Southwest Review
Southwest Review

Interviews

I first met Bun B on December 3, 2019, at White Oak Music Hall in Houston. We were both attending Red Bull Presents: Thee Outlaw, a branded concert for Megan Thee Stallion. Back then, Megan Thee Stallion was but a young Black girl from Texas aspiring to worldwide success. And Bun B was there as an elder, one who had spent years defending and protecting Houston’s claim to a hip-hop dynasty. I served in the role of archivist disguised as journalist, curious to see who had taken up Houston and the greater South’s claim to the throne of hip-hop. All three of us were admirers of the craft, and anxious about the possibility of a Houston rapper taking hip-hop’s reign with her hoards of hotties. All of us were bound by something UGK and so many other rappers from the Third Coast had laid down for us.
The South, Texas, and hip-hop overall owe Bun B a great debt. Alongside his partner Pimp C (Chad Butler), he formed the legendary hip-hop group from Port Arthur, Texas. Without the storytelling prowess of Bun B and Pimp C, the genre would not be the juggernaut it is today. Hip-hop has a direct through line to the oral tradition of African diaspora, and for this reason it stands out among other genres in pop music. Southern hip-hop in particular, which incorporates elements of gospel and blues, draws upon the deep lineage of African Americans using music as a way to preserve their heritage. When Megan Thee Stallion calls herself Tina Snow, an alter ego inspired by Tony Snow, Pimp C’s alter ego, in her discography, it’s more than a simple shout-out—it shows a deep reverence for the Southern rappers who came before her, for a tradition that still influences hip-hop today.
Bun B has witnessed the birth and evolution of hip-hop. (In fact, they share the same birth year: 1973.) At the age of fifty-one, he is also an author, an entrepreneur, a father, a grandfather, and a university lecturer. I had the opportunity to talk with him about the legacy of UGK, the history of hip-hop, and his later-in-life mission to pay it forward.

Taylor Crumpton: Let’s go back in time to when you were young. Tell me about the beginning of your career. Did you ever think that when you first started rapping, that you would have this legacy—musical children and grandchildren—who reference and revere you? 

Bun B: When I found hip-hop, I was immediately a fan. I’ve always been a collector of music. Back then I was trying to find as much of it as possible because hip-hop wasn’t easily accessible in the earliest days. Every record store didn’t stock it. It wasn’t until certain people I knew started working at certain places [that I could find it].
Then, as the culture started to grow and expand into other regions outside New York, the stores started stocking more and more hip-hop, and people started to adopt different aspects of the culture. Some people became DJs, some became breakdancers, some became graffiti artists. And some people became rappers. In my city, Port Arthur, there was a group of people starting to create and record hip-hop music. Pimp C was one of them. He was already a practitioner when I decided that I might want to give it a try because I was good friends with a guy who was rapping and I was like, “He doesn’t even listen to as much rap music as I listen to. If he thinks he can rap, then I can rap.” I wrote a rhyme and it was terrible. But I wanted to be good. That was the fire that lit under me at the time.
But I couldn’t have imagined a life in hip-hop. At eighteen, nineteen years old, growing up where I grew up in the world that I was living in at the time, I couldn’t even imagine being fifty years old. I’ve been blessed with a slow but steady ascension in my career. I’ve been able to contribute to the culture in many different ways. My work is not always music based; I do a lot more speaking engagements now. This year, I’ve probably done as many speaking engagements as I’ve done concert performances. And of course I’m in the food industry [as cofounder of Trill Burgers in Houston].
Being open to change; being aware of a need to transition into other things—you end up exceeding expectations. Not only that other people had for me, but some that I didn’t even realize I had had for myself. I’m knocking down walls that I never even knew were standing in front of me thirty years ago. It’s amazing to me to be in the position that I’m currently in.

TC: One of my favorite things you’ve ever done. I’m so jealous I wasn’t in college at the time, when you were a lecturer at Rice in your hip-hop and religion course. For myself, who was raised in the church in Texas, I’ve always found Southern hip-hop to have a spiritual element, a gospel element, a Baptist element. I love that you’ve been able to bring hip-hop to all your endeavors—Trill Burgers, speaking engagements, being in the academy—and breathe life into them. It’s representative of what hip-hop can do and can become over time. 

