Zine Release: Revenant / A Degenerate Model for Living

If the first edition hardback is the literature world’s 180-gram vinyl LP, the zine is its demo tape, handmade with its rough edges intact, a home-dubbed statement of purpose for the 50 people who care to listen. You can pre-order this zine NOW from Spider Baby Depot

Maybe it’s laziness, or having too many competing interests, or writer’s block, or depression. Maybe it’s the muses taking their sweet time to get back to me. Maybe it’s fear. Whatever the reason, I work slow. The ideas come when they come, and I make sure to get them down in one form or another, but the process of completion isn’t one that comes quick or easy. My drafts folder is a museum of loose ends waiting to get tied up.

For most of my writing life I took it one sentence at a time, revising as I went. A three-sentence email might take an hour. Maybe a good way to kill time at work, but it’s an excruciating way to make art. Every time I’ve helped a friend or student with their writing, it’s been with a heavy “not as I do” caveat. And I’ve begun to follow my own advice, at least sometimes — embracing the capital-W writing part of the thing and doing my best to save the edits for later. It’s more fun that way, but even still, it’s slow going.

For all the hand wringing about the worth of MFA programs, the cost-benefit analysis that only seems to break even when the writer can land one of those elusive white whales — New Yorker bylines, tenure-track professorships, six-figure advances — I got exactly what I wanted from my MFA program: deadlines. Like all great procrastinators, I work best under pressure.

In 2018 I completed my MFA thesis, All By Our Lonesome. A collection of linked stories, written and published in a paperback I designed myself. Making that book was a really special experience, the culmination of half a life spent in creative writing workshops and DIY punk communities — the feeling of having made something completely on my own, start to finish, was intoxicating. Still is. And a big part of getting it done was that I simply had to.

Since grad school I haven’t finished many writing projects, but that isn’t to say I haven’t been writing, just that I’ve been finding space to write without an end goal or audience, putting words down because — however much I resist the ass-in-chair dictum — there’s some part of me that has to do it. But after months of gathering wool, I realized I had something I wanted to share with other people — if only on my own terms.

The traditional route to getting published is a lot of work, and heavily dependent on other people. And for a slow mover like me it’s hard to cast that wide net that tends to bring in the fish, and even then the fish aren’t always doing so hot.

I’m not here to shit on lit mags. I’ve founded them, edited them, even read them sometimes. It’s a well-trod path that has led to great things for many writers. But that’s a path that never felt right to me, one paved by an industry with its glory days behind it.

There’s another way, similarly worn but still dirt and loose gravel, one that makes more sense to my punk spirit than any open submission period: the zine. If the first edition hardback is the literature world’s 180-gram vinyl LP, the zine is its demo tape, handmade with its rough edges intact, a home-dubbed statement of purpose for the 50 people who care to listen. And as nice as it would be to publish a bestselling novel, it’s ultimately the zine that I most want to make.

Of course, zines are typically a fast medium — words to paper, paper to xerox, staples, send it out. And even working in a fast medium, I work slow. And maybe it’s because I’m a physical media junkie, but I wanted it to look and feel nice, something worth the reader’s time and money. So I spent a few months putting together 40 pages of material about the dumbest thing I’m passionate about: professional wrestling. At some point along the way, my good friends from Spider Baby Depot asked if I’d like to release it through their burgeoning imprint, Intercourse Publishing. And just like that, I’m not self-publishing anymore, but still getting to make the thing I really wanted to make, with the added bonus of some fantastic illustrations from Spider Baby proprietor/killer punk artist KNOX.

Now the printer has the files and we’ve signed off on the paper stock and in a few days we’ll receive a box full of loose pages to fold and staple and ship out to anyone who wants one. I’m really excited to have another piece of writing set free, and I hope the people who read it like it, too.

Preorder Revenant / A Degenerate Model for Living now from Spider Baby Depot.