An Interview with Justin Taylor

WEST 10TH: The Gospel of Anarchy has a very specific sense of place: Gainesville, Florida, in 1999. How does place figure in your prose, and what process do you go through to choose a particular setting? Are your stories all set in places you’re familiar with, or can you come to know a place though the act of writing about it?

JUSTIN TAYLOR: You definitely get to know a place better by writing about it, but usually you have to be at least somewhat familiar with a place to know it’s something you want to write about. Writing a certain place at a certain time complicates things considerably, though in other ways it simplifies them. I wanted to write about Gainesville, where I lived during college and knew intimately, but the book is in part about the millennial fever and utopian urges of the late 90s, most of which I missed because I was in high school in those years. If the characters in Gospel really existed, they’d be a few years older than me—so in their mid- or even late-30s now, which itself is kind of a scary thought. 

WEST 10TH: A lot of your stories seem to be about young anarchists in Florida—does this come from personal experience or is it a product of some other kind of inspiration?

TAYLOR: There are three “anarchist stories” that I can think of: two in my first collection and then the novel, which was written because I wanted to spend more time with them, and to create a world in which their con- cerns had self-evident value, rather than treat them as the butt of jokes, as I felt that the short stories had done to a certain degree. There’s a lot of personal experience in both the stories and the novel, little episodes and details borrowed from life, but I don’t think more than any of my other work, and in Gospel’s depiction of extreme faith and extreme punkrockitude, very little to do with my own lived experience. I wrote the book to try and imagine what that kind of mindset, that kind of life, might be like.

WEST 10TH: Are you every afraid that too many of your characters (mainly protagonists) begin to sound the same, or do you have any kind of process to try to make them distinct?

TAYLOR: Sound the same? No, not really. Sometimes you do worry, especially with stories, that you’re striking the same chord once too often, but if a subject is demanding repeat attention then there’s probably something still unresolved about it, so the trick is to find the part that’s fresh, and write toward that. At the same time, some of my favorite writers have distinctive, immediately identifiable voices, as well as themes or obsessions. If the stories are good, it doesn’t matter what they’re about. And if they’re not good, it doesn’t matter either.

WEST 10TH: You published your first novel, The Gospel of Anarchy, after the debut of your short story collection, Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever. Did your work with short stories in any way prepare you for novel writing, or are the two entirely different styles? How do you, as a prose writer, balance both styles? Do you inherently have to prefer one over the other? I’ve always imagined that the difference between writing novels and short stories is more subtle than the difference between poetry and fiction, but still just as large.

TAYLOR: I think stories and novels are totally different beasts. The short story is much closer to the poem than the novel, in terms of structure and the way it engages its reader. Novels have to create a world and sustain it; the reader’s interest has to be able to survive all the times that life forces you to put the book down and do something else, like eat or sleep. You develop a relationship to a novel while you’re reading it: it has better and worse sections, favorite and least favorite characters or storylines, etc. A story or a poem, under ideal circumstances, is consumed in one sitting, goes about its business with maximum economy, and provides some kind of “total experience.” At the same time, it must raise at least as many questions as it answers, and invite repeat viewing, in a way that a novel can, and maybe even should, but doesn’t have to. People often ask why more short fiction doesn’t have happy endings. It’s because happy ending are endings, and short fiction can never end. It can’t afford to. A novel can be forgiven its definitive ending only because the reader has had hundreds of pages to revel in the uncertain and unknown.

To answer the other part of the question: Everything Here and Gospel were mostly written during the same period of time, so it wasn’t a question of preparing for one with the other as it was of going back and forth between them. There was very little in the way of balance in that process, and that’s still how it feels for me now.

WEST 10TH: In that same vein, I know that you’ve published both poetry and fiction. Do you have a different process or mindset when writing in either genre? Does each type of work come from the same place or do you specifically sit down knowing that you’re going to write a poem or a story?

TAYLOR: I don’t write or publish poems anymore. I believe strongly that young writers should read a lot of poetry, and write some if they feel so moved, but a lot of that early stuff I published I probably shouldn’t have, simply because I was eager to be published, which I always warn students against and they rarely listen, though why would they, since I was warned against it and didn’t listen. Anyway, I’ll pivot this a bit and say that I also used to write a lot of flash and experimental fiction and I don’t do that much anymore either. Some writers are true polymaths or interdisciplinarians, but the rest of us eventually specialize, or at any rate learn to con- serve our strength.

