The author, circa 2008, sitting at the table where he wrote much of his first novel.

In 2005, during my senior year of college, I petitioned one of my literature professors to allow me to do an independent study in fiction.  Over the course of a semester I wrote a handful of short stories that he would then review.  Among these were a science fiction tale about a young girl who effects a dramatic escape from a futuristic brothel by means of an enchanted flying bathtub, and a few other less memorable pieces, several of which were in fact so unmemorable that even I, the author, cannot recall them.

One stuck with me though, wedged like a popcorn kernel in the molars of my subconscious. A couple of years after graduating, cloaked in blissful ignorance, I set about the task of expanding it into a novel.  I would spend six years working on the book, eventually completing ten separate drafts. Towards the end of draft nine I began trying to find an agent, embarking on an ignominious journey that the prevailing wisdom indicated would be disheartening at best.  

“Prevailing wisdom” could be alternately translated as “earnest Googling,” the modifier being a nod to the sense of heartfelt but often rudderless intuition that guided said Googling.  In truth, earnest Googling sums up the vast majority of the resources at my disposal.

That was convoluted.  Let’s try again:  I didn’t know what the hell I was doing and there was no one around to show me the way.  I did not have a single friend who thought of herself as a serious writer.  I was not part of a writing group.  I had a literal handful (as in I could count them on five fingers) of bylines to my name, only one of which was with a publication I would consider in any way reputable.

The process of actually writing the book had been an often-torturous experience akin to meandering through a large maze constructed of mosquito-infested poison ivy hedges.  Some authors, like Mark Helprin, compare writing for hours at a stretch to drinking from a cool, clear well.  They look up only when the light starts to fade, wondering where the hours went.

That’s not me.  I’m more like Steve Almond, who I once heard describe the act of writing by talking about all the things he did to avoid it.  The laundry, the dishes… anything to avoid staring at the blank page.  Although I’ve gotten much better at self-discipline, I still fight the impulse to refresh my email every thirty seconds, or check ESPN.com when confronted with the tiniest mental block.  Perhaps, like Jonathan Franzen, I should take a screwdriver to the airport card on my writing laptop and relieve the temptation.

Psychological issues aside, I didn’t know what I was doing in a craft sense. I soon learned that holding a three hundred page story in your mind is not easy to do.  You need copious notes, or writing software that helps you track plot issues, or better yet a good old-fashioned outline which you’ve made ahead of time.  Can you guess whether or not I’d made a good old-fashioned outline ahead of time?

Around year four, in the midst of a grueling revision, I saw Jonathan Safran Foer speak in Seattle.  When he responded to an audience question about his process by claiming that, “writing is always painful.  It’s never not like pulling teeth out of my penis,” I laughed and felt a grim surge of kinship.

And then, on a day not unlike the 2,100 before it, I finally finished.  I got the characters and the plot and the dialogue to a point where everything sucked on such a less profound level than it initially had that I believed the thing was well and ready to be sent off to someone who reads for a living.  My earnest Googling had indicated that the best way to sell a novel is to do so through an agent, and that hooking an agent, if you’re going to do it without the help of a recommendation from someone who is already a client or by means of some other connection, must be done through a query letter.

I emailed out a few of these and was summarily rejected.  I got back on the horse and queried once again, kissing my fingertips before clicking SEND and winging my emails into the ether.  I queried while eating, lying down, and in class.  I queried in the morning and at night.  I fired off letters while traveling, on holiday, and while I should have been doing many other things.

Over the course of several months I would query a total of 51 agents, none of whom I had a referral for or any previous relationship with.  I was fairly discriminating in my choices, seeking out agents who had clients with books similar in tone or genre to my own manuscript.  I never contacted agents who indicated they were not accepting queries.  I personalized my letters, explaining why I was reaching out to each person, why they might hesitate before banishing my letter to the electronic slagheap of their slush pile, and otherwise tailoring my pleas so as to satisfy the advice I had received from the occasionally dubious websites and blogs geared toward aspiring novelists that provided my main source of direction.

The silence was deafening.  Out of the 51 agents I queried, 21 responded.  Of those 21 responses, 17 were form rejection letters, in many cases almost identical to those being sent out by their peers.  Of the four personalized responses, one agent requested to see some sample chapters of my work.  Elated, I sent them off.  A month later he requested the whole manuscript.  Yet more elated, I mailed a satisfyingly chunky envelope to a New York City address.  Two months later I received a form rejection email.

Having already done open-heart surgery on several of the characters, and believing in hindsight that even after all of my work the story still had significant flaws, I found that I had lost the appetite for more revisions.

I’d been a golden child for much of my life, with many of my endeavors meeting with general success despite a minimum of effort on my part.  Mine was a childhood and young adulthood unmarred by crisis.  I’d sailed along with a distinctly American trade wind at my back, composed of a confluence of talent, privilege, and luck.  None of which I could take credit for.

Given all that, I might have expected to find myself crushed when my first book failed to launch.  Instead, I have tried to take heart.  That book strikes me as the first thing that I have truly stuck with, on my own, for a period of years.  I hung on like a pit bull who won’t unclench despite being beaten with a crow bar.  My characters became a part of my thought life, their tattoos, bad choices, wild ideas and crashed motorcycles entering the very fiber of my daydreams.  I had breathed life into something, coaxing it out onto the page through huge investment and at significant mental and emotional cost.

It didn’t go anywhere.  But I still got somewhere.

