Hello, Kevin! Thanks for doing this Q&A. You are quite the busy lad.
You are a writer, parent, bookstore hero, small press juggernaut - and we don’t use that term lightly -
and, most recently, collagist. But let’s go back in time first…
You are a writer, parent, bookstore hero, small press juggernaut - and we don’t use that term lightly -
and, most recently, collagist. But let’s go back in time first…
In 1990 you not-on-purpose started Future Tense Books when you wrote that name on the back of your self-published poetry chapbook. Eight years later, with a few indie delights published by Future Tense, you launch a website. Two years after that, you finally get letterhead. Now, Future Tense produces several titles a year, ranging from chapbooks to hardcovers.
Thirty years later, how has your vision changed for Future Tense? It was so raw in the beginning and it was mostly poetry. Keep in mind that I wasn’t even much of a reader until I was twenty-one, and I was twenty-three when Future Tense was born. Luckily, the Internet wasn’t the beast it is now and I was able to mature and grow Future Tense without too much outside noise. It helped me to be able to experiment and try things without getting criticized and judged to death. I think that’s a sad biproduct of today—that writers might not reach an audience if they’re too weird or if people don’t understand them right away. Young writers have a lot of pressure on them to be great right away. Probably because of the instant gratification or disappointment that the Internet inspires. I had time to grow while being sort of “underground.” After those early days, the press has shifted more to fiction and personal essays/memoir in the past decade or so. The production value has gone up as well. And I think my vision has become more focused and refined. I approach each new book as a marker in the press’s history. I want each book to be some kind of surprise or revelation to readers. How do you choose books (is it you alone who makes the choices)? It’s pretty much just me! I pick books that I want to see in the world. I love writers who take chances, who reach far, and who have ambition. I’ve taken a lot of cues from small independent record labels and the way the best ones celebrate each album they put out. I’m actually in the middle of a reading period right now (mid-September 2020) and it’s the first open call we’ve had in a couple of years. So I have a couple hundred manuscripts to dig through the rest of this year. I can’t wait to find out who the next Future Tense authors will be. What has been one of your most memorable experiences in micro-publishing, with Future Tense? My favorite thing is discovering new writers and putting out their first book and then seeing them take off and grabbing a lot of attention and taking a step up in the publishing world. A bunch of my writers have started with Future Tense and went on to bigger presses and more success. Writers like Zoe Trope, Chelsea Martin, Chloe Caldwell, Gary Lutz, Chelsea Hodson, Myriam Gurba, Wendy C. Ortiz, and Genevieve Hudson. Besides the actual books that I made with these writers, I just love them as people too, and the time I got to spend with them. What do you see, sorry about this, in the future for Future Tense? It’s hard to say. It all depends on who and what comes my way. We’re doing a Scout book or two each year (a 32-page pocket-size chapbook) as well as a couple of paperback releases. I would love to somehow put out collage art books someday. I just started an on-line collage gallery called Sharp Hands Gallery and that’s kind of a way for Future Tense to ease into the world of collage. Now, your work as a writer. In 2010, when you were 43, you released your memoir, A Common Pornography, on Harpers. The book explores your life in sharp moments, unfolding a brutal and tangled web of family, including a mother who had children with three men, incest, abuses at every level, the institutionalization of your step-sister who had a baby in the hospital that was taken from her at birth, and a host of other moments that add up to one fucked up, intense life. Yet here you are, an artist with a great relationship with his son. What do you think got you through that childhood to become this man? Well, the main reason is because I was pretty shielded from the abusive parts of my family. I just thought I had a normal, boring childhood! At least until I started writing about it and discovering these other things. Maybe a low-key form of trauma I endured as a kid was the fact that our family was so stiff and awkward, so uncomfortable with affection of any kind, that I never really felt loved or cared for. So when my son was born, when I was 27, I vowed to be the opposite of that. I was very affectionate with my son and told him I loved him all the time. It was such a relief (and so easy) for me to feel unconditional love probably for the first time ever when he was born. It was like I waited my whole life (27 years anyway) to let my heart open all the way. One thing repeatedly mentioned in reviews of your writing—other than the fact that you are amazing—is your honesty. Were you always honest or was this part of a process to come into yourself? Thank you for saying that. I think that’s one of the things that writing has given me. That chance to be open and able to express myself more nakedly. I’ve tried to foster honesty with my fiction too, but I think it was writing the memoir and other personal essays that gave me a real reason to confront myself and just be blunt. Writing can be a wide open road of honesty and sometimes it is scary. I’m not a very confrontational person, so I try to unpack my true feelings in a way that’s more generous when I can. In real life, I have to admit I can be cagey and have not been great at honesty all the time. The older I get, the easier it gets though. Your next book, the novel This is Between Us, came out in 2013 on Tin House, a smaller, independent press. Your longer writing tends mostly to address, as your novel does, your relationships with women. Is this because you tend to be in longer relationships with women or you find them more confusing or have you only started exploring your expanded view of sexuality in the past decade? Most of my relationships have been with women, but I’ve been with—and been in love with—men too. Both the memoir and the novel have queer sex in them as do some of my poems and short stories. I identify as bisexual and because I find human relationships the most interesting topic to write about, I have written about all sorts of love lately. I’m actually writing a novel right now that’s kind of an autofiction and it explores bisexuality, polyamory, and getting older. What has been your experience being one of the rare writers who have published across the gamut of big publishing house, independent house, and self-published? What are the upsides and downsides?
