Juliet Escoria is the author of the story collection You Are the Snake, available from Soft Skull Press.
Escoria is the author of the novel Juliet the Maniac (Melville House, May 2019), which was named a "best of" book by Nylon, Elle, Buzzfeed, and others, and was shortlisted for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Prize. She also wrote the poetry collection Witch Hunt (Lazy Fascist Press, 2016) and the story collection Black Cloud (CCM/Emily Books, 2014), which were both listed in various best of the year roundups. Her writing can be found in places like Prelude, VICE, The Fader, BOMB, and the New York Times, and has been translated into many languages. She was born in Australia, raised in San Diego, and currently lives in West Virginia, where she teaches English at a community college.
***
Otherppl with Brad Listi is a weekly literary podcast featuring in-depth interviews with today's leading writers.
Available where podcasts are available: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, etc.
Subscribe to Brad Listi’s email newsletter.
Support the show on Patreon
Merch
Twitter
Instagram
TikTok
Bluesky
Email the show: letters [at] otherppl [dot] com
The podcast is a proud affiliate partner of Bookshop, working to support local, independent bookstores.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
When you need meal time inspiration, it's worth shopping Kroger where you'll find over 30,000 mouth-watering choices that excite your inner foodie. And no matter what tasty choice you make, you'll enjoy our everyday low prices, plus extra ways to save, like digital coupons worth over $600 each week. You can also save up to $1 off per gallon at the pump with fuel points. More savings and more inspiring flavors make shopping Kroger worth it every time. Kroger, fresh for everyone, fuel restrictions apply. Walmart has the trusted brands and products your kids need for school. Like HP Chromebooks? Yep. Webok hoodies? Yep. Pokemon pencil cases? I think you know the answer, but just in case, yes. Go back in a style with Walmart. [MUSIC] Hey everybody, welcome to The Other People Show, a weekly podcast featuring in-depth interviews with today's leading writers. I am your host Brad Listi, it is nice to be with you, I'm in Los Angeles, hope you're doing okay wherever you happen to be. Don't forget to hit the subscribe button wherever you listen, subscribe to this program. You can also subscribe on YouTube. Follow me on social media, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, and Blue Sky. So my guest today is Juliet Escoria, author of the story collection You Are The Snake. I know this story collection, I wasn't thinking, I'm going to write a story collection that's going to explore this, this, and this. Like I knew I was writing about gender as I was doing it without really trying to, but I was aware of that. And then later looking at it and being like, what is this quote unquote about and trying to find some sort of like sense in the stories that I just wrote because I wanted to write them. And I think that was like something I was trying to do was, you know, it was they post me to ARRA, a lot of it was written during COVID of people just, you know, being morally superior type stuff on the internet. And I was like, none of us are like that, like we're all bad if we, you know, are able to admit that to ourselves. So just wanting to kind of write about that of we're good and we're bad. And if we were all honest, it's not cool. I think you said. All right. That was Juliet Escoria. Her story collection is called You Are The Snake. It is available from Soft Skull Press. You Are The Snake features stories about girlhood, new womanhood, impulse, desire, family. Our story set in California, in the suburbs, in West Virginia. These are stories that challenge preconceived notions about what it means to be a woman in the world and a woman on the page. It also challenges our ideas as you just heard Julia herself speak to of morality and what it means to be a quote unquote good person. I'm very happy to have Julia Escoria back on this show for a third time. Last time we spoke was in episode 593, I believe that was back in 2019 as Juliet was celebrating the publication of her novel, Juliet The Maniac. My conversation with Juliet Escoria is coming up in just a couple of minutes. Don't forget to subscribe to my newsletter. If you haven't done that yet, I would love it if you did. It's over at Substack. It's pretty simple. I will let you know about the latest episodes of this show on a weekly basis. I also share a list of links to things that I've been reading and finding interesting. So check out my newsletter over at Substack. And if you are a regular listener, if you tune in week after week, year after year, if you get something from this show, I hope you will join the other people Patreon community over at patreon.com/otherpplpod. Help keep this show going into the future. Help me keep doing this work. Today's episode is brought to you by Penguin Press, publisher of The Memoir and Essays, The Way You Make Me Feel by Nina Sharma, The Way You Make Me Feel is a book about love and allyship, told through one Asian and black interracial relationship. I just spoke with Nina Sharma not too long ago. That interview is in the can. She is going to appear on this show. The Way You Make Me Feel is the official July pick of the other people book club. So stay tuned for an episode featuring Nina Sharma as we discuss her new memoir and Essays again it is called The Way You Make Me Feel, available now wherever books are sold from Penguin Press. So my guest once again is Juliet Escoria. Her new story collection is called You Are the Snake, available from Soft Skull. Juliet is the author of the novel Juliet the Maniac, which was named the best book of the year by Nylon, El, Buzzfeed and other publications. It was also shortlisted for the VCU Cabell first novelist prize. Juliet Escoria is also the author of a poetry collection entitled Witch Hunt and a story collection called Black Cloud. Her writing can be found in a variety of publications including Vice, The Fader, Bomb, The New York Times and elsewhere. Juliet Escoria was born in Australia, raised in San Diego and she now lives in West Virginia where she teaches English at a community college. I'm very pleased to have Juliet back on this show always fun talking with her and I'm excited to share the conversation with all of you right now. So let's get to it. Here I am with Juliet Escoria and her new story collection, One More Time, is Cold You Are the Snake. I said out in that Juliet the maniac like I just felt so close to it that it felt unhealthy and uncomfortable and I was like I want to do a story collection like a story collection is much less stressful in terms of wanting to golem it and so I know that's not what you're supposed to do. I feel like you're supposed to do novel, novel story collection but I wanted something that I could have a healthier distance and that was less putting myself through the wringer in a weird way and I did have some older stories and I do like writing short stories like they're fun for me but yeah I was just like I'm going to write stories until I have a collection. So what do you mean you were too close to Juliet the maniac you were just immersed in the work and it was maybe like auto-fiction-y and in a way that made you feel like you were too kind of close to yourself or something? Yeah and like protective of it because you know it was like irritatingly like the most defining portion of my life and part of my life that I just feel like overly sensitive about in general so then like turning that into a book was really weird and so I felt like I don't know I just cared about that book in a way that seems overly caring like you know you want to care about your book of course but it was just like a little bit too much and I didn't want to have another book that was like that because I do want to write like another you know based on my real life novel but not now and not when I started working on this book seriously. And you're supposed to go novel novel story collection? I don't know if that's true but that's just what I feel. Oh okay I was like wow no one I didn't get the memo I got self-conscious I was like well I guess I should do a story collection now since I've done two novels. Yeah I don't know if that's actually true. Alright and maybe you're not supposed to write any story collections but just some people can't resist. I like story collections. Me too. I also don't understand why they're not more popular these days because people don't actually like reading and you could read like five stories from a collection and then pretend you read a whole book and be proud of yourself. I heard you say that you were sensitive about Julie at the maniac because it dealt with a particular time in your life that you felt was like really formative and pivotal which if I'm recalling correctly is like what adolescents laid out of lessons. Maybe maybe even early 20s I forget exactly the time span. It was 14 to I don't know what I actually did in the book but like maybe 14 to 16 in the