A couple weeks ago, I wrote a column for McSweeney's Internet Tendency on Amish/Christian romance, "Ten Thousand Zombies in Bonnets." I wrote at some length on the models who grace the covers of these books, idly wishing that someday I might have the chance to talk to one, ask her all the questions I have.

Today is that day. Through the magic of the Internet, Claire DeBerg, actual Amish romance cover model, has graciously agreed to answer some of my questions.

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Let's start off with the question that I'm sure we're all thinking: Are you a zombie?

Wow, you really cut to the chase. I thought we’d ease into that question over the course of our conversation. Let me answer with some insights so you can come to your own conclusion: I have spent a considerable amount of my life rocking in place with bloodshot eyes, and I may or may not have had drool extending from my mouth to the floor. But usually during those hours of Ultimate Rocking Monotony I had a baby in my arms, and it was occurring at an un-sane hour of the day like 3:06 am, so there’s that.

I see what you did there.

I have also been known to describe my children as tasty little morsels though I have yet to fully test that insight. And while I’m not entirely undead, I’ve oft described myself as having an old soul since I’ve lived a lot of life already by age 35 (but that’s an interview for another time).

Given what you know now…are you absolutely sure I’m not a zombie?

I'll just go with "not entirely undead." Okay, so, Amish romance cover modeling. Here's you on the cover of Beverly Lewis's The Prodigal. How did you get the chance to actually model for this book? Do you have an agent or know someone involved in the cover shoot? Is there like some sort of special classified section that lists job opportunities like this?

I am a model for a variety of different segments of our society: those who indulge in Amish romance novels, for instance, and those that want to, say, buy a tent at Target…or buy a lure! I was in a commercial for Rapala once.

But I digress.

I hadn’t honestly thought of doing modeling, especially after my friend in high school once snorted and said: “Models get paid to make other people feel bad.” Turns out that’s not true, but what is true is you get to choose what you consume in the media and then you even get to choose how to feel about it (gasp!). If you choose to give models the power to make you feel bad, well, then, good luck with that. While there are women who are super tall and super skinny they are not the majority of models…those women are the runway models and they’re incredibly fierce and awesome at what they do.

In fact, the vastly tall, terribly skinny profile is precisely what places like Target and Best Buy (the two largest retailers in Minneapolis) are not looking for in models. They want people who look normal…like the segment of the population they want to reach with their advertising...the people they want to buy their products (which is the overwhelming majority of the population). Not to say that those long and lean giants don’t buy towels at Target and TVs at Best Buy, but do those retailers want their ads to look like New York’s Fashion Week? No way. They want normal moms, nice dads. Ho-hum. So I guess what I’m saying is: I’m pretty normal looking. I’m not emaciated, and I’m not over 5 feet 9 inches (I’m 5 foot 8½ inches [but who’s measuring, right?]).

Let me pause briefly to thank you for using double parentheticals ([]). It's like the dependent clause version of Inception. Okay, continue.

So when an agent approached me from a modeling and talent agency (actually she came up to me on the dance floor at a wedding while I was possibly channeling a bit too much Elaine Benes), I considered her offer for a week or so and eventually decided, “Well, this could be fun.” And it has been fun because I’m not competing with anyone. I am reminded of the distinction between competing in a cross country race in high school because I had to and then years later just going out for a run around a lake…because I wanted to. The feeling of joy in the choice is incomparable. With modeling I’m at the run around a lake stage—I do it because I can and because it is fun and because I want to (plus the fringe benefits are pretty fantastic).

I’m 35, and I have some seriously delicious plans and dreams that don’t include wearing blankets of makeup and getting fitted for a shoot with clothes I’d never buy. Because I keep the opportunity to model fun, it remains a wonderful way to learn about the industry from a different view. Plus I can earn extra money (and yes, it pays very well but I’m too polite to talk dollar signs). I will say, though, that each of my family members has landed modeling gigs (my husband for Medtronic, my daughter for Tony’s Pizza, my son for Huggies) and we’re beautiful and we’re normal.

The singular reason I was approached was because the agent felt I looked the part that production houses are currently seeking: ethnically ambiguous. Am I Latina? Am I Greek? Am I Native? Am I Caucasian? Am I Middle Eastern? Am I Italian? Am I Brazilian? What’s your guess?

Didn't we cover this with the "not entirely undead" ethnic designation above? Although, I'm assuming that's not quite what they were going for.

Well, turns out it doesn’t really matter what ethnicity I actually am (I’m Cherokee) because it is a boon that I can’t be pegged by any one group. So I am accepted by nearly all groups.

Maybe for this Amish book cover the question posed to my agency was: Does she look Pennsylvania Dutch? When my agent sent me an email to see about my interest in modeling for this book cover, I knew she’d sent the same email to all her talent that fit her profile needs. She sought a woman, in her mid-30s, dark hair, dark eyes….AND the model needed to appear as the aged character from previous books in the series. In my agent's long list of talent she could narrow her email to a handful of potential models.

I let her know that yes, I could make the shoot dates work so then she sent me requests for very specific headshot poses as per the publisher:

• Facing camera, non-smiling
• Side profile, non-smiling
• Side profile, hair up
• Front, hair down

So apparently these pictures got me the job (thanks to my dear, sweet husband, Darren, who happens to be a really excellent photographer).

So explain what the process of actually shooting this was like. How long did it take? How many people were involved? How often did the photographer tell you to "look more wistful?" Did they put you in Amish shoes and socks, or just clothing from the waist up? How uncomfortable was your neck at the end of it?

This was a very interesting shoot. It took place in the photographer’s studio, which is located in his quite beautiful, spacious home, in the suburbs of Minneapolis. I was the only one on camera…there was no other talent there so I wasn’t able to swoon in reality to the hunky Amish chap in the background of the final cover.

So it was me, the photographer, the hair/makeup/wardrobe assistant, and the publisher hanging out on set. The assistant was very perfumey and adorable and when she wasn’t texting she was snapping her gum and explaining how she pretty much knows how to “do” authentic Amish hair because according to her rough calculations she has done the hair for “a million of these covers.” I went into the bathroom to get changed into my plain clothes and taped all over the mirror were several pictures of Amish women stuck there as inspiration. Since Amish people regard photographic images of themselves as sin given the 2nd commandment, all the pictures are of Amish women shot from very, very far away.

I put on my dress (backwards, at first…turns out the small buttons go in the front, not the back) and my little v-shaped coverlet, which goes over the chest like a chevron. I was actually wearing mukluks for the first few shots (I live in Minnesota, Jordan, mukluks are the winter uniform) but then the crew wanted me to do some slow turning and spinning so I ended up barefoot by the end of the shoot.

I love dressing up—and more specifically I like playing dress-up in costume-ish kinds of clothing over dressing up in fancy garb which is why this particular job was appealing to me. One idiosyncrasy about me is I do so love fashion, but I so do not love shopping. I’d rather eat my own hands than “go shopping” (as though shopping were a recreational sport). You’d think online shopping was my personal savior…alas, the types of clothing I like to wear can’t be discovered online. When I do find myself perusing the rack at my local consignment shop I specifically look for items that hang funny on the hanger or don’t look right on the hanger or have buttons in awkward places or a ridiculously scooped, open-backed situation or have zippers where no zippers need be. I like individual pieces of clothing and then bringing several pieces together to create some outrageous outfit that I can safely assume will not be on anyone else I might meet.

This is why I loved this Amish book cover shoot so much: because I was in costume. Most of the modeling jobs I land, wardrobe sends an email with a list of your own clothes to bring to set—but this was fun because it was character work and I gravitate to this kind of guise.

