get.

Rumpus: And you used to screen-print them yourselves, right?

Dee: No, we have never screened them ourselves. Initially, one of Drew’s friends did it. Then, as we got more popular, we had to switch manufacturers. Now we have a company up in Michigan. They do our warehouse stuff, and they ship our stuff, and they make our shirts for us. They’re good. I do all the graphics stuff for it myself. I prep all the stuff for them, so all they have to do is make the screens and screen it.

Rumpus: Was your business model always the plan? When you first started the comic, did you think, Oh, maybe these would also be good as shirts. Maybe I can make some extra money here?

Dee: No, it was never the plan. When I first started, I didn’t think anybody was going to look at it. I didn’t think of it as being something that would even hold interest with anybody, and when I started, people weren’t even on the Internet like they are now. People didn’t have the Internet at work, you know? People might work on computers, but they wouldn’t have the Internet hooked up on their computers. So the scene on the Internet was totally different. There wasn’t anyone on there. It was more of a hobby that I was initially just doing by myself. I had a whole bunch of these doodles and I just put ‘em up. I didn’t even have a computer. When Drew and I met, he lived in Cincinnati, so he would come up and we would hang out. He was like, “Why don’t you just post your pictures on the Internet?” And I was like, “All right, but I don’t really have a computer.” So I drew stuff, and I would mail it to him.

Rumpus: Oh really?

Dee: Yeah. I didn’t even really have a computer until I had been doing my site for a while. And I say “doing my site” in a very passive way, because how involved can you be if you can’t look at it?

Rumpus: Do you still have the drawings that you would mail to each other?

Dee: Um, I think that he probably has them somewhere in his office. But I don’t have them. I’m not real sentimental about stuff.

Rumpus: So when did you know the shirts were gonna take off? I’ve read that, over the years, you’ve shipped merchandise to every country with mail delivery, right?

Dee: Oh, yeah, absolutely. I think it’s really crazy how many shirts we’ve sold over the years, and how many places we’ve sold to. But, I mean, it was never the plan and it was so gradual that it wasn’t even like, one day we didn’t sell anything, and all of a sudden we were selling a ton. It was a really gradual process, so we were able to improve our workflow and our order-packing speed as it was ramping up. It really wasn’t like waking up one day and suddenly everything’s just going great. It was gradual, and Drew and I are kind of frugal, anyways, so it wasn’t like we were struggling and suddenly we weren’t, you know? We were generally pretty frugal. So we were never really hurting when we started out, even though we weren’t selling much.

And we weren’t doing it because we expected to make money. We were never really shocked and amazed by suddenly selling a bunch out of nowhere, or planning to sell a ton and making sales-projections or whatever. We just worked and it slowly snowballed. We shipped a bazillion shirts by ourselves. I’m not even sure—like 100,000 shirts. We folded them up and put them in envelopes, and shipped them ourselves. And we did that until I had my daughter because at that point, I was too sick and that’s when we set up fulfillment with someone else. Until then, we were doing it all ourselves. If we shipped 500 shirts, it’s because we packed up 500 shirts and carried them to the post office. We would do it ourselves. Especially over Christmas, we would go in a few times a week and mail out hundreds of them a day. But like I said, I’m not afraid to put my back into it. It’s amazing what you can do if you’re not afraid to get some blisters.

Rumpus: And it must be nice to get out of the house and switch it up, right?

Dee: Oh, yeah. And now I feel really bourgie about it, because I have someone else shipping stuff, so all I have to do is graphics stuff for the shirts—when I need to do that—and I work on my comics. I work on other stuff on the side and it’s a lot more chilled out. It was really a little bit hectic when we had a lot of stuff to send out and I had a lot of comics to do and this and that. But with a kid, that wasn’t doable. It feels different, but we tend to have a way of filling the time up with other stuff. So we didn’t delegate the shipping and then go drink beer in the yard, or something.

Rumpus: In terms of the shirts’ popularity, are there designs that clearly stand out as your most popular of all time? Also, do you discontinue them after a while, or do you keep some of them around forever?

Dee: We’ll keep a shirt around if people like it. We have three sites and we have all the shirts for the sites. We will keep shirts if they are popular. If they are unpopular, we will get rid of them. Even when we were shipping stuff ourselves, a spot on the shelf is money. Renting that spot on the shelf is money. If something is not selling, we will discontinue it, so we can make more money putting something on that spot on the shelf that will sell. It’s just like with my comics—when I put new shirts out, I will put stuff out that I know other people will like, and I will put stuff out that I like and that I’m just making because I like it. Then, when we discontinue stuff, it’s always stuff that I liked best. That’s always the stuff that gets flushed down the toilet first.

Rumpus: How did Sharing Machine come about? Did you just want to come up with an umbrella company for the whole thing?

Dee: Yeah, kind of. Originally, my stuff and Drew’s stuff was separate. I had my store page and sales got deposited into my bank account and he had his. Then we got to the point where we were doing more business and we were filing taxes together and all that other stuff, so it was just a lot easier to set that up, to have one store page to maintain, instead of three store pages to maintain.

Rumpus: You guys really seem meant for each other. I mean, you were both doing independent comics when you met, right?

Dee: Yeah. We were doing different stuff job-wise, too—I had my job where I was doing pharmaceutical stuff, and he was a chemical engineer. We were doing our own projects in our spare time, and that stuff definitely wasn’t our main gig. We had a lot in common when we met, obviously, and we hit it off. We have different stuff that we are good at, aside from being fond of each other or whatever. Like, we have complementary skill sets. I’m horrible at computer stuff and math, and anything that has to do with little, teeny details. I have to get the calculator out to multiply “7-by-8,” you know? But I’m better at, like, having an eye for certain design stuff and things like that. So I think it balances out and makes it a little bit easier to do as much stuff as we do. I have my nail polish, and that’s all me. Every single part of it I did on my own, I didn’t really have any help from anybody. The packaging, formulating, making the store—everything was just what I’ve been doing for the last year or so. But Drew is a chemical engineer, so if I have to talk to commodities labs, he will talk to them for me, because he knows the lingo. He used to do that stuff at work when he was doing chemical engineering, and I don’t need vendors thinking I’m a rube when I get confused and think a pound is more than a kilogram or something.

Rumpus: Were you guys familiar with each other’s work before you met?

Dee: No. He had stuff online, he had the Drew site. I didn’t even have a computer so I didn’t know. I just met him and we hit it off because we had a lot of stuff in common. We were both kind of weird.

Rumpus: Did you both come up in Ohio?

Dee: Yeah, I was living in Columbus and he was living in Cincinnati. I don’t even remember how I met him. I met him in some capacity and I was probably drunk. But I met him and I was like, “Heeeyyy. Why don’t you come back to my house?” And he stayed for three days.

Rumpus: That’s a great first date!

Dee: It wasn’t even a first date. I didn’t know him, and then I met him, and then he was at my house for three days. And that was basically it. I always joke with him—we should’ve just gotten married that first day. Just to freak people out.

Rumpus: That’s a great story, though, and it would be a good addition to the nonexistent Wikipedia page about you.

Dee: Oh yeah, oh yeah. Like I said, I got married really young. And Drew and I have been together for a really long time.

Rumpus: And what about your collaboration with Drew on Married to the Sea? What’s that like?

Dee: Well, I do not work on Married to the Sea as much as I did when it first started. We don’t collaborate, like collaborate. If he does the comic on Married to the Sea, it’s all his. And if I do one, it’s all me. It’s a lot easier to get an idea across if you don’t have someone else trying to help with it. The reason it started off with both of us trying to work on it is because it’s like a font and the art is not hand-drawn, so it’s easy to put any voice into it that you want. It kind of feels like a mutual screen to project stuff on that’s different from his site or my site. It’s a place where you could throw something up that doesn’t necessarily fit on the other sites.

Rumpus: I always pictured you guys working across from each other, basically nose-to-nose.

Dee: Oh, no. We used to share an office, but I actually moved my office recently, because he always wants to listen to some kind of Portuguese psychedelic stuff, and I’d rather be by myself and listen to Nicki Minaj for a minute. We always have instant messenger on. We’ll talk, but we’re not in the same room anymore. I had to spread myself out.

Rumpus: Switching subjects again, do you have favorite and least favorite things to draw? I know you have certain things popping up from time to time, like your dog Chester, and other repeating images.

Dee: You know, I used to like drawing my dog, because my dog is so dumb looking. But people were unable to see it as a comic about a dog. They were like, “Pug, pug, pug,” fetishizing the breed or something, calling me a “pugmom” and stuff. So I kind of don’t draw my dog as much anymore because it was a little annoying. I like drawing animals. I like drawing gory stuff, like bruises and zits. I like drawing gross stuff. I think drawing gross stuff is probably my favorite, but I don’t draw it all the time. I think it’s better if you don’t do it very often. It has more impact if you don’t do it very often.

Rumpus: I also really like all your sea creatures: the narwhal, the sharks, all that.

Dee: Yeah. A lot of times, I just draw animals because I haven’t drawn them yet. There are certain animals that I always like drawing. I like drawing snakes just because I think it’s fun. I like drawing the scales and stuff. It’s not that I care about snakes. I don’t give a fuck about snakes.

Rumpus: Do you sometimes approach something like, “I’m going to challenge myself. I’ve never drawn this type of thing, so I’m going to try it?”

Dee: You know, I used to do that a lot, and there are still things that I’m not very good at drawing. I’m really bad at drawing horses, stuff like that. But there’s a feature I have on my site where I will periodically draw commissioned pieces, and it’s usually like, “Will you draw something for my girlfriend?” Usually they want me to draw something that would never, ever, ever occur to me to draw. So I used to challenge myself more, but when I started doing the custom drawings on my site, it had me drawing stuff that is beyond what I would even think to practice. Every kind of dog. All kinds of stuff. If you pay, it’s spec work; I don’t care anymore and I’ll draw whatever.

Rumpus: Have you thought about doing books? Collections of comics? Or is that not on the immediate agenda?

Dee: I’ve had people contact me about doing books and they always give me the “Fuck You” deal. The deal where they’re like, “$5,000, and you’re never going to get any royalties.” And I’m like, No. And they would put [the book] in that area—we always call it the “LOL Ghetto”: that shelf where it’s all the website books and the next month, the whole shelf is on the clearance table. I’m not really trying to get into the LOL Ghetto, so I have turned down some book deals, because the deal isn’t very good. I’m a little bit petulant—I know it’s really hard to believe—but I’m a little bit petulant, and I don’t like when people tell me what to do. It’s hard for me to get into the idea of a book, because there’s a lot of work involved with getting a book set up. It’s hard for me, because they just want to do, like, a collection of stuff I’ve already done. It’s hard for me to set aside so much time so I can redo a bunch of stuff I did already, and then I’d just end up in the LOL Ghetto and not make any money for it, anyway. And if they give me $5,000, I mean, that’s not much money for how much time I would have to spend putting it together.

Rumpus: Yeah, but on the flip-side of the coin, do you ever look at somebody like Gary Larson and think, Oh, I should be making all these calendars and all this stuff that sells forever like The Far Side does?

Dee: You know, I’ve thought about doing that stuff, but I’ll say if I decide to do something like that, I have business relationships with print shops from making merch over the years, so I would do it myself. I don’t think I’d give people my cut. Because that’s my problem—I know how much money book companies make off of stuff, and I know they give everybody the “Fuck You” deal. And for the same amount of work, I can remove them from the process and get to keep their cut, you know?

I’m just a little too crotchety. I don’t want people saying, “You have to have it done by next week.” I have other shit to do! I’m not dying to have a book out. I mean, if people want to see my old comics, they can look at them for free online. That’s what stops me, because I’m like, Who’s going to buy it when they can look at it for free, online? And they’re not going to let me put the nasty stuff on there. They’re not going to let me put the messed-up stuff. They’re going to make me put all the dumbest ones in there, and it’s all stuff that’s already online.

Rumpus: About have you thought about newspaper syndication? You already have a built-in readership. But I would imagine going through a syndicate to get your comics in the newspaper would be a hassle because…

Dee: It would be impossible! It would be impossible. I don’t have any illusions about the stuff that I do. It’s not, like, an ongoing storyline. So there’s nothing compelling in that regard. The jokes themselves are either nasty or sort of absurd. It’s not something that people reading the paper would want to read, or any other host of reasons.  I don’t think anyone would want them in the paper. When I’ve had comics printed in the paper, my comic doesn’t stand up very well in black and white. That’s another thing that makes it hard for me. It’s just not something I’d pursue. Like I said, I have problems with people telling me what to do.

Rumpus: And what are your current side projects? Are there things that we haven’t heard about yet?

Dee: Probably, probably. I’m starting a cosmetics company. I’ve been making handmade nail-polish. So I had been selling it on Etsy, but it was moving so quick on Etsy that I didn’t publicize it. I posted it to a group of 1,000 people and it sold out immediately. And that happened a couple times and so I’ve been kind of trying to organize that… I put the brakes on it, just for a little while, because I wanted to get a better workflow going on with it. I’m getting an actual site set up, instead of selling through Etsy. There’s other stuff on the side—like I’ve been taking notes about a horror novel and just different stuff. I get tired of myself, I get tired of it. People have this idea about who I am that is really suffocating. So I always have to do stuff on the side that doesn’t have anything to do with that. I want to do something where I make it look how I want it to look and it doesn’t have a comic on it, it doesn’t have my name on it.

Rumpus: You just seem like a real idea person. Have you always been like that, where you’re always thinking of new concepts and stuff?

Dee: I mean, I try to. I feel like I’m obligated to, because my situation is so unusual and it’s such a privilege to be in the kind of situation I’m in, so if I get an idea, I run with it. I have the free time, or at least the flexibility to make time if I need it. I have the space and all that kind of stuff. I’m not rolling in money. We call it “Ohio rich,” which is not at all rich, but the low cost of living here makes it easier to scrape money together for projects. If I lived in the Bay Area or New York, I would not be able to get half the stuff done that I do, because the cost of living is exponentially more. I doubt I would be able to do my site as a full-time job, and I’d probably live in an apartment behind a dumpster.

Rumpus: That’s what I do!

Dee: But since I live in Ohio, it’s different, because the cost of living here is so low. So it’s a lot easier to be able to flex your muscle—in terms of stuff like that—because it doesn’t cost as much to run a house, it doesn’t cost as much to do…whatever. So I feel obligated with my situation and what I’m able to do, and what I’m able to produce with the connections I’ve made in the process of getting other stuff done with my comics. And so I feel like I have to. If I didn’t, then who’s going to? And so, in order to be happy with doing the same thing all the time, I have to do stuff on the side, just to keep balance with it. And I’m prolific, but Drew is mega-prolific compared to me. He is a lot more prolific than I am, because I have attention problems. There’s certain things that he’s better at than I am. But there’s certain things that I’m better at than he is. I think it kind of makes it easier for us.

Rumpus: I’m really impressed by your output. It seems like it’s pretty smooth sailing for you, at this point. Do you ever look toward the future in terms of where you see Natalie Dee comics going, or are you having a good time now, and you’ll basically keep doing it as long as you’re having a good time?

Dee: I am doing it, now, and I like the body of work I have, thus far. But I can see the Internet changing and I can see the way people interact with content changing. So I’m always keeping an eye toward that, because I don’t want to play dumb on the stuff that’s going on and end up fucking myself. You know what I’m saying? I like making my site, but at this point, I’m in my thirties, I have a house, it’s my job now. I like doing it and I’m very fortunate in being able to do it, but I always have other stuff that I’m working on. And if one thing stops working and something else starts working, then I think it would be stupid to not follow avenues. I am flexible enough to take other avenues if they present themselves to me.

Rumpus: Is there anything you want to add?

Dee: I feel like we’ve covered it. We’ve talked for such a long time that I don’t even remember any of the questions, honestly.

***

All comics © by Natalie Dee.

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In his first issue as editor, Stein wrote:

Our generation grew up with the Review as a fact of life. It was America’s literary magazine. To our minds, it still is. It has launched our favorite writers. It has made a special claim for the quarterly as such, being both timely and lasting, free of the news of the day or the pressure to please a crowd. Most of all, the Review has shown, repeatedly, that works of imagination can be as stylish and urgent as the flashiest feature reporting, and can do more to refocus our picture of the world.

It was Stein’s job, however, to refocus the Review itself. His immediate predecessor had placed a heavy emphasis on nonfiction pieces and photography for the first time, but Stein—who came from a fiction background and a love of the form—wanted to get back to the Review‘s roots, publishing fiction that astonished him, he says.

Previously, Stein had worked for years as a fiction editor at publishing house Farrar, Straus and Giroux, where books he edited received the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award, among other honors, working alongside notable authors including Denis Johnson, Lydia Davis, and Jonathan Franzen.

Since assuming the post at the Review, Stein has succeeded in making the literary journal his own—although he balks at taking too much credit—from his decision to create an extensive online archive of Review interviews from its famous “Writers at Work” series, to penning his own advice column filled with book recommendations, and overseeing the Paris Review Daily blog.

But it’s his newest co-edited venture, Object Lessons: The Paris Review Presents the Art of the Short Story, an anthology curated by twenty contemporary authors, that Stein is (currently) most excited about. Authors were given instructions to choose a story from the Review archives that meant something to them and explain what, exactly, made those stories work. Curators include Dave Eggers, Ann Beattie, Jeffrey Eugenides, and Mona Simpson.

Stein was getting ready to go jogging when I called him at home in New York. He skipped that day’s exercise and spoke with me for more than two hours, rolling at least one cigarette in the process. We started with Object Lessons and the state of the short story, before transitioning into a discussion about interviews, themselves.

***

The Rumpus: Object Lessons is structured a bit like a textbook. Is the goal to show people how to write a short story? Is it to re-inspire passion in the form? Would you like to see it taught? Or is it all of the above?

Lorin Stein: All of the above. I’d love to see it taught. I’d hope it would be useful that way. In general, short stories are less read than before, they’re less published than before and, not surprisingly, they’re less taught than before. If you look at the archive of Paris Review short stories, it’s very eclectic, but what you can say is that there is a tradition of experimentation and freedom. We’ve never had a giant circulation. And we’ve always been a magazine for writers and for sophisticated readers. We’ve never had to run stories that would appeal to a million people. And what you end up with is a kind of tradition that might have staying power—the cockroach after armageddon. I regret that there aren’t more short stories in other magazines. But in a certain way, I think the disappearance of the short-story template from everyone’s head can be freeing. Partly because there’s no mass market for stories, the form is up for grabs. It can be many, many things. So the anthology is very much intended for students, but I think we’re all in the position of writing students now. Very few people are going around with a day-to-day engagement with the short story.

Rumpus: Is there less of that day-to-day engagement because there’s a perception that short stories are not as satisfying as a novel, in that you either start to get to know the characters and all of a sudden it’s over, or the endings are deliberately vague. Will you touch on that?

Stein: That’s a complaint that you hear about, what is called—unfairly—the “New Yorker story.” The New Yorker, nowadays, publishes all kinds of things, wonderfully. But when there were more short stories out there, there was a sense—in the ’60s and the ’70s, especially—that New Yorker stories leaned too much on open endings. I, for one, like open endings. There are two basic defenses for an open ending: one is, If you read carefully enough, you’ll know what happened. And the other is, That’s how life is: things don’t come to neat endings, there isn’t a “happily ever after.” But if you take that second line of defense, then I think you have to make the point that the writer has shown the range of possibility. I listened to a lot of country songs when I was a kid and I would ask my mom or dad whether the woman was going to come back to the guy. Because the whole song would be asking her to come back. It’s a fair question, right? But it’s a childish question. Grownups understand the point isn’t the outcome, the point is defining the problem. And so that’s how I would defend an open ending. When it works, you get a sense of the dilemma.

Rumpus: Something I’ve seen you say is that The Paris Review is always going to publish things outside of one’s comfort zone. Is that just a matter of breaking new writers? Or is that more about trying to challenge readers?

Stein: For me the question that you have to ask, about any magazine, is whether it’s needed, whether it’s publishing things that no one else could publish, or publish equally well. So there’s that. When I was a book editor, I got used to being told that my tastes were dark or edgy. These are not words that would’ve occurred to me, but I was told that enough that I have to believe it’s true — that I like things that some other people find off-putting or upsetting. My job is to publish stuff that I really, really care about. That might mean that it doesn’t sit well with everybody.

Rumpus: So what was the assignment that you gave to the people who were assigned to select the pieces for Object Lessons?

Stein: We showed them a big printout of the archive and asked each of them to choose a favorite. We didn’t want more than one story by any one author. So, it was first come, first served. As soon as someone chose an author, that person’s stories were taken off the list. And then we asked each of these curators to try to say, in a few words, what kind of technical problem most obviously got solved in that story.

Rumpus: I would imagine that this easily could’ve been a completely different book. Did any selections blindside you? Or were any of the stories so vital that you couldn’t have done this book without them?

Stein: A lot of the stories were stories I didn’t know. It made me realize that with George [Plimpton] dead, there probably isn’t anyone around who knows the archive personally. It’s suddenly become slightly bigger than any one person’s brain. If you tried to read the back issues of The Paris Review, at this point, it would take years. So, some of the stories were a surprise, not in the sense that I thought, “What is he or she thinking?” More, “Ha! What is this?” There were a few omissions that I was surprised by. I would’ve loved for someone to pick one of the early Phillip Roth stories that we published. Or the David Foster Wallace novella Little Expressionless Animals. I love those stories, and I’m proud that The Paris Review had so much to do with their early careers.

Rumpus: Were all the selections in the book first choices by writers?

Stein: Most people got their first choice. And a lot of the writers had a selection in mind before we even showed them a list. Ann Beattie wanted to write about Craig Nova from the get-go. Norman Rush wanted to write about Guy Davenport from the get-go. We heard back within minutes, I think.

Rumpus: Were you happy with the balance in the tone of the anthology—the melancholy stories versus the humorous stories? And did you feel like it was balanced, gender-wise?

Stein: I hadn’t thought about the balance in mood. You see that we did it in alphabetical order, so if there’s any kind of shape, or any kind of flow, it’s random. Gender…we didn’t think much about it. It was sort of interesting to see that women often were choosing women and men often were choosing men. And sometimes they wouldn’t and that was fun. I didn’t know that I would be excited by that, until I saw it happen.

Rumpus: What about the authors’ interpretations of the stories? Were there any that got you to look at an old story in a different way? Or any that made connections that you hadn’t seen before? Or were there any that got you thinking, This isn’t my interpretation of this story at all?

Stein: None of the latter. But there were some really revealing ones. I thought Mona Simpson’s intro to the Norman Rush story was a neat picture of an editor at work, where she talked about that story coming in, knowing from the first sentence that it was a winner. This is something that editors don’t usually talk about, because it leaves you open to the charge of being hasty or overconfident or cocksure. But I think most editors have had some experience like that. You just know, “This person isn’t going to make terrible mistakes.” I thought Ann Beattie’s long, technical treatment of the story that she chose was a lot of fun to read next to the story. That’s exactly the sort of explanation that I was excited to see. Because only a writer would talk that way. But the same is true of many of those introductions, most of them.

