The 2009 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction went to Ted Gilley’s Bliss and Other Short Stories, a first collection that is as startling as stumbling upon a full, immense moon—scarred white and sharp above the trees—and just as quiet. This collection’s nine stories serve up people who are reeling in the borderland between desire and despair, trying to survive the only way they know how: by recounting their stories and scrambling to make sense of their worlds’ unraveling.

From “All Hallow’s Eve,” the stunning three-page opener that drops Sirut, a Cambodian refugee, into the sexual and social wilds of a North American winter, to the final story, “The End Zone,” which begins, “My folks are dead,” Gilley shows the face of grief, maps its breathless journey from haunted to home safe.

The trip toward bliss, Gilley tells us line after line and situation after situation, is dangerous, the destination only a brief respite in a longer journey. As the opening line of “White” indicates, the trip is neither rational nor painless, especially for those who seek certainty and love. Here are the two protagonists in their car, in the parking lot after a San Diego Padres game:

Without thinking, she hit him. And because she had not made a fist—for all that had been said, she had not expected to strike her husband—Sheila’s blow was neither a slap nor punch, but a flail of nail-tipped fingers that zipped open the skin under his near-side eye.

The seeds of Sheila’s action are planted long before “White” begins. That her husband, Grant, ”doesn’t even know what hit him” only adds to the trauma, as this couple starts owning up to the everyday violence they commit, the silences they suffer and inflict as their relationship grows distant. After their altercation, Sheila escapes the car and the parking lot on foot and topless, Grant having torn her shirt while fending off another potential attack. While Grant stews and Sheila wanders, Gilley gives us their history, letting readers cringe in self-recognition at such incidents as the funeral of Sheila’s aunt: “As Sheila contemplated the finality of a quarter ton of earth heaped next to a hole in the ground, Grant, beside her, said, ‘Okay?’”

Ted Gilley

Grant, after getting his face clawed by his wife, spends his time, like many of Gilley’s life-torn regulars, reconstructing the time before the emotional wreckage, the imaginary time when life was “simple, really.” Left alone long enough, though, contemplating his scratched and bloody face in the rearview mirror, his wife’s shirt still in his fist, he bumbles onto the truth of his situation: “I don’t have time for this or any other lesson.” Meanwhile, the shirtless Sheila, semi-bent on revenge, heads into a deserted area where four sex-starved, beer-drinking boys are interested in having her for a snack, and a pair of cops converge, guns drawn, on our man Grant.

The miracle of Gilley’s characters is their stupid impulsiveness and their lightning-quick humility. In other words: their humanness. The miracle of the stories in Bliss is how that humanness hangs in each image and deceptively plain, glimmering sentence. When we find Grant on the verge of boiling into violence—and never-spoken fear, at being forced to wait for his wife’s reappearance—his hands find the car’s dashboard, and his head finds an ironic reverie. It all puts him somewhere between hangdog and humble, with the language indicating the intersection of history, chance, and choice:

nothing like the metal dashboards in his father’s cars, the kind kids dashed their brains out on back before some genius figured out that bodies continue to move forward when a car slams to a stop. Was restraint such a hard lesson to learn?

Sheila, having found momentary safety in the kitchen, and clothing, of an older female stranger, weeps openly in the woman’s arms and blushes at her unashamed love for the woman’s gift of what she herself had lost. The shirt off her back, truly. And as Grant stands “real, real still, nice and still, and nice, and quiet” before the cops, Gilley puts into his head this ravishing unthought:

[H]e understood that the worst had truly happened. He could rest now because… when things unraveled and unwound and broke and fell apart and stopped moving and cracked open, things became understandable. No—bearable.

It goes like this for all Gilley’s people. Their lives have gotten hard and their choices unexpected. From Cleave, in the title story, whose fragile hold on reality becomes the key to his heart’s desire; to Johnny, of the sweeping “Vanishing World,” whose childhood spent building miniature worlds and whose tragic sexual awakening leads to his late recognition of his mother; to Robert, of “Physical Wisdom,” whose fear in the face of an earthquake leads to a belief in the power of “slipping into a universe that [never stops] moving”; the characters’ devotion to finding bliss doesn’t keep them from actually stumbling onto it—at least for one painful, delicious moment. Their worlds are so full of pain and heart that they can only be asking of us what they demand from themselves—to be good, honest, and truthful.

