
MORE WRITERS SHOULD JUST BE DOING THIS FOR FUN: An Interview with Tyler Dempsey
Everyone believes there’s something more out there. And if we were just braver, had more time/money/whatever, we’d Don Quixote it up.
Everyone believes there’s something more out there. And if we were just braver, had more time/money/whatever, we’d Don Quixote it up.
Where neighbors handed warm zucchini bread over fences, a 10-year-old drove me around a farm in a rusty truck, and I most likely met a serial killer.
I’m still thinking through and discovering all Seinfeld has, and will, teach me about creative writing, particularly poetic movement, and/or MacGuffins as a narrative technique.
I just kept doing it until I had over three dozen paradoxes saved on my computer. Some of them allowed themselves to be shaped into publishable stories.
What’s the relationship between reality/life/history and stories? When do stories productively enrich our lives, and when do they overtake them to a troubling degree?
I enjoy the wish fulfillment of making up a controlling, overbearing asshole and then torturing him by making everything go wrong no matter what he does.
Kyle experimented with ChatGPT once: “What are twenty-five short story ideas?” The answers it puked out were uniformly terrible, except for one.
I knew I was going to love it when the head started to vomit guns. The tone felt like a Monty Python film. Is that a common comparison?
I was reading my bad poems and in between bad poems I was telling some stories and Steve said I should quit writing poems and instead tell funny stories. So I followed his advice.
At my most pessimistic I’ve worried that this collection is akin to charging people to watch me at the gym; when I’m more optimistic, it feels like I’m just flexing in different genres.