Rumpus: It seems like some of the intros to the stories were more nuts and bolts, breaking down exactly what worked, whereas some of them seemed more like an artful piece of writing, but a little bit more vague in terms of describing what he thought worked.

Stein: Honestly, I like either way. We wanted that freedom to be part of the anthology. We wanted everyone to feel they could do it without undue strain.

Rumpus: Is that a goal of the Review: to give the writing life the appearance of undue strain? To make it look fun?

Stein: When it doesn’t look fun, what does it look like?

Rumpus: I think it would look dense, or show-offy, or something written for ten people that you have to wade through. Something that feels like work.

Stein: I’ve never thought that it made sense to put something out that I didn’t actually find really fun to read. Or, if not “fun,” engaging. My tastes are whatever they are, but I may be a little bit afraid of certain kinds of density. I may get turned off by certain kinds of show-offyness. I tend to think that the onus is on the writer to engage the reader, that the reader should not be expected to need the writer, that the writer has to prove it. All that stuff might add up to a kind of fun in the work. I like things that are about interesting subjects, which sounds self-evident. But I like fiction that deals with matters that are of burning importance to us in our private lives. And not all short stories are like that. In general, short stories—and maybe this is a little bit off-topic—but I think short stories have this bad association with, like, waiting rooms. You know?

Rumpus: Really?

Stein: Well, I was an editor for a long time at a publishing house called Farrar, Straus and Giroux. When I would sign up a book at F.S.G., I would sort of have a fantasy of when the book would be read by the average reader, or when I would want to read the book. And the times that I read most are over dinner, and then when I go to bed, so it was a sign to me, reading a novel, if it was a book that I wanted to take to bed. Maybe that says something about my taste in novels. Maybe there’s something kind of comforting or escapist about the novels that I like. Even if they’re very realistic, there’s something about the way they take you out of yourself. Maybe I like books that make you feel kind of cozy. But short stories are not things that, ordinarily, the average fiction reader takes to bed. They’re more like things that you might read on a commuter train.

A lot of people who want to see the short story have a renaissance of readership—they tend to think of short stories, and sometimes poems too, as being well-suited to the way we now live, with all of these broken-up bits of time. I hope they’re right, but my sense is that our fiction reading has become, if anything, more cherished as a kind of escape from fragmentation. So, short stories have an even harder time, because they tend to get read during the day, between other things. They’re interstitial. And yet the content of short stories tends to be very much “nighttime” content. I mean, Chekhov’s stories are about the moment that a life goes off the rails and the price that will be paid—forever. That’s a typical Chekhov story for you. Something that you’re used to lying in bed worrying about at four in the morning, before you have the psychic defenses to kid yourself and tell yourself to get up and shower and go to the office. Right? Or short stories are about adulterous passions, or kids having terrible accidents. You know, all of this stuff is nighttime, nightmare, dream stuff. And I like the idea of trying to take a piece of the night and trying to plunk it down in the middle of the day. But that’s the kind of fun that isn’t for everybody.

Rumpus: In a general sense, when you’re looking at a short story submitted to the Review, when a short story arrives on your desk, are you able to sum up what you’re considering, or is it just so different for every story? Can you say what connects a short story to The Paris Review or to you, personally?

Stein: It’s impossible to say. You can go back and try to generalize, but then you end up saying things that all editors say about everything that ever gets published. Something about voice, about urgency, about actually having a story to tell.

Rumpus: And being a “name” author—that doesn’t mean that you’re going to get into the Review, right? You’ve said in the past that one of the hardest things you’ve had to do as an editor is to turn down some of your favorite writers.

Stein: Names don’t matter, CVs don’t matter, previous publications don’t matter at all, because, in a certain way, the ideal is for someone to come completely out of left field. And still, of course, it is hard to say no to a writer who matters a lot to you and who you know matters to your readers.

Rumpus: It does seem like you, personally, could launch writers’ careers. That’s a big responsibility.

Stein: That’s part of the Review‘s job. If the Review publishes a short story by a writer who doesn’t have a publisher, or doesn’t have an agent, and if that writer’s career doesn’t change, then the Review is not fulfilling one of its main pragmatic functions: to be a sort of filter for the book business. You’ve got to take that stuff seriously, though there is no way of orchestrating it unless you are doing your job in other ways. It’s just sort of a side effect.

Rumpus: When you were a fiction editor at F.S.G., were you paying attention to the fiction in the Review?

Stein: I was. And to other magazines, too. To Noon [Annual], for example. Very different magazines, but I was always curious to see what they were up to.

Rumpus: The Paris Review has a long tradition of propelling new authors into the public eye. I know that in the first issue that you edited, you said that April Lawson’s story astonished you. Is that what you’re going for? Stories that just show up out of the blue and astonish you?

Stein: Absolutely. It’s fun when it’s a writer who’s been around for a long time. But there’s something especially exciting about finding a new writer who really turns you on.

Rumpus: Is that a rarity that something will show up like that, or have you had another astonishment since that piece?

Stein: Pretty much every issue that we’ve put out, there have been at least one or two things that really surprised me. It sounds like bullshit, but most of the stories that we’ve run had that effect on me. We get thousands and thousands of submissions and I don’t think we’ve published a story yet—very few, anyway—where there wasn’t something like what Mona Simpson described, where a first sentence or a first page didn’t just really command attention.

Rumpus: At this point, you’ve done a lot in terms of revitalizing the Review and adding new features and creating an online archive and personally penning an online advice column, among many other things. Do you feel like, at this point, you’ve done plenty to make the Review your own, or are you still feeling a pressure to assert and to prove yourself?

Stein: I don’t think the Review needs another strong personality for its editor. By now the Review has a job to do that is defined by the tradition of the Review. So I haven’t had to worry much about that. But if you’re asking whether I’m satisfied with where the Review is right now, I would say no. I want more people to be reading the fiction and the poetry and the essays and the interviews. And the strategies for finding the readers—who I think could use the Review, who could love the Review, and who don’t yet know about it—that’s a work in progress. It was a big step forward to relaunch the website. That made it a lot easier. And each of the three women who’ve edited the blog have taken it forward in ways that I could never have dreamed of. But that doesn’t have much to do with me, with putting my own stamp on it. If anything, the less my stamp is on the website, the better for the website.

Rumpus: In retrospect, it seems like an obvious decision to have a digital archive. Were you surprised at how little had been done online before you got there?

Stein: It wouldn’t have occurred to me, necessarily, that it was a big deal to get the interview archive on the Web. That was proposed by the former managing editor, Caitlin Roper. Naturally, as soon as she said it, it made sense. Two days before we put the archive online, I got a call from The New York Times, from a fact-checker, who introduced himself and said, “You don’t know me, but I was just working on a story and it was a real hassle trying to track down this Paris Review interview and we sent people to the New York Public Library and this one interview wasn’t there, for whatever reason. Would you consider making them more widely available?” And I said, “Well, sir, actually your timing is very good, we’re about to make them available for free by the end of the week.” And the guy said, “No! I wasn’t saying you should make them available for free.” Which is not a surprising response from someone on staff at The New York Times. But the deed was done and I’m actually very happy with the way it’s worked out.

Rumpus: How do you respect the fifty-year tradition of the magazine while making it contemporary at the same time? Is that a constant question that nags at you? Because I would imagine that in any decision that you make that’s new or different, there’s going to be people around you dragging their feet.

Stein: Oh, I don’t think so. To answer the first part of the question: at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, one was always very aware of the backlist and of a kind of quality that the publishing house stood for. And that didn’t make it hard to sign books up. In fact, it was kind of a helpful guide, because in a certain way, each new book was kind of unfolding the meaning of the house. Maybe that’s a pretentious way of putting it. But there was this sense that the publishing house was always trying to become itself with each new book. Because again, just as in publishing a literary magazine, when you’re working at a literary publishing house, you don’t have that much control over what you’re going to sell next year. It depends a lot on what a bunch of writers do, what you can afford, whether someone else buys it instead of you…there are a million variables. So having the tradition of the house as a guide was really useful and it’s just the way I was taught to think. And I would say that the same thing is true at The Paris Review. And the board has been very supportive. The board would be the people who would—as you say—drag their feet or check new initiatives, but they’ve been very, very supportive. In fact they’ve pushed me to innovate online, and have given, not just financial support, but technical advice.

Rumpus: In your time there, do you have a checklist of things that you’d like to accomplish? For instance: discover however many great new writers, or publish a number of poems by unknown poets. Do you have a list like that, or is that always evolving?

Stein: No, I should probably make one of those lists. As I say, I have the feeling that the magazine can reach many more people than it reaches and has something to offer that not everyone knows who should know it. That’s why we’re starting an app, and that’s why we do the blog. But editorially, I think it’s mainly a matter of keeping your eyes peeled. You just really don’t know what’s going to come along. I just read this novel by Karl Ove Knausgaard, that James Wood reviewed a few weeks ago, and if I had known that that guy was around—it just kills me. I would’ve loved to serialize his book. Or Sam Savage, who gave us a reworked excerpt of his fourth novel. His fourth novel, and I’d never read him, never heard of him. If I’d had the novel three months earlier, I would have offered to make a special issue, or to run it as a serial. Either of those guys, I think would’ve been just a coup. I would’ve felt that the magazine was really doing its job by bringing them more readers than they’d had before. But I can’t help being hopeful that next year, I’ll see new things in manuscript, in time for us to help bring out their next books, whoever those writers might be.

Rumpus: The Paris Review is known for its in-depth interviews with writers. I’ve read your interview with Jonathan Lethem a couple of times. I know that the Review allows authors to go back over the interviews and refine them and I was wondering about the first draft of the interview with Lethem, if you could just talk about that process: how much of that interview was off the cuff and how much of that interview was revised?

Stein: I remember that we did it in three long sessions. I remember that I studied a lot, between sessions. I remember Jonathan sending me home with a lot of books that I didn’t know. When Jonathan proposed that I do it, we knew each other slightly, not well. I was of course very honored, but I pointed out that I wasn’t qualified. I could think of a lot of people who knew a lot more about where he was coming from. It turned out that was actually part of Jonathan’s thinking: he wanted someone who didn’t know that much about science fiction, for example. Or movies. Or baseball. Or…the list goes on. That was very interesting for me. I remember that we worked on the transcript together from the beginning. There were several moments in the transcript where I’d say something kind of silly and he would correct me rather sharply. I remember us agreeing to keep moments like that in the interview and even making one of them up. We thought it helped get the points across.

Rumpus: That was actually my next question. It’s not something I see in every interview, but there did seem to be hints of conflict while you talked. I liked it and I was wondering if that was important to you, to have that conflict? Do you feel like challenging the interview subject—or vice-versa—creates a dynamic interview?

Stein: I think it can be helpful in certain interviews. Not every interview needs it or should have it. My favorite example of that—I didn’t know about it at the time, but the interview with Henry Green by Terry Southern. Now, if you read that, the whole thing is adversarial, with Henry Green being very dry and Terry Southern sounding very pretentious. And Terry Southern will ask some half-page-long, involved, philosophical question and then Green will mishear him and dismiss the whole topic in one sentence. But really the two of them wrote every word of that interview together. Jonathan [Lethem] probably knew all about that. I didn’t. Of course, that sort of thing requires a certain amount of trust and affection between the subject and the interviewer.

Rumpus: There’s also just something about journalists where they don’t want to reveal things that they don’t know and they write like authorities on all subjects, no matter what that subject is. On your part, I thought it was a really confident approach to take, admitting that you were ignorant in certain areas. But it also struck me as an approach that someone who’s just starting out might not take.

Stein: It’s nice of you to say that. The truth is, I was just starting out. I’d never done a long interview before and I still haven’t done another one. And I don’t know how confident I was. I think I just took Jonathan’s lead. I’d done a few magazine profiles. Little ones, for Publisher’s Weekly and a couple of other places, and I had found it pretty bruising to be in the room—in one case with a writer who was a real hero to me, and in another case with a writer who I found impressive in a worldly way. And those two times, specifically, I remember finding it very bruising…you must’ve had this experience: you want the person to like you or to notice you. And yet it’s hard to do a good interview when that feeling is uppermost in your mind. I mean, in particular, when I went to interview David Foster Wallace, I kept trying to put him at ease by telling him how much his work meant to me. And of course every time I tried to talk about it, he became more uncomfortable. Now that makes perfect sense to me, but at the time, I didn’t realize that it was actually easier to go in and cop to your dumbest self. It actually feels better doing it that way.

Rumpus: Or challenging them instead of worshipping them. Make them defend their work.

Stein: Yeah. It’s probably easier for them to be on the defensive than to accept a lot of praise. Or a lot of smart observation, which is what I offered Wallace. I was trying to show him that I understood his work very well. But, you know, why on earth would he care if I understood his work? It only mattered to me.

Rumpus: Who else would you like to interview? Do you have anybody on your wish-list that you would like to get to, personally?

Stein: No, I love having people around who are better interviewers than I am and who can make the time to do a really great job. All of the interviews that we’ve published are with people who really interest me. When I took the job, Josh Pashman already had 500 pages of transcript with Norman Rush. Now, Norman Rush is one of the most fascinating writers alive, but I’d rather read Josh’s brilliant interview than try to do it myself. Or Robyn Creswell, our poetry editor, interviewed James Fenton for the new issue. I could never have known enough to get that interview out of Fenton. And yet I felt very spoken for, editorially. That’s partly because Robyn and I work very closely together, but mainly it’s because he knows so much and is such a talented interviewer. That sort of luck depends on having people around you who know much, much more than you do.

Rumpus: And what about the Terry Southern interview? I read that it was in the pipeline since 1967? [The interview was started in 1967 and published in 2012.]

Stein: Yeah!

Rumpus: How does that happen?

Stein: Well, you have to remember that there’s really no paper-trail that links us reliably with earlier incantations of the Review. I mean, we’ve managed to lose almost all of our contract files before 1980. So when I say “in the pipeline,” I mean something pretty notional. I probably couldn’t tell you at this very moment what’s in the pipeline now. We’re not like a normal magazine where you plot out what’s going to be in each issue. You just sort of wait for them to come in. And what happened was that Maggie interviewed Southern in ’67, sent him off with her version of the interview and he just kept working on it. And then he died in the ’90s and his widow said, “Well, at least now we’ll be able to publish the interview.” But then it disappeared and no one could find it. Then it surfaced, just last year. And it was really done. I mean, he really had worked on it. So it was ready to go.

Rumpus: That’s an amazing story. But it leads me to my question: this is truly an interesting way of doing interviews, allowing the author to help craft it and refine it, but also I imagine it can be frustrating because of that instance with Terry and others—people will want to labor over everything. And I wonder if sometimes in-the-moment comments from an author would be better than the stuff that they’ll want to take out later, or they’ll want to revise. Are there times where they’ve taken something out that could’ve been great?

Stein: Yeah, that happens. It happens a little less than I thought it would. I guess the writers that we’ve been interviewing have a nose for what is lively and what sounds spoken. After all, we are interviewing writers. When George [Plimpton] tried to explain to his parents in a letter what he wanted to do with the interview section, and he described the first interview, which he did with E.M. Forster, he told his parents that he was writing an “essay in dialogue on technique.” If you think about it that way—that you’re helping the writer to create an essay—it gives a feeling for why you wouldn’t mind giving up a good first-draft answer in exchange for a second-draft answer.

Rumpus: I would guess that it possibly gives the subject more freedom upfront to open up, because they can redact their words and make sure that what finally ends up in the archive, forever, is something they really wanted to say.

Stein: Exactly. I think the main advantage of this technique over standard interviewing technique is that it lets people who are very concerned with their words be very free. And whatever the drawbacks of doing it that way—and, of course, there are terrible drawbacks if you’re a news reporter dealing with The White House—but when you’re talking to writers and you want them to talk for hours, it’s really very freeing.

Rumpus: I’ve read that, when you got to the Review, you wanted the poetry section to be for non-expert poetry readers. But the interviews are with writers who mean something to other American writers. Is there a disparity there?

Stein: We don’t choose our interview subjects because we think they have something special to say to American writers, though I guess that’s always true. They’re people who really fascinate us. Sometimes a favorite writer will suggest someone whose work I and the other editors don’t know. Then we’ll hunt down some books and take a look. I don’t think of the interviews particularly as being for writers. I just think of them as being for interested readers.

Rumpus: Is there a reason why the interviewer is just called “Interviewer” in The Paris Review in a very intentionally anonymous way?

Stein: I don’t know why it started, but notice the way that convention has been used. Not unlike the way The New Yorker uses the convention of the anonymous Talk of the Town persona. You can have fun with it, the fact that the person is wearing that mask of “interviewer.” The interviews are always signed, so you know who did it, but it kind of helps the person drop out. It’s fun when the interviews have the sound of a good psychoanalytic session, where the impression that you get is of a very tiny question that opens up paragraphs of reflection. And some subjects don’t like that. Sometimes they push back because they want it to sound more like an exchange. And sometimes they do sound more like an exchange, and that’s fine. But in general, the sound that I love is that sound of little questions unlocking big answers. That’s very much something that happens in the recording studio, not live. Here’s a good example of where the “interviewer” handle comes in handy: when [literary agent] Ira Silverberg interviewed [author] Dennis Cooper, a few issues ago. I asked Ira, because Ira had been his agent and his publisher and—more than anybody—had talked about the difficulties of bringing Dennis Cooper’s difficult, disturbing work across to a wide audience. I thought that that would lend itself very well to questioning Cooper. But then there’s the problem that they’ve known each other forever. And I loved the way Ira pared back his questions so that Dennis could go on for a very long time and gets very deep without there being a lot of chat between the two of them. The questions have a certain kind of priestly anonymity.

Rumpus: Picking the interview subjects for the “Writers at Work” series is pretty internal at the Review, right? You’re not necessarily advertising that you want people to come to you with ideas.

Stein: That’s right. For the most part it’s internal, though sometimes ideas come from other places. It can take us a year or more to decide. Recently, a couple of different writers proposed the same author, and I knew the person’s work a little bit. But then I was in a used bookstore and I picked up one of her novels and was flabbergasted by how good it was. So we assigned the interview to the first-comer, a year late. Sometimes people will come to us with an interview that’s already underway. In theory, that could work. I don’t think that that’s happened since I’ve been in the job.

Rumpus: I imagine that for the most part, everyone is really willing to submit to the process, but I read that Ira Glass was too busy to do one. Are there others who are still on your wish-list, people who maybe would be interested but just don’t have the schedules to do it?

Stein: I hope Ira finds time. I don’t pester him, but he would be so great for “The Art of Editing.” Because I think his editing style has really changed the way we tell stories. Lately I’d been hoping and hoping that we could get Bob Silvers to consent to an “Art of Editing” interview, but no soap. Cormac McCarthy we bother every nine months, through his agent. Charles Portis. J.K. Rowling. Not everyone wants to be interviewed. And I can understand that. I mean, Hemingway was terrible, it was so hard to get that interview. And George [Plimpton] really got the interview by having a not-very-revealing conversation with Hemingway, who clearly loved George in real life. But the first interview is a picture of someone being pestered by a gnat. And then George kept writing these follow-up letters like, “When you told me that such and such was an idiotic question, what exactly did you mean?” And Hemingway would write back a paragraph about why George was being foolish. And over the course of the correspondence, a real interview started to take shape.

Rumpus: So it was just born out of an antagonistic push-and-pull.

Stein: I think antagonism, undergirded by hero-worship on one side and a lot of affection and respect on the other.

Rumpus: Is this job about what you thought it would be? Or have there been some surprises here and there?

Stein: That’s a good question. In some ways, it’s kind of what I imagined. I’m more thrilled by the short fiction than I expected to be. I’ve found more pleasure in reading short fiction than I used to. By seeing what kinds of thinking are going on in short fiction. I was also surprised by the panic I’ve felt, especially at first, when we’d put an issue to bed and then realized we had to put another one together.

Rumpus: Why’s that?

Stein: Well, we don’t commission very much. We almost never commission things. [Writer and editor] John Jeremiah Sullivan—he’s done a few commissions for us. It’s wonderful when you know that John Sullivan is at work on something for you. But it’s also nail-biting. Because John’s a perfectionist. And it goes with this thing that I’ve noticed in him that my family has always noticed in me, which is a not very realistic sense of time. You know how you can forget that time is marching by, even as you’re trying to plan how you’re going to use your time? We’re both a little bit like that. So we both depend heavily on the discipline of the managing editor, Nicole Rudick.

Rumpus: Do you do a lot of self-reflection, or are you much too busy to really analyze how much you think you’ve gotten right since you’ve been at the Review versus how much you’ve gotten wrong, or could’ve done better?

Stein: I guess I don’t think much about the issues after they come out. I like it when people like them. Often, when people have criticisms, I find myself agreeing with them. I think some issues are stronger than others. I hope we’re getting a little bit better, overall, issue by issue.

Rumpus: It seems like the Review is such a good fit for you because you take a lot of pleasure in personally recommending books and authors. And you’ve said that one of the main points of the Review is that it’s a gateway drug to other authors and other reading. Is that a love of yours—you see a person and you think immediately of something that you know they’ll love to read? Is recommending things a personal passion of yours?

Stein: Ha! No. I asked Sadie [Stein, Deputy Editor of The Paris Review and co-editor of Object Lessons] a few months ago if I could stop doing the advice column because I just can’t write funny. She ceded the point. Others do it so much better. Sadie, for example. Or Josh Cohen. And honestly, after a few months of recommending, I realized that I haven’t read enough, really, to recommend very many books. I recommend the same things over and over again. How many times can you tell people to read Rebecca or Remembrance of Things Past? There are people like [author and radio host] Kurt Andersen who seem to just be up on everything, and I am not that guy at all. I have such a thin knowledge of even the stuff that I do read. So I feel a little bit fraudulent offering reading advice. Not always, but sometimes.

Rumpus: Something refreshing that I thought was very funny was that column that you wrote about not needing to read the Lord of the Rings trilogy. I thought that was great.

Stein: I’m glad.

Rumpus: It’s very rare to hear to hear somebody say that.

Stein: Oh, do people not say that?

Rumpus: No one says that. You’re the only one, I think, in the history of letters.

Stein: That must be the difference between San Francisco and New York, right there.

Rumpus: You’re right. So when you got the job, I know that you had read the Review over the years, since age fourteen, but when you were applying and since you’ve gotten the job, have you really just immersed yourself in everything? I mean, do you feel pretty much like you’re caught up at this point?

Stein: I don’t feel at all caught up. I did a lot of studying when I was applying for that job, but as I say, it would take years, even if you gave hours a week to it, to know the archive. And some of it’s great, some of it’s not great. The sad fact is that, and it’s a strange fact—fiction, in general, ages less well than criticism. Which is counterintuitive. But I’ve found it to be true. So, a giant fiction archive—a giant poetry archive, too—you’ll find some things that you connect to. But time passes rather quickly in those art forms. That’s not a knock on the art form, it’s a difficulty of the art form. It’s always going to be more fun in general to read a page of advertisements from an early modernist journal than to read the editorial content. And in a certain way, it would be great if I just had the whole magazine in my head, but when you read, you have to exercise the critical faculties that you bring to bear on new stuff, too.