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Belle Boggs’s Bakeless Prize-winning Mattaponi Queen moves quietly and with confidence. Boggs’s stories are connected subtly and organically, filled with damaged creatures who live out their tough, wise-cracking existences in Virginia’s semi-rural Mattaponi River region—in its reservation and nearby towns—where four hundred years ago stood the Mattaponi chief Powhattan, his daughter Pocahontas, her eventual husband John Smith, and English colonists who launched an era of violence still felt by Boggs’s people, Indian, white, and black alike. They define bittersweet:

Wayne “Skinny” Littleton lived with the expectation of not living much longer, but this had been going on for years now. Why don’t you just get on with it? his friend Bruce would ask… But the truth was he had gotten used to living. He had his regular customers with their steadily deteriorating vehicles, all dependent on him; he had his friends, his cooking shows. He had his house to work on, to finish; he wanted to put in a hot tub and a second bathroom. He had his kids, Erin and Tyler, who could hardly be called kids anymore and with whom he mostly communicated by telephone. He looked forward to the small things: Friday night bluegrass on the public radio station, driving across the reservation to Bruce’s house for supper, fishing the Mattaponi in his dented aluminum johnboat. His first beer of the morning, his last beer at night, and all the beers in the middle.

Skinny’s story, like nearly all the stories in Mattaponi Queen, deepens at the same time it enriches other connected stories throughout the collection. “Homecoming,” for example, the longest story of the collection—here, whip-smart and on the verge of becoming a state-ranked runner in New York City, Marcus comes to stay with his grandmother and attend King William High School after his mother gets arrested for selling drugs. He answers an ad that Skinny put in the paper: “Odd jobs for local mechanic. $8/hour. Plus you fix it, you can drive it home.” It soon becomes evident to Marcus that Skinny is “not what you’d expect… not skinny but giant and fat,” a devotee of the television show Molto Mario, and a car mechanic who can barely get his boot up on a bumper. In a deft turn, Skinny, a regretful fuck-up of a father to his own kids, ends up as the only soft landing left for Marcus, the quickly risen and now fast-falling star of his adopted high school’s homecoming. Skinny accomplishes it by doing the hard work of love—spending days cooking one superb, memorable meal for Marcus before their final goodbye to each other—and by cooking for other friends in other stories, meals he himself is too sick to eat.

Belle Boggs

Other such satisfying regularities appear as soon as the book opens. The story “Deer Season” begins, “On the first day of deer season the high school is deserted by all the boys.” It takes Boggs twelve words to point to one of the themes of the collection: desertion. On the same page we encounter “empty” and “absences,” as well as “softness and gentleness” in a deer that wanders up to a school window from the forest where all the boys are waiting to bag her. That softness and gentleness speaks to those students still left in school—the girls, the boys who don’t hunt, the sensitive outcasts who nevertheless make a home here, near “a forgotten and overgrown patch of brownish chickweed.” It isn’t the students but the narrator who notices the deer’s “newly hardened antlers, bone for locking against bone,” who knows they all have “found the safest place in the county, but of course [they don't] know this, and [the deer] soon will run off again into the woods, where shots will be fired throughout the day and night.”

As if to say it’s risky, unknowable business, this living we do. As if to say all the fragile creatures of Boggs’s world—parents, children, husbands, and wives—dodge what dangers they can to survive in the midst of their aching loneliness. Sometimes they find grace. Always they aspire to be, as Loretta, a character in the title story, says, “neutral and regal” as a boxwood tree. From the soldier who gets sent home for losing an arm, to his young half-Mattaponi wife, Ronnie, who keeps her pregnancy a secret; Ronnie’s dad, the heartbroken Bruce, who faces his last years relaxing on the reservation; school principal Lila, who ruminates on a former boyfriend to avoid taking a chance on new opportunities; and Cutie Young, an old biddy who gets her silver stolen and forces her nurse (Loretta) to go town to town trying to reclaim it. Intimately familiar with the strange soil from which they grow, each of Boggs’s characters makes fine, heartbreaking attempts to do just that.