WEST 10TH: How does popular culture figure into your stories? Do you consider it integral to the identity of your stories (i.e. “Tetris”, “Jewels Flashing in the Night of Time”)? How do you think things like Twitter influence our generation of writers?

TAYLOR: I don’t think popular culture figures all that prominently. “Tetris” makes a fetish object of the Nintendo game, sure, but the item in question is easily 25 or 30 years old. And “Jewels Flashing in the Night of Time” deals with the Abu Ghraib photos, but the narrator reads them against Joseph Conrad and Georges Bataille, and the story was published a good six years after the scandal broke. I’m engaged with the world I see around me, and more likely to namecheck a brand name or a band name than do some kind of fictionalizing runaround (for what? decorum’s sake? faux-timelessness?) when anyone reading the thing will know I obviously meant X and not Y.

I don’t think you can say that Twitter—or any web technology—“influences our generation” in a single way. For some writers it has opened up huge vistas in terms of stylistic innovation and in terms of exposure. Tao Lin was, in my view, the first major writer to engage deeply and powerfully with the internet as both medium and message, though he did most of that work before Twitter. Other writers have since continued that work or set out on their own paths. Teju Cole was doing truly innovate and compelling work with Twitter for a while. Mallory Ortberg, Patricia Lockwood, Michael Robbins, Elisa Gabbert, Zak Smith all come to mind. The whole “alt lit” thing, which I have to say I don’t like very much, as so-called “movements” go, but they’re doing their thing, and social media is utterly central to it. And also some magazine and book publishers: Melville House, Electric Literature, Harper Perennial, this new site called Real Pants. Each writer gets to decide for herself how the medium fits into her writing/ publishing life, which in a way is really saying into her life, period. Some people decide they don’t want any part of any of it, and some will be active for a while then suddenly disappear—they quit or just took a hiatus, which seems to be what Teju Cole has done. That’s okay, too.

WEST 10TH: Reviews tend to use the word “millennial” to describe you, do you ever worry or think about being categorized as a writer, or is it something that you don’t really consider?

TAYLOR: I used to think I was a very late Gen X-er, but lately I’ve been hearing that 1982 is the first year of the millennials, which means that I’m not the very youngest of the old guard but the very oldest of the new. Oh well. At least I never went in for that “Generation Y” shit. We all knew that wasn’t going to stick.

WEST 10TH: A lot of your writing has to do with the now, featuring spe- cific references to bands or subcultures that I think only exist now. Does that affect the way that you write the stories? Do you worry that including specifics may alienate some readers, or is the usage of such specific references a nod to the “write what you know” mentality?

TAYLOR: I swear I’m not trying to be difficult here, but what exactly is “the now”? The plot of Middlemarch is shaped by the expansion of the railway. The freeing of the serfs is a huge part of Anna Karenina. I’m not attempt- ing anything like that degree of headline news. Punk has been around, as a form of music and a subculture, for at least forty years. The Grate- ful Dead were founded in 1965, which makes them just a shade younger than the Voting Rights Act and almost a decade older than Gravity’s Rain- bow. Will Oldham, Stephen Malkmus, and David Berman—all musicians whose work has appeared in my work—are into the third decade of their careers. I know for a fact that some of this broadly contemporary period detail does alienate some readers, but I can’t for the life of me figure out why. It’s as if they’re offended by the fact that they recognized something, like “Hey, I know exactly what you’re talking about and I also love it—SO FUCK YOU!” That’s a totally honest paraphrase of emails I’ve gotten.

WEST 10TH: Slate recently listed one of the lines from Flings as one of the best lines of 2014. When you sit down and write a line like that, one of the longer prose-y ones, do you sit down and try to perfect it or do those kinds of lines just come with the rhythm of the story?

TAYLOR: That was a cool accolade to get, but there are plenty of other lines—in that story, in that book—that I personally am prouder of having written. I don’t know why that line in particular struck such a deep chord with the person who read it. But that’s the luck of the draw and the fun of the enterprise—you put it out there and anyone who picks it up can make of it what they will. I try to make all the lines equally perfect, in the sense of being 1) necessary, 2) original, and 3) good. But sometimes you get lucky and come up with one that’s just a little bit more perfect. That’s okay too. 

Justin Taylor is an author of the novel The Gospel of Anarchy (2011) and the short story collection Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever (2010), which was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. He edited the acclaimed short fiction anthology The Apocalypse Reader and his work has appeared in The Believer, The New York Tyrant, Flaunt, on NPR, and in many other publications. His most recent book is Flings: Stories (2014).