This story does not end in my getting a book deal, or being meaningfully closer to getting one.  It does not end in the alleviation of my punishing student debt, or the acquisition of health insurance.  It does not end with me having been disabused of my extreme ambivalence about the American Dream, or my anxieties about my skill as a writer, or with my wife being exuberant about the fact that I continue to work part time so that I can devote significant resources to working on my second novel, though she’s been exceptionally supportive.

This story, or at least this chapter, ends instead with me having learned something about my own capability to see something through.  Furthermore, through the visceral process of struggling mightily to complete a work of art and finally succeeding in that goal, I have gained a kind of firsthand knowledge about what it is that drives me to make my art in the first place, and a clarifying sense of needing to press further in.  Of needing to write stories.

There are also practical things I have learned.  I’ll be following this post up with another at some point detailing a few of the most helpful lessons I gleaned from the process of grinding out a first novel.  For now, though, I simply bear witness to that novel, as well as to the thousands of other aspiring writers who have drunk from the mixed cup of paradox, tasting failure and success at the very same time.

The world of skateboarding lends itself to the creation of mythological figures.  Despite having been thoroughly infiltrated by corporate interests, skate culture remains grounded in a kind of psychic free zone that not even Nike can fully buy its way into—an astral plane soaked with the dark magic of lawlessness, the jazzy beauty of kinetic free association, and the weird energies of underground culture.

It is a world littered with tall-striding demigods, some of whom you have probably heard of even if you aren’t a skateboarder. But it’s the cult heroes we’re interested in today.  Tony Hawk, with his video games, clean-cut image, and technical precision has done much for skateboarding, but he will never hold the same type of appeal that the dark horses do; the Heath Kircharts and Tony Trujillos of the world, rebel punks who come by cover of night to grind their way across flaming gas station pumps or shred abandoned pools while blasting hair metal. Guys like Jamie Thomas.

Thomas fully inhabits the contradictions all living legends are heir to, be they heroes or anti-heroes.  As the owner of Zero Skateboards and Fallen Footwear, he’s managed to straddle the line between the responsibilities that come with steering a multi-million dollar brand, while also maintaining his credibility in the streets.

In addition to his successes on and off a skateboard, Thomas is a devoted family man and an open Christian, who famously designed a board featuring a simple cross emblazoned over a passage from the gospel of John.  His overt declarations of faith have brought the usual scrutiny. He has weathered accusations of hypocrisy as a leader at Zero, a brand built on the image of the rebellious loser and known for bleak, sometimes violent imagery.

At 38 years of age, Thomas has long since hit the downward slope of his skating career’s bell curve.  In a 2012 interview with Transworld Skateboarding, he spoke to feeling internally dogged by the expectation that he must quit soon.

“Skateboarding’s progressed so much.  The evolution and the progression of the actual tricks has gone far beyond anything that I could try and step to, but… I’m really inspired to want to keep skating.  I feel like I’m not supposed to keep skating.  I’m almost 38 years old and it feels like I’m supposed to slow down, supposed to stop. I really want to keep going despite that.”

Several months later, his 38^th birthday having come and gone, I asked Thomas to revisit the question of whether he is in the twilight of his career.

“I would like to say that I’m in the renaissance,” he offered.  “But I think the physical reality of how I like to skate means I’ll be in the twilight of my career until I’m done.  I’ve had some pretty catastrophic injuries.  I know what it’s like to come back from those, and you can only come back from so many.

“But I’m getting good at finding creative ways to express myself in my skateboarding. I’m getting better at risk management.  There have been different times I thought I was at the end of my career.  I mean, I thought I was in the twilight of my career in 1997-98.  Realistically, I think I am in the twilight now.  Physically, though, I feel like I could keep going for a while.”

Thomas had been chipping away at a new video part for a month, getting reconditioned to regular skating through twice weekly filming sessions at the new indoor park at The Berrics, with regular rest days in between. His decision to film an installment for the park’s Battle Commander series had necessitated putting work on the new Zero video, Cold War, on hold.

“The opportunity with The Berrics was too good to pass up.  It’s a new park, and I’m going to be the first person featured in a full-length part there.  So, I put the Zero video on hold.  I feel like the Battle Commander part has been like boot camp, getting me in shape for the Zero video.  My goal is 100% to do a full video part for the Zero video.  The only thing that could keep me from it is injuries.”

All the talk of injury and reconditioning and lingering in the twilight paints a picture of a man coming apart at the seams physically.  Watching Thomas’s Battle Commander piece dispels that idea quickly.  He continues to hurl himself through the air in ways the average 18-year-old would never dream of attempting, let alone be able to execute.

All things are relative, of course. There was a day when Thomas regularly attempted things his current body could not withstand.  Most infamously, in a stunt that has since come to be known simply as the Leap of Faith, he once attempted an ollie melon over a nearly 20 foot vertical drop at San Diego’s Point Loma High School.  I asked him about what he considers to be the highlights of his career.

“I don’t really look at the Leap of Faith as a highlight,” he countered.  “It might have encouraged some kids to jump off big stuff.  I’m not sure.  I think Welcome to Hell was a highlight.  It was a really special time for me in my life, my partnership with Ed Templeton and the other team riders.  That and Misled Youth are probably the most nostalgic times in my career.  My favorite part is my part in Dying to Live.  I think 2002 was really my peak in terms of what I had to offer on a skateboard.”