• Read “Imperial Chrysanthemum” in this spring’s Paris Review

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“I like to go where the life is.  I’m pro-life, in the sense that chaos seems like life to me and order seems like death.  I’m of the people in the bar and the people in my stories.  They are my tribe.” –

**

To an outsider, Bonnie Jo Campbell’s life might seem full of surprises. Once upon a time, she was a circus worker; later, she was a contender for a Ph.D. in Mathematics. She holds rank of nidan, second degree black belt, in kobudo, the art of Okinawan weapons. And she writes. As the author of a previous collection of stories, Women & Other Animals, and the novel Q Road, she’s won a Pushcart Prize, the AWP Award for Short Fiction, and the Southern Review’s 2008 Eudora Welty Prize for “The Inventor, 1972,” a story in her second collection, the 2009 National Book Award-nominated American Salvage.

American Salvage seems to break NBA conventions: It’s not a novel (not even a novel-in-stories) and it’s not published by a major New York house but by Wayne State University Press’s Made in Michigan Writers Series. But however surprising all these twists and turns might seem, it’s business as usual for Campbell, a Kalamazoo, Michigan, farm girl who happens to keep donkeys. What follows is a review of American Salvage—and if that’s not enough, an interview with its author, conducted on the eve of the National Book Award ceremony.

In other words, it’s another fantastic Rumpus Original Combo.

**

The Rumpus Review of American Salvage

A finalist for this year’s National Book Award in fiction, Bonnie Jo Campbell’s short story collection American Salvage is an overnight sensation—twenty-five years in the making. And whether or not the author walks home tonight with the bronze statue and an extra thou in cash, any night a reader spends with her book will give them a gift that stays with them for the next twenty-five years.

Judging by her influences, Campbell’s success is no surprise; previous NBA winners are embedded in her writer-DNA. As deep-dark as Joyce Carol Oates and as black-humored as Flannery O’Connor, Campbell adds down-in-the-dirt setting (economically depressed Kalamazoo County, Michigan), characters (the desperate, deranged, drug-addled, and physically debilitated), and her own brand of realism (broke-down cars, homes, and farms with few prospects in sight) to a collection that tells poignant, painful truths about American life.

Remember that moment when Tim O’Brien’s First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross puts that stone in his mouth for love, in “The Things They Carried”? Or when Denis Johnson’s Fuckhead, oops, crushes those tender baby bunnies against his body, in the drug stupor of “Emergency”? The best moments in American Salvage are like that—they get you in an instant and stay with you forever. Take the opening story, “The Trespasser,” wherein a family—mother, father, teenage daughter with braces—enter their “family cottage” to discover it’s been burned and pillaged by a troupe of meth addicts, including a 16-year-old girl and three considerably older male strangers/drug connections who broke in through the kitchen window and cooked up their stuff:

It is the teenaged daughter, the swimmer, the honor student, who discovers her own missing mattress on the river-side porch, screams “Mommy!” a term she hasn’t used in years. The trespasser had dragged the mattress out onto the porch as soon as the men had gone. The daughter studies the sheet, torn off, tangled at one end, the quilted fabric of the mattress crusted with jism, more jism than the daughter’s mother has ever seen… the daughter sees there’s blood, too, smeared across the fabric, dried and darkened… That night… the dream that scares [the daughter] awake over and over again is the dream of entering a stranger’s bedroom—only it is her room—and encountering there her own body, waiting.

Campbell’s battlefield may be in Michigan, but she shows the real war, still and always is, as Faulkner said, the human heart in conflict with itself. And she shows without flinching what exists in the distance between the Haves and the Have Nots. She shows, too, how the artifacts of our lives may shift in an instant and reveal a horror we recognize: drugs, destitution, desperation, damage, that can easily enter our homes, rearrange our illusions of safety, flash a mirror at us to show the real straits our communities swim in. Nobody is immune. “Drugs and alcohol affect every family I know,” Campbell told me, “country and city, middle-class and poor, so those human propensities and their effects seem worth investigating.”

Bonnie Jo Campbell

And investigate she does, in these fourteen stories, down to the blood and bone.

Another example: “The Inventor, 1972” won the 2009 Eudora Welty Prize for Fiction. Its opening line begins a trajectory of pain and injury: “A rusted El Camino clips the leg of the thirteen-year-old girl, sends her flying through the predawn fog. She lands on the side of the road and lies twisted and alive in the dirty snow.” The man who hit her, “The hunter,” was burned years before in a foundry accident, and

has [even] scared himself a few times when he’s encountered unexpected mirrors. Because he has run out of his prescription ointment, the scar is burning more and tightening, tugging down the skin around his eye, making him feel as monstrous as he must look to a stranger.

