hobart: Interview - Sean Carswell

an interview with Sean Carswell

Sean Carswell is the co-editor, co-publisher of the small publishing company Gorsky Press, and the independent music magazine Razorcake. He is also the author of the novel Drinks for the Little Guy and the book of stories, Glue and Ink Rebellion. That means there is a whole lot of quality stuff out there with Sean's name on it somewhere and we recommend you pick up at least some of it.

You are very loud and lively at your readings. It's very entertaining. What has the general response been from the crowds?

A lot of people come up to me after a reading and say, “Man, usually I hate readings, but this was fucking fun.” People always use the word “fuck” around me. I think it has something to do with my stories.

Do you usually memorize your stories so you don't have to actually read them?

Yes. I get really nervous at readings or any time I have to speak in front of a crowd. I’m usually way too nervous to actually read anything. If I look at the page during a reading, I generally can’t even focus on the words. So memorizing the stories helps to relax me and makes the whole experience a lot more fun.

Also, I do a ton of readings in weird places. A lot of times, especially when I read in bars or at punk shows, the lighting is awful in the sense that there’s no light behind me but there are lights shining right in my eyes. This casts a shadow on the book and makes it really tough. I’ve done readings where I literally couldn’t see the pages of my book at all.

The funny thing about this is that, even though I’m not reading from the book, I usually bring the book up on stage with me. I used to just go up and tell the stories without the book, but a few people told me that it made them uncomfortable. That there was something psychological about having the reader actually have a book in his hands. So I’ve tried readings both ways and found that, even when I hardly look at the book at all, people just seem more comfortable if I have it up there with me. I can’t explain it.

pics taken from Razorcake

What significance does a reading have for you?

When it’s done right, it’s the purest form of entertainment there is. Think about it: when you hang out with your friends, what do you do? You tell stories. You may drink or go bowling or go to a show or whatever, but mostly, you hang around telling stories. Everyone loves a good story. When you were a little kid, it didn’t matter what was on TV, you’d rather have your mom read to you. If you go back to tribal cultures or pre-industrial cultures, their main form of entertainment was to sit around and tell stories. As a culture, we may think we’ve gone beyond that, but we haven’t. Outside of sex, nothing is better than hearing a good story.

What was your worst reading experience of all time?

It’s hard to pinpoint the worst experience. I’ve literally done hundreds of readings, and even though they go really well ninety percent of the time, that still leaves me with a couple of dozen nightmarish experiences. The first story that comes to mind has to do with a reading I did last summer. It’s not the worst experience. It was just a bummer.

Last summer, I went on tour with Rich Mackin and a poet named Janaka Stucky. It was a different kind of tour. There’s no real network of clubs or bookstores or venues for what we do, so we took whatever we could get. We performed in art galleries, at backyard barbecues, in bars, in anarchist bookstores, in little community theaters, wherever. For the most part, the tour went pretty well. When we were setting up the tour, we had an open Monday night to fill in between New Orleans and Longview, Texas. So I’d set up a show in a small city between those two places.

I’d set up the show through a friend of a friend who we’ll call Terry. Terry couldn’t line up a venue for us himself, so he got his friend (who we’ll call Dave) to line us up with a place. That’s how the booking for these tours go and it usually turns out fine. This time, little signs kept popping up to indicate how it would work out.

First off, we rolled into town and pulled up to the venue where we were supposed to perform. It was this really upscale, trendy restaurant. I’d like to say it was a yuppie place, but most of the people inside were too old to be yuppies. Everyone there was dressed in business suits. There were a lot of unintentionally bald white men with briefcases. None of the promo stuff I’d sent them was anywhere to be seen, so I hoped that I had the wrong place. I asked the hostess, and she seemed to think I had the wrong place just by the way I looked. Then, the owner came out and he was the guy who I’d talked to about the show. He was excited that we were there, and even told us to hang one of our tour posters in the window. He told me that he wasn’t sure how stand-up comedians would go over there, but he was happy to have us. “We’re not stand-up comedians,” I told him. “We’re writers.”

“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” he told me, then walked away.

While I was talking to the owner, Rich and Janaka were checking out the menu. The cheapest thing on the menu was a seventeen-dollar salad. We were clearly booked in the wrong place.

