Grant Maierhofer Interview

What the hell is a book anyway? The more I read them, the less I’m certain. A living object? A consciousness preserved? A glorified paperweight? When I thought I’d gotten close to figuring it out, Grant Maierhofer came along and punted my brain into the stratosphere. I’m grateful he did.

Maierhofer’s name should be familiar to anyone following the underground lit scene in this Godforsaken country. His output includes short story collections, novels that do not behave like novels, and brick shaped tomes of “ambient nonfiction.” No matter the guise, Maierhofer displays remarkable dexterity, pushing the confines of language into unexplored territory that would make Burroughs blush.

The good people at 11:11 Press have collected Maierhofer’s early writings in the ambitious new collection Works, an omnibus of b-sides and rarities, if you will. This follows last year’s excellent Drain Songs (FC2), which yours truly had the good fortune of reviewing. On the heels of his latest release, I corresponded with Grant to discuss experimental literature, science fiction, and writing in the face of pure abjection.

Let’s kick it off. Gag was my introduction to your writing and I’ve been hooked since. I remember it being such a breath of fresh air at the time. Reading that book restored a bit of my faith in contemporary American literature. Before that I’d only heard mutterings online about Flamingos, but hadn’t read it yet. Naturally I was excited to see you’ve got an extensive back catalogue. Can you trace a brief history of the texts compiled in Works for us? How did you decide what to anthologize?

That’s very kind of you to say and very nice to hear. With Gag, Clog, and Peripatet there’s such a particular relationship with Inside the Castle and John Trefry as an editor that I’ve wondered what it’d be like for someone to read those and then the other stuff. I can’t put my finger on it but with John the editing experience is unlike anything else and I’ve always felt different about those books because he pushes the work into such a unique space. The books collected in Works probably represent the most formative pieces of writing for me. Postures is the first time where I’d taken autobiographical source material but focused way more on sentences as the thing in writing a novel or fiction in general. Flamingos is the book I wrote when I found out I was having a daughter and wanted to make a sort of statement about what I thought fiction could do as an art form. The stories are new and old, updated and cut, some from Marcel as that’s OOP (the others are as well, which brought this about as much as anything), as well as more recent attempts at genre writing, and short fiction is where I sort of figured out how to approach the bigger projects. And then, sort of coming full circle, the PX138 3100-2686 User’s Manual is a project I started quite a while ago, working with the musician Lorn, where he was creating The Maze to Nowhere, and the manual I wrote was going to be liner notes for the project. That was put aside for a while, accepted at Solar Luxuriance, put aside again then accepted at Inside the Castle, but then I completely rewrote it and it became Clog, so there is sort of a nice ouroboros model to the book. The manual was also where I figured out how to do the sort of stuff I did in Gag and Clog, with translation and converting text to code and back again and automatic cut up things and the like. We had the first three books and Andrew at 11:11 felt like something in the Inside the Castle vein would be nice, so I emailed Lorn and asked if he still had that original file, and it all came together. Even typing this I’m happy there seems to be a uniformity to the book I wasn’t consciously thinking about.

What strikes me about Works (and your writing in general) is the staggering stylistic range. You explore a lot of vastly different terrain, often in the same book. No matter the approach, you bring an unmistakable vision and versatility. I’m reminded of the famous John Peel quip about The Fall—“always different, always the same.” Postures and PX138 3100-2686 User’s Manual might seem world’s apart at first glance, but I definitely sense that ouroboros connection you mentioned. I know the term “experimental fiction” gets overplayed, but I consider you to be a writer who truly does experiment with language. Is “experimental fiction” an arbitrary label or a proud tradition or both? What drives you to push the boundaries of fiction?

Again, very grateful for your reading. I think a phrase like “experimental fiction” is tough because it skips over figures like Melville and probably only refers to the 1960s-onward in terms of either critics calling writing that, or writers owning that with a press like Fiction Collective in its first iteration. I don’t know where I first saw this, but I remember someone in the “transgressive” tradition having an issue with it too, I think because of its religious connotation, and it aligns Dennis Cooper fairly randomly with someone like Bukowski even though I don’t think they aspire(d) to the same things in writing at all. I think it’s useful insofar as it allows someone to connect a writer’s work on a timeline, and the notion of each book as an experiment is nice because it allows for failures to kind of be swept up into the whole enterprise. If I were talking to someone at FedEx, while shipping a book, and they asked what I write, I might even use the term as I think it would either dispel their interest or solidify it (most people would probably think of Joyce, or Pynchon, or “difficult” writers on hearing the phrase, so it can be useful to at least hint to somebody they might not care for a book of mine and that’s ok).