With the body’s slow decline come reflections on how one has spent one’s youth.  I probed Thomas on where skateboarding fits in the longer arc of his life.  Were there things he had put on hold in the pursuit of skating?  He responded with a meditation that might have come from the lips of any small business owner.

“This last decade has been tough.  I’ve burned a lot of hours fighting the odds, the economic situations.  I might be aging faster than I would have liked to.  I think this time, and how hard things have been, have given me a lot of insight.  They’ve made me appreciate a lot of other things in my life outside the skateboarding industry.

“Like any business or industry it’s political and can get really murky.  There are times I want to get away from it all.  I have a list of things I’d like to do in my life; learn how to be a mechanic… I’d love to live on a farm.  Right now, though, I’m so entrenched in the skateboarding world that I can’t imagine when a change would come.  I’m just so all-in.”

There is no one more fully aware of the extent to which skateboarding, originally an experiment in pure fun launched by a few bored southern California soul-surfers, has been cannibalized by corporate interests. 

“When you talk about skateboarding today,” he reminded me, “You’re also talking about Nike.  Who is running skateboarding?  For the most part, it’s large corporations.  Things move in cycles.  They always have.  Because of the infiltration of corporations, it’ll probably never go back to the way it was.”

Yet, while he acknowledged the dark influence of outside money, Thomas remained optimistic about the soul of skating. “There’s something really pure about skateboarding.  New creative people are going to come and defeat the corporate infiltration.  Creativity will always win in skateboarding. I try to stay in the streets as much as I can.  To stay with the team; To stay falling down; To stay picking myself up off the concrete.”

In talking with Thomas it became obvious that some of his responsibilities as a businessman, particularly those that keep him out of the streets, frustrate him.

“When you get so invested on the marketing end, you get away from the raw essence of skateboarding.  It’s like when you’re a musician and you’ve gotta have a Facebook, and book shows, and do all these things that don’t involve doing what you want to be doing.  Sometimes I wish I could be on the outside, juts doing it and not knowing how it works.”

Hailing as he does from southeastern Alabama, a region not known for its cultural exports, Thomas is familiar with the need for inspiration.  Yet he was reticent to give advice to younger skaters.

“I’m careful about giving out words of wisdom, because everyone’s life and situation is different.  I would say that whatever you want to do in this life, do it like there’s no tomorrow.  Commit to it 100%.  In order to progress at any one thing you have to commit.  Stay on course and persevere.  The best that my story has to offer is that I was a kid from Alabama who wasn’t supposed to make it.  I worked really hard to get my foot in the door and then took advantage of every opportunity I had.

“I’m also grateful for the mistakes I’ve made.  There are always mistakes you could live without, where you didn’t learn as much as you got hurt.  But that’s life.  That’s reality.  We’re human, we’re all broken.  You’ve got to learn to deal with that reality, to make your peace with it.”

Like any street skater, Thomas has had to make his peace with the moral gray zone of how his skating affects the property of others. Not all good street spots are owned by faceless Fortune 500 Companies. There are small business owners who don’t want their curb or bench scraped up, and fair arguments to be made by those who feel that when skaters cover public areas in wax, or grind the edges of planters into unsightly smithereens, they are defacing a public space.

I put the issue of the ethics of property destruction to Thomas.  Turns out he’s done quite a bit of thinking about it.

“There’s a thin line between right and wrong.  This is just how I deal with it; I consider the amount of damage.  Every situation that comes up, I try to make the best decision I can, and to live by the idea of treating your brother as you want to be treated.  I look at stuff like, ‘What’s the amount of damage I’m going to cause?  Who owns this?  How are they going to feel when they see what I’ve done?  How would I feel if it was my place?’

“When I broke the window at the bank in New Blood, I sent an anonymous letter.  I got a quote for a window that size, called the bank, got the manager’s name, and sent an anonymous letter with 500 dollars cash.  I took a picture of myself mailing it, in case they saw me in the video later.

“I feel like I was raised by my parents with a set of morals and values.  I’ve tried to evaluate that and establish my own moral compass and set of values.  If I feel I cross the line with someone, I try to make it right.”

This seemed a natural segue into talking about the pressures of being a highly visible Christian. I asked him whether he has felt that people are desperately hoping he succeeds, or desiring to see him fail.

“I’ve felt both,” he said.  “The more I talk about it, the more people are going to find things that are contradictory about what I say.  I’m a flawed human and no matter how hard I try to be perfect, I’m not going to be.  I just try to be the best person I can be, based on the words I find meaningful, which is largely the Bible.  I’ve tried to walk in line with what everyone wants me to be, and it hasn’t worked out.  It hasn’t made people happy.”

I asked Thomas if he cared about his legacy.

“I think it’s somewhat narcissistic to think you can control your legacy,” he said without hesitating.  “It is what it is.  I try to lead by example.  I try to make the best decisions I can and live the way that seems right.  If that ends up being worth remembering, then it is.  If it’s not, it’s not.”

We’d reached the end of our time. Thomas had reached his destination, and it was time to sign off and go thrash. As I hung up, I was overtaken by the distinct, bracing feeling of having spoken with someone who was not concerned with telling me what I wanted to hear—only with being true to himself.

