Could you elaborate?
On the origins, or just the structure,
or what is teacher mode?
Maybe the-- Is there privilege in digital hurt?
Is there privilege in a digital heart, or is that--
Hurt, hurt.
OK, both sound good.
Well, you could answer both.
That would be great.
It is, there is this, you know, this place right now.
And it's a very sort of feminine dominated place
within sort of the social media arena that exists.
And it's-- and I've read a lot of studies,
and I've seen this in my own family,
in terms of the kind of currency that's made,
the value that comes with this sort of brand mass public
approval of people that you've never seen.
People that, if you saw them on the street,
you wouldn't care one way or another
what they thought of you.
But then it becomes this mass, this intangible sort
of, kind of, force, right?
And that's what I was really thinking about
and I had a lot of scenes of real, real images.
The 1985 pic was real.
And sort of, I saw these kinds of things
and I was trying to put them together,
in terms of something that really should govern our lives.
And it's so forceful.
And there's this phrase, it's called,
if it's not one thing it's the mother.
So, so that shows up a lot.
And the mother in the story is the only one
that is not speaking because she's also being observed.
She's also in that arena of having
a force working to sort of bear witness to her existence.
So she doesn't have that right, for a lot of reasons,
to look back.
So I was thinking about those kinds of things
as I put it together.
I don't know if that's the answer to your question.
So, I really appreciate your writing.
You are one of those writers who can say so much complexity
with really--
with simple beautiful words--
Thank you, I appreciate that.
--which is really nice.
And I just wonder, are there particular
other authors that inspire you or inspire your process?
Well, let's go back to the genesis of things.
So I was talking, I was talking to Manuel
and he said, yeah, he's got all the weight of religion
and organized religion that has shaped him
and I'm very much the same way.
I was raised in a church.
I even taught Sunday school up until age 20
or around that age.
And things like that.
But I have left for more sort of spiritual exploration of life
or whatever that might be.
But the Bible, those kinds of textbooks,
were some of my earliest teachers,
because the language is beautiful.
It is very ornate and very poetic,
and it can go really long and you
would talk about Methuselah and his second cousin,
and just listing all that.
So I do, I do like less.
But then after that I discovered other writers like David Packer
and David Smith and Gabriel García Márquez.
Recently, I was floored.
I had a colleague tell me that to like Gabriel García Márquez
is like saying you like Kenny G. It's cool,
but, and I don't know when that happened,
but, so there was that.
But I do like them.
I like language that deals with the fantastic.
Aimee Bender, she was a teacher of mine too at USC.
So I like that kind of thing.
It can be humorous, but it can be very, very expansive
in terms of what the reach of humanity
that it's trying to understand in their language.
I also read a really cool book.
It's called The Signs Preceding the End of the World
by Yuri Herrera, and it's very good.
Yeah, right?
And it's, and it's like that.
It's a novel.
126 pages, something like that.
But it's sort of, it's really, really how it moves
and how it can capture.
It's not as ornate, it's not as flashy.
And it doesn't have a lot of symbolism, things like that.
But it's very accurate, because it's
a discussion about intention and people
and the nature of our choices as we move through time and things
like that.
So yeah, those are a few.
OK.
I have two.
OK.
Unrelated to each other.
That was beautiful.
Thank you.
My first question is, because everything you read was short,
I'm wondering, do you tend to write short?
And do you ever feel pressure to write longer?
I do write all of it.
So there's a story here, I think it's 30, 40 pages or something
like that.
There's others that are 10, 20.
So there's a variety.
But I do love the short story.
I like reading them too, just because it's
a little bit more accessible in this kind of environment.
But I do write all of them.
And I've written certain stories in both formats,
so they're saved like that in my drives.
I have this one, 500 words, this one, the same exact same story,
2,500 words.
So I'll play with length, and sort of
see what I want to do with it.
And then the game becomes what journal wants which version
first.
And then it becomes a thing and then
I'll just walk away from that point on,
or I'll steal other parts from the longer one
to expand later into other things.
So I'm not that precious when it comes to the story as a whole,
or length or anything like that.
I don't have that kind of, I don't know,
artsy kind of spiritual connection to it.
It's clay to me.
I'll make it do what I like to do.
Yeah.
What was the second one?
That was good to hear.
And second one is, you mentioned a couple of times
that you write very close to your life.
Do you write, are you interested, I guess,
do you write memoir at all?
Or have you thought about memoir or anything like that yet?
There's a saying that for new writers,
everything is just thinly veiled autobiography, right?
But for me, it's everybody else's biography.
So I don't write about myself as much
as I write about everyone else that comes close to me,
so be careful--
[LAUGHTER]
Of what you say and reveal in my presence.
Because if I like it, you know, I like it for a lot of reasons,
because it feels so real, and so true and so beautiful and so
lovely and so tragic.
I want to mess with it and see how
the world might look at this, and how I can look at this.
And that could be really insulting to people
that are like, I just told you the most intimate thing,
[LAUGHTER]
And then you just sold it for $100.
[LAUGHTER]
So that could be a problem.
And I don't know if it's a corrupted moral core
on my own part.
I don't know, but I think it's all fair game.
It's all beautiful, so I just, I don't know.
But, but yeah.
It's not as always as close to me.
The parts about me are always very small, very subtle.
Might be the most tragic thing that shows up in the story,
maybe.
And then I could take other things around it,
sort of build on those moments.
And the worst parts of my life, I
still haven't to figure out how to write yet.
So I'm not there yet for memoir exactly,
but whatever that other word is for when
you take other people's lives and write about them,
and fictionalize it, I'm doing that.
[LAUGHTER]
In large numbers.
Thank you.
You're welcome.