Nick Flynn

Posted on June 6, 2011 by daysofyore

Nick Flynn has worked as a ship’s captain, an electrician, and a case-worker with homeless adults. His two most recent books, both released in 2011, are a collection of poems, The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands, and a memoir, The Ticking is the Bomb, which the Los Angeles Times calls a “disquieting masterpiece.” His previous memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (2004), won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award, was shortlisted for France’s Prix Femina, and has been translated into thirteen languages. A movie adaptation of Another Bullshit Night, starring Robert DeNiro and Paul Dano, is scheduled for release in 2012. Flynn is also the author of two prior books of poetry, Some Ether (2000), and Blind Huber (2002), and a play, Alice Invents a Little Game and Alice Always Wins (2008), for which he received fellowships from, among other organizations, The Guggenheim Foundation and The Library of Congress.

Flynn’s poems, essays and non-fiction have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, National Public Radio’s This American Life, The New York Times Book Review, and others. His film credits include artistic collaborator and field poet on the film Darwin’s Nightmare, which was nominated for an Academy Award for best feature documentary in 2006. He teaches at the University of Houston during the spring semester each year, and spends the rest of the year in Brooklyn and upstate New York.

On the day that we spoke, Flynn was boyishly animated and wearing a bright purple stocking cap.

Growing up, what were your early experiences with books?

I went to a public school, we didn’t have a whole lot of money, and there weren’t a lot of books around the house. Some of what I saw of books didn’t seem to be a life-affirming activity—it seemed to be almost like taking Valium. My brother read mountains of science fiction, which I didn’t understand could contain deeper meanings. My grandmother read murder/romances that she bought by the pound, just books to pass the time. To me, that wasn’t interesting. But my mother had a few good books around the house, some Shakespeare. Plath. ee cummings. And I liked to spend time in our local library, and to hang out at the local bookstore in town.

The first book I ever bought on my own was Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, because I was really into horror. I was maybe in second grade. I remember looking at it and being like, I can only understand half these words. I can’t read this now. But it was so thrilling to know I’d be able to read this someday. A year, maybe two years later, I went back and read the whole thing.

The stuff that moved me in a creative way didn’t happen in school. I had one English teacher in junior high who was great, and we read interesting stuff, like Something Wicked This Way Comes. But most everything that excited me happened outside of school. I would find books that I wasn’t supposed to read. Illicit books, books people had hidden someplace. Things that were somehow charged, like Henry Miller, something dirty, or that people had hidden in a little shack down by the river. Strange things, you know? But they seemed somehow important enough to hide. You weren’t supposed to read them, and that had a pull.
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Patrick Fischler

Posted on May 30, 2011 by daysofyore

Patrick FischlerPatrick Fischler is an American television, film, and stage actor. You’ve seen him in over fifty projects, including films like Mulholland Drive, Speed, Old School, and The Black Dhalia. He has an upcoming role as poet Lew Welch in Michael Polish’s Big Sur, a film about Jack Kerouac’s journey with his close friends from New York to California in the wake of all that happened in his life after publishing On The Road.

Fischler has also appeared on Mad Men, Lost, and pretty much any other show that’s been on TV for the past decade. His work has garnered him an AFI Fest Best Actor Award and the opportunity to work alongside the likes of David Lynch and Matthew Weiner. He is also a founding member of the Los Angeles based theater company, Neurotic Young Urbanites.

Fischler will tell anyone who asks that his greatest accomplishments are his daughter, Fia, and his relationship with his wife, Lauren. He loves to cook and secretly wants to be a teacher.

Okay, where did you grow up?

I grew up in Los Angeles, in the City of Angels.

And you come from a long line of actors, like many LA–

Not even remotely. My Dad wanted to be an actor. He did plays in South Africa. He was American, but he went to South Africa when he was in his thirties. So, he always had a sort of love for theater and film and he used the restaurant as his stage. That’s what everybody always said.

What’s the restaurant?