Anyway, before the camera shutter went haywire, the publisher caught me up on the premise of the novel…Leah, the main character and the woman I would represent, is raising her sisters after their mother has died and is faced with myriad challenges with her sisters: a stillborn baby, a young widow, a wayward youth, lots of family secrets, and barely time to think of falling in love herself. He asked for my deepest concerns in my personal life to emerge in how I held my body and let my face be the stoic yet hopeful answer showing tentative resolve.

Hold on, quick recap. He wanted, in one single expression: specific, multi-layered grief, loneliness, deep concern, stoicism, hope, and tentative resolve.

Did it come across? I’ve never had his kind of intense direction on a set previously. After two hours of turning and craning my neck and holding still, and drawing my brows down or smiling ever so slightly and 800-some-odd pictures later, they got their shot, and it was a wrap. No seriously, 800 pictures.

Ok, so here's the part where I ask a bunch of questions about the bonnet. Is it a real Amish-style bonnet? How long did it take them to get the bonnet situated perfectly on your head? What was it made out of? Was it comfortable? Did they have a specific place for the tassels to fall, or did that just happen naturally? Did it make you feel elegant and/or classy? Because I feel like if I was a woman that's how it would make me feel. Is it weird that I just said that?

I was given a (surprisingly) long back-story about the bonnet I was to wear before I was even allowed to see the stash of bonnets. And by stash, I mean the very carefully stored pristine Amish bonnets—each in their own special container (which may or may not have been temperature-controlled) so there is no chance of crushing these delicate, starched head coverings. The photographer for this shoot does lots and lots of Amish romance novel book covers and has been summoned for so many that he is a premier source of authentic bonnets and Amish plain clothes for Hollywood studios.

The week my shoot was scheduled he just received a bonnet back that he’d rented out to a movie set shooting a film in California. It was returned completely crushed, bent and not even in its original container. I think I saw a tear emerge when he showed it to me, but I can’t be sure. He was very distraught because authentic Amish bonnets are not easy to come by and they can be expensive. I actually never touched the bonnet that was pinned to my head. The photographer took it out of the container and the assistant pinned it to my hair.

I know it sounds like this photographer was on the verge of needing some serious group therapy about those bonnets but the truth is I respected his knowledge and care for this seemingly small yet hugely significant moniker of Amish faith communities. Somebody besides Amish women has to care about these things, and I’m glad he does.

Would you do another cover?

I would…and indeed I have! The next book cover I did was a connection Valerie [Valerie Weaver-Zercher; see below] had as she works for a Mennonite publishing house that was having a book cover shot in Minneapolis. This book, however, was of an Amish woman from the mid- to late 1800s. There was much discussion about the type of bonnet I would don, and we ended up taking several shots with lots of different props (a basket of dried meadow flowers, a falling apart Bible, a shawl wrapped in my arms) as well as two different head coverings. This time around it wasn’t as tense because it was a totally different creative company doing the shoot so there were no bonnets in special boxes (and the dress wasn’t Amish-made) but…it was still fun so for me it was perfect. That book should be coming out in 2015.

So as an actual Amish Romance cover model, what did you think of my column?

Honestly I thought it was bright and relatively spot-on, tongue-in-cheek though some parts were. Amish romance novels are hugely popular (hence your wall reference). I learned so much more about the phenom of the plain woman romance when I got to know Valerie Weaver-Zercher, author of The Thrill of the Chaste: The Allure of Amish Romance Novels and appreciated her Wall Street Journal article “Why Amish Romance Novels Are Hot,” where she describes what keeps those books flying off the shelf. The top three most popular authors have sold over 23 million of these books, combined.

And, you’ll be happy to know there is a series of Amish Vampire books—your quest is over, Jordan! Sleep well…or sleep worried, I guess, that those nice plain pious women are creatures of the night…will they pray for you or suck your blood?

Either way, I think I would probably try to interview them first. So what do you do when you're not modeling for romance covers? (aka 99.9999% of your life?) Where do you live? What's your day job like? Do you have a family or pets or people you talk to at Subway a lot?

When I’m not an unfamous model in the Twin Cities, I am an editor of the magazine Timbrel a publication from the organization for which I work, Mennonite Women USA. I also run a successful freelance commercial writing business, Tasty Text, and write blogs, website content, e-newsletters, white papers, brochure copy, Facebook posts, and really any number of text communication needing a serious virtual refreshment.

I live in Minneapolis in a 50s-style modern house in a neighborhood I call The United Nations because of the diversity of all the families living here. We’re just a few miles from hopping on the 60-some miles of bike trails in this urban wonderland and a new co-op is opening next spring three blocks from our house, so I’m twitterpated.

I have two humans (2 and 12), and I’m surprisingly thrilled with the ten-year space between their births (see Zombie question above for more insight) because I really get to know their sweet souls in a singular way, and I’m in love with them. Gloria is a classical guitarist and rock climber. She takes the city bus to 7th grade at her Montessori school in St. Paul so obviously she rules. Harold is this charming flaxen-haired boy with an affinity for memorization and airplanes. He has very good diction and careful enunciation, which thrills his Montessori guides and tickles us to no end. We attend Emmanuel Mennonite Church in Minneapolis where I lead singing in the worship band. (That’s right…a band. We’ve been known to rock...)

After running 7 marathons (including Boston!) I am on the prowl to find a sport that offers the same requirements for stamina and mental prowess that marathons demand. I’m open to suggestions in this realm. Other than being committed to the written word, my husband and I love making our own things (tables, toys) and watching good cinema. We super enjoy not being on Facebook and some shared hobbies are loving up our littles and going on bicycle adventures around the lakes. We would rather spend money on ridiculously good food and powerful experiences than material things any day. I eat heaps and heaps of peanut butter, and I’m a closet ballerina.

I noticed in some of your emails that you also write fiction. What kind of stuff do you write?

I used to say, “I’m writing a novel, therefore my house is immaculate,” but I’ve just completed my Novel Marathon Training, and my full manuscript is complete (huzzah!). So I’m shopping it to agents this fall. My novel takes place in Southern Turkey at the base of Mount Olympos in a remote fishing village. I was inspired when I visited Turkey and fell into a helpless love affair with the Mediterranean Sea and a sweet old couple who made my breakfast each morning when I was a guest at their home. I guess I didn’t want to leave, so my novel is the next best way for me stay without actually staying. The story is a tragedy and definitely a testament to love. It is injected with beautiful, aching, lovely and terrifying magical realism. I worry about my characters and love them desperately and am shocked by the horrible and wonderful things they do and thoughts they hide. I was just sharing with a friend that writing my novel, for me, is an opportunity to work out the conversations I know I’ll never have in real life.

My latest personal writing project is…wait for it…an Amish romance story. I know, I know. Truthfully I’d rather have my name on a cover than my mug, but what can I say?

Well, I can't say that I will read it, but I can say that I will go to Barnes and Noble and stare at the cover for a long time when it comes out.

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You can read more about Claire at her website, clairedeberg.com.

As some of you know, I write an occasional column for McSweeney's Internet Tendency, "Speaking for all Christians Exactly Like Me." The column came about as a result of McSweeney's annual contest, which awards ten or so people with an opportunity to write for the site for a year. Today, I'm continuing an ongoing series of interviews with the other nine winners (or as many of them as I can track down and get to return my emails).

Today’s guest is Wendy C. Ortiz, author of the McSweeney's column "On the Trail of Mary Jane." You'll probably figure this out on your own, but my questions and responses are in italics.

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JJ: I guess I'll start with a couple of political questions, given the topic of your column. What do you think of the current drug policy in the US?

WO: I vacillate between decriminalization of many (not all) drugs and just a simple change in approach by which people are treated justly and fairly for crimes involving drugs. I'm certain that I don't agree with standard drug policy as is.