Then, we went over to Terry’s. And I want to say that Terry wasn’t a bad guy. He was pretty friendly and he did do us a big favor in setting up a show for us. His main problem, though, was that he surrounded himself with the wrong people.

Anyway, we met up with Terry and hung out in his driveway for a while, chatting. Then, we walked up to his back door. Terry put his hand on the doorknob, turned to us and said, “Seriously, y’all, my girl’s autistic, so if she freaks out on y’all, don’t worry about it.” Then, without pausing, he walks into the house. We follow him in and his wife is standing there, looking dumbfounded, holding a young girl’s hands. It wasn’t immediately clear which one was autistic and who he meant by “his girl,” but both of them looked like they were about to freak out on us.

We went inside the house and sat down on the couch. Janaka accidentally sat on a bible. Terry handed us a book to check out. It was this expensive, full color coffee table book filled with pictures of pot plants. Then, Terry and his wife joined us and they started telling us the story about how Terry started smoking again on the day that his wife told him that she was pregnant with their daughter. They alternated telling the story, both filling in their own details, and the story had all the bitterness and aggression of a couple having a longstanding fight. And that’s exactly what they were doing: fighting. They were both being really mean to each other and expecting us to take sides, but we’d just met these people ten minutes earlier. The worse thing about the fight was that it was about having an unwanted child seven years earlier, so you know they had to have been going through this charade for the past seven years. It was so ugly that we made up an excuse and left.

We got some whiskey and went to a park and drank it. We made a bunch of jokes about the situation, and I’ve gotta give Rich and Janaka a lot of credit for not getting mad about me for setting up this reading. They understood that, whenever you schedule a tour like this, you take your chances. Sometimes, things don’t just work out.

Once we were good and whiskey-fueled, we made our way back to the fancy restaurant. The stage was upstairs, and the upstairs area wasn’t quite as upscale, but it was very trendy and very rich. It was a tough place for me to read all of my stories about working class issues. It was a tough place for Rich to read his letters to corporations. It wasn’t a place where you’d expect to see Janaka’s poetry. No one in the bar was there to see us. There were a handful of people there to see the stand-up comics, but no one to see us. We ended up hanging out with Terry and his wife and his wife’s sister, who was the spitting image of Britney Spears and who kept telling stories about “smelly black people” at Applebee’s. Dave, the guy who booked the show, brought his girlfriend and they hung out with us, too. It was a weird group to hang out with because they were all so openly hostile to each other. I got the sense that no one at the table liked anyone else at the table except Rich, Janaka, and I; we liked each other fine. The aggressiveness of the whole scene was made worse by Britney Spears’s repeated racist comments about the Applebee’s wait staff. And, just to make this perfectly clear, we were nowhere near an Applebee’s. Anyway, I borrowed a cell phone from someone at the table and called a friend of mine who lived a few hours away, in Longview, Texas. He was expecting us the next day, but he said that, if we came into town early, we could stay at his place.

Rich, Janaka, and I discussed skipping out without performing just heading to Longview and calling this night a wash. By this point, there were about thirty people in the bar, most of whom still had their business suits on and had been drinking at the bar since happy hour began five hours earlier. There were also a handful of military guys hanging out by the gambling machines. No one was there for us. But, by this time, we’d also drank about a dozen free beers and the owner wanted a show, so the show had to go on.

Janaka went first. Most of the people in the bar didn’t even look at him. He’s six foot four and screams a lot, and almost no one paid attention. Then I went up to tell my story. Terry’s wife and Britney Spears sat up front. They talked during my entire story. Some people seemed to be looking in my direction, but no one laughed when I read any of the parts that normally get a laugh. I thought about cutting the story in half with some impromptu editing, sticking just to the facts and getting through it as quickly as I could. But the owner and Terry seemed to be enjoying it, and Dave’s girlfriend was paying attention, so I went through the whole story and did my best, just for those three. Then, Rich took the stage. He read his hilarious letters and no one laughed. That made me feel a little better about no one laughing when I was on stage, but I still felt bad for Rich. Britney talked through his whole set, too.