Rumpus: I know it’s early in your career at the Review, but do you think about your legacy? Do you think that you would like to have a run-time of what George Plimpton did? Or is it too early to tell? Could this potentially be your last job, in terms of where you’re going to end your career?

Stein: Unless I’m cycling in traffic, I don’t really think about that. I’m not looking to do anything else for a while, but I don’t really think about it. The question of legacy—George Plimpton invented the magazine and he laid down the basic parameters and you really couldn’t hope to be more than a good steward of what he started. But that’s plenty.

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Or so we were told. With the War on Terror less than a month old, David Rees sat up in his Brooklyn apartment one night and wrote eight comic strips about the world’s newest (and vaguest) war. His frustrations were on full display. His method: a conversational comic about the state of the world, laden with profanity, passionate as a comic strip has ever been. The art, Rees says—public domain clip art—was beside the point. The two guys talking on the phone could’ve been anybody. They were both Rees. It was a conversation with himself, fueled by world affairs and a bottle of whiskey.

Here’s the thing about that conversation: it was hilarious and cathartic and, even though Rees only e-mailed the page to a handful of his friends, within a couple of weeks the comics had been forwarded countless times. Nobody knows the exact number of page views, but it was immense. As Rees points out, it was before Facebook and Twitter, before we could count “Likes” and retweets. Rees knew his comics had struck a nerve based on a.) how often his website was crashing, and b.) eventual phone calls from media outlets.

I remember standing in my college newspaper office that fall when my editor told me I had to check out this hilarious and insane new comic strip. Then, he watched me as I read it and laughed. Other people gathered around our screen, reading along, a scene that was surely unfolding in office settings across the country. I wanted to know who was behind the comics, but they were unsigned. No name on the entire website, in fact. Also, the URL was complicated, a series of letters, not immediately decipherable.

And that was the unlikely beginning of Get Your War On, which basically started with the War on Terror and ended on January 20, 2009, the day President Obama was inaugurated. (Rees announced early on that the comic would last as long as the Bush administration.) In the interim, Rees became a professional cartoonist, wrote 80 more full pages of comics, and was signed by Rolling Stone magazine to produce an original strip for them each week. The comics were republished in two bestselling book-collections by Soft Skull Press. Rees donated all of his book royalties—more than $100,000—to Adopt-a-Minefield, an organization removing land-mines in Afghanistan. Not the moves of your typical struggling artist.

Rees had been using clip art since he worked temp jobs, banging out absurdist comics like My New Fighting Technique Is Unstoppable, which he sold at comic shops in New York. He’d never had the goal of becoming a cartoonist, though; it was always just something he did to alleviate his boredom, stuck in gigs with no creative outlet. Recently married and transplanted to New York, Get Your War On set him off in an unexpected direction. There was never an overarching career plan.

When Rees retired the comic eight years later, he was essentially broke. He’d given most of his money away, then given up his livelihood. To make matters much worse, his marriage ended in divorce. He ended up working for the United States Census in 2010, just to pay the bills. Early on, he was instructed by a fellow employee about proper pencil-sharpening techniques. This next part is going to sound like a joke, but it isn’t: something clicked for Rees and he decided to investigate pencil-sharpening further, to learn everything he could learn about it, to master numerous pencil-sharpening techniques. He researched the history of the pencil. He talked to experts in the industry. He collected books on it. And then, just like that, Rees decided that he would start a pencil-sharpening business. People would send him pencils, Rees decided, and he would charge them $15, in exchange for a sharpened pencil mailed in a protective tube, along with the shavings and a certificate of authenticity. To date, Rees has sharpened more than 750 pencils for paying customers. In April, he released the book How To Sharpen Pencils, which he intended more as a how-to book than humor, he says. It has become a real-life business, something for Rees to focus on after his phenomenal cartooning career and marriage ended in short order. Sharpening pencils, some might successfully argue, is the anti-digital comic.

There have been plenty of other projects for Rees in the last eleven years, some of which we touch on in the wide-ranging conversation, below. But we’ll start with Rees’s most famous creation, Get Your War On.

***

The Rumpus: Do you have vivid memories of creating the original page of Get Your War On comics that night in October, 2001? I’ve wondered about that, because I’ve heard the story of you sitting in the dark in the middle of the night, drinking whiskey and making those first strips and then e-mailing them to a handful of friends. And then, within days, they were being read by millions of people. Did you know what you were on to?

David Rees: I have some memory of that night. It’s like really specific stuff. I didn’t have my own computer back then. I was using my girlfriend’s iMac. It was like those bulbous blue-colored iMacs, in our weird apartment in Brooklyn. And I remember I was listening to slow jams really loud on headphones, like Jodeci or something. I used to really be into ‘90s R&B slow jams, R. Kelly and Jodeci and stuff. And I was listening to it as loud as I could. I listened to slow jams throughout making Get Your War On, at least for the first six months. That was the soundtrack to it. And I remember drinking…Jim Beam was what we were buying. And then I do remember a catharsis. Like, I didn’t cry or anything. But the feeling I remember was like—and I haven’t felt this too many times—but it’s kind of like the feeling I felt when I made the comic My New Fighting Technique Is Unstoppable, which was just completely silly. That was the feeling I had with Get Your War On. Like, this is expressing me perfectly in this moment. This is exactly what I wanted to read. And so I had to make it. It’s like this weird loop. Do you know what I mean? I made what I wanted to be able to read.

Rumpus: Right. And everything was gelling, too, because you had the comic background and you also had all this stuff that was bubbling up, that you needed to say. It seems like it was such a perfect example of all things coming together.

Rees: Yeah, I agree. I mean, it was a great experience and I was lucky to have it, and I do think that it was a situation where I took this form that I was already really comfortable with, which is clip-art cartoons and a lot of bad language. And it’s that same idea of being really limited and being in a box. And it was like, “OK, use this stuff to make a super personal cartoon about all these feelings that are churning around in you after 9/11.” And I only sent it to friends. I sent it to like, I don’t know, 15 friends, 20 friends, a.) because I didn’t want to offend anybody, but b.) I felt like they were the only people who’d even understand what I was doing, because they were friends who knew my background, making clip-art cartoons. It was like sharing your diary with 15 friends. You know what I mean? It was like the same impulse on my part. Like, pretend you’re obsessed with Daniel Day-Lewis and all your friends know you’re obsessed with Daniel Day-Lewis, and then there’s a huge terror atrocity and you make this painting about Daniel Day-Lewis crying or something. Well, you’re not going to share that with the world, because the world’s going to think you’re crazy. But you’ll show it to your close friends and be like, “You guys will get this,” and that was kind of like what it was with Get Your War On. And then it just so happened that other people responded to that…people responded to the contrast between the boring clip art and the boring outer façade and the crazy, over-the-top language that was just below the surface.

Rumpus: So did you actually go from angry to relieved that first night? You must have had some sort of anger while you were writing those comics? They’re so passionate.

Rees: Maybe it was anger. I don’t really know who I would be angry at. At the time, I wasn’t really angry at Bush. I thought his first speech after 9/11 was actually a pretty strong speech. I remember watching it with a bunch of people and being pretty surprised at how impressed we all were. I was just disturbed. I think “disturbed” is the word. I was disturbed that we were gonna bomb the shit out of Afghanistan and, at the time, I think there was a drought concern, or a famine concern, and we were cutting off food-supply routes. It just seemed disturbing. I’m gonna say something controversial right now: you can print it or not, but the days after 9/11 were disturbing. Boom! Exclusive! Rumpus exclusive.

Rumpus: And what was your reaction when it hit? When did you realize that Get Your War On was a phenomenon? Was it really the next morning?

Rees: No, I mean, the only way we knew how to tell how popular it was back then was how often my website was crashing and looking at those statistics from the web server. And my friend was very web-savvy, he was an Internet guy, and he was like, “This is a lot of traffic. You need to pay more money per month to keep your site up.” And then I really knew when it hit was—it was maybe two weeks out—things were kind of going crazy, but the media hadn’t really got hold of it yet. I hadn’t done any interviews. And then what happened was: I had flown to Manitowoc, Wisconsin for my dad’s 70^th birthday. It was a surprise birthday party. And I hadn’t told my parents about Get Your War On, because they were already worried about us living in New York. And those first editions were pretty dark. They’re about getting drunk, thinking about killing yourself and just masturbating to porn all day. And, you know, I didn’t want them to have to worry anymore than they were already worrying. My girlfriend, now my ex-wife, but my girlfriend at the time had stayed back in Brooklyn and called me in Wisconsin and said, “Listen, I hate to bother you and I know you don’t want to talk about this with your parents, but I’ve been getting calls from all the stores that sell your Fighting Technique comic, because they’re getting calls from newspapers asking, ‘Who are you?’” At the time on my website, I had no personal information, there was nothing about me, I don’t even think my name was on my website, or anything. And the only telephone numbers and the only real-world stuff was: on my website back then, I had a page of stores where you could go and buy my stapled, photocopied comics. And journalists had started calling these stores, saying, “Who makes this comic? We want to know, because he’s made this online comic and there’s no way to get in touch with him.” So these stores were calling [Rees's then-wife] Sarah and saying, “Hey, the Village Voice called me looking for David. He should get in touch with them. It might be good for his career.” I think it was the Village Voice or the LA Weekly…alt weeklies were really into it. And my mom was like, “Why did Sarah call? Everything OK?” And then I had to be like, “Guys, I have to tell you about this crazy comic I made. Don’t look at it, it’s gonna freak you out, it has a lot of bad language, but I have to make some phone calls.” So, it was a couple weeks out.

Rumpus: Get Your War On is easily some of the most well-written, elegant cussing I’ve ever read. Do you just have a knack for that? I mean, the meter is so perfect. It’s really impressively written.

Rees: Oh, thank you.

Rumpus: Was that something that just came easily to you?

Rees: Well…that all came out of Fighting Technique. I mean, that was the first thing I made where the profanity was part of the humor. And that was just influenced by all the rap music I was listening to back then. Yeah, the language in that —obviously, there’s not much thought given to the images, but the language, I gave it more thought, probably, than people would think. I was taking the writing of it pretty seriously. You know? I wanted the language to be very strong, obviously, because there was nothing else for the reader to respond to. It was all just about the writing.

Rumpus: You’ve said Richard Pryor was an influence.

Rees: I’ve always liked Richard Pryor. That was probably just about the profanity. I’ve always responded to rhythmic profanity. The big influence was the Minutemen. I mean, that was the biggest influence in Get Your War On.

Rumpus: Their stances?

Rees: Politically, I guess. But really structurally. Coming back to that idea of structure. The Minutemen’s best songs, to me, are very concise songs, like 90 seconds long, no chorus, super compressed, super political and didactic, the lyrics don’t rhyme, you’re just in and out. And they are my favorite band and that was kind of what I was going for with Get Your War On. Like—I want to make a Minutemen song in a comic form. Super concise, super quick, a lot of times no punchline. So I feel like that was the single biggest influence.

Rumpus: And hip-hop was an influence?

Rees: Well, I mean I was using a lot of slang that was contemporary at the time and there was a lot of hip-hop influence just in the vernacular, that’s how people were talking back in the early 2000s. And the big hip-hop influence, I think, was Fighting Technique, because I would literally be listening to the MP3 downloads of freestyle battles while I would make Fighting Technique at this temp job I had. And Fighting Technique was all about using hyper-masculine language to mask your insecurity about your status as a man. So it felt like, thematically, Fighting Technique was really influenced by hip-hop, as well as the profanity and whatever weird poetry is in that comic.

Rumpus: So, it was already there. It was just a matter of transferring it to politics. Like, “I’ve already got the language. I’ve already got the approach. I’m just going to use it in relation to what’s going on in the world.”

Rees: Yeah, I think so. Basically. It’s like a musician. “Yeah, I got my guitar and usually I write about my starry-eyed love. But I’m really upset by healthcare, so now I’m going to write songs about healthcare.” It’s the equivalent. Like, I had my tool. I was like, “I’m going to use it for this, now, instead of that.”

Rumpus: And did you immediately know what you were going to call the strip? It was based on a song, right?

Rees: Well, at the time, Missy Elliott had this famous song, “Get Ur Freak On.” And I don’t remember if I titled it that first night. I think I did. I just liked how jarring it was: Get Your War On. Because, we were going to war, but it was this weird kind of war and people didn’t know how to feel about it and some people were really excited about it. I don’t know. To me, I was just really into Missy Elliott and I was really into that song and yeah, I just thought it made sense. Like, in a way, it kind of was like the message of the comic, conveyed in the title. Like, this is a mishmash of wildly inappropriate juxtapositions. I mean, it’s four words, you can’t over-think it too much, but still, that was very deliberate, that title.

Rumpus: And it has a sort of flippancy to it, even though the comic is serious. There are tons of variations of that expression that get thrown around, so it’s immediately catchy.

Rees: Yeah, right. Get your drink on. Get your PowerBar on. Get your single-serve ice cream on. Yeah, that was part of it, because I was kind of freaked out. People were so excited [we were] starting a never-ending war on terror. Like, really? I don’t know—I was skeptical of it.

Rumpus: And were you deliberating whether to make a second page of comics? Did you think about just keeping it as one page, or did you know it was something you had to do at that point?

Rees: No, the first page was just like this one-off thing and I put it on my website and you couldn’t even get to it from my website. I think I just hosted it on a page on my website and then sent that link to my friends. I guess it was like the equivalent of a private link. But then, eventually, I made it more accessible. I’ve never been good at self-promotion. And my URL is really obscure. And for years and years, there was nothing about me on my website.

Rumpus: So, did that second page of Get Your War On comics come easily to you? I imagine there was some pressure to try to top yourself.

Rees: The second page is about the anthrax attacks. I bet if there hadn’t been the anthrax attacks, it would’ve just been that one page. But I feel like that’s when that happened. That’s when I was like, “OK, this is getting bananas.” And the second page, even more than the first page, was when people were like, “Yeah. I’m feelin’ this. This is crazy.” But, I mean I feel like those first pages— stuff kept happening. I don’t know if I was having a good time, but I felt like I was doing something good for myself. Like, in a weird way, it felt really healthy. Even though I was half drunk when I was making them all in the middle of the night, listening to Jodeci and hurting my eardrums, it felt healthy.

Rumpus: And in a way your comic kind of seemed like it was a response to everybody’s fear getting out of hand at that point. Granted, anthrax was being mailed around, so I guess some of the fear was warranted.

Rees: Yeah, totally. I don’t know if I was expressing my fear, or making fun of my fear.

Rumpus: At one point, you said that you weren’t trying to change anybody’s mind with Get Your War On. Was that pretty consistent throughout? Were you mostly doing it to vent?

Rees: I feel like I went through different stages with that comic, based on whatever I was responding to. Sometimes it was to vent. Put it this way: sometimes it was just like yelling into the wind, because I was upset and I wanted to yell. And then sometimes [it was] yelling at people. I mean, it’s an absurd fantasy, but a lot of cartoonists have it: yelling at people. Like, “You’re an asshole. You should be in jail.” That kind of stuff. A lot of political cartoonists, they’ll do a cartoon about the politician that’s supposed to be mean, and the politician will write and say, “Hey, can I buy the original?” That happens. And cartoonists hate that. Because it’s like, well, the fact that you’re comfortable with having this in your office means you don’t take my criticism seriously. Like, really enervating, if you’re into cartooning for any reason other than just the vast financial rewards that come with political cartoons.

Rumpus: You’ve also said that you felt a responsibility to make cartoons that were generally important.

Rees: Yeah, maybe. I got too into this idea with Get Your War On that I have to provide a public service and be a responsible cartoonist and convey information and be accurate and not just say shit to be provocative, but be able to back up anything that I say.

Rumpus: And you’ve said that it peaked for you that first night.

Rees: Yeah, I mean, any working cartoonist will tell you this, anybody who’s working in a creative field: at some point, it’s a job. You have deadlines. I think, for over a year, I refused to make them for publications, because I only wanted to make them when I wanted to make them. But at some point, I was like, “This is crazy, you have an opportunity to be a professional cartoonist. This is something that your eight-year-old self would never forgive you for not trying, at least.” And then I got the contract with Rolling Stone and I would make stuff for other publications. But yeah, it becomes a job. I mean, you can still have amazing, fun experiences where you’re like, “Oh my gosh, I got so lucky this week, I’m so proud of this one.” But other times, you’re like, “Yeah, that’s not that great.”

Rumpus: And how did Rolling Stone come about? Did they just call you up and ask you to do a weekly comic?

Rees: Rolling Stone had this issue every year called the Hot Issue, which you’ve got to buy if you want to know what’s hot in the world of arts and entertainment and politics. And I guess that year, maybe 2002, they had “Hot Comic Strip” and it was Get Your War On. And then I think the publisher was like, “Why don’t we just see if he’ll make it for us.” And then they called me. I also heard from [Minutemen co-founder] Mike Watt once, [who] said, “I put in a good word for you with Rolling Stone.” So that was nice.

Rumpus: I’ve read that Rolling Stone was supposedly serializing it. But weren’t you making new comics for them?

Rees: Yeah, they had an exclusive. The ones I gave Rolling Stone, no one else could run. So, for a while, the model was: I would make a comic for Rolling Stone every two weeks, because they’re biweekly. And then I would make weekly comics for my weekly papers. It was on two parallel tracks. And then they all got collected in a book.

Rumpus: And so, did they ever have to water anything down? Or were you just allowed to do what you wanted?

Rees: Man, Rolling Stone was the best. I mean, you know, it was so interesting. On the first tour I went on, it was in the fall of 2002, when Soft Skull published the book—because after I self-published it, Soft Skull published it—I went on this tour in the fall of 2002, and the question people would most ask me was like, “Has the FBI contacted you or anything?” I’d be like, “No, man. Why would they? It is America. Everything I’m doing is perfectly legal.” And then when I went out on the next book tour, after I did Get Your War On for a couple years, people were like, “Hey man, is Rolling Stone censoring you because they’re so corporate?” And I’d be like, “No! Rolling Stone is actually not corporate. It’s still a privately held magazine by the guy who started it.” Listen, a lot of their music coverage might trend towards the corporate, but structurally—actually as a physical entity—it is not corporate. And also, when I met with the editors, I was like, “Listen, I would love to be in Rolling Stone, but I would really love to just keep doing what I’m doing.” And they were like, “Yeah! That’s why we want it. Do what you do.” They never toned anything down. One time, I think I had a bad word in a font that was too big and their sales rep said, “If this goes to print, Walmart won’t carry it.” Or something. Or they would be like, “This one isn’t funny.” Or, “Change this.” But it was never like, “We can’t touch this with a ten-foot pole.” It was never like that.

Rumpus: So, you had to start reading the daily newspapers to stay informed, right?

Rees: Yeah, I hated that part of it. I mean, I really felt this obligation to stay informed and I think at one time, I was probably subscribing to, like…I think especially after I got the Rolling Stone gig, I think I was getting the daily New York Times, the daily Financial Times, Foreign Affairs Magazine, some policy journal called International Law and Ethics, Current History magazine. I can’t remember if I was still subscribing to National Review and Z Magazine, The Nation, Harper’s, and it was nuts. At the time, I did not like reading all that shit.

Rumpus: And technically, what was your process like in terms of creating the comic?

Rees: I was using Quark. Running on Mac OS 9. And I just did everything in Quark. I made the dialogue balloons in Quark as text balloons, and just typed in the dialogue directly. Obviously, I never had to sketch anything out. To me, that was the appeal of working with clip art, working digitally. You make it and it’s done.

Rumpus: The clip art was already red, right?

Rees: No, the clip art was black.

Rumpus: Oh, it was?

Rees: Yeah. I made it red just to distinguish it visually from the other stuff on my site, so people would realize—because it was the same clip art that I was using for My New Filing Technique Is Unstoppable—I just made this decision to make it red so that people would realize, “These worlds do not intersect. This is its own separate project.” I just wanted a really simple, dramatic way so that fans, people who were reading my comic, would be like, “This is something different.” Just to flag it, almost.

Rumpus: And when did you decide that you were going to donate all of your royalties from the Get Your War On books that you sold? I know that you gave away a considerable amount of money. Wasn’t it more than $100,000?

Rees: It was around $100,000 by the time it was all said and done, yeah.

Rumpus: That’s really impressive.

Rees: Oh, thank you. I felt good about it at the time, but now that I look back on it and part of me’s like, “That was the beginning of my career. I could’ve held on to that $100,000. It would’ve been useful.” No, it was great. I mean, what happened was people were asking if I would turn it into a book, and I think we might’ve reached out to publishers, or publishers had reached out to us. But I didn’t like how they wanted to do it. Like, one publisher wanted to do it, but they also wanted to include Filing Technique comics. And I was like, “No way!” Like I said to you, “This is the red comic. The red comic does not exist in the same book as the black comic.” You know what I mean? I’m talking about the clip art. At that point, I was self-publishing Fighting Technique and Filing Technique. I knew how to do it. And I had good relationships with stores. And I was like, “All right, I’ll self-publish it. But I’m only going to do 1,000.” This was my thought process. But I hate self-publishing; it’s a real drag and it takes up a lot of space. And then I thought, “Well, if I’m only doing 1,000, I should sign ‘em. And if there’s only 1,000, you can charge a lot of money because now, all of a sudden, it’s this limited thing. And then, as long as we can charge a lot of money, we can raise a lot of money, give the money away.”

At that point, I still felt really conflicted about making money off stuff that’s creatively satisfying. I have that Protestant thing where it’s like, “The way you make money is to do something you don’t like to do. And that’s how you know you’re a virtuous person.” Which is why I’ve never had any money. I felt bad, like, “I’m making this comic, it’s super rewarding and I’m going to make money from it that I’m going to use to buy groceries? Hmmm. I’m not a war-profiteer.” So I was like, “Well, we’ll give the money away.” And then I was just thinking about charities and then I remembered that Afghanistan land mine comic. I was like, “Oh, perfect. Now it becomes this little project. I use the money that I make from the comic to help resolve the issue that made me so upset I started the comic.” Like, the comic is going to eat its own tail. You know? To me, that just felt super efficient and super cool.

Rumpus: Speaking of the land mine comic, I’d imagine that picking your favorite strips from the eight years of Get Your War On is a challenge, but I remember you saying that the comic about the land mines was a personal favorite. Does that still stand out to you?

Rees: Yeah, I think so. I mean, that was one of the darkest things I’d ever made at that point in my life, you know? It was dark, but it was really heartfelt, really profane, really sincere. And kind of funny, but kind of not funny. Kind of like anti-joke humor. And to me, I think when that cartoon was at its strongest, those were the buttons it was pushing, or that was the language it was using.