BB: Having the opportunity to use something that benefited my personal growth tremendously, and being able to apply that in a space to educate young people, is something special. If you look now, there are so many different spaces where hip-hop culture has been brought onto campuses and into classrooms to better meet kids where they are. It’s not about dumbing yourself down to reach children. We’re not trying to be hip or cool; we just want to let students know that we understand and have a frame of reference for the world that they’re living in nowadays. There’s always going to be comparable things that exist in childhood, like falling in love, social awkwardness. That type of stuff happens across the board, no matter which generation you’re from.
I currently work with a program called Reading with a Rapper. We’re going into classrooms and using hip-hop as a way to teach English. We show kids that when you listen and rap along to these songs, you’re not just singing. Alliteration, rhymes, similes—all of these different aspects of language are happening in these records. Metro Boomin is saying the same thing as Shakespeare and Dickinson. It’s about expression and exploration of the English language to communicate deeper with people.
And the kids take to it. By looking at some of the lyrics to the songs—not just songs from my generation, but some of their favorite songs—we can break things down and show them, “Hey, when this guy is talking about getting money, this is what he’s alluding to.” The teacher is taking them into consideration when putting together the lesson plan and as a result, they’re a lot more receptive. I’m so proud of being able to reach the minds of students.

TC: This is beautiful. Speaking of Pimp C, I was privileged to meet his wife [Chinara Butler] at Red Bull Presents: Thee Outlaw. It was so great to hear of her love for Megan. And on Megan’s recent album, she gave Megan one of Pimp C’s verses. I would love to hear about the process of you and Pimp being on “Paper Together,” because it’s also Megan’s way of informing her fans—who are younger, multiracial, and who span across the globe—about UGK, Pimp C, and the rap tradition coming out of Houston.

BB: People ask for stuff all the time. I don’t own anything lyrically or production-wise of Pimp C’s. The first thing that has to be addressed is through the estate. Just to make sure that everything legal is exactly where it needs to be, everyone gets exactly what they’re supposed to have due to them contractually. When the estate decides to hand something over, it’s got to be to the right person. It’s not necessarily about who wants to pay the most. It’s about who represents what it is that Chad gave his all for. It keeps his name and spirit alive, his energy alive. Then it gets to me and I’m pretty much all in. I couldn’t think of a better current artist to share a UGK record with than Megan Thee Stallion—she’s Tina Snow.
“Paper Together” was originally recorded as a reference track. The original version of it was more experimental. The original sample from the song was very different, and not the kind of music that rap was being performed to—it was a soul record, an R&B record. It had a groove to it, but not the typical groove and feel of hip-hop. That record evolved from the original version to another version and ended up in the archives. From my best estimate, the rhymes you hear are from when Pimp C and I were eighteen years old at the youngest, twenty-one years at the oldest. Those vocals were not re-recorded. It just shows how music can be appreciated across time. I think we did a good job with that on “Paper Together.” Because quite frankly, you can’t tell if that’s from the Dirty Money era, from the Underground Kingz era. You can’t really tell what era it’s from, but it’s distinctly UGK.
We always consciously tried not to time-stamp our music. When I say time-stamp—we were very careful not to have too many songs with the year in it. If you talk about cars, talk about models that are consistent in the brand, like the Mercedes 600. You know there’ll be a Benz every year. That line of thinking but also rapping about general things like love, hate, having money, not having money, feeling empowered, feeling small, being seen, being heard, being invisible—these are all human conditions that have existed for centuries.
But some people don’t understand the nuance. So there needs to be some clarity. That’s what Pimp C did best, more than anything else. If Pimp C wanted to get outlandish with the storytelling, there had to be clarity about what the overall message was because some people wouldn’t get it. You can hear it in “Pocket Full of Stones.” It’s a tale about being stuck in a cycle. If you sell drugs, you go to jail, then you come back out, you’re probably going to go right back to selling drugs, you’re probably going to go right back to jail, and now you’re caught in the cycle of it. At some point, you have to be clear about these things, especially in entertainment.
Kool Moe Dee had an album with a report card on the back—all the things that he was good at in terms of writing rhymes. One of them was sticking to themes. That really stood out to me. I’ve heard the Beastie Boys talk about the same thing: the ideas, the qualities that a songwriter in hip-hop should take into consideration when you write a rhyme. The topics of UGK songs may have seemed frivolous or outlandish, but there was deep thought that went into what we were saying.

TC: I was joking with one of my friends, Kathy Iandoli, author of God Save the Queens, that this year feels like the 1995 Source Awards. A lot of rappers are going back to a regional style. They’re wanting to represent where they’re from because, for a long time, everybody in hip-hop sounded like they were from the same place. I’m curious to hear your perspective. As someone who has witnessed the rise and ascension, how are you feeling about Texas hip-hop? 