In terms of what drives me, I think that I was very moved by a large enough corpus of writing at just the right time (after sobering up, sixteen and seventeen, when I truly felt a need for writing and reading and lucked out in finding artists I admire) that I developed a sense of fiction (and really any sort of writing) as a life force for certain types of people, and so over time the notion that I could in turn contribute to the spirit of this thing has carried me through all these various projects. Often I’m a very reactive writer, so I’ll think of the work of others that’s moved me or even the shell of a text that just proved immersive and curious as a reader, or student, or critic, and I’ll expand this into a project of my own. Sometimes, with books like Clog, the feeling of iconoclasm is enough, of disruption. I read The Place of Dead Roads around the period I just mentioned, and I remember feeling this sense of permission as a beginning writer. Even if a work of mine isn’t the thing in and of itself, the hope is that there’s something there for someone else to take and blow the whole thing to pieces or something. That’s enough to justify the experimenting, and the rest of it is this blend of something to express, and a consistent belief in the power of language in our lives. What the power does I’m a little less certain, but I’ve been affected by it enough to trust it’s worthy.

Yeah, I feel like it gets tricky when “experimental lit” is used as a catchall. Most people wouldn’t apply that term to someone like Melville even though Pierre is way more out there than most of what gets called experimental these days. Nice to hear Dead Roads had such an impact on you. I remember shoplifting a copy of that book from Borders when I was 16 or so, ha! Similarly had my mind blown. I thought, “Wow, people can write like this? I should try that!”

The lineage to Burroughs is definitely evident in your new book, especially in Bleach with stories like “Interzone.” Those writers who blur the lines of literary fiction and science fiction always resonate with me—Burroughs, Ballard, Delany, etc. In his introduction to Bleach, Brian Evenson writes about how you play with genre, using the techniques of experimental fiction to mutate otherwise familiar conventions. What are the uses and limits of genre? How would you respond to the snobs who stick their noses up at anything sci-fi adjacent?

I think that genre is incredibly important and significant because if you look at almost any era of genre writing there’s a thriving tradition of writers within it challenging the limits of what a book can be. With Delany, no question, and then with Simenon or Highsmith, for crime, or Theodore Sturgeon for SF. I think the first writer to actually explode my sense of what genre writing could be was probably Jim Thompson, whose work I just fell in love with at eighteen or so. Before that I’d conceived of genre writing as all fitting into this formula that more closely reflected an episode of Law and Order or something rather than something anarchic and expressive. Thompson felt like reading John Fante or something but it was almost better because he’d also shown clear concern for engaging the reader wherever possible, whether it’s plot or visceral images or whatever. Then discovering stuff like A Sweet Sweet Summer by Jane Gaskell sort of continued this feeling of realizing the experimenting that happened within genre and I think Delany kind of finalized everything. What’s nice though is I’m able to read stuff like Delany’s The Mad Man (my favorite of his I think) and it feels like a continuation of reading Dhalgren, or even his The Motion of Light in Water (in my opinion one of the greatest memoirs ever written) and the experience feels connected to his genre work.

I think that right now there’s a weird dynamic with SF because of Silicon Valley. The figures there are often referring to science fiction as inspiration and that’s the only thing I might sort of stop paying attention to w/r/t genre. I haven’t noticed as much snobbery from elsewhere regarding genre I guess because I tend to learn about and engage with genre stuff with others who are just excited about the work being done. I do think it’s a problem especially in terms of learning how to write (academically or otherwise) and in that area I’m far more drawn to David Foster Wallace’s approach of teaching popular works to show there’s just as much experimentation and ambition there as there is in Carver or whoever else is taught as standard in writing programs. Genre literature is also one strand of literature that seems to have figured out how to compensate its writers fairly well. Money can’t really be a reason to write with things as they are, but even for publishing a story or two of science fiction there’s been more compensation than I’ve received for a year’s royalties. And on top of that I felt as engaged and taken with the process of writing those stories as I have with anything I’ve written.

Man, Thompson is a God. Savage Night is one of my all-time favorites. Delany’s trajectory is pretty incredible when you look at the early, pulpy sci-fi/fantasy stuff next to something like Hogg. Absolutely agree that you can tell it’s all an extension of the same imagination though. People shouldn’t scoff at reading something mainstream or popular. I always got a kick out of DFW being a Tom Clancy fan. I admire a lack of pretension.