Rumpus: Did you ever hear from a politician or anybody that you went after?

Rees: No. But I did hear from a guy who wrote for the Pentagon that Get Your War On was one of the cartoons that they would circulate every morning to—I can’t remember who it was, like Joint Chiefs. They would put together, along with articles and stuff, recent cartoons that people were writing about the War on Terror. And I guess, every so often, my stuff would be in there. That was kind of cool.

Rumpus: Was that one of the crazier responses you got to your comic? Or, do any e-mails really stick out where you were taken aback?

Rees: Probably fifty percent of the e-mails I received about that comic over eight years of its life came within the first two weeks of it. People were just going crazy, e-mailing me. And most of those were supportive. Like, “I didn’t know anybody else felt the way I did. Thanks for making this comic. Who are you? Keep up the good work.” Or it would be, “Fuck you, I wished you had died on 9/11,” that kind of stuff. Which is a pretty harsh thing to say when you think about it. Because, what you’re really saying is, “I wish the terrorists had actually been more efficient in murdering Americans.”

Rumpus: That’s so crazy. I can’t believe somebody would send something like that. It’s insane. So, would you respond to any of these people, or would you just be like, “Oh, this is not a good thing to get myself into.”

Rees: Back then, I would literally respond to everybody, no matter what, because it was really important to me that people realized that I was a sincere person who was not trying to offend anybody, I was trying to express how I was feeling. And also, this was in the months after 9/11—we’re all supposed to band together, and I felt like if someone’s going to write me about this thing that I made, I think it’s my responsibility to have a dialogue with them. So eventually I would get to the point where it’s like, “I’m not writing this person back because it’s just gonna be bad.” But initially I wrote to everybody.

Rumpus: It was a longstanding decision that you were going to give up the comic at the end of the Bush administration. You announced that in 2004.

Rees: Yeah, I like projects that have a definite duration and I didn’t want it to be my job. I decided that that would be a good endpoint. Like, this is a cartoon that this guy made while Bush was president, fighting the War on Terror.

Rumpus: It must be a blur for you at this point. It seems like a lot happened for you in a very short amount of time.

Rees: I don’t know. In a way it felt very static and I would get very frustrated. I mean, frankly, I think the Get Your War On experience, overall, from a professional standpoint was unhealthy because it fell in my lap and I got so much out of something that I made for myself, and then the world—or, not the world, but tastemakers—got into it, and I was really spoiled for a while, I never had to pitch anything. Editors would come to me. And when I retired it, I realized I did not have the skill-set to function as a freelancer. I don’t know how to pitch, I’m too scared of rejection, the Rolling Stone money stopped, obviously, and that’s why I went to work for the census. I had no fucking money! I didn’t know what to do. I got essentially—not to disparage people who work for the census, but kind of like an entry-level job. I took an aptitude test and I didn’t have a criminal background, so they hired me. You know? But that’s something I still really struggle with. Sometimes I feel like, “Why hasn’t something else amazing landed in my lap while I sleep ‘till 1pm? What’s wrong with the world?”

Rumpus: And what about the Get Your War On play that was based on your work? What was that experience like?

Rees: Oh, that was really cool. It was just this theatre company that asked if they could do it. The best thing about it was when I would do my live show, I would use overhead transparency projectors; I didn’t like doing it digitally, so I did it with overhead projectors for years. I just had the comics on transparencies. And they had four projectors going simultaneously. And they were doing amazing shit with overhead transparency projectors. And then I feel like—at some point late in the run—they were like, “Do you want to know something interesting about these overhead transparency projectors? We bought them from an office liquidator. These are Enron’s overhead transparency projectors.”

Rumpus: What? That’s amazing.

Rees: Yeah. Isn’t that cool? And it makes sense. They were a theatre company in Austin called the Rude Mechanicals. And Enron was Texas-based, of course, so they were the late Ken Lay’s overhead transparency projectors. I think they were supposed to give me one, but they never did. I should look into that.

Rumpus: And when you saw the play, did it live up to what you had hoped for?

Rees: Yeah, it was good. I didn’t know what to expect. I just really didn’t know how they were going to adapt it. And they did do a lot of A/V stuff that I thought was really cool and was kind of like the stuff that I was trying to do in my live shows when I would read the comics. But it’s very difficult—and this is something I realized when we were making the animations—when you go through the comic, those guys never had personalities or names or even fixed political identities. And the theatre company made that same decision with the live show. And we realized, when we were making the animations, that you really do have to attach, if you’re dealing with voices and physical moving people, the audience is really going to want consistency from moment to moment. They can’t be character-less ciphers like they are on the printed page. So when we started the animations, I was like, “It doesn’t matter who says what. Whatever.” And then, within a day, we were like, “These guys need identities. They don’t have to have names, but at least you have to know what to expect.” Like, there has to be some consistency. Especially since it’s serialized. And then I got super into it.

Rumpus: So the animations are written by you, right?

Rees: Yeah, I wrote ‘em and I guess you could say I directed the recording sessions, although it was pretty collaborative. That was really fun. I’m really looking forward to doing it again because I had a good time working with those people and it was really fun to, like, they would ad-lib stuff…it was good.

Rumpus: So you have actors and you’re rotoscoping it, correct?

Rees: Yeah, we hired actors who looked like the clip art, we rotoscoped them, and then we hired two different voice actors who do the dialogue.

Rumpus: I love that there’s looseness to it. There’s room for people to talk over each other.

Rees: Yeah, they did great. Those guys are super-talented and the editors did a great job. We wanted it to sound really kind of realistic, even though it’s absurd, what they’re saying…like, mumbling under each other. I feel like a lot of animation is very shouty. And I didn’t want it to just, like, obviously you could just have everybody—if you’re transferring that comic to video—you could just have everybody yell in all caps. But we kind of wanted it to be a little more naturalistic. And I feel like the editors and the actors were very talented at doing that.

Rumpus: And do you have any sort of impulse to just start political cartooning on your website again?

Rees: No, I mean, if something new and crazy happened, something as disruptive and traumatic as 9/11, who knows, I might do it. But at this point, I think of cartooning…I mean, that particular comic, Get Your War On, I truly feel, at least with the static comic, that I basically did as much as you can do with it. Like, I think very formally in a way. I’m interested in the structure of art and how it works. And the content is also interesting, but I don’t want to keep the same structure and just plug in new content every week. To me, I feel like there are people who can just do that better. I like to do things that are new, where I feel the sense of discovery. That’s what I like: I like feeling like I’m discovering something new. That’s really a special feeling and also, you don’t have it that often. At least, I don’t. Maybe I’m not creative enough.

Rumpus: Speaking of new things, I hear that you have to continually convince people that your pencil-sharpening book is the real thing. Is there something in the specificity of the project that you like? It’s a funny idea, but you really intended for it to be a how-to book, yeah?

Rees: Yeah, I mean, it’s the same with the business. The best way it’s been put is [when] a friend of mine said, “The joke is there’s no joke.” I wanted to get paid to sharpen pencils originally just because I thought it would be fun. I liked sharpening pencils and I was like, “Oh, I wonder if I could get paid to do it.” And I figured it out and I did it. And the business is kind of whimsical and it’s not like I make a living off of it. It’s just a way to get paid to do something and to learn more about something I was interested in: sharpening pencils. And then the book was kind of an extension of that. Like, first and foremost, artisanalpencilsharpening.com literally is a pencil-sharpening business. And I wanted to have the same spirit with the book. Like, this book is actually going to be a working, functional how-to manual about pencil-sharpening techniques. I just thought that was a good way to structure the book. It made it a lot easier for me to write it and think about it. And then also, I just thought it would be actually genuinely interesting to talk about how different devices produce different types of pencil points, and how a machine or a tool or a technique that you might use in one context may be inappropriate in another context. And I felt like, if I just really went deep on that stuff, hopefully first it would be genuinely interesting, and then second, the specificity and the detail would be kind of interesting or jarring or…the word I always use is “defamiliarizing.” Like, I really wanted sharpening pencils to kind of make people think about it again. Because pencils are really cool.

Rumpus: Do you feel like they’re archaic? Or are pencils just as in use as they’ve ever been?

Rees: Well, I assumed that the pencil market was collapsing, but then it turns out that from 2010 to 2011 in the United States, pencil consumption went up by over six percent. I mean, those are all foreign-made pencils. Those are probably Chinese pencils, mostly, and Mexican pencils. I mean, it is an archaic communication technology, but it is still ubiquitous. It’s not yet at the point of, you know, the telegraph or something. Everyone has pencils in their house, no matter how hip and contemporary they are.

Rumpus: And you said you really wanted this to be a serious celebration of pencils, right?

Rees: Yeah, I mean, the book does a lot of things, hopefully. But yeah, it’s like a celebration of pencils and, by extension, it’s a celebration of over-thinking anything that’s really common in your life.

Rumpus: And there’s a little hint of a memoir in there, details about your now ex-wife, among other things.

Rees: Yeah, absolutely. In fact, I had submitted an introduction to the publisher that was literally just about how I started sharpening pencils at the census and how that was a difficult time in my life because my marriage was ending and I had quit cartooning and I didn’t know what to do with myself. And then it talked about the initial media-response to the business. And the publisher, to their credit, they’re like, “We don’t need this. This is all in the book. It’s just subtext. Why foreground it and give it away? Because frankly, yeah, the pencil-sharpening project or business, it did come out of a time when I was searching for what to do next. I felt that my identity was in flux, professionally and personally, because I was no longer making cartoons and I wasn’t really a husband anymore. And those had been the two big, defining identities of the last 10 years for me. You know? Basically, my 30′s. I was making Get Your War On and I was married. And so the pencil-sharpening thing, I felt like if I was going to talk about pencil sharpening and talk about my business a little, I should at least allude to some of this stuff. Because it came out of that time. And I also did like the idea of having some kind of different emotional tones that are associated with different layers of the book. Does that sound pretentious? Do you know what I mean?

Rumpus: I definitely noticed a melancholy tone.

Rees: Yeah, the melancholy tone was partly because it was kind of about my marriage. And the melancholy tone was also because I was inspired by all these old technical manuals that I used to collect. And I find old books really melancholy, in a way, and I wanted to have that—I don’t know why—but I also wanted to have that vibe in this book, because those old technical manuals inspired How To Sharpen Pencils, in terms of the format and in terms of the language and the mood. The most important thing in this whole publishing project for me was: I don’t want people to think this is one of those quick turnaround Internet-meme-into-crappy-paperback-books you buy and then leave on your toilet for five years, collecting dust. I really wanted it to have as much depth as a pencil-sharpening how-to manual is capable of sustaining.

Rumpus: And it seems like you really do know what you’re doing. It’s very clear as a reader that you’ve done your research.

Rees: Yeah, I mean I had the business going for a long time before I wrote the book. And I learned a lot, doing my business. I did a lot of research, I read Henry Petroski’s history of the pencil [The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance] which is, like, a 500-page book about pencils. This is the thing that Henry Petroski proved with his book about pencils: his book was the first book to do that thing where you take one banal item and then explain everything in the world through the lens of that item. And pencils are great for that, because they are an old writing technology but they’re also—because they are something you buy—a perfect test-case for examining so many issues of production, efficiency, capitalism, pricing, all that stuff. I mean, it’s all there in that one little object. I talked to people in the pencil industry and I talked to people as I was sharpening their pencils about the frustrations they have with pencils, so I really did do my research and I do know more about pencils than most people, I would say, at this point.

Rumpus: Can you give me an example of somebody’s frustrations with the pencil?

Rees: The thing I hear about a lot is when people over-sharpen their pencil with a single-blade pocket-sharpener and then when they put the pencil to the page, their tip breaks and pencil points always break irregularly. It always gets all jagged and you have to refresh the point. That’s a common complaint. But these days, especially if people are thinking about school supplies, a complaint I hear is that it’s just really hard to find well-made, reliable pencils.

Rumpus: I hear you were a little bit worried upfront about having enough to say and then you had to cut, what? Fifty or sixty pages from the manuscript?

Rees: Yeah, I mean, we cut a substantial amount of text. Because once I went down the rabbit hole, it was just like, why would you stop? There is a lot to say. I didn’t even touch on the last hundred years of pencil-manufacturing and how it’s been affected by tariffs and trade restrictions and wars. I had written, actually, an entire chapter about mechanical pencils and then we just cut it in favor of just that really quick one-sentence chapter. Which is a lot of people’s favorite chapter.

Rumpus: When did you realize that there would be enough interest to make this an actual business?

Photo credit: Meredith Heuer

Rees: Well there were a couple stages. The first was when I cracked the nut of how I was going to ship pencils without breaking them, because that was obviously the big concern. And the moment when I put the rubber sheath around the pencil point and then put the pencil in the tube and threw it against the wall and it didn’t break, that’s when I was like, “OK, I’m onto something here. This is cool. This is gonna work.” And then it was, my friend made this nice poster that we sold to promote the business and that kind of took off. I mean, my initial concern was just like, I don’t want to lose money on this. I was broke. I thought that this [would] be a great project, but I don’t want this to be another thing that I do where I’m just shelling out money for an idea and not actually making money. To me, it was crucial to this project that it functions as a business, even if that just means I don’t lose money on it. At the time, I didn’t dare to dream of making money. But now of course, I’ve made many thousands of dollars sharpening pencils.

Rumpus: Have you been keeping track of the number of pencils you’ve done?

Rees: Yeah, I’m at like seven-hundred-and-seventy-something. And I raised my prices a few weeks ago to slow down demand. Because I realized that when I was getting orders, I wasn’t happy about, like, “Oh, look at this money I just made.” It was like, “Oh my gosh, I wish I had charged more money because now I have 20 orders. That’s like many, many hours for me to work. So I raised my prices to the point where now I’m happy about the money I get, per order. And again, that just comes down to actually treating it as a business. Like, I want to be satisfied creatively with this project and I also want to be satisfied financially with it.

Rumpus: And when people are placing orders, do they get to specify the type of sharpening that they want to get?

Rees: They usually don’t. They can make a request and when I ship the pencil and the shavings I document the tool that I used. I circle a series of abbreviations. Sometimes they’ll write me and say, “Hey, I noticed that you circled ‘PL’ and then you also circled ‘K’; what does that mean?” And I say, “Oh, that means I started the pencil with a pocket-long-point sharpening and then I finished it using a knife.”

Rumpus: Are you bouncing around between favorite techniques or have you picked a favorite at this point?

Rees: I cycle through techniques, just to keep myself engaged in it, or if the person has made a request, or if I have a new device that I want to try out. You know, I really go through a bunch of different phases. Sometimes people are really interested in having those old-school shavings, the ribbon shavings. You can’t achieve that with a hand-crank sharpener. So for those, I would just use a pocket sharpener.

Rumpus: To go back to the specificity of the idea for a second, I remember you said that you sort of feel overwhelmed if there are no rules and endless possibility in your projects. Do you feel like that ties into setting up very specific parameters and boxing yourself in? It’s kind of like what you were doing with the comic strip, in that it’s a very specific pursuit.

Rees: You know, you’re the second person to make that point and I think that’s a really great point that I’d never thought about. Because in my mind, one of the appeals of this project was that there’s no political subtext, it’s not satirical, it’s nothing like Get Your War On. And that’s true, insofar as the content goes, but structurally, I agree with you—it is kind of the same thing. You work in a really limited box and you just do as much as you can within that box. So, when I was a cartoonist, I didn’t want the responsibility of drawing, a.) because it’s a pain in the butt, and b.) I felt intimidated knowing that I could just put anything in the universe on the page. For me, it was like, all right, just work with six images, or whatever, and just have as much fun as you can with those images. And that fueled my cartooning career for, like, eight years. And I never made that connection with pencils, but this is the first prose book I’ve ever written. I’d always been really intimidated by prose writing. But I think it was a good introduction to that art, because I did just focus on one very particular thing and that was a thing I knew very well: sharpening pencils. And then by the end of the book, when everything’s gone completely bananas, it’s just because I’m having fun with it. You know? So I feel like those constraints are really helpful to me.

Rumpus: Get Your War On served as a big catharsis for you. Is there any sort of catharsis with pencil sharpening?

Rees: You know, this is going to sound crazy, but my pencil-sharpening business is kind of like a job. It’s like any other job. There are some days when I’m really stoked about it and I’m really excited and I’m having fun and other days where…you know, when I was on tour, I came back home and I had like 68 pencils backed up, and then it was just like, “Jeez, another day of sharpening pencils? How am I going to make this interesting?” So, it’s just like anything else. I mean, the Get Your War On thing—the catharsis there was just the first couple nights when I made those first comics. That was probably the most cathartic artistic thing I’ve ever done. Pencil-sharpening has never really had that catharsis. I mean, it’s been really fun and satisfying, it’s been great to meet people and sharpen pencils for them, and learn about pencils and actually become…not to toot my own horn, but become a bit of an authority in the pencil world. I’ve met with people in the pencil industry and talked about pencils with them. And writing the book was cathartic, I guess, because it was about this weird time in my life and I wanted to write a good book. And I’m proud of the book. I feel like I did a good job expressing what I wanted to express about my business and by extension, I guess about my sensibility or just about my interests.

Rumpus: And do you feel like this has broadened your audience in any sense? I know that you had a preexisting audience with Get Your War On, but have you heard from folks you might not have heard from when you were doing the comic?

Rees: I don’t know. I’ve always been a bad judge of how popular Get Your War On was. I was uploading that shit to a website that I was just coding in HTML. It was before Facebook “Likes” or retweets or anything. I mean, I know it was kind of a big deal because a lot of newspapers would call me, and we sold a ton of books and raised a lot of money for land mines. That was probably bigger than pencils. It’s funny because I got a lot of hate mail when I made Get Your War On, especially in the early days, pretty soon after 9/11. But I’ve been really surprised about a lot of the negative comments about artisanal pencil sharpening. Like, it really rubs some people the wrong way.

Rumpus: Why do you think that is?

Rees: I think people are worried that it’s a huge joke and they’re not in on the joke and I’m kind of denying them access to the joke. And then other people completely misinterpret it and they think, “Wow, people in America have so much money, they’re sending hundreds of pencils to this guy.” I don’t think those people realize that most people who are buying these pencils are buying them as art objects or conversation pieces.

Rumpus: And do you do much writing in pencil, yourself?

Rees: No, I hardly ever use pencils.

Rumpus: Really?

Rees: Well, I’m left-handed and it’s really messy if you’re left-handed because of the graphite smudging. I use them more now than I used to because there’s, like, 15,000 pencils all over my house.

Rumpus: Why did you choose John Hodgman to write the foreword?

Rees: He had been an early adopter of my business and he had ordered pencils for friends and he was really enthusiastic about it, and he knows me pretty well. And I just felt like it would be good to have somebody who could write with a lot of humor, but who could write very sincerely. I think John is a super funny guy, but the writing of his that really gets me so excited is when he’s just writing sincerely about stuff. People like him and think he’s really funny, but I think as a writer, he’s really underrated because he became a celebrity and you don’t expect a celebrity to actually be able to write. But he was a writer before he was a famous guy. So I just thought—on so many levels—he was the perfect guy to write a foreword to the book and kind of put it in this context. And then, once his foreword was over, it would be time to go deep, get to work.

Rumpus: He had a post-9/11 piece that’s really poignant that the McSweeney’s site republishes every year on the anniversary of the attacks.

Rees: Oh yeah, yeah, I remember that. He used to do this reading series called Little Gray Books in Brooklyn. And he did one right after 9/11. He read that at the beginning of the night and then I played a couple songs and then we did a big karaoke sing-along to New York, New York and then some other people read stuff. That was a really special, fun night during a really weird time. And then actually I think I went home that night and started Get Your War On, but I could be mistaking the chronology, somewhat.

Rumpus: I find it very interesting, by the way, that it wasn’t a goal to be a professional cartoonist, but it was a goal to become a professional pencil-sharpener.

Rees: Well, I don’t think I would’ve ever dared dreaming of becoming a professional cartoonist. I wouldn’t set myself up for that disappointment. And it probably was that thing I said, like, “Nobody could be a professional cartoonist, because you have to do something you don’t like to do in order to be a responsible adult and pay the rent.” With pencil-sharpening…I never thought I would make a living as a pencil-sharpener. Like I said, the first goal was: I don’t want to lose money. And then the goal was: I want to see if 100 people buy my pencils. I just kept upping the benchmarks. It was like a lot of projects. It was like the fundraising for Afghanistan. At first, we were like, “I wonder if we can make $20,000?” And then, “I wonder if we can make $30,000?” All the way up, until we made $100,000. And then pencil-sharpening, I guess, was kind of the same thing. I had a real crisis when I hit 500 pencils. Because I was like, “Well, the next obvious benchmark is 1,000. And it would be amazing to tell my grandchildren, like, ‘Yeah, I was paid to sharpen 1,000 pencils.’” You know? But part of me was like, “I don’t know, another 500 pencils? I wonder if I can get away with a benchmark of 750 pencils?” But then I passed that benchmark. So now it’s like, “Well I’ll do 1,000 of them, then. And then I’ll probably do 10,000.”

Rumpus: It seems like you launch various projects all the time, or you have over the years and you just really strike me as an idea man. Do you ever think of yourself as a person who just wants to see how far you can take a particular idea?

Rees: Oh yeah, totally. I have very limited craftsmanship. And a lot of the stuff I make plays on that. And even my comics were pretty rudimentary. I’m talking about the clip-art comics. That was part of the appeal to me. It looks slapdash because it is slapdash. Because who has time to connect the word balloon to the little line that connects it to the character’s mouth. I got really into this comic Relationshapes, just because I had never made anything like it and I honestly didn’t know what to think of it. I didn’t understand why some strips appealed to me and other ones didn’t. I didn’t understand what type of humor it was. I didn’t understand if it was offensive or not. I mean, it was just a complete mystery to me on every level. And so, for a while, that’s what I would do. Even though it didn’t pay any money.

Rumpus: It was something different, another type of humor that’s one-panel thing, as opposed to a strip. And it didn’t have to be political. Was that some of the appeal?

Rees: Yeah, it was one panel. I got to draw shapes. I really like to draw funky, geometric shapes. And I got to use just different fonts and make a joke of how feminine it was, but it didn’t even have people in it. To me, it was so exciting and interesting to do that for a while.

Rumpus: It really struck me as anti-humor in the best sense of the term. I love anti-humor. And the comic seemed packed with it. It was just like overhearing somebody’s arguments. There were no jokes.

Rees: Yeah! And sometimes they would get wacky. They weren’t real arguments from my life—people always ask me that. I feel like, looking back on it, that comic is about how fucking boring relationship tension is to everybody except who’s experiencing the tension. Nobody gives a shit about your argument. You’re arguing about dishwater detergent and I know it’s really deep, more on some deeper level it’s about how his mom doesn’t respect you and coddles him, whatever. It’s like, no one gives a shit, man. You know? I feel like that was one of the things maybe that I was exploring. Those banal, boring arguments and then you have these fat, bulbous shapes just sitting there and then put a gold frame on it and be like, “I’ve made the perfect cartoon for the modern woman!” Like, it was crazy. I didn’t understand what was funny about it, but sometimes it would just really crack me up.

