All posts in Interviews

VOTM: What’s the most unusual experience you’ve had at a reading?

HILT: At a Chuck Palahniuk reading the week before Thanksgiving, I won a plastic turkey by blowing up an 6ft inflatable Oscar statue faster than everyone else in the audience. Really? Is that a surprise? No. It’s not.

Jessica Hilt likes to pretend that she’s some ethereal and mysterious writer of beautiful things but she usually ends up writing about body fluids and sadness. She’s a graduate of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop and wants constant reassurance that she doesn’t need an MFA. You can find her work in Bourbon Penn, Fanzine, and the anthology States of Terror.

Come see Jessica read at 3rdSpace in San Diego on Thursday, June 9 at 7:30pm. 

VOTM: What’s the most unusual experience you’ve had at a reading?

SOTHERN: I collected signed first-edition contemporary fiction for many years and so went to a lot of readings before I ever had one of my own. A lot of book collectors would come to events with bags of books to be signed and I always thought they were kind of nerdy. There was this one guy who kind of became a friend who I didn’t really like. He was in his late seventies and wore a bad toupee and always sat next to me. In a conversation about NYC, where we had both lived in past years, I mentioned a time I’d been mugged and he said he had been mugged as well. He asked if my mugger had a weapon and I said no but there were two of them and I gave them my money and told them to have a nice day. I asked did his mugger have a weapon and he said yeah, a knife. I asked did he give the guy his money and he said no, I took his knife away from him and then killed the son of a bitch. He said it was no big deal, he’d been in the Korean War and killed a bunch of commie bastards. I still think of book collectors as kind of nerdy but with the knowledge that some are killer nerds.

Writer-photographer Scot Sothern spent 40 years hustling photography and drifting from job to job. His first exhibit, “LOWLIFE,” was held at the notorious Drkrm Gallery in Los Angeles in 2010. His first book, LOWLIFE, was published in the U.K. by Stanley Barker in 2011. Sothern has since had solo shows on both coasts of the U.S. as well as in Ottawa, Paris, Basel, and London. The British Journal of Photography called LOWLIFE, “The year’s most controversial photobook.” From 2013 to 2015, Scot wrote more than fifty photo-illustrated twice-monthly columns, “Nocturnal Submissions” and “Sothern Exposure,” for Vice. In 2013, CURB SERVICE: A Memoir was published by Soft Skull Press. PowerHouse Books will publish STREETWALKERS, thirty years of stories and photographs in February of 2016.

Come see Scot read at Book Show in Los Angeles on Friday, February 19 at 7:30pm. 

VOTM: What’s the most unusual experience you’ve had at a reading?

BECKER: I was almost kicked out of a reading (at which I was reading) at a bar for getting caught drinking from a flask. Drinks are expensive. It was one of my favorite readings ever.

Lauren Becker is editor of Corium Magazine. Her work has appeared in Tin House online, The Rumpus, Wigleaf, The Best Small Fictions of 2015, and elsewhere. Her collection of short fiction, If I Would Leave Myself Behind, was published by Curbside Splendor in 2014.

Come see Lauren read at 3rdSpace in San Diego on Saturday, February 20 at 7pm. 

VOTM: What’s the most unusual experience you’ve had at a reading?

KLEINE: I got paid!

Andrea Kleine‘s debut novel, CALF, was described by Publishers Weekly as “unsettling, scary, and often brilliant.” She is a five-time MacDowell Colony fellow, a New York Foundation for the Arts fellow, and was valedictorian of her 8th grade class.

Come see Andrea read at Book Show in Highland Park on Friday, October 30 at 7:30pm. 

VOTM: What’s the most unusual experience you’ve had at a reading?

ULIN: I once met Norman Mailer in the early 1990s, during a publication party at the New York Athletic Club. I can’t remember any longer who the party was for, only that Mailer was throwing it, and that when I arrived, he was holding court at the bar, a flushed grin on his face, looking every inch the host. Knowing almost no one in the room, I kept largely to the corners, avoiding Mailer altogether, and settling only at the appearance of a familiar face. Still, I couldn’t help looking towards Mailer periodically, and at one point in the evening, I happened to catch his eye. For a moment, the two of us watched each other, until I turned away. I hadn’t taken more than a step or two, though, when I felt a tap on my shoulder, and there was Mailer, hand extended, having come over to introduce himself. The story, I believe, captures everything one needs to know about Norman Mailer, casting the two essential, contradictory threads of his personality — the ego and the insecurity — into sharp relief.

DAVID L. ULIN is the author, most recently, of Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles. His other books include The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time and the Library of America’s Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology, which won a California Book Award. A 2015 Guggenheim Fellow, he is book critic of the Los Angeles Times.

Come see David read at Book Show in Highland Park on Friday, October 30 at 7:30pm. 

Photo by Noah Ulin.

VOTM: What’s the most unusual experience you’ve had at a reading?

MACDONELL: Earlier this year I had a blowout with my wife. I surrendered and drove alone to a scheduled reading at Stories Books and Café in Echo Park. The Stories employee who had booked the event was not there. Maybe thirty people, most of whom I believe love me, sat watching me reading. I reached the good part, and I thought, Why am I imposing myself on these people? Why do I take advantage of my friendships in this way? Maybe that’s not such an unusual experience after all.