In contrast to something like the Gag/Clog/Peripatet trilogy, much of Works has a more concrete narrative quality. Nothing I would call “traditional” by any stretch, but perhaps more structurally familiar. With that in mind, you’ve created some wonderfully weird and sometimes disturbing individuals whose headspace we get to inhabit. How do you approach developing a character, whether it’s the semi autobiographical X from Postures, the disembodied voices of Flamingos, the serial killer in the title story of Bleach, or even the all-consuming saw in PX138 3100-2686 User’s Manual? What makes for a compelling character in fiction?

I think when it comes to developing a character, or even just a vague perspective, for the most part it has to start with voice, which in turn has to start with language. Often that means one sentence, usually an opening, which is somehow curious. I remember working on “Everybody’s Darling,” which is collected in Drain Songs, and it all emanated from the line “I suppose I took to wearing mother’s unders” and there was maybe more to it than that, or the final version changed, but that line almost just seemed like a fun body to inhabit. And from there some more lines come, and it becomes clear it’s a story about a person in mourning. That line, too, had a connection to reading, as I was thinking of the first (I think it’s first, anyway) story in Venus Drive with the strange maternal stuff at her bedside.

That’s sort of one way it’ll happen, I’ll need to find a vessel for some language I’m interested in, and once I start to nag at that a little bit it’ll either start to go somewhere, or it won’t, in which case it might be a fragment of a novel, or it might be abandoned.

With X, though, since I’m not exactly inventing situations but creating an amalgam of lived experience and imaginary stuff, it’s almost the opposite. The language comes easily as I’m just riffing, the lowest possible stakes at the beginning, and hopefully I’ve got enough that I can start to rewrite that, and through three or four full rewrites I’ll start to really focus on the language, and the reshaping will come naturally enough after that.

In terms of what makes for a compelling character in fiction, for me, there usually has to be some focus on the language, some oddity that comes through there, that makes it compelling. I’d connect this from the often nameless characters in Lish-edited or Lish-inspired writers’ works, to the wanderers in Dhalgren, even through to someone like Hannibal Lecter in those novels, there’s a sense that language is a tool to heed, to respect and follow, and these characters are brought into existence by respecting the language they seem to need to be written out by someone. Often the quickest way to sense this is the language, but it isn’t always the case as there’s much to enjoy in writers only glancingly interested in prose. I think in my favorite characters form and content are so bound up as to be unnoticeable separately. I’m thinking of books like The Trick is to Keep Breathing, which sort of enacts the drama of a mental illness memoir on the page, or even the diaries of May Sarton, or the referential and fragmented narration in Tan Lin’s work, we can sense the author’s presence usually, and in compelling fictional characters (or nonfictional really) seem to occur when the author is transcribing as much as composing.

Interesting how an author’s voice and a character’s voice can bend against one another. It becomes a kind of paradox where the author is both organically channelling and consciously manufacturing language. Some characters seem like they almost demand to be realized. Our job then is to pick up those idiosyncrasies and decipher what this imaginary consciousness is trying to communicate.

Speaking of process, I think it’s safe to say you’re a prolific author. You’ve put out more books in five years than some do in a lifetime. It’s also clear to me that even at their most abstract you’ve dedicated a lot of time to writing and revising these texts. Do you stick to a strict regimen when you’re working on a book? How do you make time for creative endeavors while juggling family and career obligations?

Usually when I’m working on something I’ll write it in short bursts, maybe two or three a day, but when I feel my wheels spinning a little bit I’ll need to stop and then it might start up again better the next day or I’ll wait a bit before getting back into it. I guess that’s the method with shorter things. Otherwise it’ll depend on my relationship with who’s putting the book out, and whether an agreement was made before the thing was totally finalized or not. With John at Inside the Castle every book was basically collaborative, where I sent him something at the outset and through working together the final book was reached after a number of months. With ITNA, who first published Flamingos they were nice enough to work with me based on a document assembled after reading and loving Matthew Roberson’s 1998.6, that was an absolute mess, and bring Travis Jeppesen on board to edit the thing into what finally became the text as it is now. Right now I’m working on a book on professional wrestling with Reaktion Books that was accepted conditionally based on an outline, and that’s taken the majority of my time, and I work on it a little bit most days.