But in reflecting on that strategy over recent weeks, and on the focus that comes with it, I’ve been reminded of how trying to zero in on how others have done what they’ve done can quickly become an exercise in despair and envy. While I remain confident that the niche aim of this blog, to ferret out information and inspiration about the art of making art, is a worthwhile endeavor, I’ve also been reminded that part of trying to foster endurance and hope while getting sandblasted by the storm-clouds forever hovering above the creative path demands that we not only get down to brass tacks about the practical aspects of how lofty goals get accomplished in the real world (“How do I put myself in the right place at the right time?; …actually get the first draft of my novel out onto the page?; …pursue an internship?; …build my network?; …figure out where to start in making a film?”), but also remember to continually surround ourselves with good work.

You know, garbage in garbage out. You can only read so many blog posts about how to develop your personal network or increase your creative output before starting to wonder how the tines of that fork lying on the counter over there would feel if you jammed them into your eyeball.

Enter Brian Phillips, a staff writer for Grantland operating in his own self-contained nexus zone at the edge of mainstream American sports reporting. Folks, this is the kind of writing that makes me want to keep writing. Phillips combines Grantland’s colloquial style with his own ephemeral touch to create work that is honest without being self-important, and funny without feeling vacuous. The site, a subsidiary of ESPN, offers up long-form reporting and features on pop culture and sports. In addition to an expected focus on the most popular topics in modern American sport—football, basketball, baseball, and the personalities and exploits of the athletes and owners who populate their respective national leagues—the editors make room for a healthy range of fringe coverage. This is the realm Phillips operates in.

His first passion is soccer, which he covers with vigor and pathos for both Grantland and The Run of Play, where he serves as editor. But Phillips is not daunted by the constraints of expertise. He seems up for anything, bringing the same razor wit and eye for humanity to his coverage of the National Rodeo Finals as he does to his take on the current state of world-wide soccer in the wake of Europol’s recent damning report on match-fixing. Two of my favorite pieces he’s written over the last year include his reflections on Felix Baumgartner’s mind-blowing astronaut skydive, and his epic five-part series of dispatches from Wimbledon.

I have a clear memory of the first time I saw Andy Barron.  It was a warm evening in late August, 2001, and I was lying in bed. It was my first night away at college.  Just as I was about to fall asleep, the door of my dorm room cracked open and someone slunk inside, attempting to be quiet.

I knew that one of my two roommates was named Andy.  We’d even spoken briefly on the phone ahead of move-in day.  But I had no idea what he looked like.  Being the shrewd fellow that I am, I feigned sleep.  I figured if I was about to be robbed by a malingering undergraduate taking advantage of unattended belongings during the chaos of move-in week, I would wait until he got closer and then brain him with my alarm clock.

Instead, the shadowy figure clambered up the edge of the bunk bed, shaking it crazily in the process, such that if I had been asleep I would have woken in a panic thinking an earthquake had struck, and proceeded to fling a guitar bearing a Jimmy Eat World sticker onto the mattress along with a backpack and various other sundry items before climbing back down and immediately leaving again.  Two days later I found out it was Andy.

The phrase “one thing led to another” seems to have been invented for Andy, who by now has been making his living as a graphic designer, photographer, tour manager, press wrangler and videographer for over a decade.  He has toured extensively with Switchfoot and Foster The People, and has taken captivating photographs, perusable on his website, of everyone from The Jonas Brothers to Paper Route.

Of all the artists I’ve had occasion to know, he is one of the least pretentious, least neurotic, and least anxious.  He comes across as being singularly unconcerned with whether or not people find him, or what he “is into,” to be sufficiently cool.  Which makes him a very easy person to be around in an industry generally rife with insecure men and women desperately trying to manage others’ impressions of them.

We corresponded via email.


I can still remember the original Switchfoot tour poster that featured your photos and jump-started your relationship with the band.  Can you retell that story in your own words?

I have distinct memories of driving in the desert towards Vegas with my parents and wearing out a copy of Learning To Breathe in my discman. They were one of the first bands that I really loved.  I went into college as an audio production major because I somehow wanted to be involved in the making of music.  I took a job as a photographer at my college paper to help pay the bills, and I eventually ended up covering a Switchfoot show for said paper.  I ended up running into some friends there and weaseled my way backstage, and eventually on stage shooting photos.  After writing the concert review and putting a photo in the paper, a few copies made their way to Switchfoot’s management, and eventually to the band.  I then met up with their drummer Chad and talked photos over In-N-Out burgers, and eventually decided that I should come shoot some more for them.  The relationship just kind of grew from there.  I ended up designing a few posters, shooting more shows, then eventually spending about 4 years on and off the road with them.  It was amazing.

Was there a point at which you had a light-bulb moment, and believed you could provide for yourself full-time as a designer and photographer? 

There was a moment after that first year in college where I was at my parents house making a bulletin for the church I went to at the time.  Pretty sure whatever program I was in had the graphics and computing power of MS Paint.  My dad came in and asked what I was doing and I showed him and he said something like, ‘I knew you’d always end up doing something creative or with design.’  It literally wasn’t until that moment where I thought, ‘wait a second… I could do this as a college major and a job?’  I seriously felt like an idiot for not figuring that out sooner, but feeling like an idiot is something I’m great at, so that makes sense.

Was it an intentional goal that you’d worked towards for a long time, or did it feel more like something that you fell into or that resulted from being in the right place at the right time?

I definitely fell into it, as I kind of do with most things.  After that first year in college I switched to being an art/design major and then it was a month later that all this stuff with Switchfoot happened.  It was definitely a confirmation that, ‘Okay, yeah, maybe I am doing what I should be doing.’

You now work with Foster The People.  How did that come about?  