Patrick’s Roadhouse. He bought that when I was five years old and named it after me. It’s sort of an L.A. institution. It had it’s heyday, really, in the mid-eighties, so all these celebrities and political figures would come in, and my dad would stand in the front. He was very flamboyant in these crazy shorts and knee high green socks, and he would sing opera…and insult people, and that was kind of his stage. He almost performed without performing, but it was his life.

Do you think that your desire to be an actor came from your Dad? Came from being in L.A.? Where do you think it really started?

That’s a really good question, actually. I remember as a little kid, as a little little kid, always loving movies and TV. Always. And I was a latchkey kid, so I was opening that door after school and turning on that TV. But I was also into theater. I remember my first New York trip. My dad took me when I was ten. We saw this show called Barnum, a musical, with Glenn Close. This was before she was famous, or anything like that. It was about P.T. Barnum, and it was unbelievable as a kid to see a show about the circus. I was always interested, even at a young age, and my dad took me to a lot of that kind of stuff.

I always knew I wanted to be involved in the business in some way, but I think the acting thing really struck in high school when I got into drama classes after I got back from South Africa because I went to Beverly High and they had an incredible Drama Department.

So you were right on the path?

A big part of it is that I had been in school with these kids from Kindergarten to Eighth grade, same school, and then I bailed in ninth grade and then came back [from South Africa]. Those years between 13 and 16 are so huge. You become such a different person. When I came back, none of the people I was friends with were my friends anymore. At that time there was no internet, no Facebook. I’m in South Africa. There was no communication unless you wrote a letter. So, I lost touch with everyone, and when I came back everyone had changed so much. I think that drew me to finding a crowd that I could relate to. I instantly thought: drama.

I got the experience of doing theater for two years, and I couldn’t have loved it more. I really feel like Beverly High did interesting plays, too. They did The Elephant Man and Amadeus. They did smart theater, and it was incredible to be a part of it.
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Crystal Williams

Posted on May 23, 2011 by daysofyore

Crystal Williams writes poems that vibrate like tuning forks to the frequencies of contemporary social politics, personal responsibility, family, and identity. Her third and most recent collection, Troubled Tongues (Lotus Press, 2009), won the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award and shortlisted for the Idaho Prize. Her previous two collections are Kin (Michigan University Press, 2000) and Lunatic (Michigan State University Press, 2002), and she has recently completed a fourth manuscript, titled Walking The Cemetery: Detroit Poems.

Her poems have been widely anthologized and have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, 5AM, The Crab Orchard Review, The Sun, Ms. Magazine, The Indiana Review, Callaloo, and many other publications. She has also performed her poems in venues across the country, including as a member of the 1995 Nuyorican Poets Café National Poetry Slam Team.

Williams holds a B.A. from New York University and an M.F.A. from Cornell University, and has received fellowships and grants from The MacDowell Arts Colony, the Oregon Arts Commission, and the Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. She is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, and she has a deep, generous, and irresistible laugh.

You grew up in Detroit and wound up getting your start in poetry in the slam scene in New York. Can you walk me through how you got there?

I originally went to college for acting, then went up to New York City to study acting with a fairly famous acting coach. When he accepted me, he said, “You’ll be a very good character actress, or you could lose fifty pounds and be an ingénue.” I thought “character actor” sounded lame. I didn’t know that’s what you want to be, a character actor. But I had also started writing dramatic monologues at Howard, because my friend Stevie was running talent shows, and the prize was a hundred dollars.

So when I came up to New York and decided, “To hell with acting,” I kept writing dramatic monologues and got involved with spoken word. I was at the Nuyorican Poets Café from ’93 or ’94 through about ’97, and I was on the ’95 Nuyorican Slam Team. At the same time, I had started studying creative writing at NYU with poets like Ruth Danon and Karen Volkman.

Two things were gnawing at me: I was tiring of the three-minute constraint of the slam poem, and I was getting more interested in the craft of poetry as a vocation.