I don’t write every day, and I don’t think that’s a prerequisite for anything as a writer, and the same goes for reading religiously to be honest. If a writer feels less compelled to read, as all people do these days, then I think following that is more important than imposing strict rules on yourself, because you’re more likely to write something reflective of the world and the people in it that way. Not that that’s a necessity in writing, I just like the idea of people angry about books and writing and reading or at least disenchanted with it writing books, as I’m way more likely to read those as they seem more honest.

In terms of making time, I tend to email myself pieces of projects lately. This wrestling book is vaguely academic so I’ll often bring up a couple of PDFs or something and peruse them and then send myself sequences of emails throughout the day that I’ll assemble when my kids go to sleep. I have three kids under 5 so those moments throughout the day are few and far between, but usually there’s enough if you’re not too particular about having to sit at a desk to get anything substantial done. Then there’s that time in the evening which I’ll either use a bit or spend watching tv with my wife or something but those small moments have proven enough to keep going. I know some people are adamant that you need to be at the desk or you need to be super selfish with your time or something to really do anything as a writer or artist, but honestly the writers and artists who make do while living real lives mean way more to me anyway—Mierle Laderman Ukeles, or Christine Schutt are great examples and have served very well as direct inspirations on however I’ve managed to do anything.

Hadn’t realized Jeppesen edited Flamingos! I’m a big fan of The Suiciders. Refreshing to hear you don’t set a rigid work schedule. Seems somewhat robotic/masochistic to force yourself to read or write, as well as less genuine. I like the anecdote about Schutt writing Nightwork while her kids were asleep—hence the title.

I noticed Works is rife with allusions to films, particularly French cinema—Renoir, Godard, Cocteau. These are filmmakers whose work has a certain literary quality, especially Cocteau since he dabbled in both worlds. What is your relationship with film and how does it intersect with your writing? Do you see any parallels between cinema and literature?

Yeah, Schutt is just unbelievable in every respect, very grateful her writing exists. I think the film stuff probably hooked me before literature. I remember when I still did drugs I would often skip school and take a box of Benadryl and whatever else was around and watch movies and I think aside from punk shows it was the first time I remember feeling like I was engaging something aesthetically powerful. Cocteau I think I read first and then watched his movies, so it probably wound up doubly inspiring as a result. I remember reading his journals Past Tense and his book on opium and it just floored me how engaged he seemed in any medium he touched. The same goes for Pasolini. They’re both poets in the old sense I think, and Pasolini’s Trilogy of Life is probably as informative for me as any work of literature. It’s constantly referential and human and hilarious. I think a lot of my favorite contemporary writers are very inflected by films, especially that 60s French stuff for someone like Dennis Cooper, or DeLillo, or even Rachel Kushner. I imagine that down the line the parallels between film and fiction or literature will be more clearly established, as the kind of writing I’m into feels very contemporary and very responsive to the perceived death of the field and the same has sort of happened to film of late.

The nice thing about film is it’s mostly held onto its role as this thing people from all walks of life will seek out for being sort of experimental and arty, with stuff like Uncut Gems or Portrait of a Lady on Fire or even back to Prisoners and The Master. These are all films a huge number of people saw and were happy to engage as artworks in the same theaters where Trolls 2 or whatever were also shown. There’s something nice about that, like going to check out Oakley Hall’s Warlock from the public library and finding out someone in your small town has it checked out. It seems like people do wish that books held that sort of sway and I guess I understand but it’s also nice to feel like you’re accessing something special and content to remain outside the world itself.

I’m getting flashbacks to my own teenage phase of doing triple c’s and watching Fulci movies. Those were the days… I think the accessibility of film allows for more “high art” to crossover into the mainstream. It’s pretty wild seeing recent movies like The Lighthouse or Parasite playing in theaters. Interesting time to be alive, to say the least.

The midwest features prominently in a lot of your work. I must confess I’ve spent little time out there—I’m an east coaster. I feel like middle America gets a bad rap for whatever reason. I’m always curious how the geography surrounding an author can seep into their writing. Have those landscapes and cultures influenced your perspective? What does the midwest symbolize to you?

The Midwest is very strange, because on the one hand it’s known for this very self-deprecating niceness, and on the other it’s produced as many noted serial killers as the Pacific Northwest. I live in the Pacific Northwest now, and I think its main differences from the Midwest have to do with landscape. I think probably the biggest effect landscape and culture have had on me have had to do with recovery and the like. Going to rehab in the Midwest where there is this massive thriving recovery community affected how I see things, and definitely how I write, as I first really started writing while in treatment, in Minnesota, which is sometimes called the Land of 10,000 Treatment Centers.