Yeah, it’s funny that I’ve been published on all these various presses for one book each! I feel like one of those basketball players who plays on a different team every year. They call that a journeyman. Big publishing is great because they have more resources and money, but small presses are fantastic too, because I feel like those relationships last longer and feel more personal. Any time you have a publisher, it’s a comfort. |
Do you have plans for more book-length work? If so, can you tell us a little about it, where you hope to have it placed (big, medium, small, or micro-press), and why?
Besides that bisexual autofiction I just mentioned, I actually finished a novel at the beginning of the year and I’m super excited about it. But then COVID came along and it’s been hard to find an agent. I’m hoping it will land at a big press eventually. It’s a weird one for sure, but I also think it’s sweet, funny, and accessible. It’s the POV of a baby who is trying to figure out where/who his father is and he sneaks out of his home at night to talk to the moon. It’s called Baby in the Night. Wish me luck on it. I have a book’s worth of short stories and a book’s worth of personal essays that I’d like to get out in the world sometime this decade too. Now, your art. I know you ran an open collage night in Portland, where I personally garnered some of my best old retro magazines to cut apart. Were you collaging before the collage nights, or did this start as a way to hang out with friends/build community that sparked interest in you? I hosted a collage night here in Portland for three years and I started it after I caught Collage Fever! Whenever I’d mention to people that I was making collages, I was surprised at how many would say they used to collage or they had friends who made collages or what-have-you. I was so entranced by the physical act of cutting and pasting that I wanted to hang with others who did it too, so I started having collage parties at people’s apartments and then at the IPRC. It was an amazing monthly event and I met a bunch of great people. Collaging also led me to connect with artists from all over the world and I started doing interviews with some of them. I still make collages now, but I don’t do the monthly thing anymore, just occasional workshops and casual group cut-ups. It’s definitely a whole other community outside of the writing world, though there are a number of writers who also make collage art. Have you worked seriously in other mediums before collage? Not really. I don’t have the talent it takes to draw or paint. But I am slowly trying to add some paint, markers, and other textures to my collages recently. I’m most comfortable just cutting and then finding interesting combos and then gluing down. The simplicity and speed of it. What drew you to collage? After This Is Between Us came out, I wanted something different. Something that felt fun. I had actually done some funny word collage experiments a long time ago (mid-90s) and wanted to fool around with that again. I used images too, as backgrounds to the words, but eventually just transitioned to images, with no words at all. Words were getting in the way. Without them, they looked more elegant and mysterious. I love collage because it’s all about seeing, whereas writing is in your head more, and being in my head was sometimes exhausting. Collage is like play for me. You are a pillar of the robust Portland literary and art scene, championing folks for decades—and when Powell’s Books opens back up, you will be back on the bookstore floor. However, it seems, the lockdown gave you a chance to go into building the collage community, including working to amplify the artists, notably with the start of the Sharp Hand gallery. Yeah, the quarantine is dragging on, but it has given me a lot of free time to write and open up Future Tense submissions and to start Sharp Hands. I was thinking about how people couldn’t really go to art galleries right now and wouldn’t it be cool to somehow do an art show on-line somehow. I played around with doing something on Facebook or Zoom but decided that a dedicated website would be ideal and the best way to build an archive and a place for people to visit an exclusive home for collage whenever they wanted. I contacted my friend, Cheryl Chudyk, and asked if she wanted to curate it with me. She lives up in Seattle and, like me, has a huge love of collage as well as a lot of connections and energy. She’s awesome. So, after learning how to run the mechanics of the site and asking our first artists for work, we got it up and it turned out beautiful. The first Sharp Hand show, curated by you and Cheryl Chudyk is up now, with some incredible names in collage. What was the inspiration for the on-line show? There are so many awesome collage artists all over the world, it’s been super fun to pick ones we want to showcase. I don’t do any fantasy sports leagues, but I imagine it’s like drafting a really awesome fantasy football team! We’re both reaching out to our favorite artists—mostly on Instagram, which is a great way to find collage artists. We’re fans first and curators second. It’s just a thrill to work with these folks. Right now, we don’t have specific themes for each show going up, but we try to combine different styles and backgrounds, and do that with artists who might be really established names in the scene or ones who are lesser known but deserving of more recognition. You have a book of collage, your first, releasing soon. Can you tell us when, and who is publishing, and how you intend to promote it (i.e., can anyone hope to see your shows in their towns)? Yes—it’s called I Made an Accident and it’s being published by Clash Books sometime early in 2021. It’ll have about 200 collages as well as about twenty or so poems. The collages run the gamut of early stuff with words on them to more abstract non-word stuff and various other experiments and, yes, accidents, which are usually how some of the best collages are born. I hope to do events in a few places, maybe with a slide show and poetry reading. It’s sort of hard to figure out when things will be back to normal here in the U.S., but if I do travel for events, I think it would be fun to do some workshops or collage making parties too. On a personal level, what has been the worst and the best thing to come out of lockdown (other than Sharp Hand)? Has it changed anything about your views or habits or life, etc.?
It feels like a weird retirement. I have a lot of time to read, write, collage, cook and bake (lots of cookies and pastries!), watch movies, and do Future Tense and Sharp Hands stuff. That’s all great, but it is tinged with sadness because I haven’t seen many friends and I miss all the people I worked with at Powell’s. My main companion has been my one-year-old kitten, Susan. I adopted her in January and she has been such a sweet little joy. Anyone who follows me on social media has probably seen a lot of photos of her. It will be so nice to get back to work at the bookstore someday, but then I’ll probably miss these lazy days with my darling Susan. Thanks again, Kevin! You can read more in Kevin’s column on the Rumpus, “Paper Trumpets”, and visit him at Future Tense and on his website. |