BB: I’ll be very honest: The South won, in terms of regional dominance in hip-hop. It’s very hard to argue [against]. It’s a numbers thing. You gotta go up against Texas. You gotta go up against Tennessee, Georgia, Florida, North Carolina, even Virginia with the Clipse. Within that tradition of Southern hip-hop, many of the cultural cues come from Houston. We’re still at the highest levels of hip-hop. So many people now do a chopped and screwed variation of an album. Then there’s the Latino representation, with artists like [That] Mexican OT, Bo Bundy, and Peso Peso.
Arguably the biggest, most impactful hip-hop artist on tour right now is Travis Scott. If you look at the crowd that he just had in Milan [for his Circus Maximus Tour], it was insane. That’s typically the kind of crowd you have for a music festival, where there are thirty different top acts. One guy tore that entire city to pieces. I’m loving this second wind of Travis Scott right now. He’s been exonerated from everything. He’s settled all his lawsuits. He’s made his amends. He’s back out on the road now with full confidence.
Megan Thee Stallion, she’s the female version of that, touring now internationally. It’s a great time to be from Texas. BigXthaPlug is showing that he’s having a ball out here living his best life. I’m proud to have ushered that in. It’s a beautiful thing.
All we ever wanted was a level playing field. We didn’t want any undue advantages. Let everybody start from the same place and we’ll show you they can’t fuck with us. It’s been beautiful to watch, but we don’t do it to just flex on people or for clout. It’s to contribute to the culture because we understand what the West Coast gave to hip-hop. We understand what the East Coast gave to hip-hop. We’re trying to make sure that everyone understands not only collectively what the South has given to hip-hop, but specifically what Texas has given and continues to contribute to the culture. I love having been at the forefront of that. I love being in a position that allows me to perpetuate further motion as well.

TC: When UGK was coming out, when Southern hip-hop was coming out, there was a lot of commentary about how Southerners can’t rap. People from Texas can’t rap. A lot of pop music credits André 3000 with announcing to the world that “the South got something to say.” However, UGK was releasing some of its best music before André’s statement at the 1995 Source Awards. How does that resonate with you?

BB: It was true. It was something that we all felt, but I don’t think any of us had been given a microphone and a platform in a room full of those people. That’s why the words resonated so strongly—not because of what he said, but where he said it.
They went up there all confident, and they literally were booed for having won with that album. There’s a stereotype of Southerners—outside of music and entertainment, just as people, as human beings—that we are lesser than. That we’re slower. That we’re still operating under some sort of slave mentality. But where do you think the civil rights movement started? The marches. Where people were getting rocks thrown at them and hoses and dogs turned on them. All of that happened in the South. We’ve been fighting oppression the entire time we’ve existed in the South. We’ve always operated from a space of cultural isolation. Even among other Black people.
It felt good to see someone get on a stage like that and be unabashedly Southern. I take nothing away from the impact of what André says. My job is to make sure I’m living up to it. We’d already been fighting that fight. We were already living up to it when those guys got there, but that only strengthened us. It also unified us because there was no taking it back at that point.
We got on the biggest stage, in the biggest room you could be in—New York, East Coast, however you want to designate it. André got up there and asserted our relevance and our eventual dominance. Those words still resonate with me today in everything I do, because even if it’s not music, even if it’s burgers, it’s still Southern.

Bernard Freeman—better known to the world as Bun B—changed the hip-hop landscape as one half of the legendary UGK, alongside the late Pimp C. From their 1992 debut Too Hard to Swallow to their groundbreaking “Int’l Players Anthem (I Choose You)” with OutKast fifteen years later, the Underground Kingz made the South the center of hip-hop. While the Grammy-nominated duo collectively delivered six classic albums and two EPs, Bun solidified his solo-warrior status with five projects that embody his Port Arthur, Texas, mantra to keep it trill.

Taylor Crumpton is a music, pop culture, and politics writer from Dallas. She covers a range of topics, from Black queer advocacy to underrepresented hip-hop scenes in the US South to pop analysis of releases like “WAP” and “Black Is King.” Her work can be found in Time, where she writes a monthly column, as well as the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Harper’s Bazaar, Essence, the Guardian, NPR, and many other platforms.

Illustration: Vitus Shell.

 

“I wonder if I haven’t simply explored and brought together in [this] text the twofold fascination I’ve always had with photography and the material traces of presence. A fascination, now more than ever, with time.”