I think, in addition to this, there’s a sense of wanting to stand behind the stories and things that make your place of origin significant for you. I think that places like LA, or New York City, or the south more broadly have received so much coverage in literature that there is this feeling of wanting to convey this place I come from so it gets its due. Lots of brilliant writers have come from the Midwest, though, so there is a tradition to engage with, but I think everybody tends to pull from this sense of memory they have and want to give that back in their writing.

I think, with that in mind, the Midwest symbolizes a lot of strange failures of promise. The niceness counteracted by police violence and circumstances in places like Chicago where the government has all but given up on helping communities there torn apart by violence. The sweethearts you might meet buying bread on Sunday morning versus the legacy of Ed Gein. Even the reason lots of immigrants came to the Midwest, the promise of logging and farming advertised in Germany and Poland and elsewhere but when they arrived the ground was full of stumps and the logging boom had already started moving further westward. Underneath that too though there is an enduring magic to it, a warmth. That section near The Great Gatsby, where he’s talking about taking the trains home in the winter in his youth, and passing these sleepy towns and feeling good that he’s of this place, that’s still there for me.

Recently reread The Great Gatsby for the first time since high school and found it incredibly disturbing in a way I hadn’t remembered. It was like, “Wow, these rich people are just pure evil.” Sadly this country is still run by a soulless upper class with unlimited access to wealth and power. Probably why that book has remained so relevant over the years.

In David Vichnar’s masterful afterword to Works, there’s an excerpt from your “Research Notes” for Flamingos where you mention that language is a type of lie we use to paint different versions of the same reality. Literature can be a means to counter “shifting definitions” since language can often manipulate people in dangerous ways. This has become so pronounced lately, as language has often served to divide us or placate us. Data about the Coronavirus pandemic meant to save lives is rendered “conspiracy theory.” Peaceful protestors get depicted as “riotous thugs.” I’ve been thinking a lot about what purpose art can serve in support of the fight against police brutality and racism. I’m trying to resist the voice in my head saying, “Your writing is irrelevant in the face of state sanctioned murder and an ever mounting COVID-19 death toll and a fascist administration trying to strip us of the most basic human rights.” This year has forced me to reconsider the purpose of art in general. As writers, how can we use our craft to combat oppression and inequality? Is all writing political? Or was Artaud right about all writing being pigshit?

I’ve thought about Chaucer on a lot of occasions lately for a lot of different reasons, but it applies pretty well here. What’s nice about The Canterbury Tales is they’re a literature born of the Black Plague. Several works have stood the test of time that were written around the time or about the subject of the Black Plague. That’s important because Chaucer’s work isn’t only steeped in death. It’s a book about a bunch of weirdos telling stories while they make this walk to honor a hero while everything is literally and figuratively falling apart around them. It reminds me of that amazing monologue Francis Ford Coppola gives at the end of Hearts of Darkness, talking about the universal stories that exist and what he was trying to do with Apocalypse Now. The first winter of man and this sense that everything was going to fall apart and die and life was over, but then spring came and life flourished and was better again. Like Chaucer, he’s talking about telling stories and creating art in the face of total misery and abjection, staring at the hideous state of things on the tail of the Vietnam War and all this ugliness about humanity being unearthed simultaneously. The same is true of literature focused on the holocaust, on slavery, on anything that’s brought civilization face to face with its ugliest tendencies and forced a reckoning to boil. This means that this stuff serious writers are trying to do will always have some purpose or matter in the grand scheme of things. With the means to write and publish at everyone’s fingertips it also means that not everything will be helmed as this era’s Canterbury Tales or even In Our Time, but the effort will always matter.

I think in terms of all writing being political, it’s maybe useful to think that all things can be political, or can have political implications, because outright asserting that all writing is political, for instance, is a mental trap that seems very difficult to be able to escape from as the person trying to write something. I feel like even a while ago you could more comfortably come up with things having zero political implication, like when reading your question I thought about whether pouring a glass of tap water is political, and was immediately reminded of Flint, Michigan. Maybe that means things have always held more political implication than we’ve realized, which is why I’m comfortable with the idea that everything can. I think writing is but I’m more likely to give it credit in terms of its political implications than see them as purely negative. I think, sort of connecting with your first question, that when the language of the world is attempting to skew things for us, and tell us things are a certain way, that writing as an artform can serve to enhance our relationship with language and understand things more fully. The world’s language is chaotic, sales, paranoia, money, whatever. Literary language can respond to this by being restrained, or rambling, concise or Proustian, and like Abstract Expressionism can represent things that another painting of a pot of flowers cannot.