JJ: What drugs would you want to keep criminalized? As a resident of the Midwest, the strongest argument for me against decriminalization of hard drugs is meth. It seems to be about the fastest way to ruin your life. Though this is coming from someone who has never consumed anything stronger than a Trappist ale.

WO: Have you read Methland? What an incredible book. Yes, meth is harsh. Heroin is harsh. I have a hard time imagining decriminalizing these two. And then there are the legal drugs that have a hold on so many people: prescription drugs, for example. I have lots of ambivalences here.

JJ: I have not read it, though it looks pretty good. And that hits more at the heart of where I'm going with this. Meth doesn't just ruin people's lives, it ruins whole towns, whole counties. How do you think medical marijuana dispensaries affect the communities they are in?

WO: It remains to be seen. From my own journeys into the nine dispensaries and one prescribing doctor, and taking a cursory look at the surrounding neighborhoods, these businesses don't appear to negatively affect the communities they're in, and yet it would take a lot more research to learn if this is true. I can only speak from what I see, and at face value, I don't see outright harm. What I'd love to do is look at this more deeply, with the help of existing data about the neighborhoods and in conversations with residents. That, however, is another different and larger project.

JJ: So who do you think of as your audience?

WO: As much as I'd like to say I don't think of my audience, I do. It depends on the venue, though. The audience I imagine for my memoir coming out this summer (aside from GENERAL and WIDE, hopefully) are young women like myself, who were once 14, 15, 16 years old, trying to navigate potentially dangerous situations.

The audience I think of for my McSweeney's column is composed of people who have not stepped foot inside a medical marijuana dispensary but have a curiosity about them, what goes on inside them.

The audience of my second book coming out later this year might be poets, artists and others who've lived on their own and struggled with trying to make money and do their art for the first time in an earnest way. My perfect reader is one who is open, with a strong sense of curiosity.

JJ: So I'm curious about that first sentence. Why would you like to say that you don't think about your audience? Do you find it restrictive in some way? Mostly I ask because I've always viewed my writing primarily as communication, rather than, say, expression or even art, broadly conceived. I usually find that I can't even start writing until I have an audience in mind, even if it is only a single person that I know. And by "person that I know," I mean "person I am married to."

WO: It seems freeing to write with no thought of audience, but I do write with an audience in mind, whether it's me (past or current versions of self), one other writer (usually someone I admire or have a connection with), or a readership of an established literary journal.

JJ: Why do you write? And how'd you get started writing?

WO: There have been times when I have found myself without enough time, space or energy to write and during those times I have felt a malaise which, at its worst, had me feeling nearly suicidal (luckily I can say the last time I felt this way was many years ago). I would joke and say it made me homicidal but what I really meant was, I don't know if I want to live if I can't write.

I started writing for a general audience when I created my first zine in second grade. My mother photocopied it at work for me, and I tried to sell it for 25 cents to my classmates.

JJ: That's a pretty stiff price for second grade. What did you write about in it?

WO: I don't remember. But I do remember the cover being a hand-drawn picture of the interior of a box of chocolates.

JJ: When you're not working on your column, what do you do?

WO: I'm a registered marriage and family therapist intern, which means I provide psychotherapy to clients in a private practice setting under the supervision of licensed therapist. I set fees at the local nonprofit counseling center where I received much of my training. These jobs take up about ten to twelve hours of my work week. I'm also what is known as a "stay at home mother" though I'd hardly say I "stay at home." I go to parks, museums, and other places my three-year-old loves. I write, occasionally teach creative writing to undergrads, and run the Rhapsodomancy reading series.

JJ: Do you like teaching the creative writing classes? I find a lot of the people I know who do that sort of thing are rather ambivalent about their jobs.

WO: I am totally, utterly ambivalent. Yep. I love teaching, I have been told directly and in student evaluations that I'm a great teacher, but the amount of energy and work that goes into it is not compensated fairly or well, I find.

JJ: What's the last book you read that you loved, and why did you love it?

WO: I can't just include one book, so let me list a little. The last three books I read and loved: Meatheart by Melissa Broder; The TV Sutras by Dodie Bellamy; and Ditch Water by Joseph Delgado. The first and the last mentioned are poetry. I'm doing a spree of Melissa Broder books right now. I will read anything Dodie Bellamy puts out because she is amazing, and I'm hooked on the tweets of poet Joseph Delgado, so a book of his poetry was like eating a meal after many many delicious appetizers.

JJ: I read Bellamy's The Letters of Mina Harker a couple years ago. It was one of those books where I felt like I was missing half of what was going on, but it was weirdly fascinating anyway. The cover still freaks out my wife.

So last question, that I like to ask everyone. Let's say that somebody you loved was going to enter the McSweeney's column contest next year. What advice would you give them?

WO: First, I'd assume they're familiar with McSweeney's. Then I would ask them, what would you want to write even if it wouldn't appear in McSweeney's? What kind of ongoing writing project would interest you enough that you'd want to write it monthly for a year and not know if anyone would pick it up?

JJ: Bingo. That's exactly the way that I approached it when I decided to enter. I thought about my own site, and the sort of thing that I thought was missing. Really, I used the process of entering the contest as a way of developing a repeatable concept that I wished I could read.

WO: Right? And have you suddenly come up with more ideas for columns? I have at least a couple, after this experience.

JJ: Good. We'll have something to look forward to then.

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Wendy's new book Excavation: A Memoir is now availabe.

As some of you know, I write an occasional column for McSweeney's Internet Tendency, "Speaking for all Christians Exactly Like Me." The column came about as a result of McSweeney's annual contest, which awards ten or so people with an opportunity to write for the site for a year. Today, I'm continuing an ongoing series of interviews with the other nine winners (or as many of them as I can track down and get to return my emails).

Today’s guest is Janet Manley, author of the McSweeney's column "Testomania." You'll probably figure this out on your own, but my questions and responses are in italics.

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JJ: So I noticed from various things you've put on the Internet that you do stand up / variety / live performance shows of various types. What do you think are the biggest differences between writing for live performance as opposed to writing a column like Testomania?

JM: I think readers, if there are any, aren't going to get as many clues about how the voice should sound, and just how ridiculous the column thinks itself is. You also get pretty fast feedback if something isn't funny when you're performing. It doesn't matter if I haven't showered for my column. Also, the McSweeney's font/layout makes your writing look smarter.

JJ: What's been the response to your column so far?

I really love when people tweet their results. I also get a lot of blank emails with the auto-subject line of the column title, so I'm not sure if people are about to exact revenge and then back out, or are just unsure of whether they want to talk to me. I love to get emails, though

JJ: So who do you think of as your audience? What kind of person do you think would really appreciate the stuff you're doing?

JM: Eek, I'm afraid to say myself. If only there were more me's out there. When something works out really well, it's usually just because I could hear it all playing out. If not me, then a sort of amused old man, a Jack Handey/Ted Wilson-type. They always seem to have good taste.

Writing something funny or "good" is oddly rewarding if someone actually reads it, but I guess I have a ton of dumb ideas always popping into my head so it makes sense to write some of them down, to entertain the inner idiot.

JJ: So do you think that you would still write these things if nobody else read them? I'd like to think that I would for my own stuff, but I probably (definitely) wouldn't. I get weird things popping into my head all the time too, but it's so much work to write down in a way that satisfies me that I doubt I would do it if no else could read it. And I'm not sure why this question seems important to me.

JM: Excellent question.

JJ: I thought so too, thank you.

JM: You're welcome. My stuff is rarely very popular - I suspect if I had fewer outlets, I'd just be sending more long-winded emails to friends and family.

JJ: How'd you get started writing?