book and then it would have been 15 to 17 in real life. And why was it so pivotal it was like the onset of again I'm working for memory because we spoke about that book it was like onset of mental illness, addiction, that sort of stuff. Yeah. Yeah and then the suicide attempts and then going to boarding school, boarding school and quotes because it was a treatment center and that just felt like you know there was the way that I thought my life was going to go and then there's the way that it went and that like kind of put me in an entirely different direction than what I thought as a youth. And it was that everybody had told me as a youth. So wait you thought prior to 14 that your life was going to look a certain way and then like the shit kind of hit the fan and suddenly you're at like this treatment center slash boarding school and you're like what the what the fuck yeah yeah I was gonna like you know get excellent grades be perfected at everything go to a great college be really good at life and then it was oh that's not happening I will be a degenerate druggie for a while and that's what my life looked like for 11 years and then I got clean and sober and now I'm a good little girl scout again. So I can't help but note that you are the snake deals a lot with that same age range. But girlhood is a big concern of yours a big concern of your work. Yes I mean I kind of think of it as like before and after Juliet the maniacs are younger and then older and I didn't want to write any more stories about drugs like that was like I'm done with that I'm sick of writing about this it's boring and whatever but they just happened. So I was like okay well whatever I guess they're going in the collection like I can't stop doing it so I hope this is my last stories about substance abuse but I already made that declaration to myself and then broke it. You're good at writing about it. Thanks I mean I hope so considering I couldn't stop like I wanted to stop but I couldn't. Well I couldn't help but note there's this vibe that you give off I think as a person and talking with you but also on the page in your writing especially when you're writing like a Juliet character who appears often I mean that Juliet the maniac obviously but in these stories I also was projecting you into them I hope that's okay it's kind of inevitable when somebody feels like somebody's writing somewhat autobiographically though maybe you fooled me but I was thinking about this this morning when I was walking my dog and I was like Juliet's one of these people who seems like you have like a real like cool intelligence and I feel like maybe as a girl people didn't realize how smart you were like because you were quiet maybe you didn't announce it but you're very perceptive and you're sort of sitting there observing or maybe you were high I don't know you don't know what I'm saying it wasn't like necessarily as overt and then I was like and I think like when I was a kid at least for a certain period everyone was like yeah you're really smart like you're getting the grades I sort of knew how to do the tricks like if I was a dog like I knew all the commands but I wasn't really that smart I was actually a lot dumber than I looked maybe you're wrong I think we're bad at judging ourselves maybe I mean that's just the way that it felt though you know I look back and I'm like yeah I wasn't that smart I was a complete fool you know but I feel like with you or at least these characters on the page they're often sharp in ways that they sort of keep to themselves or just doesn't get recognized thanks yeah I mean I think when I was in school I was like very much a perfectionist like I wanted to like I remember in third grade or whatever we had to learn our times tables and I was like I'm gonna learn those the fastest so I did and we had contests about who could read the most books and I was like I'm gonna win that and then I did so there's like very much a over achieving competitive side and then when I started screwing up in high school some of my teachers were excusing of my grades because there it was like oh we know you can do better you're just going through it a tough time so I felt like a you know gifted child syndrome thing is the competitive side of you and that like an overachiever side of you still really present in your life as an adult yeah that's something that I it feels like a lifelong battle of wanting to be perfect knowing you can't be perfect and trying to tamp that down what about like as a writer like are you clocking what's happening with other writers and who's winning what awards and all that kind of stuff does that stuff get to you on occasion but it feels like there's like a petty little demon living inside of me and it talks and I tell it to shut up and sometimes it does so it's like a small little thing that sometimes goes on in the background that I don't really believe in because I feel like when it comes down to it I'm well aware of what I want to do and what I'm doing and that I'm capable of doing it but then you get the little demon inside that's like I want all the prizes and I'm not kidding them but it's like that's not what I'm doing with my writing it's I'm not writing the type of stuff that is good for prizes unless someone listening wants to give me a price I think you deserve a price I think actually we both deserve prizes yes it's an outrage that we haven't been awarded anything yet but I think that there is a kind of book and it's really hard to actually articulate what it is but you sort of know it when you read it where you're like oh this is a prize novel this is a novel that could win prizes and I say that with some degree of authority because I have accurately predicted this before I read a lot of contemporary fiction and I'll have that thought and then the book will go on to win prizes and deservedly so you know it's not like the book doesn't deserve it but what is it what is the kind of book that deserves prize or that tends to get nominated and win prizes it's weird yeah and I can describe it in a way that is mean and that's not true because there's plenty of books that I absolutely love that win prizes but you can't I don't know I feel like it's impossible to describe that yeah it's like usually like it's got like some sort of big ambition in it it tells a grand story maybe it has some sort of social or cultural or historical context the words sweeping might be used to describe it I also feel like they have to be a certain type of polite like you can be crazy but you have to be the type of crazy that you could talk about it at like a cocktail party and no one would think you're weird and like I you know Otessa Moshvick kind of seems like acceptably crazy yeah she found a way to thread the natal yeah yeah like where you're like oh crazy edgy but yet prizes yeah we could talk up you could have these conversations at a cocktail party and someone might just find it like colorful as opposed to what the heck is wrong with you disturbing yeah yeah I get that it's like and it's such a fine line and like I often note this I've talked about this on the show and I think about it all the time including this morning because I guess I was like prepping to talk with you but like the thing I like about your work is that it really shows the sort of ugliness and darker sides of people in a way that's not cool I guess a question that I was asking myself is that if a person especially writing in an autobiographical vein were to really be honest on the page and I'm talking about any person doesn't matter who it is almost maybe there are some exceptions but I don't know any probably if a person were to accurately depict themselves especially their interiority on the page in a way that is true to life sort of joking with myself I was like I don't think any protagonist of that kind would be likable no like that they would be like kind of like in almost intolerable or you'd be sort of maybe you would like read it with interest because it would secretly confirm things to you or you'd find it relatable but I don't know if you would talk about it at cocktail parties or like even an admit that you liked it yeah I think that was like something I was because I don't know this story collection I wasn't thinking I'm going to write a story collection that's going to explore this this and this like I knew I was writing about gender as I was doing it with you know without really trying to but I was aware of that and then later looking at it and being like what is this quote unquote about and trying to find some sort of like sense in the stories that I just wrote because I wanted to write them and I think that was like something I was trying to do was you know it was they post me to era a lot of it was written during covid of people just you know being morally superior type stuff on the internet and I was like none of us are like that like we're all bad if we you know we're able to admit that to ourselves so just wanting to kind of write about that of we're good and we're bad and if we were all honest it's not cool as you said yeah I get a little frustrated though I can be I can be charmed by a