Artaud’s interesting because he’s romanticized nowadays but when you actually look at the circumstances of his life it’s pretty abysmal. We hear a lot about how treatment for those with mental illness has improved, and that’s definitely true, and Artaud was someone who lived through some of the absolute worst of it, and what he managed to write in spite of that is truly astounding. I think perhaps Artaud was responding to things like the Lost Generation, and this romantic view of the human spirit, and he saw through much of it, and his declaration of writing as pigshit is bound up in that, that man is sort of just as despicable as any animal we apparently lord over, and our writing might as well be scrawled on the walls of a prison in shit. I think it’s also bound up in his desires for the theater, a more confrontational and abject thing to be thrown in the face of the general populace instead of pored over by bored students. I do think that there should be something despicable and human in the work, for it to really matter, some level of the human ugliness we’re capable of. There should be that risk or vulnerability somewhere, otherwise it’s tough to stick with it.

Damn, what an incredibly (and unsurprisingly) thoughtful response. I was reading about how the Black Plague ultimately triggered the renaissance. Italy was so badly hit that it forced a shift in worldview—people had been confronted by all this death and they started being more concerned with their lives on earth than the spiritual afterlife, leading to advances in medicine, technology, art, etc. I wonder if we make art because of or in spite of the ugliness of humanity. It is pretty badass that a person can suffer untold atrocities and still create something beautiful or meaningful. Even Artaud for all his vitriol was sort of “saved” later in his life when he landed in a hospital where they had him practice art therapy instead of electroshock. I think language does hold a lot of power and the better we understand its nuances and complexities, the less likely we are to succumb to its manipulative potential. Helps us to think more critically, therefore (hopefully) leading us away from extremity. The best political art challenges our assumptions and demands us to confront human nature at its worst, while also allowing us to imagine a better future.

I understand you teach (or taught) composition. I wanted to wrap up our conversation by asking what advice you would offer a fledgling writer. Someone like X, perhaps, who’s hungry to write a masterpiece but disenchanted with academia and publishing. What do you wish someone had told you when you first started out?

Very grateful for all your kindness here. I’m still teaching, mainly composition and technical writing sorts of courses, but I’ve been lucky to teach some creative writing here and there. I think there would be two primary things I would tell someone like X, where maybe the ambition and desire to do something significant can seem to outweigh the actual work at hand for those first couple of years or so. The first, would be to focus on sentences as much as you possibly can. When I started writing I did it because I loved literature, and I loved the feeling certain books gave me. I thought, as a result, that the thing to focus on was that feeling, and if you could have that energy carrying you through the writing process then you would arrive at an end object as powerful as the books you love. I do think that’s part of it, but when I’d go back to edit that stuff it would feel so awkward and uncomfortable because I hadn’t really thought about language or sentences. In my case this unfortunately meant that I still pushed so hard that some of that writing was published, but you live and you learn I guess.

I first tried focusing on sentences for their sake alone around when I’d finished a draft of Postures, and from then on I’ve remained concerned about the language of what I’m doing. It took me a while though to realize that a huge reason I had such a response to certain writers was because they’d paid close attention to language and done interesting things with it, it wasn’t just because the writers cared about art in the same way I did and that energy translated. There’s a wonderful and easy-to-read book by Virginia Tufte called Artful Sentences that I’d recommend to any writer at any point in their life. It illustrates what I’m talking about better than I ever could. The second thing that I would recommend would be to review books, to some degree, in some capacity, so as to try and become a member of the many various communities devoted to all types of literature there now are. I started reviewing stuff at HTMLGIANT way back when, and have continued to try and do so wherever possible. You get free books which is nice, and you help others all while exploring what literature is doing at present. Some places even pay you for it, I’m told, but regardless it’s a fulfilling thing and seeing what your peers are doing is exciting. If you want a model of how to do this, follow the efforts of Mike Corrao. He’s a critic with the best of them and seems to publish a new review every day that he isn’t also publishing a new book, which is often. He’s a literary citizen with the best of them and he shows how writing isn’t all solitary drudgery hidden away from things, it can be social and dynamic. I’m reasonably sure that if you are able to do some variation of both of these things that you will get writing done you feel good about, and will just as likely get published.

Works is available from 11:11 Press here.