—Annie Ernaux, The Use of Photography

I went to see Annie Ernaux at her home in Cergy at the end of April 2024. The travel time is just over an hour by RER suburban train (Réseau Express Régional) from where I live in Paris. Cergy-Pontoise is one of the “new towns” planned and created in the 1960s on the outskirts of Paris to relieve urban congestion. Ernaux has lived in Cergy since 1975, and most of her books have been written in her house there. The streets of the new town, the small businesses, the shopping center, and the public transport system, especially the RER, figure prominently in her books. This is especially the case with the “journaux extimes,” diaries of the outside world (Exteriors; Things Seen; Look at the Lights, My Love), as defined in opposition to the private, inward-turned “journal intime.” In the past decade, I have rarely traveled on the RER without bringing pages of translation to correct from Ernaux’s books. And in these pages, it sometimes happens that the narrator is herself traveling on the RER, observing, listening, and reading, though presumably not pages from a translation.
Annie Ernaux lives in a house built in the fifties on a great sweep of green, sloping land. On the side of the house in which her writing room is located, looking up, at the top of the hill and the road, there is a stand of fir trees. There are many different kinds of trees on the lot. I know this from the books but even more from my email correspondence with the author. There is a plum tree, a japonica, a magnolia, and when I visited at the end of April, the last of the lilac blossoms were scattering. During the pandemic, at the most restrictive period of lockdown, when I wrote to Ernaux with translation-related questions about Getting Lost, she very kindly sent me photos of whatever tree was blooming at the time. For May 1, it was an image of a branch of lily of the valley from her garden.
To return to our visit in April: we settled across from each other at the dining table in the double room whose French windows and a balcony look out on more leafy expanses, with a blue rim of hillside in the distance and a plunging view of the Oise Valley. We spoke for about two hours, in French. I came equipped with questions, soon abandoned, apart from a cheat sheet of notes and quotes. Our conversation took its own course, digressing and then backtracking in order to retrieve the dropped threads.
Annie Ernaux is a very engaging and vibrant conversationalist. She has a wonderful laugh. We started by discussing the books I’ve been translating, The Use of Photography (for release in fall 2024) as well as The Other Girl (2025). I was eager to inquire how these books came to be, for whenever I translate a book by Ernaux, I search for its roots in the oeuvre, the life, the project notebooks, and in the oeuvre again. We did move on to the subject, but talked of many other things too, such as Exteriors, the photo exhibition curated by Lou Stoppard and inspired by one of Ernaux’s journaux extimes, showing at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris. In the exhibition, excerpts from the book—originally Journal du dehors (1993), translated by Tanya Leslie (1996)—are displayed among the works of photographers, including Claude Dityvon, Daido Moriyama, Garry Winogrand, Dolorès Marat, Janine Niépce, and Ursula Schulz-Dornburg (to name only a few), from the MEP collection. (It is a wonderful exhibition, which I visited again after my afternoon in Cergy, this time with the catalogue in English that Ernaux gave me just as I was leaving.)
Photography is a fixture in the work of Ernaux, whose writing style has often been described as photographic, objective, neutral, even “flat” (her term, from A Man’s Place). Photos—in written form—are present in a number of Ernaux’s works, in which they play an essential role (“freeze frames on memories” is one way she describes them). Yet I don’t believe there is another work by Ernaux in which photography is so much the stuff of the book as it is in The Use of Photography. “It comes from a very specific project,” she said. “It came as a total surprise to me. I never thought I’d write it.”
Originally titled L’usage de la photo (Gallimard, 2005), the book was co-authored by Annie Ernaux and the photographer Marc Marie, who was her lover at the time. It evolved out of several months of photo taking by Ernaux and Marie over the year of 2003. For most of that time, Ernaux was undergoing treatments for breast cancer. Many of the photos they took are tableaux of clothing that have been shed and scattered before sex. Undertaken as a means of heading off loss and forgetting, the project would later include writing, on Ernaux’s suggestion. From among the forty-odd photos they had taken, together they chose fourteen to serve as their subjects.

Alison L. Strayer: In the beginning of The Use of Photography, you wrote a short chapter to introduce the project and how it evolved. I’ll start with an excerpt from the back cover text:

Often, from the start of our relationship, on getting up in the morning, I would gaze in fascination at the dinner table, from which the dishes had not been cleared, at the chairs out of place, our tangled clothes that had been thrown all over the floor the night before, while we were making love. It was a different landscape every time. . . . I wondered why the idea of taking photos of it did not occur to me before.

Annie Ernaux: Well, and then the idea did occur to me, not right away but quite soon. The Use of Photography developed from a very specific project, as did the other book you’re working on, The Other Girl. It emerged from a practice of photography. I checked in my diary—we started taking them in January or February 2003.

ALS: The meeting with Marc—“M.” in the book—was in January 2003.

AE: That’s right. We started taking photos very soon after, but in reality the writing project didn’t start until November 2003.