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Jo Ann Beard

Posted on May 16, 2011 by daysofyore

Jo Ann Beard achieved cult status among a whole generation of young writers with her essay collection The Boys of My Youth, which came out in 1999. Her avid fans had to wait a long time for the next book, In Zanesville, a novel, which was published in April, 2011. In the meantime, her essays were widely anthologized in collections like The Best American Essays and the Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction: Work From 1970 to the Present (2007). Her work has also appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, The Iowa Review, and O, The Oprah Magazine.

Beard was the recipient of a 1997 Whiting Foundation Award and a 2005 Guggenheim Fellowship. She earned a BFA and an MFA from the University of Iowa and currently teaches writing at Sarah Lawrence College.

Susannah Meadows for The New York Times recently wrote of Beard, she “has a knack for melding the funny and the sad, amplifying small moments into something big.”

When did you first realize you wanted to write?

I discovered writing in my early 30s, as I was finishing my undergraduate degree in art. A fiction class I took on a whim was what did it. Though recently when I was visiting an old friend, she dug into her closet and pulled out a flannel bag filled with notes and letters from me, beginning in seventh grade and ending when email was invented. Each one was like a little essay, what can I say. The bag itself had leopard spots and matched a sleeping bag my friend used to bring to sleepovers; I remembered it a lot more clearly than I remembered the person who had written all those notes in class and all those Selectric Typewriter letters from whatever office she/I was pretending to work in.

Were you a big reader early on? What did you read?

I read everything, and by that I mean: everything. Favorites were Charles Dickens, Albert Payson Terhune, and Mary O’Hara. Dogs, horses, and distressed children.

How did your family and friends feel about your decision to pursue life as a writer?

Nobody thought anything, because pursue wasn’t really the right word. There was nothing for other people to notice: I went to work every morning and after work I did other things. Writing just became one of the other things; it was like building model ships. I wrote stories and set them on my mental mantel.

Writing isn’t exactly a stable career path. Did you or do you feel pressure to do something more “practical?”

I have always been practical, though I don’t particularly believe in it. I was raised by people who cared a lot about certain things and not much about others. They cared that you got good grades in school so you could get a good job in an office. What they didn’t care for was anything that took you away from home for too long. Like a road trip, say, or college.

When you say you’ve always been practical, how did that manifest itself in your life choices?

By being practical, I mean I always had a day job, so it didn’t matter if writing paid off in a monetary way. (It doesn’t.) And I don’t make life choices, I operate more short-term than that. I never chose to be a painter or a writer; those things chose me, and then, in the case of painting, unchose me.

How did you go about becoming a “writer?” Early writings?

The first story I wrote was set in a post-apocalyptic Iowa City, about having to put your dogs to sleep because you don’t want them to be left roaming the smoking ruins after you have succumbed to radiation sickness. (It was the 80s.) It had King Tut in it, and cavemen. The second was about a very wealthy little girl who poisons her grandparents by putting pesticides in their pudding. It had lions in it.

You can understand that I didn’t publish for quite a long while.
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Sarah Ruhl

Posted on May 9, 2011 by daysofyore

Sarah Ruhl is a widely acclaimed American playwright. Her plays include In the Next Room, or the vibrator play (Broadway 2009, 2010 Pulitzer Prize Finalist), The Clean House (2005 Pulitzer Prize Finalist; The Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, 2004); Passion Play, a cycle (Pen American Award, The Fourth Freedom Forum Playwriting Award from The Kennedy Center); Dead Man’s Cell Phone (Helen Hayes Award for Best New Play); Melancholy Play; Demeter in the City (9 NAACP Image Award nominations), Eurydice; Orlando; and Late: a cowboy song.