It is through this eye, its “lower lid pulled inside out to reveal red flesh like a leech’s,” that we view the girl, whose flesh is fresher, more beautiful than any “promise of painkillers and surgeries.” It is through this eye we view our own repulsion to ugliness. It is through this eye we pass through judgment into a place of tenderness and understanding of what it is to be deformed, dejected, guilt-ridden by bad decisions or—worse—short shrift from a remorseless life. We see how one hunter’s life follows its own course to become nearly hopeless—and how it keeps surviving anyway. And somehow finds, in a memory of adolescence with his friend Ricky, that snow-white thread of joy when he “grabbed one insulated boot and tackled Ricky again. He reached way down the front of Ricky’s jacket this time, down inside his shirt, and pressed a handful of packed snow against that kid’s war skin.”

In an instant, ugliness disappears like mist. And we, like the hunter, regain our hope in the healing powers we ourselves can manufacture from thin air, when there is precious little else left in our foundries and factories manufacture.

The stories in American Salvage are packed tighter than the best snowballs, and fly with excellent arc. But be careful: they sting upon impact and leave a long-lasting bruise. Lucky you’ll be healing even while the sun rises on spring and reignites the stench of Campbell’s community (“my tribe” she calls them), who’ll still be struggling in the pig-penned margins of the country’s—and the world’s—deepening transition into the Information Age.

Incidentally, the one story that was twenty-five years in gestation is “Bringing Belle Home.” But that slow-cooker is balanced out by the capper of the collection, “King Cole’s American Salvage,” which she added just a few weeks before the book went to copyediting, and which provided its memorable title, as well as a final, healing grace after all its beautiful savagery.

**

The Rumpus Interview with Bonnie Jo Campbell

The Rumpus: Bonnie, congratulations again on American Salvage‘s being named a finalist for the National Book Award. Are you ready for the results?

Bonnie Jo Campbell

Bonnie Jo Campbell: Well, if you mean out of my mind, well, yes.

Rumpus: What might any of the fierce, funny, and hardscrabble characters in the collection say about the nomination?

BJC: They would be surprised and impressed that city folks and “rich” folks would take any interest in them. My donkeys [Jack and Don Quixote], on the other hand, have not been impressed at all, or not until I’ve offered them an extra apple.

Rumpus: One of your stories, “Bringing Belle Home,” was more than two decades in the making, while “King Cole’s American Salvage” was written late in the editing process, and after you’d hit upon the book’s true title. What had you uncovered in the collection that brought you to the title American Salvage?

BJC: I wasn’t writing stories with the intention of creating this particular collection. I simply wrote stories, and then discovered common themes among a good number of them. Even so, it took me a while to figure out what the collection was about. I realized that I was writing about folks with lots of skills, especially fix-it skills and survival skills, who were nonetheless not doing well in the new-millennium America.

My characters, most of whom are men in this collection, are working industrial jobs that are being phased out, leaving them in slightly desperate circumstances. In some of the stories, people make money off of actual “salvage” automobiles or building materials. In others, people are trying to salvage what they can of their past lives as they try to move forward into the new century. I also see the word “salvage” as relating to salvation. I’m very interested in the salvation of all these folks, if not in the religious sense (as Flannery O’Connor might have written it) then in the sense of their finding their way back into their communities.

It took me a while to come up with my title, and I wore out all my pals trying out various titles on them. For example, the original title, when Wayne State University Press accepted the collection, was Winter Life, but I knew that was not terribly evocative. Once I came upon the title American Salvage, I knew I had to have a story that justified the title.

Rumpus: You say “communities,” and I recall that each story weighs the cost of loyalty—to friend, lover or family, the crazy neighbor, a way of life, your people’s shared place in the dirt. The men and women of American Salvage often love and hate (each other and themselves) violently, even savagely. How does the rampant drug and alcohol abuse present in the collection fit in?

BJC: As far as I can tell, the drugs and alcohol and the trouble surrounding them is pretty universal—weird, isn’t it, that we discuss it as though it’s an aberration? Drugs and drinking affect every family I know, country and city, middle-class and poor, so those human propensities and their effects seem worth investigating.

Rumpus: You’ve mentioned that you’ve always liked to go to the kind of bars where people get into fights. And that you like to be friends with the kind of people you write about: “low-life types, or poor people, people who are out of the spotlight.” What about this lifestyle, these people compels you? Are you of them?