Rumpus: I love the idea, too, that there is a part of you that doesn’t totally get what the funniness is, yet you’re the one executing it.

Rees: Yeah, I mean, that’s very exciting. The thing that was interesting to me about Relationshapes—as opposed to most of the other cartoons I’ve ever made—was I knew when one worked and when one didn’t work, but I couldn’t really explain it. And I want to say that I have a really analytical approach to art. And the whole idea that you can’t analyze what makes a joke funny…I do not agree with that at all. I feel like really thinking about art and really appreciating it and learning the language of it just makes you more of a connoisseur. I believe that. So I don’t want to be one of these people who’s like, “Man, I don’t know where my ideas come from and I don’t know why this works.” Most of the time, I can tell you. I think about that stuff, you know? I studied philosophy. I get off on thinking about it. But Relationshapes is one thing where, a lot of times, it’s like, “I don’t know, man, I’m really feeling this comic about a trapezoid talking about toothpaste.” I don’t know. It’s just weird. It was really fun to kind of be in over my own head. It was a fun feeling.

Rumpus: So it sounds like you have a lot of projects going on, but do you know what’s next for you? Do you have one idea that you’ve latched on to for your next big thing?

Rees: Well, we’re going to start making new Get Your War On animations on Tuesday morning, so that’s the immediate thing.

Rumpus: And what is the agreement now with Rolling Stone? They asked you back to do comics about the election, right?

Rees: They asked me back and I did five comics and then they dropped it. They were like, “The election is boring and these aren’t as funny as they used to be.” I felt bad. But I got it, you know. Whatever. They said we’ll revisit it if the election gets interesting again.

Rumpus: And how often do you look back on your old strips?

Rees: I looked back recently because it’s gonna be included in this art exhibit about political cartooning. They asked me to send five strips, so I went through a bunch of them on my hard drive and I was looking at them. But [usually] I don’t. The time that I would spend revisiting my old Get Your War On strips is more profitably spent Googling myself and reading comments about how people hate my pencil-sharpening business. There’s a new way for people to be disgusted and disappointed with me. So, I’d rather focus on that.

Rumpus: What about that whole mess with Jamba Juice? [In 2009, Jamba Juice ran ads using the same clip art/conversational style as Rees, claiming they had never seen his comic.] Did you feel happy with the outcome?

Rees: They pulled the campaign off the webpage. They just took it down. And then they issued a statement that said, “We’re sorry if anyone confused our campaign with this cartoon. We didn’t know about it.” It was fine. I got a lot of e-mails from lawyers being like, “I think you have a case and if you want to sue them, they’ll settle. They don’t want to deal with this.” But, I mean, I don’t want to deal with that. You know? To me, I just wanted to make fun of them [although] I did take a little bit of umbrage. My tongue wasn’t only in my cheek. I felt like someone must have seen my comics. And I know people would say, “How could you, as a guy who uses public domain clip art, complain when somebody else uses the same public-domain clip art?” And I get that argument. And I’m usually, generally, like, “Yeah, just take whatever you want and make a mash-up or sell knockoff t-shirts of Mickey Mouse snorting cocaine, or whatever.” I think trademark law is just completely fucked and restrictive and stifling and regressive. But in this situation, I was just worried that someone was gonna think that I had been commissioned by Jamba Juice to make cartoons about Jamba Juice. And the big thing for me was—if I’m not getting paid to sell out, I don’t want people to think that I’m selling out. You know what I mean? So for me to make a stink about it was my way of being like, “Guys, I had nothing to do with this. This is not me.”

Rumpus: Looking back, I know that you were labeled “a voice of a generation,” every once in a while. Did you ever feel like you needed to live up to that?

Rees: No, I don’t think I ever felt that way. I mean, I think we read that once in a review or something, or an article about me, and then I would say it to my girlfriend as a joke. Like, “You’re really going to ask the voice of a generation to do the dishes?” It was just like this running joke. No, that’s crazy.

Rumpus: Something I noticed through reading numerous interviews with you is that you make very accurate predictions. For instance, in 2008, you said that if Palin loses, she definitely wouldn’t run in 2012. You said you were positive about that. Or you predicted that McCain was getting ready to run before anybody was talking about him. How do you do that?

Rees: I did my research! I subscribed to policy journals. I read daily newspapers. I mean, I’m really glad that you say that and I did get some things wrong, but yeah that was very important to me. I did not want to make a comic, one week, that would just rile people up and then not have to answer for it a year later. And to me, what I’m most proud of about Get Your War On, and I hate to sound like [former New York Times reporter] Judith Miller, [but] I was fucking right, man. The War on Terror was a fundamentally flawed model for prosecuting the people who planned and sustained 9/11. And invading Iraq was a fucking dumb idea. You know what I mean? And I took that stuff really seriously. I’m being real right now. It was very important to me to take that stuff seriously. And I did mess stuff up. You know what I mean? I mean, absolutely. Yeah, I feel like you could put—and this is going to sound really grandiose—but take my comics, and put them up against any elite pundit who was pontificating about the wisdom of a War on Terror and the wisdom of invading Iraq, like I think my shit stands up. You know? Because I didn’t have any institutional pressure to say anything other than what I believed, I felt completely alienated—maybe because of my age or my background—I felt completely alienated from the grand narrative of, like, “America will not fuck this up.” I grew completely skeptical of Bush, his character, even if he was in charge of the aftermath of 9/11. I’m kind of ranting right now, but that’s kind of important to me, because I don’t want people to think, “Oh yeah, he was an angry guy and he was upset when I was upset.” It’s like, “Yeah, and then you know what I did? I fucking read the Financial Times for seven years, from cover-to-cover, to really understand what the fuck was going on, to inform my comics and I feel proud of that.” You know? I mean, I feel really proud about that.

Rumpus: You made it look much easier than it clearly was. It just seemed like you were really prescient in a lot of your predictions and completely on top of things.

Rees: Well, even before I got the Rolling Stone gig it was like, you know, people are reading my shit and it’s really important to me, just as a citizen. I’m paying for it! I’ve got to understand it, you know? It was affecting my ex-wife. She has a lot of family in the military. It was affecting their lives. It was a really big deal. Whatever. But you wanna know something else? I’m going to make another pretentious connection. It’s the same thing with pencils, bro. Because I was like, “If I’m going to write this book about pencils, you know I’m going to learn a shit-ton of facts about pencils.” This is not a joke. I mean, it has an element of whimsy to it, but I want to be able to—if someone starts chipping away at the surface, looking for when the joke gives way and there’s nothing but a gaping void—they’re never going to get there. I’m going to know more about pencils, all the way down to the hot molten core. You know? It’s the same thing. That kind of shit is important to me.

Rumpus: I love it, because it makes it so much better. Because you do know all this stuff and it is such a serious thing to you. And it makes it a real pursuit. And it works on a couple different levels where you can approach it and assume that it’s a humor book, but when you really start reading it, you realize that it’s a real honest-to-goodness how-to book. You’ve obviously done a ton of research.

Rees: Well, I appreciate that. To me, fundamentally, and I think I learned this from punk rock and TV shows like Roseanne—I take pop culture really seriously, I think it’s really important, and the stuff that I make…I don’t want it to be insubstantial, even if it’s about something wacky, like sharpening pencils. I feel like I owe it to myself and I owe it to people who are really interested in pencils and I owe it to anybody to do my due diligence and give them something real. You know? And not just make a stupid one-off Internet joke book that no one’s going to look at in 10 years. Do you know what I mean? The type of pop culture that is honestly very moving and powerful to me is [when artists] do their homework. They make it real. To me, if you’re lucky enough to make stuff that people will pay money for, do a good job. Really do a good job. Especially if you’re talking about real stuff, like terror atrocities and human rights abuses and pencil-sharpening techniques. Like: do it. You know what I mean? Be the authority that you are presuming to be.

Rumpus: So do you look back on the years of Get Your War On as a fertile creative time, or are you just glad to have moved on at this point?

Rees: The things I’m grateful for are: I had the one thing that I feel really lucky about, which is that I made something, I made art, that truly—in a weird way—truly comforted me and comforted a lot of people. And I’m really grateful that I got to have that experience. And at the time even, because I had been making stuff for a long time and people liked Fighting Technique, or people liked my band. But that experience was just like…I knew that I was lucky to have that experience. And then I loved going out on that book tour. That was such an adventure. I’d never been on a book tour before and I met so many people and had so many crazy experiences. And people were so sweet and supportive and I was young enough that I would couch-surf with no problem and wouldn’t fuck up my back, or whatever. And yeah, I met a lot of people through that project. A lot of people in the political world and a lot of people in the publishing world, and I got to meet some of my heroes, like Mike Watt. Yeah, I think it was good. I feel happy about Get Your War On. Yeah, I feel good about that. And also, it was exciting…we had moved to New York City only a year before, and so for me, I mean it’s weird, my experience of the War on Terror was completely entwined with my experience of making comics about the War on Terror. And being invited to be on a panel with, like, [punk rocker] Ted Leo, or something. Just like all these great experiences that I felt really grateful for. And it was all tied up with the excitement of getting married and feeling like I had a really strong identity as an adult and maybe I was going to be a professional creative person and maybe I was going to make it in the city. You know?

And then in contrast to that, when all that left, I feel like the pencil-sharpening was like this really inward, kind of weird, personal, obsessive thing. Like, “OK, you’re starting over. And everything is going to be radically different.” In so many ways, even when you think about the whole thing. Like, Get Your War On was completely digital. I hadn’t held a pencil in years and years. And it was like, now I’m going back to this really old-school thing that I haven’t encountered since basically I was a kid. You know? So, to me the Get Your War On era has like a certain…like, the memories of that time in my life—and I’m thinking about this a lot because I literally, just finally, filed the divorce paperwork yesterday at the County Clerk’s office and called my ex to be like, “OK, it’s all set. I’ll let you know when we’re divorced.” You know? So I feel like I’ve just been reflecting on that era of my life and how I’m in this really different place. And it’s like: we’re no longer married. We decided we’d be better friends than spouses. We had our ups and we had our downs, like every other boring thing that I addressed in Relationshapes. But I do have a fondness for that whole time. It was my 30′s essentially. You know? It was my 30′s. It was very interesting. It was exciting.

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Additionally, Stein’s unorthodox (he calls them “obnoxious”) Q&As that he conducted with celebrities for the magazine were a coup de grace to the proliferation of inane, puffball celebrity-chats of the 1990s. It wasn’t long before nearly every magazine/newspaper Q&A had an edge, parroting Stein’s tendency to shift interviews away from the products the stars wanted to promote, away from the blind deference to which the super-famous were accustomed. The only person Stein really ever fawned over was himself. As an interviewer, he had the phone slammed down on him more than once (see: Wesley Snipes, Sharon Stone, etc.), hang-ups that Stein now wears as badges of honor.

Stein started out writing a humor column at the Stanford Daily and was later employed at Time Out New York as a columnist and editor. In addition to Time, Stein has been on staff at Entertainment Weekly and the Los Angeles Times and contributed to a seemingly endless array of publications, including The New Yorker, GQ, Esquire, Wired, Businessweek, Playboy, Elle, Travel & Leisure, Sunset, Real Simple, Food & Wine, etc. To date, Stein has written 14 cover stories for Time. He also writes a regular bimonthly food-column, The Intolerable Foodie, for Los Angeles Magazine.

Beyond magazine work, Stein has had a successful career in various facets of media and entertainment. He’s written for sitcoms, appeared all over television (you’ve surely watched him expound on I Love the ‘80s or one of the many nostalgia-inducing VH1 offshoots, whether you’ll admit it or not), and has written for the Academy Awards. In 2004, Stein taught a humor-writing class at Princeton.

Stein has also faced his fair share of controversy over the years, from a column pointing out his lack of support for the troops, to his most recent embroilment — written for the New York Times opinion blog — on why adults shouldn’t read The Hunger Games. It has sometimes made him a divisive figure among readers, the recipient of angry mail and irate Internet-comments. To his credit, Stein routinely blames himself for any upset he’s caused.

Recently, Stein wrote the book, Man Made: A Stupid Quest for Masculinity. Stein came up with the premise — after having lived a relatively cozy life, the effete Stein embarks on a journey to realize a greater sense of manliness — after he found out he was going to have a son, a notion that terrified him. Stein’s Quest encompassed two years worth of “guy stuff,” including boot camp, hunting, Ultimate Fighting Championship training, day-trading, home-building and a 24-hour shift with Los Angeles firefighters.

Stein and I first met when he came to speak at my college 10 years ago as a visiting professional. I interviewed him then for my student newspaper and we’ve kept in touch sporadically ever since. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Cassandra Barry, and their three-year-old son Laszlo.

***

The Rumpus: You worked on this book for two years. That’s a long time for somebody who’s used to a weekly deadline. Was it easy for you to stay interested in the project?

Joel Stein: Well, I did it on the side, when I had some time. I didn’t really cut down on my other work. That’s part of why it took two years. This may have been a mistake, and you may be able to tell, but when I initially wrote each chapter, I kind of treated them like really long columns. I remember it was really liberating at first, because when you go have an adventure for a couple days and write a one-page column, you wind up choosing one aspect of the experience and writing about that. And not even necessarily the best part, but just the one that seems like it would be easy to tell on a page. And this really let you digress and kind of tell the whole experience. So that was fun to write these individual things.

Rumpus: Are the chapters in the book in the order of the way things actually happened? How did you decide how to structure the book?

Stein: It took me a little bit to realize you could just kind of do it chronologically. I tried all kinds of different ways to switch them up. And I realized that, for the most part, the chronological telling worked best. But then I had a bunch of columns that didn’t really add up to a book, at all. And I came to realize that form really dictates a lot of structure. In other words, you can get away with stuff in a one-page story that you can’t get away with in a book. Or even in a Time magazine cover story, you can get away with a lot that you can’t get away with in a book. And people learn this when they go from working at Letterman or even SNL to writing sitcoms, and then they go from writing sitcoms to writing movies: the longer that things are, the more structure is required from you. Basic rules of storytelling started to apply to the book. I had to learn those in ways that everyone else probably intrinsically understands. I had to have the basics explained to me by friends who write movies. And a friend who teaches scriptwriting at Stanford sat me down and told me how storytelling works.

Rumpus: What did he say?

Stein: A bunch of things. The thing that worked best for me was giving a lot of thought to Back to the Future. You know all those parts in Back to the Future that seem seamless, that are Doc saying, “Well, this lightning hits this clock at this time, so you have to do this by then and if you don’t do anything …” Setting the rules. Setting the clock really overtly. “Don’t mess with the present.” And Marty’s like, “Well, I’ve already met my mom and this picture’s fading.” And Doc’s like, “Well, you have to fix that by the time the lightning strikes.” Now you have something to root for and something to follow and you know where the setback comes in. It’s just stuff that I had to do.

Rumpus: So in your case it was saying, “I’m having a son, I’m a first-time father, I’m not the person I would like to be for him and this is what I need to accomplish.” And this gives the reader something to root for?

Stein: Yeah, and having some setbacks. And what I wound up doing, which I think is really journalistically dubious, is changing the order of some of the things I did, so that the things I ended up struggling with the most wind up being two-thirds of the way in. And there’s other things I figured out, when it was too late, that I’d like to go back and redo.

Rumpus: Like what?

Stein: Just being much more earnest and clear about why I wanted to do this, upfront. So that people really bought into it. Which I don’t feel I did. I don’t know. I’ve definitely learned a lot.

Rumpus: What would you say if you could go back and revise? Is there a bigger reason to set off on this quest for masculinity? I thought you presented a compelling case.

Stein: It’s a little forced, obviously. But I wish I’d legitimately talked about some painful moments in my life where I felt insufficient as a kid. Just talking about some of the loneliness I felt as a kid because I couldn’t relate to other boys … just not moving, being so lonely. I would be at home reading, because I felt so disconnected from humanity. Just painting those pictures a little more clearly and seriously, so that people got it. I cheated a lot in the book. My friend from high school was like, “I liked the book, but you painted a small part of yourself.” I wish I’d explained, emotionally, some of the stuff upfront a little better.

Rumpus: Has the way you see yourself changed after doing all of this and writing about the experiences.

Stein: I do feel like I’ve changed.

Rumpus: How so? Are you still doing stuff outside of your comfort zone?

Stein: Not nearly as much as I’d like to. I’m still thinking about signing up for a jiu-jitsu class. I did check one out, there’s one down the street. But I’m fixing stuff at my house, things here and there that I’ve been able to fix. And that’s felt pretty good. My son and I have talked about going camping in the backyard, probably this month sometime. And moreover, I really just feel comfortable when I run into soldiers at the airport, now. I strike up a conversation. You feel much more comfortable in that world. The fun thing about journalism is if you go do a story about something, you can now ask three intelligent questions about it. Or say three intelligent things. And that gets people talking. Now I can do that with a host of “guy” stuff.

Rumpus: In terms of the activities in the book, you’ve said that hunting was the worst. What was it about hunting that you really didn’t like?

Stein: You know what, I don’t like to be in the forest. It’s a weird thing. I’ve learned to have a general appreciation for nature, which has taken a while. But the forest, I still don’t really love. I just don’t care about animals enough. And nature. You really, really have to care about animals to want to kill one. You have to learn all this stuff about them and start thinking like them. I can’t imagine deer hunting. I used to think I couldn’t imagine deer hunting because killing a deer seemed so awful. But now I think about just sitting in a tree and doing nothing all day and probably not even seeing a deer. Not moving and sitting in a tree? That seems rough.

Rumpus: How has the touring been? I saw that you were Skyping yourself into book clubs around the country. I thought that was a great idea.

Stein: I’ve Skyped into book groups, which has been really edifying. I don’t think I really had even been in a book club. And I didn’t really understand what they were until you get to be part of one. And I’m not the first person to think of this. I did some book club in San Antonio and I was the third author they’d gotten.

 Rumpus: You’ve Skyped into high school classes, too, right?

Stein: It seems like a bad idea, but it’s true. There’s a couple high school teachers who got into my column and then they have the students write about me. Or have me come to their class. I don’t do it unless it’s in LA. I’ve Skyped into a class in Wisconsin once or twice.

Rumpus: In a way, it reminds me of when the Beatles decided to send music videos around instead of going back out on the road. 

Stein: You know, in some ways it makes sense. Because if you’re at my level and you go to a bookstore, even a good turnout is not that many people. Sometimes it is. But for the most part, it’s not a huge turnout. So if you can get as many by Skype, pretty cool.

Rumpus: This book is the latest of so many projects. Preparing for this interview with you was a challenge because of how many things you’ve done. Let’s go back to your humor roots for a minute. When you started writing a column at the Stanford Daily, who were your early influences?

Stein: I used to read [former San Francisco Chronicle columnist] Herb Caen and I was like, “I want to do that for a living.”

Rumpus: What was it about Herb Caen that appealed to you? He didn’t really write humor.

Stein: Herb Caen wasn’t my guy, style-wise, but I was at Stanford and I saw his column and I was like, “Oh, that’s the experience I want to have. I want to be heavily tied to a city that I write for every week, that knows my stuff and I can interact with.” I thought the gig he had was kind of what I wanted, more than his writing style.

Rumpus: What about Dave Barry?

Stein: Well, you know, Dave Barry was one of my guys, for sure.

Rumpus: With Dave Barry, it always seemed like he was perfectly content just sitting back and commenting on stuff in a funny way. But, from the time I’ve been aware of your writing, you’ve always thrown yourself into your stories. You’ve always been at the center of them. When did that start?

Stein: It was a couple things: I think I realized that Dave Barry was funnier than I’ll ever be, and he made no attempt to make any actual points. He had a general libertarian point of view, but in general, he just liked to make jokes. As he later told me, he wished his stuff was on the comics page, because then people wouldn’t ask him what his point was. So, first of all, I realized I wasn’t as funny, so I had to do something a little different. But secondly, just from being on the opinion page, I think I wanted to do it more as an essay that was a little funny, instead of a funny thing that sometimes had a thought. So, reversing what he did. And then as far as going out and doing stuff, that’s a good question. It was my third column for The Stanford Daily where I went out to a sperm bank. I think I’d been reading so much Spy magazine and watching so much Letterman. It was Letterman and Spy where they went out and did things. It just seemed like that’s the way you do this stuff. You have to go, that’s where you find stuff, if you’re trying to think of something funny. I would mix it up, but I noticed that those got the best response.

Rumpus: When you were first hired at Time to write a humor column, you were 27. Most of the other staffers were quite a bit older. It looks like you really had a lot of fun using the magazine’s name and reputation and the access you got as a staff member.

Stein: It has been really fun. I mean, it’s been crazy-fun. I think this is just a personality issue, or growing up with Letterman or something, but when I got to Time [former Time staff member and current Bloomberg Businessweek editor] Josh Tyrangiel and I were like, “We’re at Time magazine! People will take our calls and do whatever we ask!” The New York Times has zero people with this attitude. And Time, they had a couple of us. I remember early on, I was working for that Notebook section. I just started — I did this for like five years in a row; it was one of my favorite things I did — for Thanksgiving, I would get politicians and celebrities and sports stars to trace their hand and make a turkey. And that was my attitude. It was like: no one else can get people to do this kind of stuff. I would do these obnoxious Q&As with celebrities. If I had continued to do them, I wanted to do them with politicians and other more serious people. And then, of course, everyone wound up doing that. But yeah, I would do these Q&As where I asked obnoxious questions and they would be confusing to people because it was coming from Time magazine, whereas if it was your local disc jockey, in a different context, they wouldn’t put up with it, or it would be stupid. I always thought that being at Time and tweaking your bosses and exploiting your expense account was just fun. Just joyous.

Rumpus: Did those interviews come from the point of view of: “Everybody’s doing the same type of celebrity interviewing. I’ve got this freedom at Time and everybody’s expecting one thing, but I’m going to do something else”?

Stein: Yeah, exactly! And to some level, that made it OK. I can’t even imagine how I’d feel now, but back then, I just felt so sick of the celebrity culture, especially interviews. I don’t really feel that as much. I’ve just given up, I think. And TMZ and all those magazines kind of turned it anyway, because everyone goes into those magazines so angry and it’s much more complicated. But back then it was much more … fluffy. So I just thought it would be fun to do a Q&A that didn’t work that way. My favorite thing to do would be to have Q&As that started with “As.” More than being obnoxious, the weird thing was, it was a Q&A that was more about me. It was just me talking about me, me asking things about what they thought of me. I mean, there was a lot of me in these Q&As. And I would go after people who meant something to me. Like, I would meet Marlo Thomas or John Cusack and so then it really became even more about me. So I thought that was really funny. There were a few that started with “As.” It was like, “I don’t really care about the Qs.”

Rumpus: Do any of those Q&As stick out to you, still, for whatever reason?

Stein: Oh, yeah. I mean, the ones I remember most are the ones that didn’t run because I got yelled at and hung up on.