Her plays have been seen in almost every major city in America, at places like the Lincoln Center Theater, Goodman Theatre, Playwrights Horizons, Second Stage, Arena Stage, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Yale Repertory Theatre, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Cornerstone Theater, The Wilma Theater, Madison Repertory Theatre, and the Piven Theatre, among others. They have also been produced internationally, translated into Polish, Russian, Spanish, Norwegian, Korean, German, and Arabic. Originally from Chicago, Ms. Ruhl received her MFA from Brown University where she studied with Paula Vogel. In 2003, she was the recipient of the Helen Merrill Emerging Playwrights Award and the Whiting Writers’ Award. She is a member of 13P and New Dramatists and won the MacArthur Fellowship in 2006. She is a recent recipient of the PEN Center Award for a mid-career playwright.

Her newest play, Stage Kiss, is currently running at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago.

When did you realize that you wanted to be a writer?

Since before I could write I wanted to be a writer. I know that’s a little strange, but there it is.

Who were the writers you most admired when you were growing up?

When I was growing up I loved the Brontes, Jane Austen, e.e. cummings, Maud Hart Lovelace, Shakespeare, Katherine Mansfield, Iris Murdoch, Plato.

You were going to be a poet when you started college. What made you decide to switch your focus to playwriting?

I majored in creative writing with a focus on playwriting. Before I met Paula Vogel I thought I would be a poet and some kind of scholar to support my poetry habit. It was Paula’s belief in me that made it seem possible to make a life as a playwright. Paula sneaked my first play, Passion Play, into the New Plays Festival at Trinity Repertory Theater and it was that performance that turned me into a playwright. I got into a car accident on the way there, blacked out, arrived, saw Passion Play, and thought, “This is what I want to do with my life.” Perhaps it never really happened. Perhaps my whole life has been a dream since that car accident.

Was your family supportive of you pursuing a career in the arts?

Yes! I couldn’t have had a more supportive family. I can only imagine that they would have been less supportive had I gone into some responsible profession. My mom is an actress and has always supported me being a writer; my father died before I started writing plays, but always supported my grand ideas of becoming a writer. Though he cautioned me about having a solipsistic writer’s life—a professional hazard or bugbear—and wanted me to teach as well as write for that reason.

When you graduated from college, what was your first move?

I moved back to Evanston, where my family lives and I worked for Americorps in the public schools, went to writer’s colonies, and did a play with the Piven Theater Workshop.

Before you were able to support yourself wholly in the theatre, what kind of jobs did you have?

Oh, God. There were so many. I remember at tax time I would have about a million W9s. Berlitz language school was one. Reading plays for theaters was one, which I enjoyed. Teaching in the public schools was one, I loved that job, I would do it forever, working for Teachers and Writers and Young Playwrights Inc. in New York teaching poetry and playwriting to very young kids. I did research for a book on public parks for a non-for-profit. I was a “lady reader” for a very old man. I was a model for figure drawing classes. I taught a writer’s group for developmentally delayed adults in Pawtucket, a job I wish I could have had forever. I worked at a bookstore.
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James Franco

Posted on May 2, 2011 by daysofyore

James Franco is an actor, writer, director, visual artist…the list goes on. Most well known for his on-screen work, Franco has appeared in a number of major Hollywood films, including the Spider-Man trilogy, Pineapple Express, Eat Pray Love, Milk, for which he won an Independent Spirit Award for Best Supporting Actor, and 127 Hours, which earned him an Independent Spirit Award for Best Male Lead and an Academy Award Nomination for Best Actor, among many other awards and nominations. He played James Dean in the critically acclaimed TV film James Dean, for which he won a Golden Globe for Best Actor, Allen Ginsberg in the independent film Howl, and he also starred as Daniel Desario in the cult TV show Freaks and Geeks. His most recent films are Your Highness and Rise of the Planet of the Apes, which premiers on August 5, 2011. He hosted the 2011 Academy Awards with actress Anne Hathaway.

In 2010, Scribner published Franco’s short story collection Palo Alto: Stories. His paintings and installation work have been exhibited at galleries in New York, Los Angeles, and Berlin.