BJC: Lordy, it’s amazing the things I’ll say.  I don’t really even know what low-life means. I do like to go to my local bar, the Tap Room, where there are often fights… I like to go where the life is.  I’m pro-life, in the sense that chaos seems like life to me and order seems like death.  Yes, of course I’m of the people in the bar and the people in my stories.  They are my tribe, though I can’t personally drink or fight too much nowadays because I have to be perky in the morning in order to write.

Rumpus: American Salvage relentlessly pursues the choices people make—and are forced to make when the chips are completely down. Ultimately, they fight for hope. What about your own life brings you to this question?

BJC: I’m not much interested in my own self when I write. I’m interested in what I observe out there, what’s going on around me. I figure that I’m always going to be fine, one way or another, but I do worry about other people who have difficulty moving from one world to the next. It’s the folks who are truly invested in their lives who have the hardest time with change. As a writer, I can live somewhat independently, occupying nooks and crannies and finding meaning there. I can even live in my mind a good portion of most days.

Thank you for using the word “hope.” I ultimately see this book as very hopeful. One reviewer in Detroit wrote, “these stories are prayers,” and I was grateful for that. Some readers have had trouble with the tough situations depicted in the stories… Some people tell me they would be afraid of my characters, but I tell those people [that] they meet these characters all the time. They just don’t care about them when they meet them, at the gas station, the car wash, the post office even.  All people in our communities are worth caring about.

Rumpus: What is or has been the hardest or best lesson for you to learn in your writing life?

BJC: The best and easiest lesson for me was to learn that writing is mostly hard work. What a relief that discovery was. Hard work? I can do that. Brilliance and genius? Now, I am not confident about those at all. Maybe the hardest lesson is the one I have to learn over and over again, that each story is its own animal, that every story I write is going to come only with difficulty.

Rumpus: What are you working on now?

BJC: Lots of things. I’m working on a river odyssey novel for Norton, so I guess I’d better finish that. I have a story collection that’s about ready, maybe, and a book of essays called Donkey Basketball. I’m writing some ghost stories and some circus stories. And poems. You can’t beat a good sonnet, and you can write a sonnet without being married to the damned thing.

Rumpus: As Stephen King once asked Amy Tan, is there a question they never ask you that you wish they would?

BJC: Why don’t you ask me something like, “Where’d you get your swell fashion sense?” and I’ll say that it’s called “Donkey Chic,” and I expect that everyone in NYC will be wearing mechanic coveralls by the end of the year.

**

Notes:

Instead of “Donkey Chic,” Bonnie Jo Campbell will don a borrowed Gucci frock for the NBA Awards tonight.

Stacy Muszynski’s interview of American Salvage editor Annie Martin, of Wayne State University Press, appears at americanshortfiction.org/blog.

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“All of us, all the time, are searching for some order in the world/universe/our lives. We’re searching for guiding principles and explanations. Especially in times of stress, we tend to find sayings, aphorisms, mantras to help guide us.”

Philipp Meyer’s much-lauded novel, American Rust, published in February by Spiegel & Grau, is impeccable in its subject matter and its timing. A character-driven drama about the collapse of American manufacturing and the devastating and violent changes that follow, American Rust is about a country, and a culture, glimpsing itself in the mirror. “Everything about this story seems essentially American,” says The Washington Post, and The New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani calls Meyer “a writer who understands how place and personality and circumstance can converge to create the perfect storm of tragedy.”

Philipp Meyer was born in Baltimore, attended Cornell, and worked for several years as a derivatives trader at the Swiss investment bank, UBS. He left banking to study writing at the Michener Center, at the University of Texas, during which time he traveled to New Orleans to work with the recovery effort after Hurricane Katrina. He currently splits his time between Texas and upstate New York. The Rumpus’s Stacy Muszynski corresponded with Meyer and discussed the novel, its underpinnings, and his attitudes about writing.

The Rumpus: Out of the gate, readers understand this novel will be intense: One epigraph is from Kierkegaard and the other is from Camus. Can you tell us the quotes and why you chose them to lead your work?

Philipp Meyer: The Kierkegaard: “If there were no eternal consciousness in a man… if an unfathomable, insatiable emptiness lay hid beneath everything, what would life be but despair.” The Camus: “What we learn in a time of pestilence: that there are more things to admire in men than to despise.”