JM: I think the first "published" thing of mine was a lousy article for a mountain newspaper on the dog poop problem. In spring, all these abandoned shits come back to haunt the towns when the snow melts, and can cause health issues. I wrote for small newspapers, always as a freelancer, just trying to get anyone who would publish me - which is not many people, to be honest. After that, or at the same time, I was doing an MA in creative writing, and that brought the critical aspect in, where I could maybe feel a bit better about putting my name on something if I thought it was objectively at least okay. (And then I got a ton of rejections, and now I'm trying to do packets.)

JJ: What's "objectively at least okay" to you? Like, what does your work need to have or show or do before you'd be willing to put it out there?

JM: I'm always on the lookout for plain bad writing, which will reliably make me cringe on sight. But to know something is good, I probably take a loose tally of moments where I feel the writing is okay/funny vs. moments I'm unsure. I guess that's just gut, huh? I think I read somewhere that Colbert has his writers put $signs$ around each joke so when he looks at a script he can see how funny it is. This is a bit similar.

JJ: How do you pick the different ideas for the tests you make? Wait, that's a really bad way of asking the question I really want to ask. The problem is that I have this inkling of an idea about your column that I'm trying to confirm and/or reject.

Ok, so here's the idea: a lot of the columns seem to be a really funny commentary on narcissism, like, there's a character you develop through the test questions that is super self-centered, and the whole premise of the column is about the way online tests enable our obsessions with ourselves. But then other columns actually seem more outward, politically focused, like "Which Economic Alliance Are You?" for example. So is that intentional, or are you deciding which ones to pick more on the basis of how funny you can make them?

JM: Yes, you're right about the narcissism. It's like horoscopes. I think I'm just trying to see what can be funny, and take the piss out of real internet quizzes ("Which character from 'Girls' are you?" "Which Disney princess are you?") while also having something of substance to make fun of. Economic alliances was really fun because who doesn't want to laugh at the BRICS? I think it's accidentally a bit niche (calling all Sandals fans!) but I really just want to find different ways to be ridiculous in a format that looks serious. I also want it to be fun. I hope at least someone takes each test and is like "I'm ready for death!" I'm not sure how boring it is for people to see similar formats each time. I did do undergrad psych, by the way, and I really thought personality psychology was problematic.

JJ: How boring the same format is probably depends on your reader. I find it sort of comforting. How about when you're not writing a column, what do you do?

JM: I'm an editor for a blog at SparkNotes - a sort of Gawker for teens. I do some standup, and run a monthly comedic variety show, and I do try to do other writing, although right now those are mostly all I have time for. I'm huge on the outdoors (used to live in Utah and Colorado and worked on ski hills etc.), but I'm not getting a lot of that since I moved to NYC. So I run, and occasionally get out to hike up the Hudson with husband and dog. (This is so boring, I'm sorry.) I also paint sometimes, and like to make gifs and dumb graphics. We eat a lot of cheese. I eat a lot of pomegranates, which take time to unpack.

JJ: Care to share your favorite gifs (the ones you make I mean)? There's a real lack of mildly humorous images on my site.

JM: Here's two, one very relevant to your last column. There are more at Put Out to Pasture.

JJ: How'd you end up in America? (Assuming you are from Australia, which I think is a correct assumption, since that's what you said in that video on your Google+ page. Also, here's your opportunity to compliment America to make me feel good about myself.)

JM: Ah! Good research! Short story: Ski instructor/patroller for six U.S. winters and four Australian winters, met husband on the hill in Colorado, got married after we both went back to school in our respective countries and moved to Denver. Married six years now. We had to live in the U.S. because my husband was finishing his law degree, but it also would (we figured) have more opportunities for writing for me, which is somewhat true. NYC has certainly been a shot of adrenaline re: the creative people it has hiding in its dirty streets. The west really is beautiful, too. I've seen a lot of the west and it issssssssss awesome.

JJ: What's the last book you read that you loved, and why did you love it?

JM: Cripes, loved? Middlesex and The Funny Man. I got really into Born to Run, which I just-just read - like found it (I apologize) sort of inspiring. Otherwise, I'm afraid to say I've been on a YA-heavy kick due to work recently, and have lost sight of any adult novels I read prior to that (excluding Game of Thrones and that kind of jabber).

JJ: You don't need to apologize to me for feeling inspired. I was once moved to tears by a montage of Little League baseball, and I mean that literally. What about the book did you find inspiring?

JM: The author of Born to Run goes through all his various physical setbacks (ultras are bananas) and the perseverance he learns, and the way he describes the sheer joy of these maniac runners made me want to leap out the door with my sneakers on.

JJ: Let's say that somebody you knew was going to enter the McSweeney's column contest next year. What advice would you give them?

JM: I'm probably not the person to ask, but don't try and second-guess what anyone will enjoy reading, or what the judges are "looking for." I think I submitted some real dogshit last year because I was desperate to figure out What I Had To Say, and it ended up being absolute drivel.

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You can follow Janet Manley on Twitter (@janetmanley) and find more of her work at janetmanley.com.

As some of you know, I write an occasional column for McSweeney's Internet Tendency, "Speaking for all Christians Exactly Like Me." The column came about as a result of McSweeney's annual contest, which awards ten or so people with an opportunity to write for the site for a year. Today, I'm continuing an ongoing series of interviews with the other nine winners (or as many of them as I can track down and get to return my emails).

Today’s guest is KA Semenova, author of the McSweeney's column "Classic Russian Writers: For teh Internets." You'll probably figure this out on your own, but my questions and responses are in italics.

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JJ: So, I want to start with asking you a little bit about your column and the theory that lurks behind it. You say in your bio that you want to test the “theory that human nature is neither analog or digital,” so you “update classics of Russian literature with modern technologies to see if the insights of those writers hold up today.” Can you expand on what you mean when you say you "update" a story for teh internets? Beyond the different technology, is there a sense in which you're trying to "update" the themes of the story too? Or is that one the points you're trying to make, that there are certain meanings that endure in spite of technological change?

KA: Yes, to your last sentence. I’m not trying to update the theme of the story at all. My entire point is that updating the technology does not change the meaning of the story, in any fundamental way. Why would it?

My sort of ongoing thesis—or my hobby horse, if you know me—is that human beings are more alike than they are different. I think that is true across cultures as well as across time. Which means, in this context, that human beings are human beings, whether they are using a teletype machine or texting. And that’s what this little experiment is all about.

If I can trace the origin of the McSweeney’s column to one thing, I’d say it’s this: I belong to some writers’ groups on Facebook, and once this guy, let’s call him Bob, asked for recommendations for novels that dealt with infidelity, to see how other writers had handled it. And I suggested that Bob read Anna Karenina, because Tolstoy had covered that particular ground, and had done it brilliantly.

And Bob said back to me, “Why would I read something that old? The world is so different now, how could I possibly find that useful?”

And I think that is just about the dumbest thing anyone has ever said. And I find it particularly distressing that it comes from someone who calls himself a writer. He epitomizes for me a kind of narcissism, a solipsism out there—that you see often on the Internet—that “our world” is fundamentally different than the world that came before.

I just don’t think that’s true, and my McSweeney’s project is about playing with that idea, doing case studies, as it were. What happens when you put a Chekhov character on Twitter? Is he still the same person? My revision of “Lady with a Dog” suggests that Gurov and @Gurov are exactly the same guy.

JJ: So, breaking in here, with this in mind, what do you think about science fiction? Because some science fiction writers would say that the advancing technology portrayed in their stories does alter their characters in fundamental ways. Actually, this is a pretty common definition of science fiction, a story in which the science is so important that it cannot be removed or changed without fundamentally altering the story. It's really hard to take something like Neuromancer, replace the technology, and still understand who Case is as a character. Though it's really easy with something like Star Wars, which is a fantasy story pretending to be science fiction.

