We love learning more about our contributors, and an interview seemed like a fun way to hear more about the writers and artists we publish, so we gave them a choice of questions to answer. We hope you also enjoy hearing more about the artists and their works. Read on and check out issue 24 for "The Audition" from Gahl Liberzon.

Or you can let him read to you!


What was the inspiration for the piece published in the issue?
This piece had a weird and wending way of coming into being. It started out as part of a piece of homework for a class I was taking with musician/writer/artist/polymath Shira Erlichman on the literary concept of Madness. I was assigned to try to physicalize the landscape of madness, and at the time I drew heavily from Rachel McKibbens’s poem “Into the Dark & Emptying Field.” In that poem, McKibbens had the narrative frame of an abusive romantic relationship between the two characters, and used the survivor character's mental landscape as a kind of internal refuge that couldn’t be violated, despite the body it was being housed in being fragile and destructible.

I personally hadn’t had any experience with physical abuse in romantic relationships, but growing up in the slam poetry scene I had certainly seen unhealthy dynamics play out for writers as their interiority became exploited and warped, sometimes by themselves and sometimes at the behest of bad mentors, in order to create a piece of art that had maximum broad commercial appeal. In the moment, this could inadvertently force writers to relive traumas they were trying to write their way out of, and over the long term, even led some to burnout with writing entirely. It's not a problem unique to spoken word, just a kind of gravitational force exerted by capitalism on all art movements– I’d seen the same thing happen more subtly to local punk and hip-hop scenes, and really explicitly to my friends in visual arts and their vexed back-and-forth with the world of galleries/museums/grant funding institutions. So that impulse laid the outlines of the original narrative– I knew that the landscape itself, in contrast with McKibbens's, needed to be not only observable but fundamentally vulnerable to outside interference, both to being warped and to some extent damaged.

Shira is an incredible teacher, and to her credit immediately saw that I was working in the rhythms of prose and getting lost in the sauce with my landscape– I originally had a number of elements that don’t appear in the final bit: lovers in cafes, criers at an open air market, etc. She was the one who initially told me to try removing the line breaks and paring down some of the excess, and it was after doing that I started to realize that it made more sense to treat it as a surrealist piece of flash fiction rather than a poem. That turn ultimately helped it become what it is now, revealing more clearly how it should be paced, where to put paragraph breaks, and so on.

What is your creative process? Do you plan pieces out or let them happen as they come?
There’s no set way, as I hope the answer to the above question illustrates. I often initially sit down with something I want to accomplish, whether that’s a series of plot points or a narrative conceit for fiction or an emotion I may want to capture and/or a form when I’m writing poetry, but that only gets me to the first draft. After that point, I have to reread what went through (or better yet, have a friend/mentor/teacher read it) and see what the piece is actually successful at doing independent of my original intention, and then triangulate between those two points to further refine it. I’m probably in the middle between gardener and architect– a landscape artist? I don’t know the name. The folks that make topiaries.

What is your #1 advice for other writers?
This is a three-part answer, because there are three pieces of advice I’ve gotten from mentors, friends, and favorite writers that have served me the most:

1) Read ten times as much as you write– I know a lot of writers are concerned about literary influence, but the problem quickly becomes moot when you think about the trillions of possible permutations of influences there are out there. The more you absorb from a wide variety of authors, the less you sound like any one person’s clone. Also, you learn a fair bit about the most common/obvious choice if you’ve read a lot, which can open a lot of doors creatively by giving you something to avoid.

2) A successful writing session isn’t about producing something good, it’s about surprising yourself– some version of this was said by Ross Gay, and it always stuck with me. It’s rare to know if something is going to stand the test of time before you’ve had the time to sit with it (let alone edit it), but if you can surprise yourself, it means you’ve done enough exploring in that draft that you maybe are growing as a writer, which is something you can take with you.

3) The average piece takes 35 submissions before it’s accepted– I have no idea if this is true or not in the aggregate, but it’s been invaluable to keeping my spirits up, as coincidentally I have made exactly 35 submissions over the course of the year (as of this writing), and this was the first piece of fiction that was accepted; I literally logged six rejections on ChillSubs this morning