Rumpus: Really?

Stein: Oh yeah.

Rumpus: And there’s no going back after that? You can’t call them back and say you’re sorry?

Stein: No, because I think in the three cases I’m thinking of, their publicist called my boss and yelled at me. Yelled about me. And I was way beyond calling someone up and apologizing to them. Those were horrible.

Rumpus: You’ve said that interviewing people makes you nervous, but it’s your favorite part of the job.

Stein: Reporting in general makes me pretty nervous. But I realized: all the amazing work experiences of my life were thanks to reporting. So that forces you to go do it.

Rumpus: It’s interesting hearing this from a guy who works at Time and seems so at ease with himself and who’s also so willing to mess with people.

Stein: Yeah, yeah. I’m just inherently socially anxious and shy. And I wouldn’t force myself into that situation if it wasn’t for work. But just walking up to strangers is awful.

Rumpus: Is walking up to strangers harder to you than, say, having George Clooney at your house for dinner?

Stein: Yeah, much. I hate walking up to strangers.

Rumpus: Does that go back to the idea of being rejected?

Stein: Yeah, totally, whereas I know that Clooney has agreed to this. He’s done this before. He’s going to act a certain way. Plus, the [celebrities] who end up intimidating you are the people who have special significance, usually to your childhood. People who meant something to you. There have been people who represent something very symbolic and I’ve been freaked out interviewing them. Like [tennis player and coach] Martina Navratilova— that felt like a big thing. And Hugh Hefner felt like a big thing. Weirdly iconic figures. In a different way than someone who’s just famous and talented, like a Will Smith or a George Clooney. You know?

Rumpus: Right. You have some sort of deep connection to them that started early and is maybe a bit harder to explain.

Stein: Yeah. They represent something to me. Exactly. Meeting John Cusack was weird.

Rumpus: How so? You watched Say Anything a lot?

Stein: All those movies. He represented some sort of attainable coolness when I was growing up.

Rumpus: Do you ever feel like you’re straddling a line, in a way? You’re reporting and interviewing, but in another way, you’re a public figure. You’ve been interviewed by Conan O’Brien and Bill Maher. You’re on VH1 all the time. You’ve experienced at least some of what these celebrities have gone through. Is that true?

Stein: It’s sometimes true. It’s rare that they know who I am. But sometimes, if they’re younger, like Lena Dunham, who has been reading me since she was super young, that gets reversed. Because I just heard about Lena Dunham and I really like her, but it’s different than if you’ve been reading someone’s column for a long time. So that is interesting and weird. It doesn’t happen often.

Rumpus: How do you prep for interviews when you’re going to talk to someone? Do you do a ton of reading, or do you just kind of approach it conversationally?

Stein: With a Q&A, you need obviously to keep it snappy. But if it’s just a profile, for a long time now, I read a ton of stuff about a person and then I approach it conversationally. I try to see what that person is thinking or feeling about that particular day. I just get more of a sense of what that person’s like and hopefully it’s more interesting than a normal conversation.

Rumpus: When you got to Time, how did the other staffers respond to what you were doing?

Stein: There wasn’t a huge generational divide, since there wasn’t anyone of my generation besides [Tyrangiel and] Romesh Ratnesar and John Cloud — we all got hired at the same time. Everyone else was either a Baby Boomer or a Greatest Generationer. A lot of people at Time, and readers, hated the stuff I was writing. Some thought it was fun. The two complaints were that it was inappropriate, which I disagreed with, but understood, and that, once I did stuff outside of the People page, it was eating up space that could have been used for an important story. Harder to argue with. I was protected since the editor, Walter Isaacson, liked my stuff. But the editors below him were sometimes blocking my stuff. Then they sometimes got overruled by Walter, which made me a disliked teacher’s pet in some corners. But basically, honestly, everyone at Time is one of the nice kids from your AP class, so the vast majority of people were just nice to me.

Rumpus: What did you learn from Walter Isaacson?

Stein: To think critically when writing. To walk up to strangers when reporting, which I still have trouble doing. To report as much as possible and say “yes” to lots of stuff.

Rumpus: Your column was always popular, but it was dropped from Time after 9/11 for a while.

Stein: Right. I was still employed at Time, but they got rid of my column. And then after some period of time, I convinced Entertainment Weekly to run my column on their back page, which only lasted maybe six months until they fired me. And then Time was starting to run my stuff [again]. They still had a back page called the Essay page. And I was getting on there occasionally, maybe once every four-to-six weeks.

Rumpus: Were there any new stipulations, based on what was going on in the world? Or did they say that you could just do what you were doing before?

Stein: I think anything went at that point. The whole thing comes down to editor changes. So what really happened before 9/11 is that we had an editor change. A great guy who I really liked personally. I think he really liked my writing, I just don’t know if he loved my column. And so the column changed a bit. All my writing changed a little bit because [incoming Time editor] Jim Kelly was different than Walter Isaacson. So, I think the whole magazine changed, including my stuff. And then I got the LA Times to run me every week. And then Time got a new editor, Rick Stengel. And Rick had been talking about running me every week. And the LA Times conveniently fired me, which I don’t think Rick noticed. And he offered me the column every week.

Rumpus: When Entertainment Weekly and the LA Times stopped running you, did they give you any sort of reason. Did you know it was coming?

 Stein: It’s like getting dumped. They never tell you the truth.

Rumpus: So, you get fired, you get a high-profile job somewhere else. When it comes to creating opportunities for yourself, are you just really persuasive?

Stein: God, no. It was pure panic mode. When Time got rid of my column, I thought it was all over. It was really sad. And then, I just started pushing it to lots of places. And I thought someone would run my column, I thought it was popular, and no one wanted it. I met with a lot of people. And I eventually convinced Entertainment Weekly. But that probably took me close to a year and they got rid of it after six months. And then I looked around for a long time until Michael Kinsley became the editor of the LA Times opinion section. I knew him a little bit and I eventually convinced him. He was resistant. I convinced him by sending him a ton of ideas. I almost got [a column] at Sports Illustrated. I talked to a bunch of different newspapers, talked to the Wall Street Journal. I had meetings at a bunch of places, but it wasn’t going anywhere. And then, luckily enough, Time has taken me back. If it wasn’t for Time, I wouldn’t have a column right now, I’m pretty sure.

Rumpus: Still, you’ve been called brilliant at your ability to parlay one opportunity into the next …

Stein: I’m not brilliant at it. That’s what happens when you say “yes” to stuff. Like, I write this book and then people see me on some show talking about it and they’re like, “Oh, I remember that guy, we should go talk to that guy again about writing a sitcom.” Which has nothing to do with anything. It’s just they kind of remember you. And you appear on I Love the 80s, right? And then some magazine editor is like, “Oh, we should get him to write for us.” It doesn’t make sense. It’s just how things kind of work. At first, I tried to define myself really strictly. People would ask if I wanted to host things and I was like, “No, I’m a writer, I don’t host things.” Just thinking I wouldn’t be good at it — which is true — but also just wanting to hold on to some part of my identity. And then I realized that that’s kind of stupid and certainly antiquated. Now you kind of have to be able to do a lot of different things. Plus, as journalism dies, I kind of feel like I want some skills besides writing. I’d like to be able to write movies or host TV shows or whatever. Things that I might actually not inherently like quite as much, but are interesting and fun things to do. A good backup plan.

Rumpus: It might be that you have a natural instinct that a lot of writers don’t, which is in self-promotion. Do you think being a good salesman applies to writing?

Stein: Early on, even in college, I figured out that it was just more interesting to me to create content than to write about other people. So that makes it more marketable. I’m good at marketing myself through the columns. But no, compared to other people I know, as far as networking and pushing yourself out there, I’m not very good at that. That hasn’t helped me particularly. Being in New York and having worked at Time Out New York and then being at Time, living in New York for a long time has helped because I know everybody. And they’re the people who call me and give me jobs. So that kind of real networking, which is just living in a place and having jobs where people around you are extremely successful, has helped me tremendously. But as far as pushing yourself, I wasn’t so good at that.

Rumpus: Do you sometimes try to take a strong stance on a point that seems relatively inarguable? Things that are commonly considered to not have another point-of-view? You opened a column in the LA Times with the line, “I don’t support the troops.” That seems like you’re either playing devil’s advocate, or trying to bait people. More recently, you wrote a piece for the New York Times about how adults shouldn’t read YA novels, focused around The Hunger Games. I know that got a negative response.

Stein: It’s a lot like what you’re saying. The most general mail is the stuff where I take a strong opinion on something that everyone disagrees with me about. It’s just that I don’t think I am aware of which things I’m saying are that incendiary. So I probably do this a lot. And it’s just like you don’t normally notice quite as much as when I hit something where I’m really in the minority and don’t quite realize it. If I have an opinion that’s very mainstream, I’m not going to bother writing about it. It’s just not interesting. You know? I love sushi, but I’m not going to write a column about it. I did write about going to Whole Foods and I made a meal by trying to get the most miles in shipping of each product, in opposition to the local food movement, which I feel strongly about. That’s not a fake opinion. I think the local food movement has been taken to idiotic extremes. And so I wrote about that and people got pissed. Now, I knew people would get pissed, but that didn’t piss off nearly as many people as saying that adults shouldn’t read The Hunger Games. And I don’t know that when I sit down to write. I’m not that clued into what people are that touchy about and how many of them there are and how niche these niches are. I have some idea that if I pick on [boy band] One Direction, I’ll get a ton of hate mail, because I know that when you’re 15, you love a band like you will kill people. But I don’t quite realize that that’s true about people — adults — who read The Hunger Games.

Rumpus: When the Hunger Games piece came out and blew up like that, were you actually shocked? Or did you expect to bait some people into writing vitriolic responses, but think that the wider majority was on your side?

Stein: No, I was totally shocked. Because I had written something years before for the Los Angeles Times about how adults shouldn’t read Harry Potter. And people got pissed. And then someone at the New York Times was running this thing on this page I didn’t even know about, their opinion blog. It’s not even in the newspaper. And he was like, “Oh, I saw this thing you wrote. Can you write a similar one about Hunger Games by this afternoon?” It was literally 300 words or something. So I just wrote it as an e-mail at the airport and sent it in. And then I was like, “Oh, I guess this New York Times page is a big deal and adults really like The Hunger Games.” But the other thing is: online reaction is very different than real-world reaction, although that one got some real-world reaction. But online reaction is very different. It’s not real.

Rumpus: It’s not real because it’s so easy?

Stein: It’s not real for a bunch of reasons: first of all, when I get real big volumes of hate mail, it’s usually because I wrote something poorly. But it’s also because some group told people to e-mail me and those people didn’t read the article, they read the post about what I wrote about. And they all e-mail me. And they all come around at the same time. They’re way more severe. People are different in different situations and people are different online than they are in real life.

Rumpus: And does your opinion ever change after you get all that feedback?

Stein: Yeah. Yeah.

Rumpus: It does?

Stein: Sure.

Rumpus: What’s an instance where you reconsidered your stance on something? 

Stein: There are some arguments I made in the “supporting the troops” column. The main argument I made, I still agree with. But there were points I made in there that I think are foolish and not well thought-out.

Rumpus: So sometimes it’s just a matter of clarity.

Stein: I think I believed some of those things and some people kind of argued against them and I realized they were right. You don’t really want an army of people making individual decisions [as Stein wrote in the piece]. And I don’t think I completely understood that until people gave me examples of what happens when your army takes over your government and it’s like, “Oh, yeah, I guess you can’t really have people make individual moral decisions.”

Rumpus: What about your story about immigration in Edison, New Jersey? What happened there?

Stein: I think I just did a bad job explaining a complicated thought. The thought was, “Hey, I see a bit of racism in myself when I look at the changes in my hometown that make me feel a wee-bit displaced, which helps me understand why people are hostile [about immigration].” But because I’m particularly familiar and comfortable with Indians — growing up in Edison, going to Stanford, working in journalism, having a half-Indian editor — I wasn’t very careful in my writing.

Rumpus: Does it just get to a point where there’s a tipping point and the consensus is to issue some sort of apology?

Stein: No. I have to say, I’ve learned over time that every editor has told me when you’re getting that much hate, you don’t talk about it. You just kind of don’t give it oxygen and let it go away. It’s almost — not always, but almost — always the best policy. It’s hard to do. It’s hard to discipline yourself not to explain yourself or apologize.

Rumpus: Do you read the comment sections on your stories to gauge public opinion?

Stein: It’s interesting because I will Google myself and read any blog that anyone’s written about me. So I’m totally self-obsessed that way. But for some reason, I never remember to look at the comments on articles. It’s weird. I can’t defend that. I also don’t read the “letters” section of Time magazine. I think it’s just my habit as a reader. I don’t read comments on stories, in general. And I don’t read “letters” sections of magazines, but I’ll read anyone’s blog post about me.

Rumpus: You must get plenty of letters, though.

Stein: Yeah. I read all those, I try to respond to all of them. So I can’t explain why I don’t read comments. Maybe because I worked at Time for so long and they don’t have them, so I keep forgetting that they’re there. Legitimately. I never thought to look at the New York Times one, even though I knew people were pissed off. I’ve seen YouTube videos from people who are pissed off at me about that and that takes a lot of effort to go find.

Rumpus: Have you, as a reader, ever felt angry enough to comment on somebody else’s article?

Stein: It would never occur to me. It really wouldn’t. I’ve definitely written people e-mails telling them I’ve loved their stories, but that seems more like a professional journalist thing to do. No, that seems crazy. What would piss me off that much? I have a really high bar for being angry. Like, it doesn’t even happen every year. What would it be? I can’t imagine what someone would write that would infuriate me. Maybe if my loved one had died of some disease and someone was insensitive, that would piss me off. I don’t even know. You’re not going to change anyone’s mind. Especially online.

Rumpus: Have you had to develop thicker skin over the years?

Stein: Yeah, I’ve gotten thicker skin mostly from just having been through it enough. And partly just from being older. You just stop caring quite as much about everything. I was in San Francisco in this hotel and I’ve gotten in this bad habit of — before I go into the bathroom, I’m like, “Is there a newspaper I can read?” — because sometime’s there’s a newspaper outside your door. So I’ve gotten in the bad habit of peeking my head out while I’m not wearing any clothes and it’s never caused any kind of trouble. And then the person across the hall also opened her door when she was leaving her room. Ten years ago, I would’ve just been mortified for the whole day, worried that I’d see this person again. Then I was like, “Oh, maybe she saw me naked. I don’t care.” I’m getting to the point where I just don’t care.

Rumpus: Moving on to another facet of your writing life, you wrote for the short-lived sitcom, Crumbs. Was that more fulfilling for you than you thought it was going to be?

Stein: No, because I’ve always wanted to do that, since I was a kid. And in some ways — a lot of ways — being in that room all day made me realize how much I liked reporting and how much I got out of it. Which I didn’t really know until I sat in that room.

Rumpus: Were you a little bit relieved when it was canceled, so you could get back to your regular life, or were you thinking that it would be a nice, cushy job to have for a while?

Stein: That’s a good question. We wrote a whole season, even though they didn’t air it. I suspected I wasn’t going to get rehired. I will never know.  But I didn’t think, for what they were paying me, I was that good. And I knew the show wasn’t doing well, so I was more in the mode of being a little sad that I wasn’t going to be rehired. But I was relived that I got to go back to having my life back. It was really, really, just really time-consuming to do that job, plus my column. I think I was doing two columns. I was doing a Time one every other week. I was writing a lot over the weekend and late at night and being in that room all day. It was hard to keep that up. Impossible.

Rumpus: When did you first move into the sitcom world?

Stein: When Time got rid of my column the first time, I called my TV writing agent. I had never written a sitcom before and he was just kind of waiting for the right time, which is why I chose him as an agent. I told him about not having a column at Time. And he’s like, “Good. Now is the time.” So I came out to LA and pitched a show and got my first sitcom. Which I probably wouldn’t have done if I hadn’t lost the column.

Rumpus: What is a standard Joel Stein workday like? Are you all over the place?

Stein: It sucks. Basically, I wake up, take care of my son for a little while, and then like, “I am gonna write!” And then I wind up … I don’t know, I have a friend who’s writing a book about food stuff and he wanted to interview me about cupcakes, so I did that before I talked to you. I’m pitching a sitcom, again, so I talked to this producer on the phone. And I haven’t eaten lunch yet. I just realize that the day kind of slips. I have to write at some point today. I have stuff due. I have to interview someone for my column. I just feel like it’s not very disciplined and it’s a mess.

Rumpus: You recently had a piece of fiction — I Will Be Your Server — published in The New Yorker. What motivated that and has The New Yorker been a goal of yours for a while?

Stein: It’s my second Shouts piece. It’s exciting for sure, but it’s not the same as writing a long reported piece for The New Yorker. I’d love to do that.

Rumpus: And which cover story at Time are you the most proud of?

Stein: The one I wrote for New Year’s Eve, 2000. Not because it’s the best written, but because I only had a few hours to write it and I had to read through hundreds of pages of reporting from Time correspondents all over the world. Plus, I asked to send a reporter in an airplane at midnight and another to be in a bunker with Y2K believers and they wound up getting great stuff.

Rumpus: Are you still hungry?

Stein: When I lose my column again, I’m sure I’ll get hungry again. Maybe it’s having a kid, but it’s probably just getting to do what I always wanted to do — I’m really not that hungry. I’m writing the screenplay for my book and I’ve always wanted to try writing a screenplay, so that’s a new challenge. I should probably try fiction, to see how bad I suck at it.

Rumpus: Yet you’re still all over the place, saying yes to everyone and everything.

Stein: My wife yells at me about this constantly. I’ve said no to a couple more things than I would’ve and it usually works out pretty well. But you don’t get anywhere without saying yes. The people who get places in life just say yes to everything.

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Thirty years later, Carroll has written more than 8,000 columns for the Chronicle, having become the newspaper’s star, leading voice and, essentially, its conscience. Although he says he doesn’t tend to think about these things, Carroll is one of the most prolific journalists in the newspaper business today (and likely its history): at 800 words per column, his output tallies somewhere beyond 6,400,000 words. He also pens his own headlines and captions.

Carroll’s column appears Monday through Friday on the back of the paper’s Datebook section. Oftentimes, he writes about his life — including his wife and two daughters — but he’s equally willing to delve into local matters, politics, world affairs, pop culture, technology and more. The subject matter (and the tone) changes by the day, occasionally by the paragraph. He is equally funny and playful, earnest and eloquent.

He’s also poetic. Take this excerpt from a column titled One Fine Day In Gualala, in which Carroll and his wife Tracy sit in the waiting room of a doctor’s office, reading books, waiting. At first, Carroll describes what the clinic looks like, the informative posters on the walls, the ambience … until he reaches the halfway point of his column. Then, he focuses in on his wife of 20 years and writes this:

It was all very sleepy and sunny and obscurely calming. Don’t know why; just reporting.

It was quiet. I looked up at her. It happened.

We were on the island. I was looking at her in a way I can just begin to describe. It was as though our entire history together were a deck of cards, usually packed in a box, but just for that moment opened and fanned out, so that every moment was equally visible. I saw her staring down at her book, rubbing one finger along her cheek, her right leg crossed over her left, her right foot moving in a slow circle, and I saw her doing the same thing in a thousand different rooms, in airports and hotels, on kitchen stools and picnic benches. And we just floated together, she reading and me watching, as we have for two decades now, mostly unaware that we were floating, the smaller movements of life disguising the gentle, ceaseless current of daily existence, the trip down the river.

SHE IS MY OTHER. It is beyond the things that attracted me to her; it is beyond the virtues that made me love her, beyond the flaws that I learned to accept. It is something beyond; it doesn’t have a name. It is like the gift of companionship raised to another level. It is coming to that part of another person that is deeply unknowable, and knowing it anyway. It exists outside emotion. These moments on the island, the moments of unique connection with the other, have a curious stillness to them, a noiselessness. I am conscious only that I have suddenly gone inside the mystery and, for a moment or two, am able to live there.

It does not mean anything at all, except that there is no turning back. It does not mean anything at all except that the islands are rare and we have found one and it is not romantic, although it can make you cry. It can lift up your heart. It can make you more than whole. It’s just the way things are. It’s just where we have found ourselves. Who knew? It was all a gamble. Maybe we got lucky; maybe we’re good people; maybe anything.

There’s more and I’m inclined to just print the whole column (and many more where that came from), but you get the point, which is this: you don’t see that in newspapers, every day.

Carroll began his career in the early 1970s as a magazine editor, including stints at Rolling Stone, the Village Voice and NewWest, the latter of which he guided to a National Magazine Award. In 1977 and 1978, he wrote a column for the San Francisco Examiner, before assuming his current post at the Chronicle. In the ensuing years, Carroll has received numerous honors, including the Ernie Pyle Lifetime Achievement Award and he’s released one book-collection of his columns, Near-Life Experiences.

Carroll and his wife live in the East Bay. He and I met on a sunny day in the Glenview area of Oakland, at a café called Ultimate Grounds. Over coffee, we sat at a small table near the back door and chatted about his career.

***

The Rumpus: What is it that you like about starting a new column every single weekday? Most people would find that daunting.

Jon Carroll: Yeah, but you can forget about what you did before. I mean, it’s always a clean slate. Novelists, poor babies, come down and they have to read what they wrote the day before and then attach something to it, live with their mistakes, live with their errors, feel bad about something that happened 28 pages ago that they still haven’t resolved. And I know friends who live with novels for three or four years and they just agonize over them. Some people start researching compulsively and some people start rewriting compulsively. I’ve got a fresh piece of paper every day. It doesn’t matter what I said the day before. It’s all gone. Nobody will expect there to be a consistency of tone or a consistency of characters, or anything like that. And if it’s shallow, well, I come by my shallowness naturally. I’m in a shallow profession, writing against deadline.

Rumpus: Something I really like about your column is how it will often take an unexpected turn after two or three paragraphs. The reader doesn’t know where the piece is going. Take your recent column about a concert you attended in Berkeley. You mention hearing a song about playing cards and then all of a sudden you’re writing about the sound of cards in bicycle tires and then suddenly the column is actually about your childhood. The concert was just a prelude.

Carroll: Yeah, well that’s all intentional. The idea is to surprise the reader. The idea is to not be predictable. My problem with most columning is that you’ll read three paragraphs and you kind of know what the argument is. You know where he’s going with it. And it’s not clear that reading it all the way through would reward you in any other way. I mean, it could reward you with good writing or good jokes or something like that, but usually it’s just kind of received opinion presented in a pedestrian way. And God knows I fall prey to received opinion, but I try not to do it in a pedestrian way. So at least the reader has some idea that there might be some little ice cream cones hidden along the way, that, if nothing else, it’s worth spending your time.

Rumpus: I love that. Ice cream cones. Little treats you sprinkle in there for observant readers. So, in the last few weeks you’ve written about big government, the sale of the website The Well, the state of the magazine industry, President Obama and Mad Men spoilers, among many other things. Is there a conscious effort to make it so varied and also switch up the tone from humor to pop culture to politics to the more personal stuff?

