Self Exposure

If you've only encountered Uzodinma Okehi through his recent Twitter persona, you might characterize him as a pest. He's a frequent poster, but he's known more for his replies and responses, which sometimes seem to take indie lit writers and presses to task for being precious, disingenuous, or faux humble. It's a tightrope to walk, especially because Uzo is part of that world, and guilty of many of the same faux pas. This sentiment, of being among but also being outside, is a major theme in Uzo's book House of Hunger, which he self published as part of a series that traces the character Blue Okoye (a stand in for Uzo himself). This book rocked my world. In less than 100 pages, it captures the alienation of being at college in Iowa City in the 90s. The bleakness of the place, the grayness, and also the alienation of being black and artistic in a school where popularity generally belongs to white jocks and their Coors Light looking girlfriends. Outside of the themes of alienation and belonging, the stylistic choices in this book are sharp and choppy, lending a racing, countdown feeling to the reader. Check out Uzo's book here:

https://www.bokoye.com/

Michael Wheaton and I talk about weed. We talk about using it as a tool for our writing and our parenting, and moreover, we talk about featuring this part of ourselves in our writing. Both of us have young children, but they won’t be young forever. Soon they will piece together what that smell was wafting through their childhood. In a way, this conversation and Michael’s latest book, Home Movies (Bunny Press 2024), is an attempt to practice how we respond to them. It’s a delicate balance between wanting to feel legitimate, to not feel like a criminal, while granting that weed is a filter that can distance you from the people you love the most. 

https://bunnypresse.org/product/bunny05-michael-wheaton-home-movies-print-chapbook/

It’s remarkable ZH Gill is among us at all, let alone producing heartfelt and hilarious prose about his, shall we say, misadventures. ZH goes into depth about his struggles with mental health, his time in a psych ward as a teen, his terrible depression at 19, and his manic jag at Oberlin which almost ended in marriage. What a beautiful person. What a big hearted baby bear. ZH talks about the people he loves with zero irony and makes you want to be among them. His chapbook and his stories in Hobart are so good and it’s clear he’s got a lot more in him. I can’t wait to say I knew him when. Now, for the love of Red Vines, can someone please get him a PDF of his story in Animal Blood volume 4!

Jesse is back to talk more in depth about our connection to one another. Jesse edited my forthcoming book from Pig Roast Publishing, The Bottomfeeder, and we talk about that experience and my anxiety about releasing such a personal book in the future. It's good to have friends you can count on and Jesse is an earnestly supportive member of our scene. He's also an incredible writer with a savant-like ability to dip in and out of genres. His latest book, The Tattletales, is a noir detective thriller that drives like a dream, but we mostly reference his first crime novel, Blood Trip, because it made his home life awkward when he released it. Blood Trip, released shortly after his ex-wife remarried, is a book about a divorced dad who stages the kidnapping of his daughter and the murder of her stepfather. Carla and her partner Hilda Hoy are also in the store and chime in about whether I'll be cancelled for writing openly about being a mom who smokes pot.

If you're listening to this episode, it's likely not the first time you've heard an interview with Kat Giordano. About to release their 4th book (a collection of poems called Thumbsucker, with Malarkey Books) Giordano is indisputably a part of the outsider/indie lit scene. And yet… and yet they feel outside of the outsiders. Part of that comes from being non-binary. Part of that comes from decades of social anxiety. Part of that comes from being opinionated in ways that diverge from the party line – and yes, even outsider literature has a clear party line. 

If the social scene doesn't represent you. If you can't wrap it around you like a cum stained blanket and feel its musty comfort, then you have to be a writer first. Kat is very much a writer first and the books they've produced are an invitation for readers to witness the ugliest, horniest, neediest moments of their life. But the work is more than just prurient and confessional. Kat's a gifted and careful writer who continues to produce work that is seldom reflected elsewhere. In this episode, we focus on Kat's 2020 autofictional novel, The Fountain (Thirty West), which is an account of a specific sort of depression that hits in your early 20s. 

Josh and I have our first 1 on 1 conversation and it could not have gone better. We talk about the genre of autofiction from a lot of different perspectives. Josh is an obsessive reader and writer of autofiction. He's working on an extended project called Autoportrait, which is made up of a mountain of seemingly unrelated declarative sentences about his life. The cumulative effect is sort of magical. Josh didn't develop this style on his own. He found a book called Autoportrait by the French writer Édouard Levé and felt compelled to try out the form himself. Throughout our conversation, we consider the important role French writers of the 80s and 90s play in defining the genre. We talk about the alternative journalism and zine culture roots of autofiction in writers like Hunter S. Thompson, Eve Babbitz and Lisa Crystal Carver as well. And we talk about proto-autofiction coming from unexpected places; The Diary of Anne Frank and Notes From the Underground. We discuss the way women are ghettoized by the term Memoir, the explosion of recovery memoirs, and how James Frey would have been saved by defining himself as an autofiction writer. We talk about the most important works in recent history with writers like Tao Lin and Shelia Heti. We talk about where it's all going and how the use of other platforms will become offshoots of autofictional writing. This is by no means a complete picture but I think it might be the deepest one in existence so far. 