I chose those quotes because I think they sum up some of the underlying philosophies articulated in the work. Which I probably share. Kierkegaard was strongly religious, which I’m not, and so to some extent I’m taking his quote out of context—I think there is a sort of eternal human consciousness that exists within all of us—an inherent valuing of love, honor, compassion, etc. Maybe that comes from something beyond us (God) or maybe it’s just innate to us.

The Camus quote articulates a few other things I believe about people. One is that, yes, in the end, there are more things to admire about humanity than to despise. The second is that it’s only in the worst times that we see the best humanity is capable of. The fact that we can act morally when our lives are easy, when there is nothing particularly at stake for us, I don’t find to be that important. What’s important is that humans are capable of acting morally, capable of enormous compassion and self-sacrifice, when everything is at stake for us—when our lives are at stake. This, in the end, is the fundamental argument behind American Rust.

Rumpus: American Rust relentlessly pursues the moral choices people are forced to make when the chips are completely down. What about your own life brings you to this question?

PM: That is a good question. Maybe see my answer to [the first question], which is that it’s those sorts of moral choices, in those sorts of circumstances, that most reveal who we really are as individuals, and more broadly what we are a species.

Rumpus: How did your MFA experience inform your work with American Rust? Did you have to sacrifice anything for the experience?

PM: The specific MFA program I was in, the Michener Center, was basically perfect for me. We had three years of funding, which gives you two and a half years of actual writing and a half year of panicking about what you’re going to do after you graduate.

Fully-funded MFA programs are God’s gift to writers, basically the new patronage system. That said, the big obvious problem with any MFA program is that your work is reviewed by a committee. You sit around in workshop and give your unfinished writing to twelve other people and then are supposed to give equal weight to all their responses. The problem, of course, is that few professional writers would ever dream of showing unfinished work to even one person, let alone twelve people, and asking for their opinion. It has a very bad effect on the work… The important thing is that you have to be able to ignore this stuff and write what is true to your vision of the world… You have to always be writing for yourself, and trusting your own instincts.

Rumpus: What is or has been the hardest or best lesson for you to learn in your writing life?

PM: The most crucial one by far came in 2004, when I realized I had to be writing for an audience. Realizing [that] the fact that I’d written something did not make it good. This, I think, is the sort of standard realization you have when you go from the apprentice level to the level of the working artist. Another person who didn’t know me had to be able to pick up my work and be pulled into it and moved, whether emotionally, intellectually, etc. Of course, the work has to remain your own, first and foremost. The way I think about my work now is that Philipp Meyer the writer is writing for Philipp Meyer the reader. If that makes sense.

Rumpus: Your characters have me thinking about adages and aphorisms—how useful they find adages in ordering their lives, making choices and in reconsidering those choices. Grace, for example, catches herself thinking, “Dignity is life.” And Isaac, “Old bones make new blooms” and “Man without a knife is not a man.” And Henry English, “Life for a life.” Do you order your own life according to adages like these?

PM: That’s a tough question. My gut reaction is that those things are primarily tools to shape those characters. But of course all of us, all the time, are searching for some order in the world/universe/our lives. We’re searching for guiding principles and explanations. Partly as a survival mechanism, but partly it’s just as a result of our curiosity about things. Especially in times of stress, we tend to find sayings, aphorisms, mantras to help guide us. They’re both comforting and useful.

As for me personally, other than the standard attempts to try treat people as I would hope to be treated myself, the only real principle I’m conscious of guiding my life by is the following. It sounds fairly simplistic, but I believe in it firmly, so here it is: “Don’t be a coward.” Anyone who knows me and reads this will probably laugh, because it’s almost my pat response to everything, but it’s true. When I think about a problem I’m facing, or if I’m analyzing a decision I’ve made in the past, I always try to figure out to what degree my choices or inclinations are being guided by fear. Fear of failing, fear of not fitting in, fear of what others might think. I’m referring primarily to emotional or intellectual fear, but occasionally to physical fear as well. Everyone is afraid, but it’s the way you face those fears, and how honest you are about them, that makes the difference. Maintaining as strict a self-honesty as you are capable makes it a lot easier to face your failures. And your successes. It goes a long way toward being happy.

As this relates to art, I think a lot of this comes down to learning to trust your own instincts. Are you creating something that is true to your vision of humanity and the world, or are you creating something that is true to someone else’s vision? No matter how other people respond to your work, that’s what allows you to sleep at night.

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