narrator who is cool like when it's done well it sort of draws you in right but then after the fact I'll be like wow like this this author rendered themselves just so like in the book so that it's like yes they expose their flaws but not enough of them we're not the kind of flaws that might cause us to actually recoil and they were witty and they had like they ended up feeling cool on the page in a way that you know you sort of admire it and it becomes aspirational but it doesn't necessarily feel like anybody I actually know yeah and I do think that there's something like I don't know beautiful in that like I think that's kind of trying to make sense of the own stuff that I'm interested in that there is beauty in horribleness and the reverse so it's not like I'm interested in showing how people are bad it's like just being able to kind of look at both things at once and see that they're not opposites yeah like it's all of the complexity and just there's a certain I guess it like comes down to crowd pleasing right it's like you're trying to I guess you're trying to please the reader that's not a bad impulse but I think I sort of feel like it does a disservice to the reader if you're too charming or you're too cool yeah it's kind of sending in a way yeah when you need meal time inspiration it's worth shopping Kroger where you'll find over 30,000 mouthwatering choices that excite your inner foodie and no matter what tasty choice you make you'll enjoy our everyday low prices plus extra ways to save like digital coupons worth over $600 each week you can also save up to $1 off per gallon at the pump with fuel points more savings and more inspiring flavors make shopping Kroger worth it every time Kroger fresh for everyone fuel restrictions apply the last thing you want to hear when you need your auto insurance most is thank you for calling please listen to your list of 46 possible service options which is why when you choose us a auto insurance you'll get great service that is easy and reliable 24 7 online service for claims access to roadside assistance and more all at the touch of a button start getting the service you deserve get a quote today ability to receive a quote depends on membership eligibility membership eligibility and product restrictions apply in our subject to change USA means United Services Automobile Association and its affiliates San Antonio Texas so I read something that you said about the writing of this book and I want to read it to you and then have you respond because I found it interesting you said in an interview quote I really like moving things around in space I've done that with all of my books ordering this one was really hard and I made myself a little crazy over it I ended up writing the titles of the stories on cut up pieces of index cards and then color coding them based on themes and also general vibe the weirdest I got with it was trying to assign them to different suites in the forgive my pronunciation thaw I think so that's one of those words that I don't know how to spell it but I don't know how to say thaw tarot deck like tarot cards I was really lost in the weeds at that point Scott McClanahan your husband Blake Butler the writer and Mesham Aaron the writer all gave me feedback and helped me snap out of it so talk about this like because I'm always interested in story collections when it comes to the issue of sequencing because it does really matter you know in terms of how the book plays well this book had so many different orders like I don't even remember how many were the official or like maybe four different bits and I do think that moving things around physically helps like that's something I teach English composition at a community college so it's people who generally don't like reading and writing and that's something I tell them which is write things down on index cards you want to be able to move it around in space because a lot of those students they don't think through writing like that's not how their brain operates and so it helps them and it also really helps me I would just think like just about anyone how their brain works is being able to physically move stuff around so with every book it's ended up on the basement floor in some shape or form and then I just kind of move things around and shuffle them and this one I was like okay I'm going to do it this way and then I looked at it and didn't work and then the wait why didn't it work it just I don't know it just didn't like it just was like this is not right like this there's this big flaw here or here or this is stupid and then the tarot deck day was like a very like in the weeds day was just like what am I doing and I sort of remember a day like that with Juliet the maniac where I was like I'm going to write in colors and that was you know I don't even know what that means I didn't know what that means then yeah but then Blake gave slightly different feedback than Misha then Scott but being able to kind of listen to all of them and my own thoughts was but was able to make it work I'm just kind of something more concrete but I almost wonder like do I need to get really in the weeds at some point in order to make sense of it or is that just like a genuine wrong turn when I do that yeah I think you do I mean it's like it's almost like due diligence right like the actual process of getting into the weeds might in hindsight seems superfluous or needless or whatever and but I think you got to go through those paces otherwise you can't feel I can't feel good about the decisions I make with the finished product like yeah I want to sort of like look under every rock and question everything and just make sure that whatever ends up I did my due diligence yeah yeah I think that was part of it too which is because when I sent it out to publishers it was kind of with the awareness that this doesn't need to be in the perfect order right now it needs to be good enough that an editor would want to read it but it doesn't need to be perfect and that I would find the closest to perfect that I could get later so it's between the acceptance and then you know the actual publication of it that the order changed multiple times something that I've been thinking about a lot lately is time like the issue of time and creativity and how time relates to a book you know a book like the project different writers need different amounts of time to arrive at like the finished product and to feel satisfied with it I think I'm somebody who needs a lot of time to fully trust myself and I think that generally speaking it seems like works of art benefit from like real careful consideration though there's no rules I mean some people write spontaneously or do spontaneous art of some kind that's just brilliant and how do you feel about it like how do you relate to your books at that level I've definitely written less since I got a full-time job because I had rented for a while and since I got the faculty job it's mostly summer and winter breaks which irritates me but I also feel like the teaching at the community college is something that's really important for me so I feel like mad but also fine with that and I keep on wanting to be like a bad teacher for a semester so I get a lot of writing done but then I fail at that goal but yeah I do think like you know because I don't know if this is actually true but I do feel like there's a lot of women's books that came out this year that were written partially or entirely during covid and I think that that's interesting because there's just been so many books that happen to all be by women that I'm like this book is amazing and then I go on to the next newly published book this book is amazing so I don't know time seems good we should all get part-time jobs that should be a thing is the 24 hour work week well it slows you down as a writer because you only have these chunks of time in which you can actually do the work but I think it probably also focuses you you feel that way yeah like summer is my favorite season for many reasons but partially because I get to fully be a writer and I get to be like that version of myself and it's just ideal because I don't have to you know moderate that with teaching people stuff and going to meetings and things like that but you feel the teaching is essential to yes why I feel like that's what I'm supposed to do oh really yeah I'm supposed to do both why like what is it about teaching that you feel like such a personal connection to I feel like I'm good at it I feel like it's like uniquely suited to my skill set and my weaknesses and I don't know it's just meaningful to me because I went to community college I don't think I would have ended up doing what I'm doing without community college and then the students that I teach are primarily much less privileged than I am like you know I went to community college but my parents both went to graduate school so I had something that these kids did and a lot of them are first generation college students so it feels meaningful in a bunch of different ways and I feel like somehow I ended up here at the correct job at this tiny little community college working with these