The two guys who manage the band and I went to the same college. Once they started working with Foster The People, they quickly realized they needed someone out on the road to help manage all of the radio and press interviews they had going on.  This wasn’t exactly what I had done in the past, but I knew just building a relationship with the band is something that could potentially lead to having them bring me out to only shoot for them, and sure enough that happened.  I seriously love all those guys.  They are the best.

I’ve spoken with a lot of people about the different ways that luck, talent, and discipline converge to allow people to find success.  I know you to be quite talented.  Could you talk about how luck and/or discipline have played a role in your success?

I definitely feel very lucky.  Hands down.  A bunch of my friends always joke that I just fall kind of ass-backwards into these amazing situations and scenarios, and it’s kinda true.  I’m not sure how to say that and not seem like an idiot, but oh well.  I’ve definitely already established my idiot-ness.

This guy Barry Lopez, one of my favorite authors, has a story where he talks about the experience of photographing a polar bear.  He was on a boat in the Arctic and they were following the bear, and after getting some good shots he went back to his cabin and reflected on the fact that during the experience of photographing the bear he had not been able to actually be present in the moment with the bear.  This seems to happen a lot with us these days.  We whip out our iPhones and document something rather than simply BEING THERE and experiencing the moment.  Do you feel that the need to photograph things, whether in the form of a professional responsibility or a personal compulsion, ever gets in your way of being fully present to a moment in time?

As a photographer, I love documenting people and things, and it so happens to pay my bills.  That said, I definitely feel like hiding behind an iphone or looking through a viewfinder is not the most ideal way to experience something.  This is not to say that when I go to a show I don’t whip out my phone and take a couple pictures and maybe a video or two, but I definitely am conscious of trying to actually hang up and hang out.  One of my favorite things is actually catching photos of friends on their phones and posting it with that exact phrase, hang up and hang out.  I understand that me taking a picture and then posting it requires me to then in fact be on my phone, so this may be a flawed experiment, but whatever, it’s funny.

You have a huge vinyl collection, which tells me that you appreciate physical artifacts. Your work gets shared through the internet, and so much of photography in general now exists in the digital realm.  How do you feel about that tension between physicality and pixels? 

I embrace pixels with open arms.  My vinyl collection and my occasional lack of money to buy groceries due to said vinyl collection will maybe say otherwise, but no, for reals, pixels are cool.  Most people that even know or care about any of the work I do is due in large part to pixels and social media, so I am totally fine with it.  That said, there is definitely something about tactile things that I will never get sick of.  Going to a record store (which I will do later today, and don’t worry Mom, I have food in the fridge and I am spending my gift certificates to Amoeba I got on my birthday to buy records) and seeing the different imagery, ideas, and artifacts people come up with is a constant source of inspiration to me.  I go to record stores and wander around a lot actually.  I secretly think the people who work there look at me walk in and go, ‘Oh, it’s that one guy who is always in here again.’  But they probably don’t think that and I’m an idiot. Crap, why does every answer of this thing end up with me being an idiot.

Los Angeles is often maligned as a shallow place.  Has that been your experience?  What are the drawbacks and advantages of being situated in L.A. as an artist?

It was really funny because my whole life up through college, LA was a place to go visit and do fun things in, but the idea of living here had never really occurred to me.  I had enough friends move here through the years that I thought I would give it a try, and I am so glad I did.  I have found LA to still be rough around the edges, but filled with really great people, and a community that I am so happy to be a part of.  LA is great because I feel like I meet people everyday that do the most interesting and exciting things, and it’s so fun to be a part of it.

Anything you wish you could go back and tell your 18-year-old self when you were just starting out?

Don’t be afraid to ask for what you want.

^^^^^
photo: Foster The People / Andy Barron

My draft board, I am told (although it may be myth), had, of all draft boards in the United States, the highest proportion of men killed in Vietnam—where, incidentally, my godfather, the photographer Robert Capa, was the first American to die, though he was a Hungarian and had nothing to do with the Hudson. The area was salted with military institutions—West Point, military academies, veterans’ hospitals—and old soldiers, including even, when I was young, some from the Civil War. The play of the boys was guerilla warfare in the extensive woods. Every stranger was a threat, an enemy. Indeed, there were a lot of bad apples around—escaped convicts from Sing Sing (twice as I remember), standard criminals, gangs in the fifties, child molesters (a beautiful little girl was taken from my third-grade schoolyard and raped and beaten over a period of many hours), and hoboes (not Shakespearian woodwinds) on the rail line that was the geographical locus of my childhood. I ran wild through all this, protected by my paranoia, by my sharply-honed guerilla skills, and by a rather extensive arsenal. Had you turned me upside down and shaken me, the floor would have looked like a military museum after an earthquake.

- Mark Helprin, The Paris Review

^ ^ ^

As an interviewer, the art of asking good questions, drawing out reticent interviewees, and eliciting Thoughtful Thoughts is a source of constant interest for me. I am fascinated by the strategies employed by well-known hosts, journalists, and at-large interviewers as they seek to alternately woo, cajole, flatter, and berate their subjects.

I mean, did you watch Oprah’s Lance Armstrong interview? Did you feel, like me, that she gave him a pass on the option of whether he was going to “talk about other people,” or fail to press him on when, if ever, he was going to offer real, honest-to-God personal apologies to the people whose lives he knowingly and viciously sought to ruin?

