Wake Island was on a short hiatus for the holidays but today we’re back at it with author Steve Anwyll. Even though we met for the first time the day before recording this episode Steve feels like someone I’ve known forever. Steve’s debut novel Welfare is about a high school student who escapes his dysfunctional homelife to drift alone with no safety net but the help of government aid. Although the delivery is straight forward there’s an elegance to the way Welfare unfolds. I also found Steve’s prose to be quietly poetic and at times unexpected. If you’re a certain type of degenerate I think you’ll get a kick out of this conversation. 

Theme music by Joseph E. Martinez of Junius 

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In the summer of 2019, Justin Taylor wrote a personal essay for Harper’s entitled “What It Means to be Alive.” It was one of the best things I’ve read online this year. The essay is about Justin’s father, who planned on committing suicide on Mother’s Day. It’s also the first chapter of Justin’s memoir, Riding with the Ghost, which comes out in 2020 from Random House. Justin has already published two books of short stories, Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever and Flings, as well as a debut novel, The Gospel of Anarchy.  

Theme music by Joseph E. Martinez of Junius

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I know there’s a lot of podcasts out there where people talk about their projects or shoot the shit about pop culture. But what I’m interested in with Wake Island is getting into art that crosses the line. I also want to hear about art that’s moving and intense, the kind of work that haunts you. So every other week I’ll be exploring these ideas and projects with artists I admire. We’ll talk about their creative process and background as well as our implicit attraction to darkness. The goal here is to make life seem seedier, stranger, and hopefully by doing so, closer to the truth. For today’s episode, I’ll be speaking to visual artist Chris Santa Maria. For the last three years, Chris has been working on this truly insane and psychedelic project based on Trump’s presidency. The idea behind it was to create a large-scale, figurative collage of magazine cut-outs, illustrating nearly every moment of the regime. Staring at this thing is like scrolling down an endless Twitter timeline on acid. 

Theme music by Joseph E. Martinez of Junius  

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Twitter: @WakeIslandPod

Instagram: @wakeislandpod