THE RUMPUS: You started SMITH magazine 3 years ago. What have you learned about starting up such a venture? When you originally started the website, what did you think it would be about?

LARRY SMITH: I’ve learned that you have to love what you do, and wake up every day obsessed or you’re sunk. That a startup, or any personal passion you’re trying to turn into a working living, is both a marathon and a sprint, but probably more of a marathon. That you have to remain flexible and you have to listen to your audience, at least if what you’re trying to do is find an audience.

The concept remains largely the same as it was when I ran around the publishing world in early 2003 trying to get funding or find a publishing partner. The explosion in technology has fueled a golden age of storytelling, from blogs to Facebook’s 25 Random Things to movies on phones and Flips to every other form of storytelling under the sun. No one bought this idea six years ago, so my original notion of a print-web, user-generated editor-curated magazine had to change. I finally listened to my cofounder, Tim Barkow (an old friend and early Wired editor) and wised up and launched SMITH as an online only publication in January 2006. His advice was similar to what I got from some friends and mentors like Dave Eggers and Shoshana Berger: if you want to do something, don’t wait around for the venture money to come in or some publisher to sign you up, just start. So that’s what we did.

Rumpus: How did the idea for the six-word memoir come about?

Smith: Legend has it Ernest Hemingway was challenged to write a story in only six words. He came up with “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” Others had played with the six-word story form, but no one had re-imagined the Hemingway story as “six-word memoirs” as we did in November 2006. We did three smart/lucky things back then. First, we asked some of our favorite writers to submit their six-word memoirs. Then, we put the call out to our community, one comprised of largely non-professional writers. We said, “Hey, check out Elizabeth Gilbert’s and Sebastian Junger’s and Joyce Carol Oates’s six-word memoirs. When you submit yours, you’ll be right up there on SMITH with them.” The idea is that famous folks provide a little inspiration and a little aspiration. We also got on Twitter just as it was launching and sent out one six-word memoir a day to SMITH‘s Twitter followers. This was all very new and fun for both us and Twitter in the company’s nascent days, so they promoted us, we promoted them, bloggers picked up on the six-word challenge, and it starting flying across the web and onto cell phones, and we were off and running.

Rumpus: How do you handle submissions? Can anyone publish a story on SMITH?

Smith: Anyone can submit a story to SMITH. When you do, whether a six-word memoir, a 100-word story about being pregnant, a 400-word Brush With Fame, or a 2,500-word memoir-in-progress in our My Life So Far story project, you hit one powerful button: publish. And—poof—you’re published. We read every story and then act as a combination of editors and curators, featuring stories (some daily, some weekly, depending on the section). If there’s a piece in the “My Life So Far” project, for example, that we like but think needs some work, we’ll be in touch with the writer and suggest changes or say, “We’d like to feature this, but there’s some grammar stuff and maybe the opening section could be fleshed out a little.” — that sort of thing. It’s a light touch.

Rumpus: Your website mentions the possibility of a print copy of SMITH. Any plans for this to happen soon?

Smith: I’d love to do a quarterly maga-book combining SMITH current and totally new content, and it could happen. But for now we’re focusing on making our online community as good as it can be and making more books.

What’s nice is that since we launched, the gap between the cachet of print and online publishing is closing: being published on a well-respected online magazine or solely on the website of a print publication doesn’t feel second-tier at all. At the same time, we expect more of our writers—better writing, cleaner copy, few factual errors.

Rumpus: Tell me about the book you just released — Six-Word Memoirs on Love & Heartbreak. How has it been received?

Smith: People like it. Some are surprised that it’s quite an intense, heartbreaking little book. We could have done a book that was, to use one of Six Word Memoir’s co-editor Rachel Fershleiser’s phrases, “all hearts and unicorns” but that wouldn’t reflect what people sent in. There’s a lot of heartbreak out there—in the world, on SMITH, in this book. So it’s a more authentic reading experience, and better book, for it. And all for just $10….

Rumpus: In a recent ad campaign, McGill University used the six-word form to describe faculty and students. Could you talk about your conflict with McGill?

Smith: In six words, “A mountain made out of molehills.” All we asked from McGill was a reference to the inspiration for their six-word memoir project—just as SMITH references and credits Hemingway at every turn—and they seemed to think this was asking a lot. A reporter in Toronto called me about it. I said I’d prefer to let McGill and SMITH work this out on our own, but he was determined to do a piece. It’s fine now—we’ve gotten a mention and a link on McGill’s site. We work with schools and nonprofits all the time doing six-word projects, without pay and with great pleasure. But when someone essentially mirrors the exact “six-word memoir” concept, we’d just like a nod—it’s the right thing to do.