Or maybe you’re a Larry King guy, or a Charlie Rose gal. Maybe you listen to a lot of NPR and have become a cataloger of Tom Ashbrook’s (On Point) idiosyncratic tics, or a devotee of Jian Ghomeshi’s (Q) velvet delivery, or a rapt consumer of Terry Gross’s (Frrrrrrrrrrrresh Air) intimate moments with Famous Voices (did you listen to the one where Maurice Sendak wept on air?)

Whether we read The Seattle Times in the morning, watch FOX News each evening, or devour every issue of The New Yorker, we all get much of our information about the larger world through sources that have been interviewed. People ask other people questions, and the answers they elicit inform us about what is happening down the street or across the globe, or at least reveal something of what it means to be inside the interviewee’s head. Interviewing, it turns out, is but a formalized version of that most basic human relational act, the conversation.

Yet formalized it is, and while the strictures and rules of interviewing are loose and often broken, they still exist. My own learning curve has been somewhat steep. For example, during one recent interview I failed to adhere to one of the most important tenets of the craft, Don’t Ask Vague Seven-Part Questions That Take Forty-Five Seconds To Spit Out.

Violating DAVSPQTTFFSTSO is a rookie move, but at least one that only tends to haunt me during live interviews. It’s much harder to bungle things quite so badly, or at least in quite the same way, when you’re conducting a written interview, via e-mail or, in the past, post. People tend to be more concise when responding to written questions or prompts (remember that dodge Jacob Bannon gave me in response to violence in hardcore?)

But not always.

Enter Mark Helprin, the lauded novelist responsible for works like Refiner’s Fire, Memoir From Antproof Case, and Winter’s Tale. I recently came across an interview with Helprin, quoted above, conducted 20 years ago by James Linville via a combination of both letter and telephone (no mean feat to marry those two) and subsequently published in The Paris Review. It may be the single most fascinating, audacious, quasi-believable, gloriously verbose, milkshake-snortingly hilarious interview I have ever read. In the spirit of my reflection on the art of the interview, it seems a fitting note to end on.

^ ^ ^

Before my first book was published, I gave it to John Cheever to read with the hope that he would review it for The New York Times Book Review. I still have the contract for the book, a slim volume of short stories published by Alfred A. Knopf, who at the time was still paddling about the hallways of the institution after which he was named. Even though the first printing was only five thousand copies, I had appended to the document a table of royalties that accounted for sales of up to one hundred million. I managed to sell three thousand copies of the first edition, which was not as good a performance as I had anticipated. My hopes lived on, however, as I had not had the opportunity to market the work in India, China, South America, Africa, or Russia, not to mention Indonesia, Japan, and many other places where, all told, billions of people make their homes to this very day.

I assumed that Cheever would read the book, think it was magnificent, review it in awe, and that it would therefore be placed on the front page of the book review. This, needless to say, would help in boosting total sales toward the one-hundred-million mark—although, I must admit, I’ve been on the front page many times now (though I may never be again), and sales have not been quite that robust.

- Mark Helprin

My piece about Patrick deWitt is running in the current issue of Willamette Week.  The Sisters Brothers, deWitt’s stark western novel about a pair of fraternal assassins, is very good.  But, in the words of Levar Burton, don’t take my word for it.  Take the word of D.V. DeVincentis.

While working on the article, I corresponded via email with DeVincentis, one of the writers responsible for adapting Nick Hornby’s novel High Fidelity for the screen.  It was DeVincentis who, following a chance encounter, started a chain of events that eventually connected deWitt to a literary agent.

DV laid out the story of that night, and the subsequent experience of getting deWitt’s manuscript in the mail, in some detail.  Editorial constraints prevented me from using all of it in the newspaper, but I immediately knew it was too good to keep to myself.  I asked DV if he’d be open to my posting it here, as a bit of bonus material.  He said, yes.

^ ^ ^

I was sitting at a bar in Hollywood at around 3:30 or 4 am. Bars in LA close at 2, so it can be assumed that there was stupid shit going on and no one was supposed to be there. Some guy came up to me and asked me if I was me, which I confirmed.  He told me he liked my writing, and that he was also a writer, and would I read something that he’d wrote. This guy was on the other side of the bar, so he held all the power in the setting. I told him sure, I’d read it. He gave me a drink, I gave him my address and forgot about it.

Some days later I walked from my front door to my mailbox, still in my pajamas. In the mailbox I found a manila envelope, in which was a printed manuscript from somebody. It took a minute to put it together that it had been sent to me by that guy in that bar. I’d assumed it would be a script, because I write scripts and we live in Hollywood, where everyone, including me, has a script, and deludes themselves with the idea that all they have to do is give it to total strangers and they’re life will change as a result. But it wasn’t a script, it was a book, and it was long. Or longer than a script, which any book has a right to be.

Odds and experience said that this would be a terrible book. This is because almost all books and scripts and audition tapes and demo tapes are terrible. This isn’t cynicism. This terrible ratio is why we enjoy good things so much when they show up. The unique situation in which I’d received the manuscript made the prospects of it being any good even more hopeless than usual. I decided right there that I would take the manuscript directly to the recycling bin 20 yards away with the rest of the unsolicited contents of my mailbox and toss it, but that I’d be a real sport and read what I could of it along the path there.

By the time I got to the bin my head was already deep into what this bar-back was putting down in his book. I stood there reading for about 40 minutes, the manuscript laid out on top of the stinky recycling bin, before finally realizing that I should just take it inside and finish it.