I guess I'm wondering if we could reverse the process you do, like take a science fiction story, replace the technology with something more primitive, and see if the story still made sense. Maybe it depends on the technology; perhaps the Internet doesn't fundamentally change things in the way that, say, true artificial intelligence would.

KA: Interesting question. But I’m not sure I have a great response because I don’t read science fiction. It just doesn't interest me because, in my mind, I already know the answer to the question, and the answer is that the technology is largely irrelevant. Science fiction, however you slice it up, is about human relationships. Those books are genre—they’re quests, or romance novels, or war novels, or what-have-you—dressed up in a different world.

And I can sort of understand, theoretically, that it would be interesting to play with the laws of physics, etc., but personally, it doesn't draw me in. So I can’t respond here with any good examples because I haven’t read anything resembling sci-fi since I read God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater in like 8th grade.

But I will give you this to think about: Historically, UFOs anticipate the next development in technology. Meaning, if you go back to 18th century Europe, the UFO reports are big steel ships in the sky. In the 19th century, reports are about plane-shaped objects. In the last century, they became flying saucers. So it seems to be a fundamental part of human nature to see UFOs, but their descriptions change over time; so clearly there is a relationship to technology as it evolves. Humans apparently always anticipate (and fear) what technology will bring next.

And I think that might bring us to Jonathan Franzen, yes? I mentioned him in my McSweeney’s bio as one of the catalysts for my project.

About a month before I wrote the first column, Franzen published a screed about the Internet and technology and culture more generally. The article really amounted to a big fat nothing. He constructed a straw man (he clearly doesn't understand Internet culture at all), then utterly failed to destroy it anyway. And I think that’s too bad. There was a moment that I really liked Franzen, in the 90s, when I read The Corrections, and when he refused the Oprah’s book club imprimatur, which I thought was interesting. I sort of got him about that, and thought he had something useful to say there.

And ever since (I realized when I saw his last piece), I've been waiting for him to say something interesting, do something usefully provocative, but he’s not delivering. Somebody said, about this last piece, that he’d become an old man yelling at kids to get off his lawn. Exactly.

So I referred to him in my bio because, like him, there are certain things about the Internet that bug me. I have questions about the way technology might be changing us. But I’m more interested in nuanced discussion, in asking questions, which Franzen isn't doing. He’s rather offering up opinion in the form of verbs, like saying Rushdie “succumbed” to Twitter, as if it were a disease. That doesn't get us anywhere.

To me, Franzen is doing what Bob did, just in the opposite direction. Franzen likewise is positing fundamentally different pre- and post-Internet worlds, though in his case, he idealized the before, whereas Bob idealizes the now.

JJ: Do you think some familiarity with the original Russian stories (in translation or otherwise) you update is necessary to really appreciate what you're doing?

KA: Maybe. At least in the form they’re offered on McSweeney’s. John Warner and I have discussed this issue. In my original submission, the editing I did to the story was shown. The reader could see the red-lines and the replacements, so he or she could see very clearly that I only had to change a few words to bring Chekhov up to date in terms of technology and setting. But McSweeney’s had some technical problems displaying that, and John was also concerned that it interfered with the enjoyment of just reading the piece, which was also a concern of mine.

So we agreed to post them with all changes accepted, as it were. And that I would post the red-lined versions on my own website, so that anyone who is really interested can go look at the editing, to see what exactly I did.

But to respond to what I think is a kind of implicit question in your question—eg, does anybody besides you get what the hell you’re doing?—I don’t know. I know John does, obviously. Because we’ve talked about it. I do hear where I think you’re coming from, though, that there is inherently a somewhat limited audience for these pieces. But that’s really okay with me, because that is the great thing about the Internet, that you can find limited audiences, fellow Russian literature geeks like yourself. And there are a lot more of them out there than you’d think.

In any case, this is what I've always liked about McSweeney’s, that it is often like hanging out with a bunch of grad students, at a bar, after class. It can be a kind of para-academic, funny place. And I think—and I hope I don’t offend anyone, but—for much of McSweeney’s stuff, it’s not really about reading every word of every column. It’s about seeing the title, and reading a piece, and getting what the writer is doing, and considering that idea. And usually laughing. Part of the fun is whether you get the joke of it at all.

I’m totally a person who believes in tribes, and I know mine. So when John said to me, when I submitted a piece, “Amazing. I’d never heard of Karamzin. This is fascinating,” I knew that a tribe member had gotten what I was doing. And I felt like I’d just won the Internet, so it’s all good to me.

JJ: Grad students at a bar—that sounds about right. I remember when the column contest was in its judging phase, John tweeted something about how around 25% of the entries had PhDs and about 50% had advanced degrees of one kind or another.

KA: That sounded exactly right to me too. I was in a history PhD program at Georgetown (left early), and one night a group of us sat around after class at the Tombs, a bar, constructing the funny hat theory of history. We almost killed ourselves laughing as we developed an outline. Even assigned chapters to each other. I was supposed to write on the pickelhaube. (picture right) Which of course I never did. Maybe I should reanimate the theory, and submit it to McSweeney’s next year.

Anyway, it’s kind of enough for me if someone notices that I put Gurov on Twitter, and then they think about that notion for a second, making of it what they will. My goal really is to raise questions, not answer them. Because, to return to Franzen, deciding the Internet is “bad,” just gets you nowhere: it gives you no answers, it gives you no questions. And to decide, like Bob, that writers before 2000 have nothing interesting to say is even worse. Both are intellectual dead ends.

JJ: How'd you get started writing? For a general audience, that is.

KA: I’m not sure I have yet, exactly. I’ve worked around publishing for about thirty years now, which is working with writing, but behind the scenes. Most of my writing for a long time was academic (I have an MA in Russian history) or things I did for myself, like journaling. I only started writing seriously, aiming for publication, about five years ago. (I have two novels in progress and two memoir-type things, too. I like to skip around!) And I didn’t really expect McSweeney’s to take my column, which meant I wasn’t quite prepared to go public yet. (Which is why I had to delay publishing this Q&A, because my web site wasn’t ready yet!) I always thought I’d go “public” later, with one of the long-form pieces.

JJ: Can you give us a little teaser on what these books are about?

The memoirs are about my Russian family, who lived the 20th century the way most Russians did—war, famine, emigration, etc. I’ve been engaged on a genealogical/historical research project involving them for twenty-some years now, so those books are about that. What I’m working on right now, though, is crime fiction, set in northern Ohio. Sophie, a PhD candidate in history who has been away for a decade, comes home to hole up in her grandmother’s cottage on Lake Erie to write her dissertation. When a priest at a nearby Russian Orthodox Church is murdered, Marty, her old high school boyfriend, who is now a sheriff’s deputy, asks for her help. Then another priest is murdered…

JJ: Is that the kind of thing you like to read too? What do you think is the best thing you’ve read recently?

KA: Hmmm. Without a doubt, Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch. I spent the week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve with it—it’s an 800 page novel—and had the most fun I’ve had in years with a book. Couldn’t put it down. And just before that, I read Death of a Nightingale, Lene Kaaberbol & Agnete Friis’s third novel. More generally, for the last few years, that’s the kind of thing I’ve been reading: Scandinavian fiction, mostly the crime fiction, though not exclusively. (And this started for me long before Dragon Tattoo went big. I’d read all of Henning Mankell by the time Larsson broke out.)

There is something deeply interesting about what is going on with crime fiction in northern Europe, not only in the Scandinavian countries, but also people like Tana French in the UK. Right now, I’m reading a book by a Swede, Johann Theorin. I had to order two of his books from the UK—they’re not available in the States yet—because I just love his sense of place.

JJ: So you are a Scandinavian crime fiction hipster?