Allan MacDonell is the author of Punk Elegies: True Tales of Death Trip Kids, Wrongful Sex and Trial by Angel Dust (Rare Bird, 2015) and Prisoner of X: 20 Years in the Hole at Hustler Magazine (Feral House, 2006). In the late 1970s, MacDonell was a defining voice of the groundbreaking punk periodical Slash. On his off hours, he co-invented slam-dancing. MacDonell lives in Los Angeles and is the editorial director of The Kind.

Come see Allan read at Book Show in Highland Park on Friday, October 30 at 7:30pm.

VOTM: What’s the most unusual experience you’ve had at a reading?

LEE: I once had to read after a white, female author during a reading series. She had this ridiculously long bio that the host felt compelled to read the entirety of, like several pages long. Then, she read this rather dull piece that not only was way too long (I believe we had asked to keep our readings under 10 minutes and she went on for like half an hour), it was also really offensive. It included several problematic descriptions of an Asian character, including “porcelain skin” and “Oriental accent.” I kept looking nervously around the room to see if anyone else was witnessing this, but as the only Asian person in the room, no one else even seemed to notice what was going on. I didn’t say anything, but maybe I should have. I had to follow up that act. Awkward.

On another lighter note, I once co-gave a talk with a collaborator on the Bela Tarr’s film Satantango. A scene of cows from the film was playing behind us, and we hadn’t thought about the volume beforehand. So at a very convenient moment during our talk, the very loud and alarming mooing of a cow mounting another cow sort of stole the show. Mooooo.

Janice Lee is the author of KEROTAKIS (Dog Horn Press, 2010), Daughter (Jaded Ibis, 2011), Damnation (Penny-Ante Editions, 2013), Reconsolidation: Or, it’s the ghosts who will answer (Penny-Ante Editions, 2015) and The Sky Isn’t Blue (Civil Coping Mechanisms, forthcoming 2016). She currently lives in Los Angeles where she is Editor of the #RECURRENT Novel Series for Jaded Ibis Press, Assistant Editor at Fanzine, Executive Editor at Entropy, and Founder/CEO of POTG Design. She teaches at CalArts and can be found online at janicel.com.

Come see Janice read at Book Show in Highland Park on Friday, October 30 at 7:30pm.

VOTM: What’s the most unusual experience you’ve had at a reading?

FOSTER: At CSU Dominguez Hills after a reading I gave, there was a line of people getting books signed, saying hello or asking questions. One tatted rockero kid with shaggy hair said, “You know, in your book, City Terrace Field Manual, you wrote about a woman who was murdered. That was my grandmother.” I didn’t really know what to say, or expect what he was going to say next. “My mom told me to give you this letter. She asked if you could give it to your mom. She said to thank your mom for being so kind to our family after my grandmother died. She always remembered your mom’s kindness. She said she made my mom’s Halloween costume, and helped her get to summer camp. She could’ve come tonight, but she’s in Washington D.C.” I did give the letter to my mom, who is now 90. 

Sesshu Foster has taught in East L.A. for 30 years. He’s also taught writing at the University of Iowa, the California Institute for the Arts, Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics and the University of California, Santa Cruz. His work has been published in The Oxford Anthology of Modern American Poetry, Language for a New Century: Poetry from the Middle East, Asia and Beyond, and State of the Union: 50 Political Poems. Winner of two American Book Awards, his most recent books are the novel Atomik Aztex and the hybrid World Ball Notebook.

Come see Sesshu read at Book Show in Highland Park on Friday, October 30 at 7:30pm.

VOTM: What’s the most unusual experience you’ve had at a reading?

STRADAL: Pat Schultz, who was the school librarian at Tilden Elementary in Hastings, Minnesota while I was a student there, came to my reading in Edina while I was traveling through Minnesota. When I was at Tilden, I was a dreamy little kid who loved dinosaurs and writing and drawing, and Pat would take me aside and give my special projects in the library during and after school to inspire my imagination and challenge my mind. There are few other adults outside of my family who have meant more to me in terms of helping me become a writer. Through her, I understood the effect of a concerned adult on a child, and I volunteer with kids today, and have for over a decade, because of her example. I hadn’t seen her since I’d left that school after fifth grade, and I unfortunately didn’t remain in touch with her, so it was a total shock — I had no idea that she was coming. She heard about it somehow, and came all the way up from Hastings — and it blew me away to see her. 

J Ryan Stradal works as the fiction editor at The Nervous Breakdown, is a an editor-at-large at Unnamed Press in Los Angeles, and volunteers for and is on the advisory board of the educational nonprofit 826LA. He is also the author of the New York Times bestselling novel Kitchens of the Great Midwest and his shorter writing has appeared in Hobart, The Guardian, and The Rumpus, among other places. He likes wine, sports, root beer, and peas.

Come see J Ryan perform at 3rdSpace in University Heights on Saturday, August 22 at 7:30pm.