Franco earned a BA from UCLA, a MFA in film from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, and MFA degrees in fiction from Brooklyn College and Columbia University. He has studied poetry at Warren Wilson College and is currently enrolled in the Ph.D. program in English at Yale University.

Franco is emphatic, determined, and unwilling to let anyone think they really ‘get’ him. He does what he wants and knows why he does it, no matter how much the rest of us keep wondering.

When you were little, what did you want to be when you grew up?

I told my mom that I wanted to be a ‘worker man,’ which was a construction worker, I guess. I liked to build things. And then I wanted to be a football player. My mom tried to break it to me gently that I was probably too small to play football, professionally. But she still gave me hope, she didn’t completely shut me down.

My mother is a children’s book author, so that was around. I remember that I wrote stuff when I was pretty young, like elementary school. There was a story called “Deep Down,” it was influenced by the comic, The Far Side, but I didn’t draw it. I drew at that time, but this wasn’t a comic. I don’t even know what it was….but I was writing young.

At one point in junior high, I read Cannery Row [by John Steinbeck] and I loved that character Ed Ricketts. He was a marine zoologist, so I wanted to do that. He kind of had the coolest set-up. In Monterrey, he lived on the water and would just go into the tide pools and stuff, and that was his job. That was a pretty cush job. I don’t know how many marine zoologists actually have it that good.

But it sounded good to you.

It was pretty romanticized. But I always— ‘cause my mom was a writer and my parents met in art school, they were painters— it [writing and art] was always kind of around. I think that all that stuff was always in the back of my head, even if I wasn’t actively pursuing it. One of the reasons I didn’t pursue it when I was twelve, thirteen, fourteen, was because of fear, I guess. When I was about sixteen – that was when I started reading seriously. But, well, I read a lot when I was younger, too. I read all the Oz books, all the Tolkien books.

Were you finding them at home, or were you going and seeking them out?

I was going and seeking that out. I guess I just loved fantasy. My dad introduced me to Tolkien and after that I was sort of off and running. I found a lot of stuff on my own.

When I was a little older, I guess eighth grade, my friend introduced me to Kerouac. Then we started reading all the Beats together. And then my dad gave me As I lay Dying, and then I read a lot of Faulkner, Hemingway, all that stuff.

At that age, when you were reading that stuff, did you have the sense that you wanted to write like that? Did you have a sense of what it meant to do that?

Yeah. I remember very clearly reading Heart of Darkness, and I don’t know why I thought this, but it’s like when somebody does something well, you think: “Oh, that’s easy!” I remember reading it and thinking, “Oh yeah, I’m going to do this, I can do this. He’s telling a story, I can do that.”
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Lis Harris

Posted on April 25, 2011 by daysofyore

Lis Harris is the author of three books, Holy Days: the World of a Hasidic Family, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; Rules of Engagement; and Tilting at Mills: Green Dreams, Dirty Dealings and the Corporate Freeze. She is a former staff writer for The New Yorker magazine, where she worked for over two decades. Her writing has also appeared in publications like The New York Times, The World Policy Journal, Du and the Wilson Quarterly.

Harris is the recipient of a great many grants and awards, including from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Gund Foundation, the German Marshall Fund, the Kaplan Fund, the Fund for the City of New York, and the Woodrow Wilson Lila Acheson Wallace Foundation. She teaches writing at Columbia University.

Harris is direct but warm, shrewd but encouraging. She has a sharp tongue and a mischievous eye.

When you were a little girl, what did you want to be when you grew up?

When I was a little girl I didn’t want to be anything, I just wanted to play ball. I was a tomboy. I had no overarching ambitions. But I was headed toward being an artist, a painter. In my family, my brother was the writer, and I was the artistic one. Totally designated. My brother is six years older than I am and he became a correspondent, very early, for The New York Times. We are so different that I thought, “That’s what a writer is, and I’m definitely not like that.”