students who have had rough rough lives that originally I couldn't even comprehend not all of them some of them are like nice shiny live children but a lot of them are adults people my age people older people who are like 25 where it's just like they've been through it they've been through stuff I will never understand yeah I taught community college for several years in Los Angeles and it's like such a wide array or at least it was here like I have like like people in their 70s in my class I had people you know who like you say were first generation college students there were kind of like well to do kids from Malibu it's like the whole gamut you know yeah that's what I get too especially the location that I teach it's the county where Scott and also Misha that where they grew up and that has a lot of wealth on one end but the majority of it is super rural and not wealthy and so you'll get rich kids there you'll get farm kids there you'll get just about everything between and this is in West Virginia yeah yeah okay what's the community college may I ask I don't want to say it it's not hard to figure out but I always get worried that someone's gonna like try and get me in trouble on my job which I think is paranoid but maybe it's true no I think that's fair and I think I think I read something that you said about teaching which is interesting to me is that you don't share the fact that you are this fancy author with your students like they don't know Julia to score you you teach under your other name yes yeah so they have no idea you're writing all of this great fiction right yeah for a while I would say because I don't know I have like guilt complex I think related to addiction and so I would like feel the need to tell them like why I'd be missing class and tell them that I have another side of my professional life which is writing I write under a different name but then they started being curious about that so I don't want them to be curious I just don't even really mention it now and I might be teaching a creative writing class for the first time this next semester and I'm trying to figure out like it makes sense to tell them that I write but I still don't want them to get curious about me yeah I mean I guess I was going to say they could google you but you write under a different name so they couldn't find out anything right I don't you can find the link if you are intelligent about your google search interesting yeah you're like sorry kids I have I you know I'm canceling class I have to do the other people podcast well it's like book festivals and it felt like this is a good reason for me to miss class and I don't want them to think that I'm an alcohol it's that those are your fears like as a person who's been sober longer than I use substances for but it's just like I have to prove to the world that I'm not an alcoholic or drug user so I have to explain this thing that it totally doesn't require explanation but I need to do it in order to make myself not feel bad like you don't want them thinking you're hung over or something that's why you missed yeah which is why they miss class that's their job yes not your job sometimes sometimes it's genuinely like their stories some of them are just like whoa yeah you you needed to miss class like nobody should go to English class if those were your circumstances you they your students I mean I guess you don't I mean just as a general observation I noticed when I was teaching that a lot of the personal essays that my students would write many of them were really fascinating you get I mean I think the point is that you just get stuff that really surprises you you're like whoa I don't know that part of the job I liked yeah when the personal essay time because Scott does the exact same job that I do then we have lovely dinner time conversations and if our friends hang out with this during that time then they get to hear about the the personal lives of our community college students because they're just wild and I like you can tell me the most horrible thing in a narrative descriptive essay now and it just won't surprise me or be that big of a deal yeah yeah like it's like oh your mom you found her dead in your kitchen table happens tell me something I haven't heard before right right get one of these a semester but uh yeah I want to go back to your book and I want to talk about violence and something that you have said again I'm going to quote you to yourself you say quote honestly I think violence gets a bad rap these days something broke in our society when fist fights became socially unacceptable we should bring back the playground and bar brawl in internet fights people use this faux veneer of politeness where they will veil something nasty with corporate HR language and I find it morally repugnant if you want to insult somebody just insult them if you want to hurt somebody just punch them it's more honest and less damaging I guess that's an aspect of violence I'm interested in too it's nasty but it's honest and there can be integrity in unvarnished nastiness now before you respond I just want to add that there are in several of these stories acts of violence and I think interestingly like acts of violence perpetrated by women so violence is a thematic concern in this collection and I just want to hear you respond to that you know quote that I just read I think some of it is maybe a slightly tongue-in-cheek but I yeah I was giggling as I wrote that yeah but but I think I kind of find myself nodding particularly the part about internet fights where there's all this passive aggression and all of this carefully doctored language and it's actually easy to see through but hard to like litigate and stresses me out you don't know saying yeah there's an aspect that you were getting at to our online lives that felt very true to life and describe something that I think a lot of us like find problematic yeah I was looking at some old twitter conversation I had had and the person it was like an argument that I had that I don't want to go into the backstory but I was looking at what they were saying and they were saying insulting things to me but because they were veiled in like this corporate HR language they felt like morally better than when I just said like fuck you and I just feel like you know like that's an honest phrase sometimes like there's nothing more clear than saying fuck you to somebody sometimes and it just seemed like meaner and more condescending and just icky to insult somebody but in a way that they can't get in trouble for insulting them and then also to act defended when you say something like fuck you which is like you said that to me but you said it in 16 words I said it in two so yeah and I do think the thing about fist fights because you know when I was in school there were fights and they weren't that big of a deal and now I just can't imagine that happening at a high school like I feel like now they probably like cyberbullying each other and leave slightly mean comments on their Instagram that they can't actually get in trouble for and that seems worse and you know police violence I don't even want to go into that because I'll probably get myself in trouble but like cops used to have billy clubs the end and like that seems a lot better guns are bad I don't know it just seems like we've gotten more abstract in our ways of being violent and of expressing bad feelings to each other like guns seem more abstract than billy clubs and corporate HR language is so abstract and that seems I don't know it relates almost to the digital stuff of instead of seeing your friends or talking about a book you'll tweet about it and everyone will go into binaries it just seems like everything is like getting pixelated in a way and more more abstracted and I don't like it it seems bad I think that maybe a great example of the kind of interpretive work that is sort of imposed upon us by online life particularly in social media realms is the sub tweet like that's like maybe the pinnacle of online passive aggression you know we're somebody tweets something and you're like wait who are they tweeting about they're saying something but it's like veiled and they're clearly not speaking directly but they've got an issue with somebody and then it becomes this mystery and then like you know 30 minutes of my life are gone as I'm trying to like connect the dots and it's a drain it's like a needless drain I've subtweeted before and I certainly created drafts of subtweets and then never posted them but passive aggression is one of my I don't know pet peeves like something that I just like find incredibly irritating and don't like I also like the tweet hope this helps or the comment hope this helps where you say something like really rude and condescending and then end up with that that's become like almost a joke now I think yeah it's like you want to try to everyone's trying to like speak their mind without getting canceled or you know it's like this weird dance that people do and I think maybe there's a part of me that's like just fucking say it and much rather like I think that's what you're saying is that it's like at least