Rumpus: Recently you held a contest with the National Constitution Center calling for people to write six words to inspire America.  These entries were meant as suggestions for President Obama’s inauguration speech.  How big was the response to this call for submissions?

Smith: We received around 4,000 submissions, and lots of great six-word speeches for President Obama. You can check out the winning six entries here. Three of my three favorite that the judges didn’t pick were, “And now for something completely different,” “Trust me, you’ll like Michelle better,” and the perfectly goofy, “I can’t do it Obama self.” Good stuff.

Rumpus: Any chance of a six-word memoir from President Obama?

Smith: I’ve been asking for two years. A couple years ago, while in a hotel gym hanging out with indoor football league referees for a story for ESPN Magazine, I heard The Voice coming from down the hall. He was giving a speech to a labor union. I walked in (in my sweats and t-shirt) and scribbled a request for a six-word memoir from the then senator. I got right up to the front of the crowd after his speech and handed the note to one of his people. But, alas, I never heard back. Still, I’m pretty happy with the way it all worked out for the country.

Rumpus: Are you working on any projects other than SMITH magazine?

Smith: SMITHteens.com is starting to take off, so we’ll be putting more energy into that—though in truth the teens just like to do their own thing there and prefer old editors like myself stay out of it.

I have a small hand in Jason Bitner’s Cassette From My Ex project, which is a site and forthcoming book. People send in their cassettes from exes, we digitize them, and run the music and an essay from the person who received the mixtape about what the music and the boy or girl meant to them then and now.

Tim Barkow and I are also hatching up a new idea that’s totally different than SMITH, which combines what I guess we call “service” or “usefulness” with storytelling. This project will surely be another marathon and a sprint.

***

Juliet Litman contributed to this article.

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Michele Knapp: Hello Zak.

Zak Smith: Hello Michele.

Michele: You have had extensive formal training in art at prestigious institutions, including a BFA from Cooper Union, studying at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and an MFA from Yale.
In response to a question about your training, you once said, “Everybody who’s any good paints totally differently than anyone else who’s any good . . . so there’s not a lot of technique to learn.” What did you gain from your years in art school?  How has your training influenced your work?

Zak: In art school you learn mainly two things:

- that no matter what kind of pea-brained crap you see in a gallery, there’s some kid somewhere who honest-to-god thought that that was actually a good idea even if s/he wasn’t going to get paid for it and,

- rich people will pay legal tender for anything at all as long as it’s in a gallery and called “art” rather than on ebay and called “random table scraps and crayon ends I glued to a piece of felt” so you might as well make whatever the hell you want.

Michele: I read that you moved from Brooklyn to Los Angeles in 2007.  Why that particular move?

Zak: New York’s perception of itself is that it’s soooo smart and soooo tough.  And it’s not.  On the subways after 9/11 they had these little Public Service Announcements on the train saying “I looked up, and where there used to be towers there was just broken dreams and empty sky”. This is a message from the democratically-elected government of the world’s most important city to its allegedly tough, smart citizens concerning its and their response to a sociopolitically momentous crime that affected allof their lives. This is the post-9/11, post-Giuliani, post-Bloomberg reality: New York is a vapid, high-rent hipster-hole where grown men wear scarfs indoors. Not that LA isn’t, but at least in LA, they know it.

Michele: Has it resulted in any changes in your art work?

Zak: Since I moved to LA, when I paint a portrait of a girl, she’s slightly less likely to be a dominatrix and slightly more likely to be a stripper. There hasn’t been any noticeable effect on the abstract paintings.

Michele: How does your environment influence your work or the way in which you work?

Zak: When I lived in New York and I painted a girl sitting on her bed, there was a fire escape out the window, so there was a fire escape in the painting and I had to figure out what made fires escapes interesting to look at.  Now there are palm trees out the window, so there are palm trees in the painting and I have to figure out what makes palm trees interesting to look at. Everything else is the same–they sell liquitex acrylic and needle-width brushes on both coasts.

Michele: Why work in porn?

Zak: Nobody ever asks me “Why make paintings”?  Is wanting to spend your time around attractive women who like to have sex much more difficult a desire for journalists to understand than wanting to dip wisps of horsehair into a wet lake of colored goo and smear it all over a piece of paper until it looks pretty?