In the end, we passed a hat and actually did okay. A few people bought books. The beer was free. And it’s true that no one heckled or booed or anything. But I’ve been heckled and booed and had shit thrown at me and everything else, and, though that sucks, it’s way better than hitting the wall of apathy that we hit that night. That was such a bummer.

The next night, we did the Texas Blues Bar in Longview, Texas. Everyone got rip-roaring drunk. I got to play pool with a dwarf. A bunch of rowdy, east Texas kids got really into the readings. They loved us. A fight broke out during Rich’s set. A kid ended up breaking his leg. It was one of my all-time favorite shows. It more than made up for the night before.

pics taken from Razorcake

If you could host a reading with any dead author, who would it be?

Probably Jim Thompson. He’s one of my favorite writers. He was smart and darkly funny, and you know that there’d be no pretension behind his performance. I never heard anything about him actually doing readings. He was more of a pulp mystery writer. But when he was a teenager, he used to do little comedy skits at a burlesque show so that he could pay for his tab there at the club. The way I see it, if you’re entertaining enough to have a strip club owner comp your drinks, you’d have to be entertaining as hell as a reader.

The stories in Glue and Ink are all written in first person, with plenty of funny author interjection and occasional stabs at mindless, contemporary fiction. What were your hopes for the book in terms of affecting readers?

I don’t know that I really thought about how the stories would affect readers. I consciously don’t write in a typical, fiction-workshop style. I’m not terribly fond of the big literary journals or the fiction that appears in them. So much of it lacks a glimpse into anyone’s soul, and so many of the writers don’t seem to try to tell a story at all. So I wanted to try to keep things on a very honest level. So many of the stories were written about true events, either in my life or in the lives of my friends. Even when the stories weren’t very factual accounts, they were very true. My goal was to present stories that would let you understand and feel what it was like to be someone else on one particular day of his or her life, to see the world from a series of very specific perspectives. And, I guess, let that affect the readers however it will.

The style of writing is straightforward and easy to understand. Yet, the stories contain complex themes and experiences that working class twenty-somethings encounter in their lives. Did you have any struggles in writing the stories this way?

Not really. Most of the stories I wrote for Glue and Ink Rebellion were originally written for punk rock magazines, so I tried to keep them as simple as possible in the narrative sense, just so the kids who read those magazines would read the stories. I pretty much wrote them exactly like I would tell them to you if we were sitting at a bar. So, in that sense, I wrote them in the simplest way I know how.

Many of the story titles appear in the stories themselves. “My Broke and Homeless Ass” is a good example. Which comes first, the stories or their titles?

The stories. It’s actually pretty lazy of me to pull the titles from the stories themselves, but sometimes I do it anyway. I never have a title in mind, though, when I write the stories. I remember being in junior high and one of my friends was telling me about an interview he’d read with Gene Simmons. Gene Simmons had said that, when he writes a KISS song, he thinks of a title and writes a song around it. I remember that even as a thirteen-year-old, I was thinking, that must be why KISS songs suck so badly.

Here's the scenario: The masonry gang has challenged the carpentry gang to a rumble at high noon, weapons included, (i.e. hot glue and staple guns for the carpenters, bricks and shovels for the masons). The battleground is a large parking lot. The weather is clear, but there's a steady wind blowing. Which side do you choose to fight on and why?

This is a tough question. If I were to bet, I’d bet on the masons. They have shovels and they lift heavy blocks all day, so they’re generally stronger and better armed. Also, most of the masonry crews I’ve known have been full of born-again Christians. Most of the carpentry crews I’ve worked on have been full of drunks. I don’t know why that’s the case. I’m not saying it’s like that world-wide. Just in the little corners of the world where I’ve worked construction. Anyway, it’s also been my experience that born-again Christians are much meaner than drunks. So I’d bet on them to win. I’d still root for the carpenters, though, because I am a carpenter. I don’t work carpentry anymore, but I worked carpentry jobs on and off from the time I was fourteen until I was thirty, and whenever you do something that much for that long, it becomes ingrained in you. In the deepest recesses of my heart and mind, I still see myself as a carpenter.

As for which side I’d fight on, though, I’d have to say neither. As much as I love carpenters, I still hate fighting. I refuse to do it. I solve problems other ways.