you know where you stand with people and there's not all of this obfuscation and bullshit you know yeah and then there's also I think tied to this like thematic concern of yours in the collection when it comes to violence it's not only the sort of bluntness and clarity of physical violence that you know as as abhorrent as physical violence is there it is clear right you know you know where you stand when somebody punches you in the nose yeah but it's also I think interesting to you how people reach that point and become violent and we're not talking people who even necessarily have a history of violence it's how like a normal quote unquote normal person can suddenly snap and stab somebody in the leg or punch somebody in the nose right yeah yeah and I think also like I don't know these days I try to be a good person but there were parts of my life where I absolutely didn't and it's crazy to me that we can do that over the course of our lives that we can have completely different priorities and defaults and you know you were told they go people don't change and we do I've changed and I don't know that seems so I think it's like you know what brings a normal person to violence in like a short term scenario but like also how someone can react to a situation completely differently at this age than they would at this other age and yeah I think that you know I don't know I also just had like a anger problem when I was younger that I still have but it's gotten a lot better and that's something that you know I've struggled with but also I don't know if I liked it but it seemed honest even when I was a teenager or something I really struggled with I've just like well this is a natural reaction to this world even as I felt like shame and guilt for having some sort of anger out first were you violent yeah like two things mostly like the number of times my parents bought a cordless phone was a lot because you would just chuck it yes and one time I broke the uh sliding glass door that was an accident but I like threw something really hard on the ground and then it I hit the sliding glass door and then it broke that was like a big oh my god I can't believe I did that whoops yeah it's like you know as like as you were talking I was just thinking like there are I was having a conversation I think on this show recently about fear of death and it was like and then you're talking also about how people change I would like add to that that like people change and there are such fluctuations like you might say like oh yeah I used to be really angry and violent like you know sporadically violent as a teenager and that I've gotten better with that I don't doubt that at all but I think there are also probably circumstances in your life today that could drive you to chuck a cordless phone through the window you know definitely and yeah like in a kind of similar way I was thinking like there are certain days where like my fear of death is pretty minimal like I feel like okay like this is it whatever I can handle it it's it's almost like that plane and then there are other days where I can feel this like cold terror when I think about like what the hell's gonna happen and what is this you know and that's kind of the human experience it feels like we sort of yo-yo and as much as I like to think of myself as like a non-violent person and aside from my sisters I've never punched anybody so you punch women I punched I punched my little sister in the arm really hard when I was a teenager and it hurt her and I've never hit anybody since then I felt I think I felt so bad about it because I had my friends over and I was trying to show off you know I was like 16 she wasn't listening to me or something you know what I'm saying just awful behavior but that said there are probably certain moods I could be in like certain days where like if if something were to happen somebody were to like trigger me or get in my face I probably could yeah any of us yeah I think that's you know something that that I was thinking about too is it just depends on the day like if you're hungry or tired or you've had an annoying day then you can have a very different reaction in a situation because sometimes I see that with my students like if it's like the third student that day that has told me that something happened and they can't do what has been asked of them I'll be like really or want to at least be really mean to them in a way that I wouldn't if it was the first person and then I think about that just kind of like the look of the draw of that if you happen to be the third person then you're going to have a very different response than if you were the first that I think is weird and we're also just like little little animals too and we think that we're not and we think that we would act this way this is the correct way to act but really we're just hungry this episode is brought to you by Experian are you paying for subscriptions you don't use but can't find the time or energy to cancel them Experian could cancel unwanted subscriptions for you saving you an average of two hundred and seventy dollars per year and plenty of time download the Experian app results will vary not all subscriptions are eligible savings are not guaranteed paid membership with connected payment account required this episode is brought to you by marrick pet care for over 30 years marrick has crafted high quality dog food since our founding in herford texas we prioritized whole nutrition with deboned meat fish or poultry as the number one ingredient in every dry dog food recipe that's why we say real is our recipe real ingredients and homestyle flavors your pet loves all to fuel more real time together look for marrick online or in your local pet store i try like i think where i'm at with it is like i it's okay to like feel angry but i try not to be angry you know i think it's natural to feel angry i mean there's sometimes anger is justified there's righteous anger there's a great you know some grave injustice or violence against human being you know there's all sorts of ways to feel angry in a healthy way maybe but it's when like i act out i think i've gotten better at maybe not acting on feelings of anger than i did when i was younger yeah and i think like one thing i sometimes struggle with is where to put that anger or whatever negative emotion is like you can't get rid of it so what can i do with it and sometimes it's hard to figure out what to do with it because there's all sorts of tools like i think that's one thing that's necessary if you're recovering from mental illness or addiction is you have to figure out ways to to deal with this stuff and so i've got all these different tools and sometimes it's like i don't know what to do with this one today it doesn't seem to have a good answer or good solution so i was going to say maybe writing stories is that help yeah that helps and then a good one is yard work i love angry yard working just digging holes plant things yeah and you know there's talking to someone there's crying there's all sorts of different things writing for sure i think writing is more not necessarily dealing with my emotions but just kind of thinking of past things and i do think that there has to be some sort of years long remove from me to be able to make sense of them in my writing for the most part like someone asked me about they can't remember who and it was like no but the stuff from my marriage like that was when we first got married that was 10 years ago and i do think it's strange that it has to be like a decade or something before it can make sense of it i don't think that's strange i think this is tied to this issue of time and art and you know again certain people might be able to process their lives in like some sort of crystalline way really quickly and like bless them but like i need time to sort of figure out like you say what the fuck happened and like how i feel about it and then i kind of feel like i need to look at it it's like i need to like turn it over like i need to just keep looking at it from every different angle because i feel like i have such blind spots i could feel really certain about something and depict something that happened with all of this like almost bravado or something this is i think what we call like an early draft and then you look back at it you put it in the drawer and then come back to it like you know a month later and you're like ew and it just i mean it engenders what i think is a healthy mistrust in my own certainty and it just takes me like oftentimes many years to get to a place where i'm like okay i did all the work and maybe and you know this is how crazy it is like maybe i've gone in a big circle you know where i started here and then i went and i tried out all these different things and then in the end i ended up right back where i began like that happened sometimes so my initial instincts were correct but other times the opposite is the case like is that how it is for you yeah that happened to me recently with the whole boarding school thing which is i have felt like i made sense of it by writing julie at the maniac and then i watched a really dumb documentary