KA: Yes! I’m not ashamed to say it! I have a whole big theory about it, to tell you the truth. I think the Scandinavians are up to something very interesting. They are perhaps alone in genuinely taking on the way neoliberalism (and the fall of the Berlin Wall) has shaped our world over the last couple of decades. They are the people who are really grappling with this, in fiction, in my opinion.

Many people like to say that the crime novel originated in the UK (with Sherlock Holmes) but I think that’s just wrong. (Of course, it’s usually Brits who say this.) Some people point to Poe, in the States, working a few decades earlier, but again, I just don’t buy that. Poe wasn’t quite doing crime fiction, and I don’t think American crime fiction has ever been especially interesting, then or now, in terms of its ambitions. It tends to be genre, and while many of the Scandinavians are doing genre stuff, a lot of them are much more ambitious.

I think that crime fiction, of a certain kind, anyway, originated with Dostoevsky, and that some of the Scandinavians are up to the same thing he was doing, which is using crime fiction to comment on social reality. I’m so interested in this, in fact, that I want to do a blog on it. I’ve registered a domain, and I’ve got some posts ready, but OMG, so not enough time in the day…

JJ: That’s a type of fiction that I don’t think I will ever really appreciate, mostly because I can’t handle the creepiness of it, especially the books about serial killers. I’m much less afraid of supernatural monsters: demons, witches, vampires, whatever, which I think is mostly because I assume that those creatures all have rules that govern their behavior. Serial killers are a complete mystery to me; their motivations and actions make no sense. It’s similar in some ways to how I’m afraid of bees and wasps but not snakes or rats or birds. I know what a bird is going to do, but I can’t ever figure out what a bee is going to do.

KA: Wow. We’re so different. I don’t like reading something when I know what’s going to happen, for exactly the reasons you cite. If it’s a zombie, I know he’s going to walk around stiff-legged and try to eat brains. If it’s genre mystery, then the detective is going to get the bad guy in the end. Where’s the fun in that?

I like books in which the end cannot be predicted; or if it can be (like the Wallander books; which are conventional police procedurals in that sense), then there must be something else at stake. In that instance, it’s Wallander’s health and relationships; but also more broadly, the health and relationships of Sweden, as he’s taking on political changes in the world and how that’s affecting the country.

JJ: So if zombies or vampires or demons don't scare you, what does scare you? Anything?

KA: Bad dreams. I had one recently. I woke up at 4:25 am, with my heart pounding, and I didn’t know where I was. I looked around my room, and it took me a long time—like a minute, no joke—to be sure I was home, in my bedroom. Because I’m not usually up at that time, of course, so the light was kind of odd and things looked different, somehow.

And in my dream, someone who I have seen exactly once since 1983 had just gotten hit by a bunch of falling metal boxes. (I have no idea where they came from.) He was leading me out a door, then the boxes fell, then he was lying on the ground, with a bloody face, and I was frozen, trying to call 911. Which is the moment I woke up.

I don’t have bad dreams like this very often, like maybe once every five years or so. But when I do, they’re really awful. I don’t tend to be prophetic on this score, thank God. I have no idea what triggers them. Wish I knew. I’d stop doing whatever it is.

JJ: I have attempted to hurt my wife three times in my sleep, twice I tried to choke her, once I punched her really hard. All three times I was having a dream where I was protecting her from some kind of attacker. So I have this fear of doing really serious harm to her in my sleep, which is sort of related to a larger, general fear of hurting the people I love, which probably has something to do with my fear of my own brain, and how weird it can get sometimes in there.

KA: Wow. That’s horrible. I’m so sorry. I get how freaky that would be. Though you’ve oddly made me feel better, I must say. At least I don’t have to worry about hitting someone.

JJ: Glad I could help. Let's end on a hypothetical. Suppose that somebody you loved was going to enter the McSweeney's column contest next year. What advice would you give them?

KA: I would say to them, “If you do it, what’s the worst that can happen?” And if the only answer they can come up with is “They’ll say ‘no,” then I’d say, “As worsts go, that’s not much.”

Because that’s how I got myself to do it. In fact, I adopted “What’s the worst that can happen?” as my mantra, the question to ask myself when I’m unsure about whether I should do something, take a chance. Over the last year or so, it’s got me a McSweeney’s column, a distressed turquoise chalk-painted bookshelf, and a new kitten. And I’ll be teaching a workshop in Puerto Rico in August. So I’d have to say this mantra is really working for me, so far.

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You can read all of "Classic Russian Writers: For teh Internets" at McSweeney's Internet Tendency. I'd suggest Vsevolod M. Garshin's "The Signal." That one is a killer.

As some of you know, I write an occasional column for McSweeney's Internet Tendency, "Speaking for all Christians Exactly Like Me." The column came about as a result of McSweeney's annual contest, which awards ten or so people with an opportunity to write for the site for a year. Today, I'm continuing an ongoing series of interviews with the other nine winners (or as many of them as I can track down and get to return my emails).

Today’s guest is Ali Fitzgerald, author of the McSweeney's column/webcomic "Hungover Bear and Friends." You'll probably figure this out on your own, but my questions and responses are in italics.

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JJ: Let's start with the most important question: Why is Hungover Bear always hungover? And what does he like to drink?

AF: Well, I don’t necessarily think he’s always hungover. I think he could just as easily be named “Melancholy Bear.” But his drinking definitely contributes to his malaise, and a hungover bear is way funnier. I want to explore the funny/strange side of drinking related depression with him. I imagine him as a kind of introspective, infinitely lovable Lost in Translation character.

I’ve thought about what he would drink quite a bit. And I think it would be Chianti, whiskey, and good IPAs. Coincidentally, that is what I drink.

JJ: So do you identify with Hungover Bear over the others, or do you think there are elements of your personality in all of the characters?

I’ve thought about that question a lot too. I kind of based Hungover Bear on myself, or more accurately, a personification (bearification?) of the way I feel sometimes. The others are mixtures of specific people/behaviors I’ve encountered along the way.

But sometimes I’ll do something and think to myself, “Oh man, maybe I am Self-Righteous Hawk.” But I console myself with the fact that I think we’re all Self-Righteous Hawk sometimes.

JJ: Do you think of your column primarily as humor or as social commentary? It's definitely got elements of both, and the best humor always has some sort of commentary within it. I'm mostly wondering how you see it, or what you intend for it.

AF: That’s a good question. Both? It’s interesting how much you can get away with using animals as proxies. Since I started the column, I feel like I should reread Animal Farm for that kind of allegorical humor. Actually, Patricia Highsmith has a bunch of great short stories from the animal’s point of view. There’s one about a one-eyed rat in Venice, where the rat isn’t anthropomorphized at all, but we still get a sense of its psychology. I’m really excited to plumb the social commentary depths with these characters, because I feel like it’s rich terrain.

Generally speaking though, it’s important that the comic be funny. It really pleases me to think that people will become attached to the characters and chuckle along with them.

JJ: Who do you think of as your audience?

AF: You know, I’m not sure. In my early twenties I tried to get a comic nationally syndicated and the response was that it was “too dark.” I was surprised because the comic was called Patent Sweater, and it was culled from my sweetest, sincerest self. After that I went to grad school and embraced more abstract, perhaps less mainstream leanings, which is to say that people who like my comics are probably not the same as Family Circus readers. But you never know - I actually had a conversation a few days ago about how subversive the structure of Family Circus really was. Surprisingly experimental with all those misleading footsteps and time-lapses.

JJ: How carefully do you pick the titles for your columns? And are the two panels that you include in each column meant to be read independently of one another, or do you put them together for specific reasons?

AF: For titles, I have a list of Al-Anon slogans that I choose from and alter to suit my whims or the comics. A few weeks ago I used "Face It," because Hungover Bear was wearing a giant Werner Herzog head.