Michele: You have said you are involved with porn “mostly because the social life of the art world is like living death.” Do you need to work in porn in order to socialize with people outside the art world?

Zak: No, especially since my girlfriend does porn. But I do think it’s important that people know that the social life of the art world is like living death. It is a lot like living death. Think about living death: Like, if you died and yet also walked the earth, what would that be like?  You could do nothing fun, and would be constantly faced with situations which only made you want to do things which you could never actually achieve (like, say, somehow ensure that the assistants who designed and constructed all the art for the artist standing next to you actually got all the money that that artist made just for signing it, or, say, grab the hors d’oeuvres tray and shove it into that artist’s eye socket), and no-one would listen to anything anyone else said or wrote, and no-one would think seriously at all about anything and yet simultaneously no-one seemed to have a sense of humor about anything and you would constantly watch unholy outrages against both reason and your fellow human beings being perpetrated in a thousand ways and you would never see anyone worth having sex with and the only music playing would be Britpop or DJs re-mixing Britpop and the only thing to look at would be Andy Warhol or re-mixes of Andy Warhol and the walls would be white and the food would be vegetarian and in very small portions, and, in short, you would be consigned to never knew beauty, pleasure, intellectual stimulation, or visceral experience in any form forever.

That would be living death, right?  That would also be the art world.

Michele: You have said sex in porn does not allow for the freedom of a “normal sexual experience,” and it leaves you wanting a sexual experience “without rules.” You have said you do not watch porn. You have indicated that you earn considerably more money from your paintings. If it isn’t about the people or the money or having satisfying sex or being able to watch yourself having sex on film, then what is it about?

Zak: I never said the sex wasn’t satisfying, it just isn’t as satisfying as camera-free sex.  Also- and maybe your readers are unaware of this phenomenon- sometimes after you have sex with people in porn, they decide it would be a good idea to have sex with you again, not-in-porn- and sometimes more than one of them decide this simultaneously.  Sometimes this strikes you as a fine and worthy decision for a young lady to make and you feel as though it would be boorish and unseemly not to accommodate them.

Michele: How would you define alt porn?

Zak: Normal porn works like this: you fill every female role with a blonde built like a girl on a mudflap or the nearest available equivalent. Fill every male role with a guy built like a professional football player or the closest available equivalent, and film them using TV-commercial lighting and camera angles having fetish-free sex in a place designed to look like it’s expensive and clean and in the San Fernando Valley.  Break one of these rules and you can call you product “niche porn.”  If you break three or more of them and think it’ll make you money, you are eligible to call your product “alt-porn”.

Michele: Are you still working as an alt porn actor?

Zak: Once in a while someone asks me to do something.  I’m not with an agency–I never was.

Michele: Do you have any new films being released soon?

Zak: No features- the last one was “Hospital”.  There’s internet stuff a few times a month.  Mandy’s having surgery for endometriosis in a few days, so we’re kinda waiting to see how she feels before making big porn plans.

Michele: Tell me about your decision to illustrate Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon.

Zak: The sentences in that book are intricate and gorgeous and hallucinatory and manage to integrate ideas about millions of different things in the past, present and future into a coherent reality that has something to do with life as it is actually lived here and now on earth by real people.  I always thought it would be good to make pictures that were the same way- so I figured a useful exercise might be to just draw the things in the book.

Michele: Was it your idea to publish the images in a book?

Zak: Yes, but, to be fair, it is always my idea to publish any picture I make in a book.  In fact, it is always every artists idea to publish everything they make that they like in a book.  Except the worst artists, whose only idea is to sell it for lots of money to a rich person so that only that one rich person ever gets to see it.

Michele: How did Tin House Books end up publishing the work?  Did you shop your work around or did they approach you?

Zak: They approached me.

Michele: Do you have any interest in another art project that crosses over into literature?

Zak: Right now I’m working on doing the exact same thing with Cormac McCarty’s “Blood Meridian“- every single page- only this time I’m doing it with 5 other artists- Matt Wiegle, Sean McCarthy, John Mejias, Craig Taylor, and Shawn Cheng. We split up the pages 6 ways and are doing it in 6 different styles.

Michele: I understand you have a new book coming out in July, We Did Porn.  Tin House Books describes it as a combination of illustrations, memoir, and lyric essay.  Can you tell me more about it?

Zak: “Lyric essay”?  I need to talk to somebody at Tinhouse about that.  Ummm–anyway, yeah, it’s 300 pages of stories and writing about working in porn and–in separate sections–100 pages of drawings and paintings of the same stuff and people.  Notes on the Adult business in two forms.