I could never do what my brother did for his entire life—to go out for a few hours, come back to a desk, write it, and it’s done. For me, there is a lot of dream-time involved; thinking, wandering, changing my mind. And, actually, I think I write to find out what I think. I’m not one of those people who knows in advance what I think before I write, not really. But even when I was young, I was a bookworm and avidly attentive to the stories people told about their lives.

Did you write in college?

I wrote poetry and I majored in what was called, at Bennington where I went to college, Language and Literature. I was the co-editor of the literary magazine…I mean, words were always my playground, I kept diaries and sometimes a journal . . . but I had this preconceived idea that that realm was already taken; that I was the artist.

So I minored in art. I was surrounded [in college] by people who were going to be artists, for whom this was their world. I enjoyed drawing and painting, but it wasn’t my true language. But I didn’t follow that out, or think, “Oh, I’m a writer,” because I had this fixed idea, even through college.

What did you do when you graduated from college?

There was a magazine in Switzerland, it still exists, called Du—it’s literary and a graphic designer’s dream. I decided sometime during my senior year in college that I wanted to work for Du. I kept writing them letters over many months, but they weren’t answering me. At all. I had gotten a job as a mother’s helper with a wonderful family who traveled all around Europe: England, Paris, the South of France. When they went home [to America], I stayed [in Europe] since I was waiting to hear from this magazine—though I was clearly never going to.

I had no money at all. My parents were not approving of any of this. I had a boyfriend in the States whom I didn’t want to borrow money from. Someone had given me the number of an editor of an art magazine which was then based in Zurich called Art International. I called him [the editor] from Paris. I told him I had been writing to Du and that they were not answering. He laughed and said, “Everyone wants to be there. You don’t have a chance in hell.” Parenthetically, several decades later I got a call one afternoon when I was in my office at The New Yorker from an editor at Du in Switzerland, asking me to write an article about I.B. Singer for them, which I did.

Anyway, I took a deep breath. I so wanted to stay in Europe—I wanted to be where my parents were not, where my boyfriend was not, where institutions that wanted something from me were not . . . I just wanted to be there [in Europe], figuring myself out, by myself, in a different culture. I absolutely wanted that. So I asked him if he needed any help at Art International, and he said, “I don’t think so.” So I said, and I don’t even know where I ever got the brass to do it but I did this, I said, “Well, I’m going to be passing through Zurich tomorrow, why don’t I just come talk to you?” What this meant is that I had to cash in my boat-train ticket to go back to America, buy a ticket to Zurich, stay up all night . . .
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Jennifer Egan

Posted on April 19, 2011 by daysofyore

Jennifer Egan is one of the finest American writers working today. Her most recent book, A Visit From the Goon Squad, won the 2011 National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and the 2011 LA Times Book Prize for fiction. It was also a finalist for the Pen Faulkner Award. Her other works of fiction are: The Invisible Circus, which was made into a feature film starring Cameron Diaz in 2001; Look At Me, which was a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction in 2001; Emerald City and Other Stories; and The Keep, which was a national bestseller.

Egan’s fiction has appeared in publications like The New Yorker, Harpers, Granta, and McSweeney’s, and she regularly contributes nonfiction to the New York Times Magazine. She received the Carroll Kowal Journalism Award in 2002 and the NAMI Outstanding Media Award for Science and Health Reporting from the National Alliance on Mental Illness in 2009. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in fiction, and a Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library.

Egan is as disarmingly forthcoming as she is disconcertingly smart. She also has one of the best author’s web sites out there.

When you were a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?

When I was little, I wanted to be a doctor. I was really interested in gore. My grandfather was an orthopedic surgeon and he had a lot of books in his library that I would just pore over. A lot of them had really horrible pictures of deformities.

It attracted you?

It did, kind of. I was interested in corporeal strangeness. I wish I could tell you it was about making people well, but I think it was more about wanting to cut them open!

But you lost that interest?

I did. I would just add that I was deeply interested in biology and physiology. I would read about that on my own time. I felt like it wasn’t covered enough at school— I went to this girls’ school and I was like, “I want to hear more about the human body!!”

