Self Exposure Self Exposure Collective

It felt good to talk to Graham about his second book, I Have A Gun. It was lovely to have Derek there. The conversation went in weird directions. We talked about our racist grandparents. At times it felt like an impromptu support group and I know this is dangerous. Is it dangerous? Doesn't every practitioner of something painstaking want to talk to other people who do the same thing and bond over shared struggles? Graham's book is skillful at pulling the reader in and then antagonizing that same reader to push them away. I think all writers are capable of sycophancy and that we're equally, if not not more capable of retaliation and retribution. There's something about being gifted with language and observation that makes you a low-level sociopath and an outright psychopath if you're not careful. Derek DMd me after the talk with Graham and said, "I think that went well, what about you?" and I told him I don't even think of it on those terms. It's just a documentary project to me. But that's not entirely true. I live for a DM like that. 

If you've only encountered Uzodinma Okehi through his recent Twitter persona, you might characterize him as a pest. He's a frequent poster, but he's known more for his replies and responses, which sometimes seem to take indie lit writers and presses to task for being precious, disingenuous, or faux humble. It's a tightrope to walk, especially because Uzo is part of that world, and guilty of many of the same faux pas. This sentiment, of being among but also being outside, is a major theme in Uzo's book House of Hunger, which he self published as part of a series that traces the character Blue Okoye (a stand in for Uzo himself). This book rocked my world. In less than 100 pages, it captures the alienation of being at college in Iowa City in the 90s. The bleakness of the place, the grayness, and also the alienation of being black and artistic in a school where popularity generally belongs to white jocks and their Coors Light looking girlfriends. Outside of the themes of alienation and belonging, the stylistic choices in this book are sharp and choppy, lending a racing, countdown feeling to the reader. Check out Uzo's book here:

https://www.bokoye.com/

Michael Wheaton and I talk about weed. We talk about using it as a tool for our writing and our parenting, and moreover, we talk about featuring this part of ourselves in our writing. Both of us have young children, but they won’t be young forever. Soon they will piece together what that smell was wafting through their childhood. In a way, this conversation and Michael’s latest book, Home Movies (Bunny Press 2024), is an attempt to practice how we respond to them. It’s a delicate balance between wanting to feel legitimate, to not feel like a criminal, while granting that weed is a filter that can distance you from the people you love the most. 

https://bunnypresse.org/product/bunny05-michael-wheaton-home-movies-print-chapbook/

It’s remarkable ZH Gill is among us at all, let alone producing heartfelt and hilarious prose about his, shall we say, misadventures. ZH goes into depth about his struggles with mental health, his time in a psych ward as a teen, his terrible depression at 19, and his manic jag at Oberlin which almost ended in marriage. What a beautiful person. What a big hearted baby bear. ZH talks about the people he loves with zero irony and makes you want to be among them. His chapbook and his stories in Hobart are so good and it’s clear he’s got a lot more in him. I can’t wait to say I knew him when. Now, for the love of Red Vines, can someone please get him a PDF of his story in Animal Blood volume 4!

Jesse is back to talk more in depth about our connection to one another. Jesse edited my forthcoming book from Pig Roast Publishing, The Bottomfeeder, and we talk about that experience and my anxiety about releasing such a personal book in the future. It's good to have friends you can count on and Jesse is an earnestly supportive member of our scene. He's also an incredible writer with a savant-like ability to dip in and out of genres. His latest book, The Tattletales, is a noir detective thriller that drives like a dream, but we mostly reference his first crime novel, Blood Trip, because it made his home life awkward when he released it. Blood Trip, released shortly after his ex-wife remarried, is a book about a divorced dad who stages the kidnapping of his daughter and the murder of her stepfather. Carla and her partner Hilda Hoy are also in the store and chime in about whether I'll be cancelled for writing openly about being a mom who smokes pot.

If you're listening to this episode, it's likely not the first time you've heard an interview with Kat Giordano. About to release their 4th book (a collection of poems called Thumbsucker, with Malarkey Books) Giordano is indisputably a part of the outsider/indie lit scene. And yet… and yet they feel outside of the outsiders. Part of that comes from being non-binary. Part of that comes from decades of social anxiety. Part of that comes from being opinionated in ways that diverge from the party line – and yes, even outsider literature has a clear party line. 

If the social scene doesn't represent you. If you can't wrap it around you like a cum stained blanket and feel its musty comfort, then you have to be a writer first. Kat is very much a writer first and the books they've produced are an invitation for readers to witness the ugliest, horniest, neediest moments of their life. But the work is more than just prurient and confessional. Kat's a gifted and careful writer who continues to produce work that is seldom reflected elsewhere. In this episode, we focus on Kat's 2020 autofictional novel, The Fountain (Thirty West), which is an account of a specific sort of depression that hits in your early 20s.