Deciding which comics go together is a fairly visual decision. They have to look “right” to me. But they are meant to be read separately as little narrative snapshots.

JJ: Ok let's get to a big question now. Why do you illustrate comics?

AF: That is a big one! I’ve rewritten this answer several times with the same degree of non-specificity. But here’s one: I’ve made and read comics for most of my life, and I think there is still so much to be explored with visual storytelling.

Right now we have this briskly changing cultural landscape, what with the internets and all, and ways of reading and composing narratives are being redefined. I admire people who push the graphic medium, like Joe Sacco, who just made a graphic novel detailing one battle in WWI without any text. It folds out to form a 24-foot-long drawing, which is incredible and shows what comics can do.

JJ: That sounds pretty awesome. Read or seen anything else lately that you really liked?

AF: I just finished the collected short stories of Patricia Highsmith, who I think is the tops. Her writing is so clear and fully-formed, and her stories are these brisk, bizarre little psychological tales. I also saw the documentary Blackfish recently which I watched twice because it was so compelling and harrowing. As for visuals, I saw a Peter Saul show here in Berlin some months ago that was totally inspiring.

JJ: Let me pause here briefly to thank you for describing something as "the tops." Also, anything on the web (in terms of visual storytelling or art) that you admire? Also-also, what sort of direction do you think we're moving in, as far as visual storytelling goes?

I’m not really up to date on webcomics really, but I was reading that wildly popular one by Allie Brosh the other day [Hyperbole and a Half], and I feel like she uses pictures to create this incredible buildup of pathos/humor. She combines text and drawings in this really endearing, highly readable way.

The New Yorker has a “Sketchpad” section now where artists relive an event, like a Pixies concert for example, in comic form. That’s kind of where I think we’re going. Not necessarily to this comics journalism-only place, but to a place where comics regularly cover a range of things, including “mature” and “highbrow” stuff like depression and Pixies concerts.

JJ: How'd you get started illustrating?

AF: I only started illustrating as a career(ish) when I moved to Berlin a few years ago. Before that I was making large-scale art installations and more invested in the gallery circuit. Then I got to Berlin, disillusioned with my life/art/America, and so I partied and half-heartedly tried to work in the same way. Eventually I began writing/illustrating stories about my expat adventures, which felt better and more honest at that time. Plus I could do them sitting in front of a heat lamp in my apartment, which is what I needed during the first few Berlin Winters.

A lot of those comics seem pretty self-involved to me now, partly because I was learning the craft and how to make stories accessible. Now I feel like I have a certain faculty with it that makes it more fun and less labored. Although it’s always a struggle somehow, I think, to make things relevant.

JJ: Ok, so here's the part where I read your McSweeney's bio and ask you things about it. First question: How's the view from the top of the Berlin wall?

AF: My street really does straddle the shadow of the Wall. When I leave my house I stumble over these little brick markers and then suddenly I’m in the East, where a Siemens factory has replaced the former death strip.

My friend Hilda wrote this blog post about my street which used to have an escape tunnel underneath it. Having said that, my apartment actually faces the backyard, where I smell wafting Turkish cooking and watch my neighbors’ kids run around.

I have a bunch of teaching jobs here in Berlin, and will literally teach anything if someone pays me to. Otherwise, I have a studio practice where I paint/draw and occasionally contribute arts writing. Lately I’ve been doing a monthly comic for Modern Painters Magazine about contemporary art, and some other “Berlinterviews,” a word I stole from my friend Sabrina. In my free time I go to the sauna and take walks around the Soviet Memorial, or I indiscriminately watch good/bad TV with my girlfriend.

JJ: I noticed from your bio that you watch a lot of Golden Girls, which I can only assume makes you an excellent person. Is the show still funny in German? My guess is that you'd lose a lot of Blanche's classic flirtatious style. Also, what's your favorite episode?

AF: Actually, my Belgian friend tells me that the Golden Girls is one of the rare shows that’s actually funnier in German. My German isn’t good enough for me to say that definitively. Blanche still carries it off though. I can’t pick a favorite episode, but I found this good top ten list.

JJ: Finally, let's say that somebody you loved was going to enter the McSweeney's column contest next year. What advice would you give them?

AF: Hmmmm…I mean, I think they should make themselves familiar with McSweeney’s. It was always one of my favorite sites/publications and I made Hungover Bear and Friends partially with them in mind, which I think helped it fit in.

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You can follow Ali on Twitter at @AliFitzterrible, and you can see more of her work on her website AliFitzgerald.net.

As some of you know, I write an occasional column for McSweeney's Internet Tendency, "Speaking for all Christians Exactly Like Me." The column came about as a result of McSweeney's annual contest, which awards ten or so people with an opportunity to write for the site for a year. Today, I'm starting a new series of interviews with the other nine winners (or as many of them as I can track down and get to return my emails).

Ian Orti

My first guest is Ian Orti, author of the McSweeney's column "Any Given Wednesday Afternoon," as well as two books, L (and things fall apart) and The Olive and the Dawn. I've never conducted an interview before, so this is sort of half-interview, half-conversation.

Also, it's about half-serious, half-nonsense, as most of the things I put on this website are. You'll probably figure this out on your own, but my questions and responses are in italics.

The Interview

JJ: We're going to start with the part where I stalk you on the internet and ask related questions. So let's begin with your two books The Olive and the Dawn and L. What do you think is important about those books? Is there anything you regret about them as you look back on them now?

IO: There's nothing I regret about those books because they were written honestly and sincerely at the time. Maybe if I open one and don't like the writing I might cringe a bit.

JJ: I react the same way to a lot of my stories. Actually, it kind of goes in shifts for me. Sometimes I'll read a story I wrote a while ago and be kind of shocked at how good I think it is, then six months or six years later I will read the same story again, and want to throw up a bit at every other sentence.

IO: I think that's par for most writers. Both books came out within 6 months of each other, and I signed book deals for each within the same month. The difference being that my first book, which took ten years to write, came out after my second book, which took a year to write. Is that confusing?

JJ: Not terribly. I understand.

IO: The first book [to be released], The Olive and the Dawn, is a novel dressed as a short story collection. It's about a somewhat-damaged-goods individual who thinks he's found a glitch in the human design and thinks he can outsmart God. Of course he's totally wrong, but that doesn't ruin the story at all. It's really about the grey zone - the non-space after trauma where there doesn't seem to be any past, present, or future.

The second book, L, is probably closer to a fictocritical essay disguised as a very slow moving experimental novel about an old man in a shitty marriage who rents a flat to an odd woman before both of their worlds come apart.

JJ: Was this "dressing" for The Olive and the Dawn important to getting it published? Like, did the mere fact that it was labeled "Short Story Collection" instead of "Novel" make the publisher want to invest in it? Or was that just happenstance?

IO: The dressing was actually somewhat necessary for the publisher since they were looking for a short story collection. But there are recurring characters and a single narrative and chronological arc for them. As a story collection it wasn't necessary to bang the reader over the head with the fact that the characters in the different stories were connected, but as a story collection it was also necessary that the stories stood alone as individual elements as well.

JJ: So let me key in on that word "fictocritical," that you used to describe L. I found that while I was in college (I spent six years in and out of creative writing classes) a lot of what I wrote came out as essays disguised as fiction. I would read something by Bakhtin and then write a story trying to illustrate dialogics, or I would muddle my way through Derrida and then muddle my way through a story that was really about how I muddled my way through Derrida. Most of the time these stories were really just ways for me to think through certain difficult concepts, to attempt to get them straight in my head, and writing fiction about them seemed to work better for me than actually writing the research papers about them.

IO: I like the form, relatively new as it is. It's refreshing to read and it's a nice thorn in the side of the literary establishment.