Glue and Ink is published by your own Gorsky Press. Tell us a little about Gorsky and what you're currently doing with it.

Well, Gorsky Press isn’t exactly my own. A group of writers and I started the press a few years ago, and some people have come and gone, but at the core of it is still my wife, Felizon, and my partner in Razorcake Magazine, Todd Taylor. The three of us pool our efforts to do Gorsky Press. But the whole point behind Gorsky Press is that we saw so much good writing in zines and independent magazines that was slipping beyond the mainstream, and, at the same time, mainstream books just seem to be getting worse. So we decided to start a press that would combine the raw honesty of personal zines, the humor that comes with people writing and not having to worry about what a literary journals or a big publishing house will think about it, and the unchecked talent that exists in the writing community at large. So we started with my novel, Drinks for the Little Guy. We took a lot of lumps and learned a lot about publishing through that book. Since we published that in 1999, though, we’ve really come a long way. We’ve been able to put out cool stuff by writers who we were fans of, but who couldn’t get published otherwise.

First, we did Rich Mackin’s book. For almost ten years, he’s been writing funny letters to corporations. Stuff like limericks for Listerine and haikus for Starbucks (“I walk down the street/ Starbucks, Starbucks, and Starbucks/ full saturation”). His stuff is hilarious, but I think it’s a little too political for mainstream publishers. He’s not afraid to confront, say, Folgers on their support of Latin American death squads. And stuff like that makes people uncomfortable when they’re reading what amounts to a bathroom book. Todd, Felizon, and I weren’t shy about that, though. We were happy to be able to publish Rich’s stuff.

Next, we went after Patricia Geary. Felizon is a huge fan of Geary’s stuff, but, after winning the Philip K. Dick award in 1987, Geary disappeared from the publishing world. It’s a long and complicated story, but a typical story of big, corporate publishers chewing up and spitting out writers. Anyway, here was this remarkable talent who had done well, made a lot of money for Harper Collins and for Bantam Books, but couldn’t get anything else published because she didn’t fit neatly into any kind of marketing niche. So we said to her, “Fuck marketing niches. Let us put out your stuff.” And that’s how we came to publish The Other Canyon. And we’re trying to keep up this spirit of putting out stuff that’s amazing, yet the mainstream publishers won’t touch it. This plan seems to be working for us.

What kinds of books can we expect in the future?

We’re releasing a new book in a few weeks. It’s an anthology of short fiction by underground writers. It’s called Punch and Pie. The name comes from that scene in the South Park movie where the guys are trying to convince people to join their revolution, so they tell them that there’ll be punch and pie. All of the writers in the book have been putting out stories and building audiences in their own way, but all of them are relatively unknown. Our plan is to put these writers together, pool their audiences, and make the book as widely available as possible. We sell it for five bucks. It’s an actual book perfect bound, full color cover, everything we even got a photographer to give us photos for each of the stories. And it’s so cheap that, hopefully, it’ll spread really good writing far and wide. We’ll see.

What is your writing schedule like?

I write all the time. Whenever I can. I write for several hours a week, though not at any particularly regimented time. Whenever I can find a few spare minutes or hours, and I have something in my mind that I want to write, I write.

Are you currently working on another novel or other stories?

I’ve been working on a novel for a few years called Crazy Broads and Dead People. It’s pretty dense right now. It’s well over eighty thousand words. A complete rough draft is written, but there are some rough patches that I need to smooth out. I’m really excited about it. I’ve also been writing a lot more non-fiction lately. Mostly essays about the US government’s desire to bomb brown people who live over oil reserves or in the way of oil pipelines. It’s not as fun to write that kind of thing, but, lately, there have been such huge gaps in what actually happens and what the US media covers that I think it’s necessary. Also, I just wrote a crazy short story that’s almost a novella, lengthwise. It’s called “Sid Harper and the Capitol of Doom.” I wrote it for Punch and Pie. I think that story is the best thing I’ve written so far.

Lastly, if you had to drink with the Hobart editors, (based on what you know about us (see: us)) what and where would you choose to drink?

How about cans of Pabst at the Punch and Pie release party?