Carroll: Yes, absolutely. That was the idea coming in, that I wouldn’t be writing in any one way about any one topic, or series of topics, or cluster of topics, because I wanted to not bore myself. I’d been around the magazine and newspaper business for 15 years already when I got the job and so I kind of understood what the dangers might be in a column. I didn’t understand all of them. But one of them is certainly that if I narrowed my purview too much, I could start repeating myself very quickly. And I didn’t want to do that. By this point, I realize it’s inescapable. You do express the same sentiment in slightly different ways. You could call that “keeping after an issue,” or something. You can’t be original all the time. But if you have a very broad field of view, you can be original more of the time, because you conceive of the world as your topic and you can go anywhere in the world and see what you think. Which is part of what writing about: seeing what I think. I can read a story in the newspaper and I don’t know exactly what’s there, but I know there’s stuff I can work with. So I — God help me, like an old journalist — I put the paper clipping aside.

Rumpus: Do you learn something about yourself with each new column you write? Or do you at least learn what you actually think about something?

Carroll: I certainly learn the latter. I don’t learn something about myself. I don’t think of it particularly as a tool for self-analysis, writing what I do. I’m not writing deeply felt novels in the newspaper, so I think using the column as a window to who I am is kind of nonsense. But, in terms of clarifying ideas on something, or arranging them, the process of writing a column is making something coherent to myself. It’s what I’m trying to do, figuring that if I can do that and express it, then maybe it also makes it coherent for somebody else. That’s the theory, anyway. So that’s what I’m doing — I’m talking to myself about this issue, whatever it is.

Rumpus: When you start on a new column, how often do you have a clear idea of where it’s going to end up? Or do you generally figure it out as you go?

Carroll: Well, you try to be open to changes. I start out with an idea. But I start out with the idea that that idea is temporary. It can go anywhere. And sometimes, in the process of writing, I find a nice corner or nook or cranny that hasn’t been explored, so I go off and explore it. And the cranny turns out to be a tunnel and it takes me to another place, entirely. And I think, “Far out!” and then go adjust the column to make sure that everything tracks, and I take the tunnel instead of the way that I thought. Other times, it’s just straight down the road. Today’s column was kind of straight down the road. I knew what I was going to do and I did it. There were no surprises.

Rumpus: Are you allowed to reveal today’s subject, or is that a trade secret until it’s published?

Carroll: It’s not a trade secret. I prefer to have people read what I’ve said, because I’ve said it better than I’m going to say it like this. That’s why I write and don’t talk for a living.

Rumpus: That makes sense. So did you already turn it in? How does it work?

Carroll: Yeah. I start writing right in the morning, because I will — as a matter of deeply held personal philosophy — avoid writing if I can. The only way I can avoid the avoidance is to do it in a pattern, set up this routine in which nothing gets done until the column gets written. So basically, I get up, have caffeine, read the paper, go into my room and stay there until the column is done. That’s my routine. And everything else has to be on pause until the column is done. And then you can press the button again and my life goes up to speed and I go do things that resemble a life, as opposed to sitting in a room, staring at a screen.

Rumpus: And you can’t do anything else until then? You protect your mornings?

Carroll: I protect my mornings, right. I mean, I work at home so there’s always a phone call, or there’s a workman and there’s all sorts of violations of the sacred trust. But that’s the plan.

Rumpus: And those around you know not to bother you. 

Carroll: Oh yeah. Oh yeah.

Rumpus: How do you know when a column is finished? Do you tinker for a while, or are you just done and send it in?

Carroll: There are several steps you take: you do a first draft, and then you go back. The first thing I do is read it through for sense, just to see if the argument is holding up and where I might’ve taken the argument off course. And I fix that. And then I go through again, with a more “copyeditor” kind of eye and see where I have failed myself grammatically, where it’s muddy, where it isn’t clear. Just seeing the individual sentences and how they’re forming and I try to fix that. And then I clean up around the edges. I write the e-mail thing, I write the headline, I write the pull-quote, I write all of that stuff. And then kind of tidy it, go through one more time and then off it goes.

Rumpus: So is there a standard length of time that it takes you, or is all over the place?

Carroll: It’s all over the place. Could be 45 minutes, could be three hours. That’s about the breadth. I can’t usefully write for more than three hours.

Rumpus: And morning’s the only time that you write? Say something really important comes up. Do you ever write in the afternoon or evening?

Carroll: Except for some very rare things, like 9/11. I write overnight so I have to have early deadlines so it can get in the paper in the Datebook section, which is printed earlier than some of the other sections.

Rumpus: So the one that you wrote today is coming out in two days?

Carroll: Yes, that’s right.

Rumpus: What gets you in the mood to write a column? I’ve heard you express that you have a sense of dread when you wake up and realize it’s a workday. Do you still have that?

Carroll: A little bit, yeah. Sure. Time to write, no avoiding it, that’s the point of the routine — that it doesn’t give you a chance to think about avoiding it, you can’t begin excusing things. So yeah, workdays are a different kind of day than the days when I wake up and realize, “Oh, boy, no column today!”

Rumpus: So when you’re on a vacation, you don’t feel like there’s a void in your life.

Carroll: If the vacation is long enough, I will eventually get antsy to write again. I will begin coming up with ideas, I will begin taking notes. But in general, the first seven days I’m happy to be away. I’m perfectly OK with those days.

Rumpus: Do you think of a specific person when you write? Do you have an ideal reader?

Carroll: I don’t really. The only thing I can come up with is someone like me. I mean, I assume that they’re interested in what I’m interested in and have the same cultural assumptions that I do. And that’s all I can do. I can’t write for anybody other than me, because I don’t know anybody other than me well enough. So I have to write for me. And if I’ve amused myself, at least I’ve started.

Rumpus: I remember you writing that you think of your column mostly as a “California column.”

Carroll: Yeah. One of the great advantages in narrowing that focus is that you can use West Coast shorthand to talk about things from a West Coast perspective, without having to transfer it and somehow make it, “That’s like your Grand Central.” You don’t have to transfer it to a national audience. I certainly have readers in other parts of the country. I hear from them, I know they exist, but I don’t write for them.

Rumpus: When you’re looking through the Chronicle in the morning, having your coffee, do you reread your own stuff? 

Carroll: No.

Rumpus: Why?

Carroll: Well, I’ve read it enough. Maybe I look at it in the afternoon. I don’t pick it up first thing in the morning. I wait to log onto my e-mail and see what kind of bomb has exploded. Occasionally, it calls for a correction and I gotta get on that right away, so I have to go find out what the initial reaction is. And then I might read it again with those criticisms in mind, whatever they are, and see what I think.

Rumpus: What about coming to a place like this café? Your work is everywhere. I walked in today and it was folded to your column. Do you ever just get a kick out of watching people read it?

Carroll: Oh yeah.

Rumpus: You do?

Carroll: Yeah. Oh yeah. That’s fun.

Rumpus: Do they ever have any idea it’s you? I mean, your photo’s up top.

Carroll: Right. No. Not usually. I’ve never had one of those moments where they finished it and looked at me. [Pantomimes looking up from reading the paper.]

Rumpus: I find that great, though, that you do watch people read it.

Carroll: Yeah, if I see where they are in the paper. I mean, I can see what section of the paper they have and if I know what section of the paper they have, I know where I am. And I check to see if they do. And of course, the dispiriting thing is when they turn to that page and just put it down.

Rumpus: I bet they’d be mortified if they knew you were sitting there watching them not read your stuff.

Carroll: Yeah. Right.

Rumpus: So if it’s a humor column, you wait to see if they smile, laugh, that kind of thing.

Carroll: Yeah. Yeah. The whole thing.

Rumpus: So, let’s back up for a second. When you got the job back in 1982, what was the job description?

Carroll: Well, it was write five columns a week.

Rumpus: Even at that point?

Carroll: There was a great Chronicle tradition when I got there: columnists wrote five a week. So Herb Caen and Charles McCabe and all those people I grew up reading, the generation before me, were all five-day-a-week columnists. So it was assumed that the replacement would also be a five-day-a-week columnist. They became aware of the aging of their battery of stars and they were looking for someone else and that’s why they gave me the job: to have me winding up in the bullpen. And in fact, I did that for almost a year. And then Charles McCabe died. And so I took his place, after a decent interval. His place, in all its permutations, is where I’ve been.

Rumpus: Was that daunting, when you first took it over, writing five columns a week? Or were you just gung-ho about it?

Carroll: I didn’t think it was what I was going to do forever. I was gung-ho at the time. I thought, “Oh, I can do this.” And I did not think of this as my last job. I had no idea that that was going to be true. Because I’d come from a period of time in my life in which I’d had something like eight jobs in 10 years, different magazines, different positions.

Rumpus: Mostly editing at that point?

Carroll: Yeah, I got writing in where I could. I would write captions, I would write headlines, I would write editor’s notes, I would write magazine copy blocks for photo spreads, things like that.

Rumpus: But the money was in editing.

Carroll: The money was in editing, oh yeah. I couldn’t make a living as a writer back then. I was fortunate to be able to learn while employed. Because I could do all the editing and then I was always ready for an assignment to do things. So I got to do a little writing, too. And eventually it turned out that editing a magazine is like carving the Lord’s Prayer on the head of a pin. It’s very difficult and not everybody can do it. After a while it’s just, “God, this is hard.” You know? And I had a personal life, but it wasn’t much of one. And I spent an enormous amount of time in the office, just deluged, working on other people’s stuff.

Rumpus: What kind of column-writing experience did you have before the Chronicle? 

Carroll: I wrote a column for the [San Francisco] Examiner for a while, three times a week, in 1977-78.

Rumpus: Similar to what you’re doing now?

Carroll: Similar, except in the Examiner, they let me draw. The drawings weren’t that good to call it a thing. They were stick figures. They were supposed to be dopey looking, that was the point. I could give them dopey looking. So, it was a thrill to me, an absolute thrill to have my pictures in the paper. Words, sure. But my pictures? Oh, that was fun.

Rumpus: You turned in five sample columns when you were trying to get the job at the Chronicle? Do you remember those?

Carroll: I remember one of them because it was the first one that was printed. It was The Universe as a Guest on the Johnny Carson Show. Not a promising premise. I don’t remember the column. But that was one of the five that convinced them. They were just going to turn over this real estate to me. They never said that it was for more than a week, but they never said it wasn’t. As the years went on, you got the idea that they thought you were permanent. Nobody says anything. Particularly at the old Chronicle. The new Chronicle is somewhat better in this regard.

Rumpus: And you didn’t ask about how you were doing?

Carroll: Well, it was a pretty good thing. And I thought, “Well, yeah, I’ll just keep doing this and we’ll see what happens.” Again, at this point, I was used to the idea that I was going to get another job. That’s what I thought I was going to do, just play this string out for however long it lasted and then go find something, probably back in editing. I didn’t know. And then they kept wanting me. Back in the old days, people got raises. That’s an antiquated idea, giving people raises for quality. I got enough raises so that even now my salary is good enough where I can save some. So, I’m fine.

Rumpus: I have your book Near-Life Experiences, which is a collection of your writing for the Chronicle, mostly from the 1990s. It’s a great selection of 100 columns, a really nice mix. When you look back at your 8,000+ columns since 1982, do you think about doing more book-collections?

Carroll: Well, it doesn’t necessarily transcribe, unless the columnist has backed it up by being a media personality of some sort, like on television. I played around with the idea of collecting again, but nobody was really interested. Many people watch Rachel Maddow, but would not be interested in a collection of The Best of Rachel Maddow shows. You know? They are, by nature, ephemeral. Popular journalism is, by nature, ephemeral. When it’s viewed in an ephemeral context, it can be very important to people. But when it’s put between hard covers, it’s somehow less important, less urgent, less of the moment. So you get the kind of tradeoff of currency with your readers. You can talk about stuff that’s going on, right in their lives. So if I talk about the weather, I’m talking about the weather that my readers in the Bay Area are experiencing. But you don’t get longevity out of that. You don’t get a historical sense. It is the first draft of history. It’s just writing very fast about events that are not completely understood.

Rumpus: Speaking of events that may not be completely understood, I loved your September 12, 2001 column “Welcome to the 21^st Century.” I thought it was so even-tempered. You were taking a long-view of something that caused so much panic and grief. It was very different than anything happening in newspapers at that point. How did you decide to approach that one?

Carroll: Well, that was a command performance. I’d written the column I was going to write for the day. And I was going to talk to my editor on the phone when it was time to edit it. I was actually going to a cactus sale in Stockton that Tracy [Carroll’s wife] really wanted to go to. And then I got a phone call that said, “You have to write about nine one-one.” And I thought, “I don’t have anything to say about nine one-one. I’m not there.” Given the immediate attention, any kind of standardized expression of shock or horror or something like that would be repetitive and stupid. Who am I to be the 932nd person to say, “Gosh, this is a bad thing”? So I wrote about the only other thing I could think about that day, which was the tendency of these things to provoke panic in the populous and the necessity to avoid the panic and to avoid scapegoating and all that … and remembering that, as bad as it seems, life goes on. Just kind of, “Let’s chill out about this a little bit.”

Rumpus: And have you looked back at that one? Because it seems like a lot of your predictions came true — specifically what you wrote about civil liberties being taken away in the name of protection. You said this on the day of the attacks. How were you so astute with your predictions?

Carroll: I think it was a historical thing. Any conversation in which Nazi Germany is mentioned always approaches idiocy. But it’s like the way the Nazis manipulated themselves into power. It’s like the anti-Japanese hysteria in World War II. It’s like the anti-Germany hysteria in World War I. It’s like all of this stuff has happened again and again and again. You find somebody to blame — an “other” — and we blame the other. And it seemed very likely that that would happen again and that unwise decisions would be made as a result of it and that it would be used as an excuse, as governments always do, to tighten control. It’s what governments are all about.

Rumpus: Now to the flipside of that: your really intimate, personal columns. You write very poetically about your wife. I haven’t seen anything in daily newspapers like your columns for Tracy. How did you know you could do that?

Carroll: I didn’t. I never asked permission, is the thing. [I say] do it and see what happens. Take a chance. Walk towards the fear. The response is so instantaneous. You’ll know if something strikes a chord.

Rumpus: When you write a column about your wife, does she see it before it goes to print?

Carroll: She does not.

Rumpus: What does she think about that kind of thing? In a way, you’re communicating with her through the newspaper.

Carroll: Oh. [Pause] She likes it. Those columns happened a while ago and I remember at the time she was very happy with them. It’s certainly nice. But she’s inured to the column-rhythm too. She knows that, in the end, it’s just Wednesday and whether it’s fabulous or awful, tomorrow it’ll be Thursday. It will go on. She’s entirely comfortable with being as public as she’s been and I don’t think she’d be more comfortable being any more public. She’s just kind of at the right level. I’m pretty able to gauge that and what’s going to work for her. Except for one column, once, in which I gave myself a speaking role that belonged to her.

Rumpus: Really? What was the column?

Carroll: It was about breaking down in King City. It was about being in the car, a long time ago, and having an accident and talking to the tow-truck guy. And she talked to the tow-truck guy. I didn’t talk to the tow-truck guy. But for reasons of economy and not wishing to introduce another character, I put her in my voice. She said, “That’s not you. You wouldn’t ask those questions.” But that’s the only time and that was at least 20 years ago. So I think I’m safe.

Rumpus: What’s your working relationship like with your editor? Have you worked with the same people this whole time?

Carroll: Yeah. It was one of my conditions. Various things would go on at the Chronicle, changes would come, changes in management, changes in ownership, but at some point, someone would think to come to me and say, “You OK? You all right with all this? Anything you want to ask us?” And I’ve always said, “Just make sure that Andy Behr is my copyeditor.” I don’t want to train another copyeditor. We’ve been together for so long.

Rumpus: How long?

Carroll: [Since] 1995, I think. Something like that.

Rumpus: And she knows your rhythms, she knows everything about your writing at this point?

Carroll: Right. And she knows what I’ve written before. She’s a friend as well as a colleague. She comes over for Thanksgiving. So that means we can talk in a kind of shorthand that we couldn’t talk in if we were just getting to know each other. That’s a given. And she’s a good copyeditor and she’s now copy chief. She’s now out of the union. She’s management, but she’s still editing my copy, God bless her.

Rumpus: And she protects your stuff?

Carroll: Yes. She is my advocate, an advocate of the prose. It’s nice that it works that way. I think every editor should advocate for their writers.

Rumpus: In terms of your relationship with the Chronicle, they’ve stuck by you for decades and for good reason. But have there ever been any times when you worried that they wouldn’t?

Carroll: I’ve never been worried about that. In general with a few exceptions, I’ve known when I’ve screwed up. So I was on it before they were. Last time, I made an awful, awful mistake. It was this Occupy the Farm column I wrote.

Rumpus: What was the mistake?

Carroll: I missed the location of a Whole Foods outlet that was planned for that general tract of land and put it on the specific corner where the Occupy movement was. I read it wrong. And [Carroll’s copyeditor] Andy asked me if I checked it and I said yes. She said she took away the idea that you never listen to writers — they’ll always lie to you. But I thought I did [check the location]. I had written the correction before management called.

Rumpus: Was there a lot of reader response from that?

Carroll: Oh yeah. Oh Christ yes.

Rumpus: And what is the response like on a day-to-day level?

Carroll: It depends on the column. Sometimes, it’s five letters. Sometimes, it’s 45 letters.

Rumpus: And do you try to answer them all?

Carroll: I try to answer all of them that are trying to engage me in some way. Some of them are just one or two or three-word things. And I usually just pass on those. And then a few of them are actively hostile and I pass on those, too, because I don’t want to get in a fight with anybody. And also it’s their chance. I don’t want to be a kind of “talking machine,” just regurgitating his opinions. It’s the other person’s turn. Say your piece, whatever it is.

Rumpus: Do you immediately know when you’ve hit a homerun with a column?

Carroll: Pretty much, yeah. I don’t know how I know. And there’s some that, when I start them, I think they’re going to be out of the park and then I realize that it’s a solid double, but it ain’t out of the park.

Rumpus: You’ve said before that one of the columns is always going to be the worst of the week. You’re OK with that?

Carroll: You have to be OK with that. It’s not a matter of ­whether I am OK. Long ago, I made the decision that I can drive myself crazy or not — take my pick — it wasn’t going to change the situation.

Rumpus: Then again, one of them is the best of the week. Are you always able to determine what’s what?

Carroll: For me, yes. It might be that the readers would have a different selection, but I sometimes take a liking to columns for reasons that are really peripheral to the point of the column. I’m thinking about a paragraph I particularly loved, other people are thinking about the opinions and all of that. Opinions are kind of boring, all by themselves. You know? Everybody has an opinion. The mere expression of opinion is not a creative act.

Rumpus: And what about being blindsided with either positive or negative feedback? 

Carroll: Somebody once said, “There’s no column so good that somebody won’t roast you for it and no column so bad that someone won’t tell you that it changed their life.”

Rumpus: You’ve said that column writing is a partnership. Can you expand on that?

Carroll: Well, the reader has to do some work. And that’s the partnership. You’re trying to get the reader’s attention sufficiently so that they will follow the argument, or follow the joke, or follow whatever it is you want them to follow. And that requires reading every paragraph. So the idea is: the closer they read it, the more they get out of it. Now I don’t know that that’s always true, but that’s the idea and that’s where the partnership comes in. They agree to read it closely, I agree to write it closely.

Rumpus: Is there an assumption on your part that they’ll actually know something, too? You were saying that you write for the demographic that you know. It reminds me a little bit of a New Yorker cartoon — the cartoonists often skip a step with the premise, assuming a base level of cultural knowledge.

Carroll: Yeah! It is like that, because, if you took time to explain it, then it would be three paragraphs of the column and you wouldn’t get to the point, or you would find a less colorful way to do it. So, I’m going to write about Oakland without cluing people in — in Pennsylvania — what Art Murmur is, other than what I’m about to tell you about it. I don’t have to go all the way back to explain Oakland’s socioeconomic situation and how it is being improved.

Rumpus: You’ve written, “When in doubt, I write about sex or death.” You said it was kind of a joke, but also kind of true.

Carroll: Kind of true, surely. You go back to fear, go back to loss, and you’ve got all of its wonderful permutations and forms and you’ve got the basis for a lot of human interactions, so you can begin to talk about them. The things we do because we’re afraid of death, the things we do because we want another human being, we love another human being, we’d like to love another human being.

Rumpus: Those are the two biggest themes then?

Carroll: I think so. Sex and death? Oh yeah. I think that’s one and two. How you’re getting older is sex goes down and death goes up. Same amount of material, either way.

Rumpus: Is there anything in your life that you haven’t really touched on in your column?

Carroll: Well, there are things I don’t feel comfortable writing about. The best example was when my mother went through a protracted illness before she died and I was involved with her and the emotional aging-parent thing. She didn’t want anything in there about her failing. So nothing went in there. Even though lots of people were dealing with issues like that. And maybe, in the sense that a column forms community, I might have been useful in talking about that or useful in thinking about that or … something. I didn’t feel comfortable. And when she died, I didn’t feel comfortable. I did do something for Mother’s Day for it. But not about her illness or about her passing or about the whole medical thing. It was a tangled deal. I just wrote about her. I mean, who she was when she was alive. And so yeah, that’s out of bounds. Illness, I think, is a general boundary. I wrote about diabetes because I have it.

Rumpus: Was that hard for you to do, to reveal that?

Carroll: No, it didn’t seem to have a stigma. I haven’t had to face revealing to the public some stigmatized illness that I’ve contracted.

Rumpus: What do you carry on you for writing down ideas? Do you have a little journal or something?

Carroll: I carry pens. And I let myself find the paper where I do.

Rumpus: Have you found that you’re so naturally observant that you could’ve easily developed a column idea on the way over to this café?

Carroll: Yeah, or I can easily not have a brain in my head. It’s that easy when it’s easy, but sometimes you take a walk and a walk is only a walk. And you’re at the end of the walk and then that’s it.

Rumpus: Can you teach somebody to come up with ideas?

Carroll: You can teach them where to look for ideas. It’s all around you. It’s really a matter of attitude, more than it is a matter of ideas. Everything is an idea. [Looks around the café that we’re in. Notices the walls.] The color this thing is painted. Any of the decisions that went into making this place …

Rumpus: You could take the color that this café is painted and turn it into something?

Carroll: Yeah, you could. You could think about the use of red and this is kind of … Spanish. It’s a very California space, this space is. The temperature is a very Bay Area temperature. The cool breeze in the afternoon and the warmth of the sun and all of that stuff, even indoors. And eventually, as those thoughts lead to each other, you may or may not have anything you can put on paper. You just start thinking the thoughts.

Rumpus: If you’re angry or sad about something, can you write good columns? Or do you need to be in a neutral state of mind?

