THE WORLD IS AN UNCOMFORTABLE PLACE: An Interview with Tara Campbell
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.
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?
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.
There was this thing near San Antonio when I was in high school called the Elmendorf Beast that killed livestock. It turned out it was just a coyote with mange.
I don’t feel free, Vi. Never have. I know you don’t either. I don’t know anyone who does, or has. Maybe nothing is, nor should it be.
Troy James Weaver is the author of Wichita Stories, Visions, Marigold, Temporal, and Selected Stories. His work often centers around young and vulnerable characters from rural areas struggling to fit into the world. He writes with an unparalleled rawness in quick, powerful bursts. A Troy James Weaver novel is quick and slim, but will change the way you think about writing and people both. In a blurb for Temporal, Scott McClanahan wrote, “[Troy] is our Witold Gombrowicz.” For Marigold, Michael Bible wrote, “[he] is the poet-laureate of Midwestern absurdity with a heart a mile wide.” Dennis Cooper wrote, as a blurb for Selected Stories, Troy’s collection out with…
Simon Han, an Asian-American writer whose critically acclaimed debut novel, Nights When Nothing Happened, comes out on November 17th, took the time to speak to me about growing up as an immigrant in Plano—a suburb of Dallas, Texas—the racism of the American Dream, his craft decisions, and more. *** Taylor Hickney: To me this novel is about loneliness, families, the immigrant experience in America and the racism that goes along with it, the facades of the suburbs, and more. Where did the kernel of this story come from? How long did it take you to nurture it until it became what…