The book was gripping, hilarious, harrowing. And it was very real, and it was a book, not some dipshit screenplay written as a misguided get-rich scheme or indulgent mumblecore memoir. In other words, I was jealous. Thoughts inevitably turned to finding this guy and killing him then changing the name on the title page to mine, moving to the Northeast or -west and becoming a serious artist in a shawl-collar sweater. His address was right there on the envelope. Instead I decided to make it my mission to get this book to someone who could help get it published.

It’s rare to read something from someone totally unknown that’s extraordinary writing. Sure, every great writer was unknown at some point, but that’s a retrospective idea; you’re rarely there when he or she is both great and unknown. In truth, I got off a little on the idea of being anything like a midwife to the success of something this good.

I called a close friend in New York, guitarist Matt Sweeney, who is one of those rare people who happens to almost always be acquainted with the best person in any field. He’s like a department store of human excellence. I told him about the book, and he immediately knew this heavy guy in publishing who should get it and could do something with it, if he liked it. We got it to that guy, and that guy understood how good this thing was, and I think things got much easier from there.

- D.V. DeVincentis, 5 November, 2012

If you’ve ever experienced the mixed blessing of attending a show at Chain Reaction, the all-ages rock club located in an Anaheim strip mall that trafficks in horny tween-punks, screamo bills six bands deep, and the drama which this volatile combination predictably ignites, you will resonate with the somewhat incongruous feeling I had on the evening during my senior year of college when I first saw a band called The Colour.  Contrary to Chain norms, nobody onstage was screaming, skanking, or Nazi-stomping.  Nobody had pink hair, giant tribal plugs in their ears, or a safety pin through their lip.  The guitars weren’t even distorted.

Which is not to say that there wasn’t some serious movement taking place up on the boards.  The front man, Wyatt Hull, was in fact gyrating quite a bit, but it was a sinuous, hip-swiveling affair, more Elvis Presley than Fat Mike.  I remember him looking a lot like Jim Morrison, and engaging in a lot of interpretive tambourine while the rest of the band churned out a sort of Bravery-inflected indie disco.

It was not bad. But it did not, as they say, grab me.

Which is probably why it took me five years to give We Barbarians the time of day.  Formed out of The Colour’s ashes by guitarist David Quon, drummer Nathan Warkentin, and bassist Derek Van Heule, the group draws obvious comparisons to Radiohead. There’s a dash of U2 in the mix as well, that combination of soaring ephemerality and angular grit.  None of which I knew, given that the men of We Barbs had released a full length and an EP and toured to hell and back and been highly touted by my taste-making Long Beach friends before finally, one day, bored to tears at work, I decided to give their Headspace EP a spin.

I quickly realized that my misgivings about their sonic baggage were unfounded and had contributed to a near miss.  I became obsessed, listening to the EP over and over again.  Later that summer, at my wedding, the bridal party walked down the aisle to “Chambray.”  I could go on, but I suppose that kind of sums up my feelings on the subject nicely.  I really like this band.  Look for them in 2013.

^^^

photo: Oliver Walker

At Ragged Band, our focus has historically been on emerging or recently established artists. Their struggles, their successes, their specific stories. In speaking with folks who are still early in their careers, we’ve pursued the hope that connecting readers to the reality of what it’s been like for the normal, mortal, flawed men and women we profile and interview to try to make their dreams come true, in hearing what they’ve had to go through and what wisdom, if any, they’ve gained on the journey, there might be encouragement for those still dreaming into the void.

What’s become apparent over the course of many conversations is that there are three realities linking all “successful” artists. Three common threads running through the stories of every writer, painter and photographer who ends up sticking with their craft over the long haul and enjoying some level of success, as defined by compensation and recognition for their work, those threads being luck, talent, and discipline. The novelist Michael Chabon famously stated that out of these three there is only one that an artist has any control over.

Interviewers and critics often introduce Chabon or his work by saying, “He has been called one of the most talented writers of his generation.” Which would be hard to dispute. He is that rare writer who is both respected by the literary establishment and also sells a shit ton of books.  The story of his meteoric rise is, on one hand, demoralizing for the unpublished novelist seeking encouragement. At the age of 24, Chabon submitted the completed novel he’d written for his final thesis in the MFA Program at UC Irvine. His adviser read it over the weekend and submitted it to his own literary agent without telling Chabon. The agent, Mary Evans, landed the young writer a $155,000 advance. The book became a bestseller.

Chabon went on to write numerous other smash hits including Wonder Boys, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, and The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. He’s written for Disney.  Wes Anderson thanked him in the credits to Moonrise Kingdom.  Do you even care why?  He was up there, on the big screen, getting thanked by the man who dreamed up Ari and Uzi.

On the other hand, before most of the success of the last 25 years, following the initial whirlwind that roared around his first book, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Chabon spent seven years of his life working on a second novel that he ultimately abandoned after writing over 1,500 pages.  In other words, he failed.  Colossally.

A couple of years ago McSweeney’s published four chapters from that dead book, the working title of which had been Fountain City, along with Chabon’s personal annotations in which he comments on both the text and his life at the time of the writing.  In the preface to this extended excerpt Chabon reflects on the idea of artistic failure, before offering four ambivalent “rules” on novel writing, each of which he admits to breaking, save the last.  We’ve excerpted a lengthy passage below, in the knowledge that most of you aren’t going to be getting your hands on an out of print McSweeney’s back issue anytime soon.

For further reading and background on Chabon’s life, check out Manhood for Amateurs, his collection of essays on being a father, son and husband.

