Writer you’d like to meet irl

I've met enough

I quit writing all the time and then I get a job and I can pretend for about a year. But then the words have built up in my head, and I start to think, “Ok, I can be homeless and it won’t be that big of a deal because I can write in libraries 

Online, I see a lot of writers waxing poetic and posting memes about wanting to get into journalism and publishing based on what they saw growing up in Almost Famous, The Devil Wears Prada, 13 Going on 30, etc. I was raised on those movies, and raised – in the first five years of my life – surrounded by writers and editors. Both of those influences made me feel like writing was not only a viable career path, but a very glamorous one too.

You have a great deadpan delivery that lends itself to humor. You’re so quiet, and yet so fucking hilarious.

It’s funny cos I try so hard to be expressive and everyone always gets deadpan.

You see Truth in yourself, and you realize we’re all having this complex, beautiful, and sometimes very dark human experience. Nothing is original. We’re all in this together. 

Put simply, Swinehart writes like Wallace, and this similarity reminds me of something Wallace once said in an interview with Richard Powers and John O’Brien about his ideal reader: “If stuff is going well, it feels like I’m talking to somebody. Or like there’s somebody there. And I think it’s somebody rather suspiciously like me.”

It's easier for me to write a poem wherein I don't have to reassure my reader that I'm going to be okay, because I don't know the answer.

Jaia Hamid Bashir spoke with Hobart editor, Breen Nolan, about her debut poetry collection, The Afterlife of Sweetness, how she sees the self as a kind of fiction and her love of making

The secret is getting almost too in the weeds. The secret is Bujalski-maxxing.

In this book, I kept using the word “buzz” in various forms. Buzz, buzzy. I think I even got the word “bloodbuzz” in there, which I stole from the band The National.

Best writing advice you’ve received? 
Press on the bruise. 

Art is, to me, a balance between what you say and what you don’t. What you let a stranger’s imagination fill in.

I draw the line at unboxing videos.

Junah at the End of the World is about, well, Junah, a twelve-year old boy going through the uncertainty of Y2K. It’s funny to look back at that time and to think about how different things were, to

I think art is interesting to write about because it’s bound in a certain idealism but scenes can get competitive and toxic.

Tempestuous is the language we carry in our head, the music of new words and lovers, the cities we dip into on a lost weekend. Jeanne, the eponymous narrator of Arielle Burgdorf’s novel Jeanne,

While many struggle to adapt to the largeness and complexity of NYC, Escobar thrived and used it to inform her work.

"We all live in that space of self-doubt, and that’s what makes us real people."

and so the wild, for me, is the trauma of loss

Poet, activist, and educator Anthony Thomas Lombardi absolutely slays the page in his debut collection murmurations from YesYes books. It is a collection steeped in survival and song—with the iconic Amy Winehouse at its center, the patron saint of the collection, Lombardi revels in variations of doomed beauty, over and over, until there is nothing left but sacred stain.

Fully, religiously, rigorously outline, and enjoy the surprises along the way.

a friend of mine once said that [Fresh, Green Life] is My Year of Rest and Relaxation for boys.

Victoria Brooks is the author of Silicone God (MOIST Books/House of Vlad) a queer sci-fi novel. Jack Skelley is author of The Complete Fear of Kathy Acker (Semiotext(e)), and Myth Lab: Theories of

One time years ago, a friend threw herself a birthday party and bought her own birthday cake, which I found surprising. She said, of course I bought my own cake. Who else was going to do it? I think it’s the same with book promotion. You have to buy your own cake, and make an event of it.

What author’s (dead or alive) persona is aspirational? 
Maybe Joan Didion, the super thin wrists, the iconic image on a tote bag. I just want to keep on writing books.