Carroll: It would be ideal to be in a neutral thing and you do strive for the ability to put all that beside you and write in a normal way. I think my mood can’t help but affect the tone of the column, so if I’m particularly happy, I might write something particularly weird and blithe and if I am feeling the weight of the world for some reason — if I’m feeling ancient and creaky and all of that stuff — I might get a little bit more cranky than I used to get. So, sure. But the idea is to not do that. The idea is to let the subject matter dictate the tone.

Rumpus: Have you ever scrapped anything because you approached it from a passionate stance and then reread it and it just doesn’t work?

Carroll: I’ve cut down on the passionate things. I’ve decided I’ve gone overboard on something like that. I know what my hot buttons are, so I try to slow down. I try to persuade people, not just harangue them.

Rumpus: What are your hot buttons? Politics?

Carroll: Well, aspects of politics: the Tea Party, the Catholic Church. Those are two big ones. Evangelicals in general.

Rumpus: Do you have a take on the state of the newspaper industry?

Carroll: It’s terrible. I think it’s going to always be a niche market from now on, people who want words on paper. And I’m afraid that a job like mine — which pays a full salary plus benefits to produce content — is going the way of the great auk. The New York Times has plenty of columnists that it pays very well. And so do some other papers. But in general, at the smaller papers, columnists don’t get paid a full salary.

Rumpus: Are you finding that there’s no new wave of columnists being groomed? There aren’t that many at the Chronicle. Is there a potential new Jon Carroll waiting in the wings?

Carroll: We don’t seem to be picking them up. We’re dropping them off. I think that might be a conscious Chronicle decision to move away from a reliance on columnists. And SFGate has a whole bunch of guys who are exclusive to the Gate. I don’t know why we stopped running [SFGate columnist Mark] Morford. We ran Morford for a while.

Rumpus: Have you noticed your writing changing over the years? Obviously, you’ve been doing this column for 30 years. Do you look back on some of your early stuff and cringe?

Carroll: I think my early writing was more often sillier. I think I’ve gotten more serious as I’ve gotten older. I think I take things more seriously than I used to. But it’s two different modes of being. I think one was appropriate for that guy, and the other’s appropriate for this guy.

Rumpus: There seems to be a recurring theme of hope in your column in that things will work out or that people will do the right things. Are you optimistic that they will?

Carroll: It depends on the day. I distrust people banded together for political purposes. I think people as members of society act pretty well toward each other. There are all sorts of unexpected acts of kindness and caring that you don’t hear about. They’re just part of how people go about living their lives. And the news — what we see and hear in newspapers and on television and the radio — is one aspect of life and it’s interesting and it’s important, because it ultimately can affect the future of our society. But it’s not the whole story of life. It’s not what life is about. And if you confine it to that, you’re missing out, because there’s good stuff around. You know, the first dry-farmed tomatoes were at the farmer’s market just two days ago. Now, see, another annual rite of passage. And good tomatoes for three months! We’re in the good tomato season. Already, this has to be a good day, because there’s good tomatoes again.

Rumpus: Not everybody would notice that. So maybe some would say that you notice the littler things.

Carroll: Well, it’s all little stuff. We can’t really perceive the big stuff. We kind of talk around it, stand around the base, rap on it, but don’t really know what it is. The little stuff, a nice tomato sandwich — that’s what I’m going to eat for dinner, by the way — a nice tomato sandwich when I get home will be just fine.

***

Photograph by Tracy Johnston.

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Brown then proceeded to release a number of other revealing, autobiographical graphic novels, including Unlikely, a tale about losing his virginity, AEIOU or Any Easy Intimacy, and Every Girl Is The End Of The World For Me, a manifesto for hopeless romantics and one of my all-time favorite book titles.

Brown’s interests are varied, and he’s also penned his share of superhero comics including Bighead and The Incredible Change-Bots and the humor books Cat Getting Out Of A Bag and Cats Are Weird. He was featured in the 2007 Best American Comics collection, McSweeney’s and the Drawn and Quarterly Showcase. Brown is an Ignatz Award winner for the mini-comic I Am Going To Be Small.

Last year, Brown co-wrote his first screenplay, Save the Date, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January. The movie stars Lizzy Caplan, Alison Brie and Martin Starr and is a semi-autobiographical comedy centered around two sisters.

As if that weren’t enough, two days after I asked him to do this interview, Brown’s new book Darth Vader and Son hit No. 1 on the New York Times Best-Seller List. Darth Vader and Son is a bittersweet look at what it would’ve been like if galaxy conquering, absent father Darth Vader had been present throughout Luke Skywalker’s formative years. The book was done with the full cooperation of Lucasfilm Books.

Brown’s next graphic novel, A Matter of Life, further explores the subject of fathers and sons. Although his dad is a minister, Brown is an atheist. Brown calls it his most intimate book, thus far.

Born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Brown was diagnosed with Crohn’s Disease in high school, which he later detailed in his graphic novel Funny Misshapen Body. These days, he’s married with an eight-year-old son, Oscar, and they live in Chicago, where he teaches cartooning at the School of the Art Institute. He and I first met at the San Diego Comic-Con convention in 2011 and have maintained an occasional correspondence throughout the year. He couldn’t be a nicer guy.

***

The Rumpus: Let’s talk about your memory when it comes to revisiting relationships and depicting them in your work. You’re amazing at recalling the moments that may seem of little consequence at the time but, in hindsight, could serve as a roadmap for how a relationship is progressing. Do you keep a journal or does it all just come flooding back to you when you write?

Jeffrey Brown: I’ve never kept a journal, although I can look back at my sketchbooks and jog my memory. I don’t know if I just have a weird memory or something. I can be a little obsessive, and part of that is playing things over and over in my mind. I also have an idea that if these are the things I’m remembering, they’re somehow meaningful in a way I might not consciously understand. So a lot of my process is about trusting the part of me that’s focused on some small event, even if I don’t really understand what it has to do with anything. I’m also a big fan of small moments, and I think those are times when I maybe feel most alive. Most of our lives aren’t spent experiencing big, earth-shattering events. Our lives are mostly composed of tiny, seemingly insignificant moments that we don’t always take the time to appreciate.

Rumpus: What’s an example of one of those small moments from a relationship that continues to plague you? Do you sometimes wish you could turn it off, or do the potential benefits of the mechanism — specifically, turning your life into art — outweigh any drawbacks of your obsessiveness?

Brown: Oh, no, the moments don’t plague me. I love them. I think that’s one of the misconceptions about my relationship books: that these sad, awful, awkward moments are negative. Really what I wanted to celebrate about relationships was both the good and bad together, how those ups and downs are both part of what we go through. Obviously I’d prefer to have more ups, but being able to appreciate a realistic view of relationships is important. I think, overall, the positives to my obsessiveness outweigh the negatives, even if there are times when that obsessiveness starts to interfere with life.

Rumpus: Does it keep you living in the past?

Brown: I think other than a brief time when I was drawing Clumsy, where the present got a little confused with the past, I definitely live in the moment. Part of that was becoming aware of that possibility and continuing to keep an eye out for when that’s happening. Trying, at least. If anything I think I start thinking and worrying about the future too much. I think my imagination is vivid enough that sometimes things that haven’t happened — that won’t, or can’t — feel to me like they have.

Rumpus: So, is it easier going through a rough patch in a relationship, or even going through a breakup, knowing that you’re going to be able to channel it into a project? Like: “This is a lousy argument, but at least I’ll be able to turn it into something, later.” Or is this stuff always just difficult, no matter what?

Brown: It’s always difficult. I do have a kind of self-imposed, subconscious rule about what’s happening at any given time and the idea of writing about it. There was a time during writing Clumsy when I had that thought — as something was happening I started thinking about it as a comic and I didn’t like that. I don’t like the idea that I would change what I’m doing to affect how it would be as a story to be told later, because it seems to me that would in some way corrupt not only how I was acting, but would also make the comic less pure. It’d be like making myself into my own fiction. I’m more interested in looking at things I’ve gone through and trying to pull meaning out of those events. It’s one of the reasons I’ve moved to writing about events that are further in the past, and when I’m writing about something recent it’s usually just something funny that happened or was said. It’s important for me to have my art be reflective rather than proactive.

Rumpus: After Clumsy and Unlikely and AEIOU came out, did women getting into relationships with you realize that they might end up in one of your books? Were there ever any concessions from your end about things you wouldn’t work into a comic? Or is your feeling that everything in your life is fair game and if they’re participating in your life, then they’re participating in your art?

Brown: I think they realized that, but from relationship to relationship that understanding has varied. I don’t think of it as everything in life being fair game, necessarily, but I think the people I know understand that I’m an artist whose work has very much centered on his personal life. There are always concessions, whether unspoken or clarified, and ultimately it’s just up to me to figure out how to negotiate those things. For the most part I think people understand that the essence of my work isn’t about specific people, per se — it’s about relationships, events, feelings. I’m just writing about these things, using the material of real life.

Rumpus: It seems like you’re comfortable showing your most vulnerable side. Have you ever thought, “This is way too much personal information,” and axed something? Or is it all about full disclosure, even if that means you’re presenting yourself in an unflattering way?

Brown: I don’t believe in full disclosure, at least not for its own sake. I always try to balance effectively expressing the ideas I want to get at with not being salacious or gratuitous in detail. I do want to be honest, so sometimes it certainly means showing myself in a less than flattering light, but all those decisions are in service of how I want the story to feel. I think that, really, full disclosure is actually impossible. I’ll always have to act as a bit of an editor, trimming things and arranging them in certain ways, and beyond that the books are always limited to my own point of view and experience anyway.

Rumpus: Clumsy was your MFA thesis. What was the response when you turned it in? When did you realize you’d struck a nerve with people?

Brown: The response was varied. Most of the faculty seemed to appreciate it, although they didn’t have the language or understanding of comics to really take it in other than on the surface level. A lot of students seemed to like it, but then again a lot of them seemed to not really care.

The big response came from selling copies at local comic shops. Initially I did just Xerox copies, and the speed at which those sold was what told me the book had the ability to strike a nerve, and gave me the courage to self-publish. I think what really gets to people about the book is just the straightforward honesty, the willingness to show myself — and more generally, the average romantic relationship — warts and all, the good and the bad.

Rumpus: It’s pretty rare that a self-published comic would fly off the shelves like that. Why do you think it stood out?

Brown: I think a big part of it was the cover — [Cartoonist and graphic novelist] Paul Hornschemeier was helping me put the book together, and it was his idea to design the cover without an image. The plain brown cover is something a lot of people mention as the reason people pick the book up. The book itself is composed of a lot of one or two page comics, and there’s something maybe about the way I write that keeps people reading; it’s, for some reason, hard to put down. From there it just grew by word of mouth, basically, something I’ve been really fortunate to get a lot of. It was a pivotal moment, certainly, though at the time I didn’t realize just how big it was.

Rumpus: You worked at Barnes & Noble for years. When did you realize you could finally quit your day job?

Brown: It was still another six years after writing Clumsy that I finally quit Barnes & Noble, partly because of getting health insurance, something especially important for someone with a pre-existing condition in this country. Even knowing how much more expensive getting my own health insurance would be, I reached the point where more and more I felt like any time I was at the bookstore, I was losing time that could be spent drawing and writing. I kept cutting my hours until I was working one four-hour shift each week, and that started to seem silly. Around that time, my first cat book came out and was selling well, and I signed a two book deal with Simon & Schuster, so I had enough work to know we could survive without the day job.

Rumpus: Clumsy was dramatized on This American Life. For many radio fans and contributors, this is the gold standard. What was it like to work alongside Ira Glass?

Brown: It was great working with Ira, although mostly I worked with producer Jonathan Goldstein. Jonathan had found one of the first Xerox printings of Clumsy at the Chicago comic shop Quimby’s, and thought the stories would translate nicely to radio. Jonathan and I spent a few months refining a number of stories into prose versions, some of which were like new versions of pages from Clumsy and others, which were like descriptions of the panels. Recording the show took over an hour, even though the segment was about ten minutes. Rerecording bits with the slightest of changes was interesting. Overall, the response was great, and the piece ended up being a big part of my work gaining a foothold for a career.

Rumpus: Were you happy with how the piece turned out?

Brown: Yeah, mostly — I sound kind of nasally, though. I try to remind myself to talk more “manly” when I’m doing radio these days.

Rumpus: I bring up your book Every Girl Is The End Of The World For Me all the time. It’s a true-life graphic novel about your encounters with five women over a period of three weeks and the title is particularly resonant to me. It’s basically how I tend to approach all new relationships: “She’s the one, I know it, I’ve finally found what I’m looking for, I should start picking out wedding invitations.” Do you still head into relationships in this end-of-the-world manner, or is this a naïve, young man’s approach?

Brown: That book was really about ending that mentality — coming to the realization that I couldn’t depend on a girl to be happy, it had to start with myself, and I finally, mostly, let go of that need. I don’t think it’s a necessarily naive approach, but it definitely makes it harder on the relationship most of the time. The most successful relationship I’ve had is the one I’m in now, and it started not terribly long after I finally got rid of that end-of-the-world mentality. I like to think I’m better [at relationships], but I know I still make a lot of mistakes. I think it always depends not just on who you’re with, but when you’re with them. A big reason the relationship I’m in now works is because of my wife. I’ve learned a lot from her, and still am. She doesn’t let me off easy, but also works with me.

Rumpus: Would you consider writing a book about a relationship that worked out? Or is it only particularly interesting to you, in an artistic way when it doesn’t?

Brown: I might consider writing about a successful relationship, but I tend to not start writing a book before I know how it ends. I’m married now, and bits of this relationship are popping up in stories. I think, in general, I just don’t have anything else that I’m really itching to write about when it comes to romantic relationships. I try not to over-think or over-analyze what I’m doing, and writing about the relationships previously had less to do with the fact that they ended than some aspect of being in a relationship that interested me. For Clumsy, it was to celebrate how imperfect most relationships are, and declare that to be an OK thing. Unlikely was about the unrealistic expectations we can build up for our romantic relationships. AEIOU was about intimacy and the barriers to it that can exist between two people.

Rumpus: How did you figure out how to draw yourself? Is that something that was obvious to you, or did you tinker over how you should look?

Brown: It’s something that’s evolved over time. I didn’t tinker consciously. I’ve tried to let it happen organically. There were times I was drawing myself from photos, but that never made sense for how I draw my comics. Of course, now I’m getting older and I’m going to need to figure out a new way to draw myself.

Rumpus: What’s your standard workday like? Do you have a routine, or is it all over the place?

Brown: It’s a little all over the place, since I’m sort of a half stay-at-home parent. Generally, though, I try to wake up and get everyone out the door, off to preschool and work, so I can get to the coffee shop around 9 a.m. I’ll draw there for a few hours, then come home for lunch, and draw more until it’s time to pick up my son from preschool. I may or may not chip away at some work while I’m watching him, and then after dinner and everyone goes to bed, I’ll stay up and draw until midnight or so, three or four days a week. That can all change depending on travel, what deadlines I have, what project I’m working on, whether or not I’m teaching my class at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. I try to draw whenever I can.

Rumpus: You’ve said that cartoonists Chris Ware and Dan Clowes were big influences on you and were inspiring when you felt like your art was becoming stagnant. What was the problem and how did they help you out?

Brown: A big part of it was just seeing their work, and how they were expressing ideas in comics in a way I’d never been able to in my paintings, and so were instrumental in getting me to start drawing my own comics. They were also all very responsive in giving feedback and encouragement, especially Chris Ware who went as far to visit my studio and wrote me an extremely important letter that gave some basic advice as an artist as well as explained what he saw in my work that he felt resonated. Chris also encouraged me to self-publish when Clumsy was rejected by publishers, spread the word about the book and put me in touch with Paul Hornschemeier, who became a great friend and inspiration after helping me self-publish. If I hadn’t met Chris, and received such a generous response, I don’t know that I’d be drawing comics at this point.

Rumpus: Do you feel like you’re moving into a stage of your career where you want to focus more on stuff outside of yourself? Or have you always been all over the place in your interests? Is it refreshing to branch off into unexpected areas every once in a while?

Brown: I’ve always been interested in doing other stuff — from Bighead to I Am Going To Be Small to the Change-Bots books. I’ve always tried to balance out doing the super-personal work with doing something fun and fictional, but I am probably doing less autobiographical work now, overall. It’s still an interest, but I’ve covered most of what I wanted to say about life in the context of my own life, for now, at least. I do feel like I’ve continued to build and widen the range of subjects I engage, and the ways in which I handle them, and that’s certainly important to my continued development as an artist. The book I just finished is autobiographical, and although it clearly follows the previous work I’ve done in that vein, I think it’s much different in how it’s written and drawn, in addition to handling a more mature subject matter in a more nuanced way.

Rumpus: I know your dad is a minister and you’re an atheist. Is that what we’re talking about here? 

Brown: That’s actually pretty much the book I just finished — it’s called A Matter Of Life and will be published by Top Shelf in March 2013. I put off writing about religion — and the dynamic of my dad being a minister while I’m atheist — for a long time, mostly because I needed to find the right way to handle it. Becoming a father myself helped give me the right perspective and I finally found the right tone and aesthetic to make the book I wanted to, something that tries to capture all the nuance and complications of the feelings I have about these things, and how I find meaning in my life as a parent. In the end, the book is fairly vague, hopefully not preachy and definitely not trying to give “The Answer” or even explain what I may believe. But hopefully it’s something that will provoke some thought and connect with people on an emotional level. Despite the personal details I’ve drawn in previous books, this is likely the most intimate book I’ve written yet, and I’m very proud of it.

Rumpus: Speaking of things to be proud of, Darth Vader and Son is blowing up. Congratulations on everything. I know you’ve experienced plenty of success before this, but is this new territory at all? What response have you gotten?

Brown: The response has been amazing, especially in terms of more mainstream acceptance. For me, just doing the book was enough of a reason to do it — I’ve always loved Star Wars, and it was so much fun to draw. The fact that I got paid was almost like a bonus, and the fact that it’s sold well and there’s been such a positive response is more icing on the cake. It’s a little overwhelming at times, but very rewarding. Hopefully it doesn’t all spoil me. I’ve been very fortunate in that, so far in my career. I’ve always been able to work on the projects I want to, and in the way I want to. So I try to remember that when I’m not drawing Star Wars, I shouldn’t expect this kind of attention.

Rumpus: How did you react when you made the New York Times Best-Seller List? What does it feel like to be No. 1?

Brown: It’s all a little abstract still, and I don’t know what to do with it, really. I think I’m also aware that it can all be pretty fleeting, so I’m definitely enjoying and appreciating it, even if it doesn’t feel entirely real. I’m still amazed that I actually got to make this book, and I’d still go back and do it again, even if I didn’t know it would sell.

Rumpus: Based on its phenomenal success, do you have plans to continue with the Star Wars books? Are you already thinking about your follow-up?

Brown: We were already thinking about the sequel before I’d even finished the first book. Obviously, Princess Leia needs to get a book, too. I’m also working on another Star Wars project which I can’t quite talk about yet, but it’ll be much different from anything I’ve done previously and I’m having a lot of fun with it.

Rumpus: Were you in touch with George Lucas or his staff at all? Do you know what he thinks of the book?

Brown: I worked a lot with J.W. Rinzler, who’s an editor and author for Lucasfilm Books, and gave some great input without ever interfering with what I was doing in the book. George Lucas requested additional copies of the book from Chronicle, so apparently he liked it, which feels pretty great.

Rumpus: How did you figure out what young Luke was going to look like? I have a theory that he looks a bit like you did when you were that age.

Brown: Luke is actually based on how I draw my son Oscar, with a slightly different haircut. Of course, Oscar looks pretty much the way I did when I was his age. He’s like a smaller version of me.

Rumpus: How has your art has evolved as you’ve changed projects over the years? How would you describe the differences in your work between Darth Vader and Son or Cat Getting Out of a Bag and some of your more personal, autobiographical works?

Brown: I try to not over-think things, and let the project itself determine how I approach it. So, considering how unsuccessful my first few romantic relationships were, it made sense in books like Clumsy and Unlikely to have an aesthetic that was messy, awkward and full of mistakes. For Darth Vader and Son, I wanted to have things retain a cartoony quality while being pretty accurate to the look from the films, and I also wanted it to feel pretty warm.

Rumpus: It’s been a big year for you. In addition to all the book success, a film you co-wrote, Save the Date went to Sundance. Why did you want to get into screenwriting? And what was your Sundance experience like?

Brown: Screenwriting — or at least some involvement with film or TV — was a big part of my creative development, from being inspired by the storyboards from The Empire Strikes Back to having a public access TV show and thoughts of becoming part of a sketch comedy troupe. I got an email in 2006 from producer Jordan Horowitz, who liked my books and wondered if I’d ever thought about writing for film. I figured I’d give it a try, though I ended up relying a great deal on my first co-writer, Egan Reich, who really helped format things and structure the story in a way that was fit for film, in addition to making the story funnier and more real. Sundance was amazing and surreal. I enjoyed it immensely, but came home with bronchitis and an ear infection. The whole experience taught me a lot about filmmaking, and I’d love to go back there. Save The Date was just picked up for distribution by IFC Films, so it will hopefully see a theatrical release soon, maybe around Valentine’s Day. In the meantime, it’s been playing other film festivals around the country.

Rumpus: How much of the film was based on your life? Do you have another movie in you?

Brown: The initial idea is based on my own life, but by the time my two co-writers and the actors were done with things, the details are much, much different. That said, the movie still feels like it’s made entirely of the emotional beats and feelings of how my relationship with my wife began. I think I’ve got more movies in me, but I’m in no rush, and happy to keep drawing comics and let the next movie project happen organically when it feels like the right time.

Rumpus: Do you have any advice for aspiring graphic novelists?

Brown: The first thing is to read as much as you can. Read it, study it, absorb it — things you like, and things you don’t. Meet other cartoonists whenever you can, talk to them, pick their brains. Go to comic conventions and signings, and if you can’t do that read as many interviews as possible. Get feedback: don’t just show your work to friends, but send it to people with self-addressed stamped envelopes and ask specific questions for them to respond to. Send your work to artists, writers, editors, publishers. And finally, the most important thing, the first and last thing, is to make work. The rest of the advice is pointless if you don’t actually make the comics. Don’t stop with a few sample pages for your “pitch,” but work all the time whenever you can. Develop a good work ethic, practice so you get better, and make enough work to know that it’s really what you want to do.

Rumpus: Have you become a surrogate therapist to any of your friends or fans who are aware of what you’ve gone through in your relationships, wanting an honest take on their problems?

Brown: I think I’m usually the one going to my friends for the therapy! I have gotten a lot of questions or requests for advice from people who have read my books. I think it has less to do with the idea that I know any more about relationships, but more to do with the fact that my books are written for friends, and I feel like I have a friendship with the people reading the books. So that’s the kind of approach people come to me with — not the wisdom of an expert, but the honest thoughts of someone who cares. In a way I started writing autobiography as a way to open up to people, and I think that helps readers open up to me. I guess it might be a strange thing, but I feel like it’s a pretty rewarding aspect to doing the work I do.

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