JJ: Also, you seem to think both of these books are sort of disguised as something other than what they are. Why do you think that is?

IO: I think because I enjoy fiction that's a little cryptic. I think both novels are sort of riddles for the reader to piece together -- though doing so is not really necessary either. But I think both invite a second visit back to some pages.

JJ: So how'd you get started writing? For a general audience, that is.

IO: My first-first-first book was a comic book I co-wrote with a friend when I was growing up. It was about an animal with an uncanny resemblance to Bam Bam and a cat which was more like a svelte Garfield. I drew Animal and my friend drew the Cat. It was called Spaz Kat and Animal and it was about two friends that went on intergalactic adventures. Maybe fifteen years after that I studied writing in university or something.

JJ: Why do you think you write?

IO: I write because I can't help it. That's the main reason. The second reason is that I loved how books made me feel and I wanted to be able to do that.

JJ: Who do you think of as your audience? Maybe another way of asking this is, who is your perfect reader?

IO: My perfect audience is one that is more into the way a story is told rather than what story is told. I have a friend who once told a story at a party about his dad getting a good deal on frozen waffles at a supermarket. That's all it was - an old man getting a deal on waffles - but when he told the story he had the whole room wrapped around his fingers. That was an important writing lesson for me.

JJ: Could you say a little more about this waffle story? Like, what was it that your friend did that you think elevated it into something interesting and (possibly) meaningful? And is that similar to what you try to do?

IO: No. It was just the way he told the story. Which is what a successful book comes down to… how well the story it is telling… is told.

JJ: So, besides the waffle story, what's the last book you read that you loved, and why did you love it?

IO: It was a long, and I mean a very long time after finishing university that I could read a novel and enjoy it. Studying literature nearly ruined books for me. Then about three years ago I moved to the coast of Ecuador for six months and brought a stack of books. A lot of classics. But the one that brought me back to loving books again was Peter Pan. I know. I shouldn't admit that. But it was.

JJ: That's sort of fascinating, given your mention of the waffle story, since Barrie has this super peculiar way of turning a phrase, so that they seem deceptively simple, and yet profound, and yet nonsense. The famous location of Neverwhere, "second to the right, and straight on til morning," is like that. Really you could just open a random page of Peter Pan and put your finger down, and you'll find an example. Is that what made you love the book, or was it something else?

IO: I loved that these kids were murderers. I loved that pirates were killing kids. I loved that this was the sort of thing overprotective parents, principals, and child psychologists would probably be fiercely opposed to, and I love that it all came together to form a really beautifully written story that is perfect for children…and at least this adult.

JJ: You once described writers as grown ups who still play with imaginary friends. What did you mean by this?

IO: I don't like meeting writers that I'm a fan of. Writer colleagues are different because you get to know them on deeper levels. But I would never want to meet the writers of the books I loved growing up because if they were dicks it would end my relationship with those books. What this means is that I am all for the celebration of a book, but not its author.

JJ: So the weird thing in what you're saying is that we should separate an author's life from her work, but that you, personally, would have a tough time doing this if you met the author and they were a jerk to you. Am I reading that correctly?

IO: Yes. If I met a writer and he or she were an asshole it would greatly prejudice my reading of their work.

What being an author really boils down to is an adult who plays with imaginary friends. These friends are the characters in the stories you are working on, and they have a real way of affecting your social life and compromising your personal relationships because, as you're working on their stories, they tend to chatter away in your head. And their actions, which occur entirely in your head, are a cause of concern until they hit the page or until the final editing of their actions is complete.

Though I think a mature writer won't let their characters affect them too much, or to be more direct, the fact that you are a writer and working on stuff doesn't give you licence to be an asshole to friends and family. My imaginary friends right now are the characters in the manuscript I'm working on.

JJ: When I was a kid, I had like a couple hundred different toys of plastic knights and mutant turtles and transformers and metal cars etc, etc, and I would spend hours in my room making up different scenarios for them, almost all of which involved a lot of dialogue, allegiance shifting, betrayal, and massive battles.

And I find that my first book, The Towers, is in many ways a (ever so slightly) more sophisticated version of this playing. And there were many times, over the course of writing it, that my wife had to pull me back, gently, from these worlds, and the fake conversations I was having in them. Having something useful to do outside of writing, which for me is prayer and church and service, keeps me more sane and less of a jerk than I would otherwise be.

IO: There is no reason to be a bastard to anyone. That's what it comes down to. The writing process invites a cast of all sorts of individuals into your head. If we didn't have the means to write down their actions, or if writing fiction were not culturally accepted, we would surely be admitted to hospitals. It's up to the writer to be in control of the traffic inside their head and not take it out on those around them when their time with them is interrupted. In other words, being a temperamental writer who lashes out at those around you when they get in the way of your writing doesn't make you interesting. It just makes you an asshole.

JJ: Let's talk a little bit about your column specifically. Why did you decide to include images in your column? Is that something you do a lot in your work?

IO: This column was so accidental and a direct result of just being out for walks on slow days out there in the world with a camera. I've never considered myself a photographer or a photo-essayist and by not doing so, I think I was able to exercise some fun with the genre. The essays you see in McSweeney's are exactly that. Some of the things are true, some are fabrications. But at the end of the essay, hopefully some kind of truth emerges.

JJ: This is one of those areas that I feel like a lot of people who are not writers are confused by. I don't know if this was important in Canada, but there was a massive poop-storm in the US over James Frey's A Million Little Pieces, where basically people found out that some of the stuff he wrote didn't actually happen. Oprah gave him a scolding. Yet this is something that every person who has ever written a memoir (or life writing, or whatever you want to call it) does. You take elements of real things and blend them with fiction, or exaggerate certain details, to get to something from which, as you say, some kind of truth emerges.

Sometimes I think the outrage over it was simply because people thought they were being lied to and manipulated. Like maybe if Frey had just put "A Mostly True Memoir" on his book cover, everyone would love him still. This is another one of those situations where labeling makes a big impact on how a work is perceived and consumed.

IO: Well, that's genre for you. It's sort of the contract that writers make with the reader. If you tell someone that this is a true story, and it turns out not to be, then it makes you a liar. Embellishment is obviously that grey line between bullshit and the truth. I would prefer not to think of my columns with McSweeney's as walking that grey line without the disappointed audience. Sort of like if Peter Pan were a photojournalist, this might be what you got. Maybe that's a poor description.

JJ: Let's say that somebody you loved was going to enter the McSweeney's column contest next year. What advice would you give them?

IO: Just press send. And maybe field test the column a bit. Actually, always get feedback. Always.

JJ: When you're not working on your column, what do you do? (In terms of work and leisure, that is. Do you have other projects or do you work a day job or moonlight as a jazz pianist, etc?)

IO: I do a lot of small things. I teach and I study. I walk and I nap. I'm learning German, but I'm not sure if that falls into work or leisure. I'm working on another book, and today I spent the day sewing pants for a great suit I found at a second hand shop. Other than that, minor explorations are kind of my expertise.

JJ: So how's Berlin?

IO: I love Berlin, though I am very much off the radar of the oohs and aahhs of Berlin. I have almost no community and almost no friends here which is the opposite of what things were like when I lived in Montreal. I have some park benches, there's a pub I go to once in a while where they know my name, and there are a couple of great English bookstores where they also know my name. If I had to count the people that know me in Berlin outside of my workplace, there are the two people who work at the two bookshops, a bartender, and my friend Arjun. But I see these people probably less than once a month. It's hermetic but I like it.

JJ: So how'd you end up there?

IO: Love, Jordan.

JJ: Ah… The best reason to do anything.

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You can find out more about Ian Orti at his website ianorti.com or at The Barnstormer, an online literary sports magazine that Orti co-founded.