This was probably nine to thirteen, fourteen. When I became a teenager I got very squeamish, and that interest totally disappeared. That squeamishness— and I’m sure you could read lots of interpretations into that— was almost a fear of the body. Just a fear of seeing what was in the body. I remember being really afraid of seeing blood. I’m not really like that anymore, but I don’t feel neutral about it. I look away if I’m getting a shot.

No more doctor. Then what?

At that point I became really interested in anthropology and I really wanted to be an archeologist. I thought that was a for-real goal, actually. I applied to Penn. I got into the anthropology department, but I specifically wanted archeology. It was the seventies and a lot of exciting things were happening, discoveries in archeology. It was a moment when that felt more present in the culture than it is now.

I took a year off between high school and college and it was kind of funny— I had this idea that I could hire myself out as a person to go on archeological digs and dig, without any training! I actually wrote to a number of archeology departments and offered up my services. I think none of them answered me except for one, who said, “You know, our graduate students actually pay us to go on digs. So, obviously, this is not appropriate.” It was a nice note, but basically saying: “This is never going to happen.”

Then I actually paid to go on a little dig, which was in Southern Illinois. They were digging up Indian remains. It was essentially the kind of thing the professor was describing to me only it was open to the public. So I went, and what I discovered was that what I had imagined archeology to be bore little resemblance to the actual experience.

How so?

In my imagination, it was kind of digging up big chunky urns with a shovel! [Laughs.] But what one so often neglects to account for from the outside of any job is the tedium— and I include writing in that. It was a square meter of earth, it was 99 degrees, it was the end of summer in Illinois. We used a scalpel. We couldn’t unearth— that was the thing that really bugged me. You had to lower the earth until the object was sitting on top of it! You couldn’t dig it out! It’s called a dig, but you couldn’t dig!

By October I knew that I probably didn’t want to be an archeologist.
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JK Simmons

Posted on April 18, 2011 by daysofyore

JK Simmons gets all the coolest jobs. A working actor/singer on and off Broadway into the early 90’s, he moved to the screen to try his luck at movies. Since then, he has appeared in over a hundred films and TV shows alongside some of the most well-respected names in the business, and has made a name for himself as a versatile and iconic character in a full spectrum of genres.

You’ve seen Simmons on the big screen in Juno, Up in the Air, I Love You Man, Burn After Reading, For the Love of the Game, and Spiderman (to name just a few). He also appears in The Music Never Stopped, an independent film by Jim Kohlberg released at Sundance this spring. He has enjoyed an eclectic TV career, ranging from his role as Assistant Chief Will Pope in The Closer and neo-Nazi Vern Shillinger in HBO’s Oz to parts on The Simpsons and Party Down. Oh, and he’s the voice of the yellow M&M.

Simmons graduated from the University of Montana where he acted, sang, and composed, then went on to attend Ohio State University before acting in New York, Seattle, and Bigfork, Montana at the Bigfork Summer Playhouse. He currently lives in L.A. with his wife, the director Michelle Schumacher, and his two children, whom he describes as “adorable.”

You’ve had a pretty cool acting career in film and TV – was this your plan all along?

I was completely uncalculated – just going from one thing to the next because it’s what I liked to do. I started out in New York, waited tables for a year and then started finally getting a couple of jobs; one thing just led to another. But the media was such a different world then, I was doing nothing but theater for the first twenty years.

And theater was just a natural inclination?

I sort of stumbled into doing summer stock in Bigfork (Montana) and I thought, “Well this is really cool. It’d be great to be able to do this for a living, and maybe I’ll teach school nine months a year and do summer stock for the rest of my life.” And then I decided that I hated teaching so, I decided to try and act full time. But it was really such an incredibly gradual climb from 60 bucks a week doing musicals in Montana to you know, giant budget movies in L.A., and it was a series of serendipitous meetings with everybody from Don Thompson [Bigfork Playhouse manager] to Sam Raimi.