If you're interested in listening to Josh read chapters from his Autoportrait, you can find those episodes of Misery Loves Company here: 

Chapter 1 + 2: https://youtu.be/G8mVEWCFGYs?si=rPhaVCtFoZSFen-r&t=1866

Chapter 3 + 4: https://youtu.be/E9qyRd3xYng?si=UdBMM87jv1f4452G&t=2031

Chapter 5 + 6:  https://t.co/LsKMfmpNVY

Chapter 7 + 8: https://youtu.be/elh0GFSkpsc?si=jjUln0cajs0SBFEv&t=1940

This is an important episode. Derek sings a heartbreaking Jawbreaker song at the top. We talk about Blake Butler and his book, Molly. We talk about memory and how hard it is to conjure images when you think in language. We talk about our old faces and dumpy keisters. We talk about losing people and being constantly on the verge of loss. We are writers. We are parents. We are friends.

This episode can be played as a drinking game. Every time Rudy and I find a pop culture intersection, you drink. I would never play it because I think all games are pointless. I also think most of our listeners are drinking just fine without a gaming element. But I leave the choice up to you.

Rudy Johnson is a quiet legend of our scene. He’s collaborated with his childhood friend, William Duryea, on many literary projects, most famously on the online journal Misery Tourism and the coinciding live virtual reading series, Misery Loves Company. Rudy and I met during the short lived but much loved reign of Last Estate, which he also co-led with William. We worked on art and layout together. It was so easy to work with him. He kept his camera off and he became, for me, a consistently kind Eeyore voice in the gloomy winter. When you view his sub-stack, which you should, it’s clear that, despite his common name, there is only one Rudy Johnson. I like to imagine him in a room with 100 Rudy Johnsons, even 100 black Rudy Johnsons from New York. What would they make of him? I believe they’d find him odd and delightful. Rudy, my friend, I hope the Ketamine helps.

https://substack.com/@lynchpoet

https://youtube.com/@Miserytourism

Early on in this conversation, I noticed I was breathing like an athlete and wondered, in some remote part of my mind, why the adrenaline and ragged nerves? Possibly it was the fact that we were back. Carla was back in the store with me and we had the TASCAM out and the headphones on. The guest, Nathaniel Duggan, wrote a book that seemed to me to be as good as any poetry book that ever won an award, and Josh was coming back for the episode, which made it feel like the early days (also known as 4 episodes ago). I read over the bleak poems throughout Black Friday. What a perfect collection for the day! Poems filled with unmoored hopelessness and capitulation to the industrial machine. Poems written by a brilliant 29 year old who has already failed as an adult, by most metrics. He has no buying power despite having had every privilege. He has no property or family of his own. His poems are about not meeting the demands of modern society. Of pausing too long during a greasy lunch to write a poem on your phone, which casts you even farther away from the GOAL of locking it down and making money. Death Egg sold 200 copies so far. We talked about this. We talked about how indie art won't change your life financially. This theme comes up a lot in the 10 episodes of Self Exposure. It's meant to be a sign of the meaninglessness of striving for and reaching an audience of any significance. I have come to see this crumb sweeping attitude as understandable. Expectations are emotional and having expectations that are too high will lead to more personal misery. Sometimes there's an opposite impulse at play. I've seen bluster about being the "best" writer or "best" indie press, and it's a quiet claim, like the time I was in the Netherlands and biked past a restaurant sign that said, "The best bolognese in Rotterdam." The space that contains these episode notes will likely be missed by most who listen to the podcast, but nonetheless, I am ready to proclaim that Death Egg is the best bolognese in Rotterdam. That Self Exposure is the best indie-lit podcast, and that I am the best auto-fiction writer in Berlin. Take that Lauren Oyler! My pecs just got hard. I'm into strength now. Join my army.

Death Egg by Nathaniel Duggan

The best food novel I've read this year is Ric Royer's Niagara Falls, NY. It's much more than that. It's also a novel about coming home to a desolate place during the pandemic, regaining personal momentum, and it's a book about the history of Niagara Falls, specifically the utopian dreamers that tried to form it and failed. But the food is what sticks for me. It's the greasy junk food of depression and if you've ever shoveled fries into your mouth to blot out the world, you will understand the mastery of Royer's portrayal. Oily sausage links sit unrefrigerated in a car trunk, along with Tim Hortons doughnuts, and Arby's roast beef. The final chapter of the novel is a symphony of take-out Chinese dishes, surreally spread out (ala Beauty and the Beast) around Royer delivering him enough nourishment to finally move on. I didn't know Royer before reading his book but I want to know him. Speaking with him, I was drawn to his soft voice and considerate tone. His gentleness is present throughout our conversation, which ranges from cancellation to suicide to the beauty of post-industrial wastelands. I read this book while I was working on my own manuscript and it made me want more for myself and for the book I am writing. I've come to see this podcast as an attempt to form a supportive community amongst indie-outsider writers. No one is getting rich here so, for me, the point is to be guided and inspired by old voices and new voices in the scene. Niagara Falls, NY inspired me. It's a great book.

More info about Ric at http://www.ricroyer.com/