about Paris Hilton that was partially about how hard it is to be Paris Hilton but partially about her experience at a troubled teen industry place that was similar to the one i was sent to but like so much worse than the one that i was sent to and then that sent me on this like tailspin of i don't was was that abusive i don't know and like not being able to like frame it and then coming back to where i was at the beginning of when i finished writing julie at the maniac i was like yes this happened it was not good but it was the best possible thing that could have happened at the time and it was both terrible and wonderful and things are allowed to be both awful and the thing that needed to be happened that needed to happen yeah yeah and i think too like when it comes to complex medical needs like mental health issues or you know coupled with substance abuse or physical i know this just as a parent like physical disability is that when medical stuff gets complicated it can be really frustrating because you're trying to find the right avenue for treatment to make things better and yet there is not just like a place there's not one size fits all right i mean really everything is so unique and specific to the person and differentiated that it i sort of understand why the treatment options can seem lacking it's just because there's no there's no way to make it specific for every person and to have it just like turnkey you know and we don't know much yet like we know so much more than we did 30 years ago and 100 years ago we don't know anything in a lot of ways in terms of like mental health treatment or a lot of different disabilities and so it's just the best guess that we have with what we got and we really don't have that much so like i can get angry about what happened to me in the 90s or what my parents did but it was the 90s like there's so many things we did not know back then like the people were just doing the best that they could and that was better than what my uncle went through and certainly better than what my grandmother went through but yeah it sucked so your uncle and your grandmother had a similar pattern of of mental illness that you inherited yeah my uncle was diagnosed and my grandmother was like you know too old to be diagnosed because manic depression was something that they were based on what i know at least that they gave out as a diagnosis fairly rarely and so i don't think she ever received a diagnosis of any type and then my uncle was in the mental hospital long term and then i was diagnosed i think manic depressive rate as that word was going out as that phrase was going out like in the what do you call the big book the big medical book that dsm yeah the dsm that term but in terms of i mean just out of curiosity thinking about this generational legacy and the differences in treatment like you seem i mean you you got your teaching job your publishing books you happily married like you got your shit together like you were able to find yourself into uh like a productive life and a better path yeah what do you what do you think crazy yeah but but i mean like what what did it take it was like a combination of medications and therapy and angry artwork yeah i think it was like early intervention you know like it was imperfect but i started getting treatment when i was 15 years old i think some of it was class like i grew up in a wealthy neighborhood with parents who were educated who loved me they had just me because they wanted to be able to devote their attention and money to just one kid they're open-minded so it was parents situations i think there's also something in me that i feel really like i don't know blessed to have that was just kind of wanting to fight even when i wanted to die so i think a lot of it was situational and then yeah i don't believe in any sort of like specific religion but i do think there's like an element of grace or god in there too there's certain parts of my labor i'm just like i don't understand how it turned out this way there must be something bigger that did that i don't know what it is but yeah i think that some people have like a real like a survivor gene or something you're like a survivor like even like you say even when you wanted to die you wanted to live and wanted to fight yeah yeah and i think that's something that i've just because i have that you know it goes back to that perfectionist thing but a real stubborn streak and so it's like well fine i'm gonna get better then i'm gonna do great i'm gonna be happy and so you know and i i knew that it was gonna be a long-term thing like i think that's one thing you can learn through 12 step groups and therapy and stuff is that it's not just like you go to therapy for three months and then you're cured but like it's a you know a hobby or a lifelong pursuit and so that seemed like a good challenge for me and just like let's get better let's get better at this now let's look at this little weird thing about me and try to address that and then part of it too i think is just accepting that you're never going to be 100% better and that's fine and sometimes you're still going to have irrational reactions to things and that's fine that's part of life you don't need to be good all the time that that's part of it too well it's not linear i think it can be easy to feel like nothing's changing especially if you're working at something in this kind of like practiced long-term way it can feel like oh it's one step forward two steps back i'm not getting anywhere but then when you zoom out and you look at yourself when you were like 20 to now it's more it's more clear and i think you know you can because i frequently do this is which is behave in a bizarre irrational way and then like laugh at it like the the other night megan was visiting and so all of a sudden megan boil the right yeah megan boil and all of a sudden i got really quiet on the couch and i could tell that they could tell that something was wrong and i had like decided that scott is like attacking me i have really bad like pms problems that i medicated for but still crack through and then i realized that that's an insane thing to think so that like snapped out of it and so then we were like joking about it for the rest of megan's visit of just like yeah i decided my husband was attacking me for no reason so just kind of like an awareness and you know if you think about that of someone who just randomly decides that their husband is against them seems bad seems mentally ill but that's you know real progress is to be able to snap out of it within 30 minutes 20 minutes however long it took and then laugh at it yeah but i don't think that sounds abnormal or unfamiliar to anybody who's in a marriage or a long-term relationship i will have periods where i'm like i don't think my wife likes me and then but it'll be like for like an afternoon or an eve like and it's but it'll be like operatic and it's in the way that it unfolds in my brain right it's intense and you're like oh god but then like the next day it'll be gone like everything will be fine and i'll be like what the fuck was i psyching myself out for do you know what i'm saying like well i think that's the majority of our fights these days is all decide that scott doesn't like me and hold aside that i don't like him and then we'll fight and make up and i'll be like i just thought you didn't like me i mean like i thought you didn't like me it's but something that i guess maybe the larger point is like so much of it is just interior we just decide we decide these things we convince ourselves and it doesn't square at all or at least not fully with reality right it's like yeah but it's such an easy you're like i can fool myself so easily you know at least it turns and when it comes to this sort of long like the long project of uh julia you know getting well and living her life and being a productive teacher and artist and everything i i think i read something you wrote it was the essay like the flow bear essay where you were kind of calling the flow bear quote bullshit this thing about being regular and orderly in your life so that you can be violent and original in your work and you were like no but i feel like maybe i i read somewhere where you said that you've sort of come back around on that and maybe that wasn't right maybe you do need to be orderly in your life in order to be more violent and original in your work like where where do you stand on that that's that's that's you know it's that's something that's i also think when i wrote that essay like i just got no the mental so so as the kids say it was like cope um of me just kind of being like it's fun that i just got mental and i think you know it was the folly of youth and i i don't know i i do need orderliness maybe not everybody does but yes i in in order to like make calculated sense of unruly ruleiness in stories like some of these stories were i was trying to do something that i didn't know if i could do i didn't know if anyone could do and i don't know if i would have had the time to do that if i didn't have a job and that made me financially comfortable and gave me time to think