So what happened? What changed?

Well, I was lucky enough to meet a few different casting directors in New York when I was doing theater there. They got me doing some regional stuff, and then I started doing some Broadway casting and this and that. And then I was doing my fifth Broadway show in a row and obviously doing okay, but, living in New York, all I was doing was paying the rent. So I told my agent, “Once this show is up and running, I don’t want to look for another play, I’d like to get the TV and movie thing going.” Got a couple of auditions, and one of them turned out to be a thing that lead to a big guest spot on Homicide, which six months later led to Oz. And suddenly I was in the middle of a pretty big transition.
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Stephen Elliott

Posted on April 11, 2011 by daysofyore

Stephen Elliott is a novelist, memoirist, and the founder and Editor-in-Chief of the online cultural magazine The Rumpus. His Daily Rumpus messages, which the site describes as “overly personal emails from Stephen Elliott” and readers describe as both soothing and addictive, currently land in well over six thousand subscriber inboxes every day.

Elliott has written eight books. The most recent, a collaboration with Eric Martin, is Donald (McSweeney’s, 2011), a novel that imagines the interrogation of Donald Rumsfeld at the same overseas military facilities that he approved during his tenure as U.S. Secretary of Defense under the second Bush administration. Donald was released in January, on the same day as Rumsfeld’s own memoir, and was described by The Washington Post as a “daring and risky” work of both humor and humanity. Prior to that, Elliott’s memoir, The Adderall Diaries (Graywolf, 2009) was lauded as “genius” by both the San Francisco Chronicle and Vanity Fair; his novel, Happy Baby (Picador, 2004) was named a Best Book of the Year by Newsday, Salon.com, and The Village Voice. Elliott’s stories and essays have also appeared in Esquire, The New York Times, The Believer, GQ, Best American Non-Required Reading 2005 and 2007, Best American Erotica, and Best Sex Writing 2006.

Elliott grew up in Chicago. He holds a degree in history from the University of Illinois and a master’s in cinema studies from Northwestern University. He was a 2001 Stegner Fellow and the Marsch McCall lecturer in Creative Writing at Stanford University. He currently lives in San Francisco.

In one of your Daily Rumpus emails, you talked about being at a recent writing conference and described the beginning writers there as “absurdly earnest and likable.” I’m wondering how you might have been described as a beginning writer?

Well, as a beginning writer, I wouldn’t have been at a conference. I didn’t do an MFA, I didn’t have a literary community, except that I would do open mics and poetry slams. So I knew some of the slam poets, but I wouldn’t ever have been at a conference.

As a beginning writer—you know, I started writing a lot when I was about ten—I wrote a lot of poetry, and it was really angry poetry. I was twenty or twenty-one when I started writing short stories. The poems just got longer and more narrative and became stories. Then I wrote a novel, and then I wrote two more novels, and I had written three books before I really started to know other writers and became a part of a literary community.

I don’t think I would have been described as earnest, though. Bitter. Cynical. Yearning for something unknown. That would have been the more apt description. Impatient. You know.

Bitter, cynical, yearning—how has that changed along the way?

One thing is that there are no more pedestals for me. I don’t think, “I love this person’s art, and therefore this person is superior.” I don’t put anybody on a pedestal anymore, and I don’t have any desire to be on a pedestal. Back then, I really wanted to be on a pedestal, because I thought then people would love me, that if I was—if I somehow created something that showed I had more talent than other people, that I was better at something than other people, then that would be worthy of love. I no longer think that makes you worthy of love. The things that make you worthy of love are kindness and engagement with the world. Which is not to say you shouldn’t have ambition, or that I don’t enjoy competition. [Shrugs.] I play fantasy football. But this idea of stratification, where the students are in one house and the teachers are in another house, that doesn’t have any interest for me. I don’t want any of that. But I did want that—and I’m not saying I’ve ever achieved it, I just know that I wanted it, and I don’t anymore.
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