^ ^ ^

Excerpted from

Fountain City: A Novel, Wrecked

by Michael Chabon

McSweeney’s Issue 36

If only, I have since often thought… If only I possessed whatever was required to finish that book, to redeem that lost promise, to finish what I had begun.  If only I could have found, to paraphrase Beckett, a better way to fail.

Because I believe in failure; only failure rings true.  Success is an aberration, a random instance devoid of meaning.  The extraction from my head of the summertime Pittsburgh novel by the dream-thieving ray of the New York Publishing Entity, and its subsequent “successful” publication, taught me nothing useful about the world,* nothing (apart from some fresh lessons in my own vanity) that felt remotely useful to understanding myself, that floundering, temporizing, procrastinating, rationalizing, frequently inert waster of time.

Furthermore, as with the scientist, the chef, the parent, as with anyone caught up in the practice of art—that distillation of the human enterprise, which is, at its simplest, a business of paying attention—failure instructs the writer.  Every novel, in the moments before we begin to write it, is potentially the greatest, the most beautiful or thrilling ever written; but in the long dying fall after we have finished it (if we finish it), every novel afford us, with the generosity of a buffalo carcass affording meat, hide, bone, horn and fat, the opportunity toe measure precisely, at our leisure, the distance between it and that L’Enfantesque dream.  Our greatest duty as artists and as human is to pay attention to our failures, to break them down, study the tapes, conduct the postmortem, pore over the findings; to learn from our mistakes.

And so for a long time after that novel failed I tried, as natured fitted me to do, to extract some valuable lesson, some use from the failure of Fountain City.

1. Writer smaller books.  Fountain City took place on three continents, in two cities (one fictional), over a long period, with an omniscient narrator, and featured numerous characters and settings.  Wonder Boys, like my first novel, took place in sweet, little old Pittsburgh, with a small cast of characters, over an even narrower scope of time: a single weekend.

This lesson was ignored in favor, and failed to stand up to the example, of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, and so I subsequently discarded it for:

2. Trust your gut.  I had known fairly soon after beginning work on the book, within the first twelve to eighteen months, that something about it was, in the technical parlance of writers, fucked.  My hero was too passive.  His grief was too vague.  I knew nothing about how architects really worked and yet was, myself, too passive to figure out how to remedy my ignorance.  Et cetera.  Often when I sat down to work I would feel a cold hand take hold of something inside my belly and refuse to let go.  It was the Hand of Dread.  I ought to have heeded its grasp.

But I had taken a sizable advance for Fountain City from the publisher of my first novel.  If I abandoned the book, I worried, I might have to repay that money.  I might fall prey to the black arts of lawyers.  On the other hand, I used to worry, sitting down to try to render less vague my protagonist or less germane my ignorance of the practice of architecture, what if the only reason that I daily persevered, in spite of my regular massage sessions under the Hand of Dread, was fear, mere financial panic?  How could such a motive possibly be the healthy basis for artistic creation?  Clearly, therefore, when Fountain City failed, the lesson of that failure was:

3. Don’t take advances; sell your work only when it is complete.  A monetary obligation to one’s publisher places all kinds of undue pressure, both subtle and overt, on the writer, chief among them the aforementioned pressure to persist on a fucked project well beyond the point of reason.  The pressure of an advance puts the writer into the frame of mind that keeps a nation, for example, after vast expenditure of moral, human, and financial treasure, fighting a war for years beyond even the most delusive hope of victory.  And yet writers need money, the same as everyone else, and when it becomes available they are no less likely than anybody else to take it.  If you had a family to support, and hoped to buy not only food, clothing, and Polly Pocket So Hip Cruise Ship play sets, but also some time in which actually to write novels, refusing to take advances meant you had to be wealthier, more optimistic, stronger-willed, or far better at managing your time than most of the writers I knew.  Therefore:

4. Persevere.  Because in later years, as I worked first on The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and then on The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, for both of which I accepted generous advances from publishers, the Hand of Dread returned, many, times, to entwine its chill fingers among my inward organs.  many times while writing those books, I felt myself overwhelmed with panic, doubt, a certainty of failure.  If I had chosen to learn from lesson 2, I would have laid both books aside before I wasted as much time on them as I had on Fountain City.  And yet I had stumbled onward, written myself around or through or out of my doubt and difficulty, finishing the books as well as I could manage to finish them, and moving on to the next.

* How to Win the Lottery: First, purchase a winning lottery ticket.

© Michael Chabon 2010

I went to grad school with Joshua Longbrake, but I never got to know him.  We said hello in passing a few times, but didn’t ever get around to sitting down to a substantive conversation.  Then he moved to Chicago shortly before I left town for Portland. I’ve kept tabs on him through his blog.

And what a blog it is.  Quixotic, unapologetic, often poignant, occasionally weird. A runaway winner for the Ragged Band 2012 Blog of the Year Award.

Longbrake is a talented photographer who has made his living taking pictures, but he’s also passionate about writing and speaking.  He’s got a particular facility for examining the interplay between art and faith; those gray lines delineating the space between hope and despair, depravity and holiness.  Lines that weave like a drunk and at times disappear completely.  He’s the kind of dude who loves Tom Waits.  In fact, he’s recently given a series of lectures that included one devoted to old Tom.

If you’ve ever had cause to revisit why it is that you make art in the first place, or found yourself grinding and grinding, doing shit work in the hopes it will lead to something bigger and better, all with the dream of someday getting your big break, you need to read his essay on the idea of giving up.