Michele: How did it come about?

Zak: I realized I had an awful lot of things I saw or thought about or thought people might want to know about porn that were occupying my brainspace in the form of words rather than in the form of pictures.  If you’re an artist, the pictures pile up in your brain and sooner or later you have to get them out or you can’t get anything else done–you can’t go to the post office, you can’t buy soup, you just sit there watching TV and trying to forget, if you’re a writer then the sentences do the same thing–they pile up until you get them out of there.  So I started writing the sentences down.  Then I realized there were an awful lot of them.

Michele: What led you to writing?

Zak: I was always writing or trying to write.  I read a lot, both my parents were writers, once in a while I did articles for art magazines–this will actually be the third book I’ve written–but, very luckily, the first one to be published.  The other two were in high school and college, respectively, and also they both sucked.

Michele: Do you intend to continue to pursue writing along with your painting?

Zak: If it keeps pursuing me.  If it will agree to just shut up, I’ll leave it alone.  So far, writing is not shutting up.

Michele: How did you and Shawn Cheng come up with the idea for On the Road of Knives?

Zak: Did you know you are the first interviewer ever to ask me about the Road of Knives?  Anyway, we came up with it because we both like to play games.  And we were trying to figure out what it is about games that we like, and so we came up with a project that kind of distilled games down to the things we liked best about them and left out all the other stuff.  So we came up with The Road of Knives–which is kind of a play-by-mail chess game and kind of a watch-the-creative-process-at-work post-modern art project and kind of a comic book.  It’s also a nice way to try out new techniques and way to make pictures in a sort of low- stress way.  Also, there are monsters in my brain and they want out.  If you have girls and monsters and abstract paintings and sentences in your head and you only let out the girls and the abstract paintings and the sentences then you are walking around all day with a head full of monsters, which is no good for anyone.

Michele: What led you to include a third artist, Nicholas DiGenova?

Zak: Well, looking at Nick’s work, he just seemed like an artist who had the right skillset.  He could improvise with what you gave him without losing any of his own style.  A lot of artists don’t work that way–they have a specific thing they need to do and it’s hard for them to integrate some random image into that withiout altering it beyond recognition.  Like I’m sure Sean McCarthy could draw a beautiful thing for the Road Of Knives, but his art is so much about manifesting his twisted inner reality that even though Sean could easily draw, say, a mouse-snail wearing a hat made of teeth, he could only do it if was HIS mouse-snail wearing a hat made of teeth that he made up that day after having a horrible dream about a horrible trip to the dentists office.

Michele: Is there any end in sight or do you intend to continue it in perpetuity?  Would you like this project to end up published in a book?

Zak: The idea is to do it forever, but to publish it periodically every few years.

Michele: What are you reading now?

Zak: “Lost in the Funhouse” and “The Floating Opera” by John Barth,  “Infinite Jest” (again), “The Biographical Dictionary of Film” (always and constantly and randomly), Lankhmar stuff by Fritz Leiber, Katherine Mansfield’s “Prelude”, “Critique of Dialectical Reason” by Sartre, “The Brief and Terrible Reign of Phil” by George Saunders, “The Futurological Congress” by Stanislaw Lem, Bukowski’s “Burning in Water Drowning in Flame”, a collection of Aime Cesaire poems, “Things That Never Happen” by M. John Harrison, A Dorothy Parker collection, Cortazar’s “Final Exam”, Updike’s first rabbit book, “Pricksongs and Descants” by Robert Coover, “Sixty Stories” by Donald Barthelme, another collection of Sartre essays, “Stormbringer” by Michael Moorcock, a colection of Nabokov short stories and “The Year of Eating Dangerously” by Tom Parker Bowles.  I need ones to read, ones to read out loud with Mandy, thin ones for plane rides and other thin ones to read out loud with Mandy on plane rides.  Plus sometimes extras because Mandy has an an anxiety disorder so if she reads to much of “Infinite Jest” she starts to get a panic attack.

Michele: What are you working on now?

Zak: A portrait of a girl who works at Cheetahs, some drawings of a miniature city I built out of model-kits and old junk, Road of Knives, Blood Meridian, and an essay on going up to Las Vegas with some of the nominees for this year’s Adult Video Awards ceremony.

**

See Also: The Rumpus Reviews Waltz With Bashir

See Also: The Rumpus Interview With Margaret Cho

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