and blah blah blah all the other stuff the sources of stability that i have in my life yeah well i mean and when it comes to the discipline and the order i mean you talk about the job but in terms of like just the ritual that you keep to write a book it's the summers it's the winter breaks what does a workday look like i mean are you somebody who's like up at dawn and doing this or do you know like these days i love to stay up late and sleep in really late so i'll get up or between 10 and 11 and then i'll work all day until dinner time which is around five so it's about six hours i'm really going hard i'll return to it after dinner but usually i'll exercise after dinner exercise is irritatingly important to me yeah me too so it's what is that probably like six hours day and that's about as much as i can handle in terms of brainpower that's a lot yeah to be honest but i go hard like scott is slow and steady like a tortoise and it is really irritating to watch i'm just like you are every day i'm such a loser and a fake writer and you are not i was gonna ask you i was gonna ask you i mean because i think maybe we've talked about this before but it is it's interesting to me to be married to somebody who does what you do and is also a writer that is not the case for me but there has to be some sort of interplay an exchange between you on a daily basis right yeah and i think it's gotten like better over the years as we've gotten to kind of understand each other and also as i've gotten to understand myself like i'm simply not a daily writer that doesn't work for me i've tried it and nothing good came of it and so just being able to accept that that you don't have to write every single day for two hours the way that scott does in order to be a quote-unquote real writer and that's fine and maybe i would prefer to be a two hours every day writer but i'm not so that was like a process of kind of going through that in our marriage of realizing that we're different styles of writing in terms of how it gets done i mean it would be bizarre and like possibly weird if you were both exactly the same in terms of writing rituals you know it's good to have some separation right yeah but he's so he did not do anything that you're like i got my mfa i moved to new york like i did a lot of the things that you're supposed to do and he didn't so then if i'm being really mean to myself i can tell myself that he's more authentic and a realer writer than i am and i'm just playing around it's dress up yeah i've been i feel that's a mean shit i'm saying to myself i listen i've had that thought with respect to scott and writers like because he's he's not he's not in west virginia and he's from there and he's writing about that place and it's not what you see traditionally in my contemporary literary fiction which is all like park slope and los angeles or whatever you know what i'm saying so it's like yeah he is more he's realer he's realer than i am i've had that thought yeah yeah i think it's natural but that's cool and i got to believe too that there are some advantages i mean we can talk about the competition there can be competitive vibes about who's publishing what and who's doing better work or working more consistently but i have to believe too and i think we touched on this earlier when it came to sequencing and the taro cards and all the rest that you can get really valuable in like immediate feedback from a spouse who understands the work at an intimate level and you can also understand like the petty frustrations like i was trying to talk to my normal friends being my non-writer friends about how unpleasant it is to have a book come out and they just like did not get it right and then scott i can tell him like the most specific thing and he knows exactly what i'm talking about like overall i think it's like a big strength to be married to someone who does the same thing as you do and like jealousy is such a like it happens but it's such a small part of the you know relationship that is us as both writers so mostly it's a big bonus and you cheer each other up you're genuinely happy yeah for sure i think i think we both have really been supportive of each other and when it comes to uh like writing auto-fiction non-fiction e-fiction i think i've heard you call it before there's definitely that in july at the maniac there's that in this new collection uh i love that as a reader me too like that's what i want to read but yeah i i think i'm always reading every book in that vein even if it's like super layered i'm always like trying to find the writer in there somewhere and i like when i don't have to work too hard yeah and i think yeah i do that too and i think that kind of goes back to this idea that i want things to be transparent for whatever reason which is all work is auto-fiction why are you making me have to work to figure out but i'm doing that even more so i guess that's a contradictory thought which is like i'm purposely making the reader think that but like lying plenty because i've had some of my close friends ask me did that really happen i was like no that was totally made up that didn't exist at all that part was true that part was based on this slightly related thing that happened to me so maybe i'm even more fake than someone who's writing about their own life but through the veil of speculative fiction or something yeah i mean that the memory is so fallible and i think maybe like i like to think of myself as somebody who's not making myself cool on the page but it's an awfully difficult impulse to resist you know it's not pleasant to like sit there and lay yourself bare on the page in ways that are unflattering i mean unless you're like a total masochist but yeah that's kind of part of the work really is to call yourself out on your own bullshit and and i feel like you have a good bullshit detector like do you i think so not to brag yeah but i mean i go have a good bullshit i'm no but my instincts on people aren't always correct but a lot of times it's like i don't link that person i don't know why and then later there will be a good reason to not like that person yeah and also uh when it comes to seeing yourself clearly i'm curious to know is it usually pretty quick like on the first draft or second draft you sort of got yourself locked down or does it take you a while to sort of dig through your own bullshit i think it depends on the story because some of them come together really quickly and then others of them take months there is a story that i cut from the collection that i've tried to write so many times and like it still isn't working and so it got cut so it really is kind of situation specific and in terms of the actual composition process for you you talked earlier again about this taro process and the color coded note cards and laying things out on the basement floor and having to kind of externalize it visually in order to see it clearly does that mean you are an outliner like when you like how do how do stories happen for you like compositionally i mean i it's like so abstract like it's i don't know like it it's just something i can't put in words but it's like very much just kind of like about feeling and about like if they're with juliet the maniac i had like this picture that was sort of like a cardiogram i think that's what they're called of up and down of because you know there's that that basic plot diagram and so that was that what i wanted to do um was up and down up and down and so with this story i don't ever like outline i don't officially think about like what is the climax or whatever like that but it's almost kind of like going through it and feeling these waves and seeing what is going to ideally propel a reader through it like i think that's something that i really think about is this idea propulsion and making it so that ideally people don't get bored but i can't explain exactly what i'm doing in a word way i'm just like oh i just was seeing making it so it felt good so it felt right it's intuitive yeah yeah yeah and i felt that i felt like there were like especially i feel about an endings and maybe especially i feel about an endings of stories because they are the shorter form and it's like uh i don't know a lot of times maybe short stories end in a more elliptical way than say a novel would where there's got to be a cleaner feeling of resolution but i would often get to the end of your stories and just feel like uh like you you have a good sense of an ending and it felt like it felt like unexpected but it also felt uh like it had to happen or something which is the way it should be i love figuring out the ending because sometimes it's hard sometimes it's right there but like it feels sort of satisfying when you're like yes i got to the ending that's the right ending yeah yeah because like it is it's not like oh you know and then they all got arrested and went to jail you know it's not like an ending it's not like an end like that you know it's it's like uh it's much more open-ended and it can easily be just satisfying that's the trick is that it's hard you know to get the ending right so it's fun when you when you nail it well there are some short story writers who are really really talented but they just don't know how to end a story and i want them to learn okay yeah we wish that for them but again it's like frustrating i'm sure people are listening who are like working to get story collections done who are like well how do you end a story and it's like it's intuition it's feel you know it when you see it is there anything to add to that for somebody who works in the way that you do which is like more intuitively unless maybe like the formal outline and the clear vision like ahead of the game you know what i'm saying like you find it in the writing you find it on the page you don't preconceive it yeah well i think you know you want to be in a different place than where you started and i think like if you think about life when i moved to west virginia it wasn't like i got here and suddenly i lived in west virginia there was like a bleeding of california into west virginia everywhere that i've moved every major life change there's something that bleeds into it so it's not like we have like a nice clean ending in life so kind of thinking about that mirroring that blending into it and i do think like it can be super easy to end a short story in sort of a non-resolution which sometimes feels like a cop-out um and i think it can be easy to mistake a non-resolution for a small resolution but yeah you know it when you see it you know when you see it uh i also want to talk with you a little bit about style there's a great clarity to your writing that i sort of prize as a reader this and i think it's kind of tied to what you were saying a moment ago about making sure that it's propulsive and that people aren't bored but also that people aren't confused you know ideally you don't confuse the reader or have them feeling disoriented in time or space but there's a plain spokenness to your books that i notice and maybe in a lack of elaborate description i guess like i'd be curious to hear you assess your own style is it just something again that you intuit and it just comes out in the writing in the editing or is it something that you can really articulate like yeah i don't like to do a ton of physical description of place or i don't like to do a ton of physical description of people or i do like the clean short declarative sentence or you know what i'm saying yeah i mean i think that all that sounds true and that's just my preferences like i prefer declarative sentence to something that feels more convoluted or what i would describe as convoluted i think that like a well chosen detail can tell more than eight less well chosen details and that's you know a stylistic choice people some people like a long big paragraph with long big sentences and maximalism so that's just me wanting to write like something that i would want to read um so i do think there's is like a certain like elaborateness i can get to sometimes like i do love a good pretty sentence or phrase or word um but i think i'm of the school of thought that less is more if you can say it in three words and say it in three words if you can get it across in one description then use one description yeah i'm the same way i think that's like i feel to me that feels like the job mm-hmm like it's like isn't that what we're supposed to be doing yeah yeah i've been teaching like this business writing class sometimes that i feel unqualified to teach um and that's something that i do feel qualified to talk about because i guess in business writing you're supposed to be succinct and as clear as possible and i'm like okay i know how to do that and i prize that so at least i can help my students with that i don't know what you're supposed to say in a memo but this book does so right uh so you've got this collection done you went what novel story collection well there's poetry collections like what's your story poetry collection novel story collection wow you're just breaking all the rules this isn't and now i'm working on something that i don't even know what it is and it's really scary is it a novel i don't know it could be a nonfiction book it could be a novel i'm not sure it's based on research can you give any further hints as to what like that's not the matter is yeah yeah i'm writing about my hometown and i guess kind of like the weirder aspects of it of its history and how it started was there are these two murders on the beach and that i didn't know about until i was in my 30s that happened in 1978 in 1984 but then just the town in general started to fascinate me so i don't know what i'm doing at all like i you know writer never really knows what they're doing until they do but i really don't know what i'm doing i don't know if it's going to work i might waste 10 years of my life what is your hometown i like this that's just relatable um del mar california so it's just north of lahoya which more people know than del mar all right i know del mar that's where the racetrack is right yes where the turf meets the surf there was murders in del mar that was at the formation of it or no that was just happened that's it kind of like what got me on this trail of i feel obsessed with my hometown and want to learn about it and then write about what i learned yeah it's like a history it's like a biography of a place or something but yeah like crap a lecture biography of place yeah uh the name of his book but yeah i think that's kind of like what i'm doing but it might be i have no idea what i want to do i want to keep the parts because there was also the two murders and then there was a series of rapes and i want to keep that true that 100 fact base because it seems disrespectful to not but i think the other stuff i want to tell lies about because that's just kind of my instinct yeah to make up stuff i think it sounds fascinating thank you i hope so i feel so lost and afraid of it yeah that's that's the that's how it goes right but maybe that's a good sign maybe if you didn't then it wouldn't be worth pursuing well and i think if i didn't have that twisted stubborn streak of just like i feel completely lost and like i can't do it i'm gonna do it i'm proving wrong and i honestly i don't know if i'm going to be able to do it but that's fine how far along are you like how many pages into it are you in terms of a draft i keep thinking i'm five years away and i thought that for like two years so yeah but you have pages you have pages yes i have some pages i have a lot of research and yeah that's what i got all right well i want to start turning it into something that actually resembles part of a book but right now i just have scattered writing and lots of research and you've got to trust yourself yeah like that's a hard maybe one of the hardest parts of doing this kind of work is just trusting yourself and having the confidence to like live with that uncertainty and that feeling of like could be wasting my life yeah yeah i do think writing should be kind of scary for you so this certainly feels scary i feel really afraid of it if i start thinking but i want to like hide it well good for you i'm happy for you me too happy you're terrified uh well and it's always fun talking with you and i love it's always fun talking with you too yeah i loved uh reading your collection i uh congratulate you on it and i wish you and mr mcclanahan well you too right because we're having you all right everybody there we have it that was juliet escoria her new story collection is called you are the snake it is available from soft skull press you can find out more about juliet and her books at juliet escoria dot com follow her on social media instagram twitter read her sub stack one more time the book is called you are the snake it is an outstanding story collection by juliet escoria available from soft skull go get your copy right this second don't forget to hit the subscribe button wherever you listen subscribe to this show follow me on social media tiktok instagram twitter and blue sky read my newsletter over at sub stack be sure to subscribe and join the other people patreon community over at patreon.com slash other ppl pod they'll keep this show going into the future if you rate this show and review this show wherever you listen apple podcasts spotify whatever it is if you give this show a rating if you review it you'll be my favorite person i would be so grateful if you want to get another people t-shirt or sign up for my book club you can do that at the show's website other ppl.com and if you want to read my latest book it's a novel called be brief and tell them everything available now in trade paperback e-book and audiobook editions i narrate the audiobook so read my book if you want to read my book it's out there it's a novel it's called be brief and tell them everything all right so coming up on Thursday the return of american zalas she i think she's been fighting covid but she said she can record we haven't recorded yet we're going to so you're probably going to hear our conversation on thursday brad and mira for the culture i mean tbd we'll see if mira can manage it we'll see what her voice sounds like it's going to be a cliffhanger stay tuned so so [BLANK_AUDIO]