ALS: If you’ll forgive another quote, this one is from your journal of projects, published as l’Atelier noir. I looked up the year 2003, for which there are hardly any entries. On Saturday, July 12, you wrote:

Breast cancer, haven’t written anything since about the twentieth of January. I’m going to get back to it. This morning, wrote about “the year of cancer,” but that’s facile.

AE: I didn’t want to write about the year of cancer on its own. First of all, I didn’t know whether I was going to get better. There’s that, after all. It weighed on the writing. It is hard even now for me to imagine that just because the treatment stops and I’m told, “Well, there you go, done!” that right away I would feel saved.
It’s true that cancer is part of The Use of Photography and part of that whole year. I was supposed to be cured in July—in other words, the treatment stopped in July.

ALS: You wrote, “For months my body was a theater of violent operations.”

AE: When we started writing, our subject was the photos alone. But soon we realized we couldn’t do it without talking about cancer.

ALS: “The other scene,” which was absent from the photos.

AE: Yes, that’s right. Of course, that “other scene” had a great impact on the whole period. It gave it its intensity, I think. It was love against death. There’s no other way of saying it.
And it was certainly a book that shocked the journalists who wrote about it. For example, Josyane Savigneau from Le Monde, who always did very good articles about what I write, was very cold, really very distant with this text. In the Nouvel Observateur, it was also reviewed by a woman. Her approach was ironic. The title was “Ernaux se déshabille.”

ALS: “Ernaux takes her clothes off.”

AE: The review in Télérama I don’t recall now . . . Yes, it wasn’t pretty. I think you’d have to look hard to find a positive review. And there were two TV interviews. Their tone was “Well, we really don’t have anything special to say, but since we’re here . . .” and so on.
The word I’d use is “disapproval.” People disapproved. Of the photos, first of all. They’re unusual, they’re not what anyone expects. No nudity—you don’t see bodies, you see clothes. Things then weren’t the way they are now, with people taking photos everywhere with their phones. This was 2003. We were taking photos with a camera, an analogue camera that took very beautiful photos—it was Marc’s camera, not mine. I don’t know . . . They disapproved because it hadn’t been done before. Certainly not by a woman with breast cancer.

ALS: Did you have a sense that people considered it irreverent?

AE: Yes, well, when you have cancer, pleasure is not allowed. End of story. You do your chemo and you don’t bother other people with all that. The less they see you, the better it is for everyone. Because there’s that, too: people don’t talk. They don’t know how to be around someone who has cancer.

ALS: You wrote that you met with that reaction quite a lot.

AE: For them, you’re already dead. That’s how they see you. It’s as if you had something contagious. Or as if you were already on the outside, outside of life, and so on. That’s why I hid it as much as possible. Completely. Only my children knew. I told Marc because he’d made a date to see me, but I didn’t want him to . . . Well, it was a sort of a test of truth, you know, to say to him, “I’ve got cancer. Now what are you going to do?”

ALS: Early in the book, when you’re at the clinic—

AE: Not a clinic but the Institut Curie. Marc Marie was very present.

ALS: The relationship was already very close.

AE: It really started there. I had the operation quite soon after we met. And because—well, you know, it’s all in the text. It was a happy time.

ALS:  It’s one of the parts that I like best. The snow, the rooftops, the quiet corridor sounds. Marc bringing you books.

AE: At the same time, it was against a backdrop of war, that of the United States against Iraq, in which the French weren’t taking part, but that didn’t stop people from coming out for huge demonstrations. When I was at the Institut Curie, there was one on the street just below. I could hear it all.

ALS: On the Boulevard Saint-Michel.

AE: Right, on the Boulevard Saint-Michel, all those young people marching. War was very present, people were waiting—we still didn’t know when the United States would descend on Iraq. It was all a huge lie that led to a pointless attack. In reality there was no reason for it. The war was looming until March. It was declared in March. And ended quite quickly because Iraq would be completely destroyed, Baghdad was destroyed.
After I came home, after the operation to remove my tumor (I didn’t know yet whether I would need more surgery), we started taking photos. We continued through October. Even up until Christmas, or New Year’s.

ALS: Yes, there’s a photo from Christmas morning.

AE: So it was right up until then. When the project was decided, we’d been taking photos for a while. By then it was November. The writing was something else entirely. It was my idea. I came up with the device, saying, well, this is what we’re going to do: together, we’ll choose fourteen photos—that was just a random number, there’s no particular meaning to fourteen—and then we’ll each write about the photos on our own. So we had the duplicates made, and so on.

ALS: So you didn’t show each other anything you wrote until the end?

AE: The texts were only put together just before I took it all to the publisher, in October 2004.
And I really don’t remember now how we thought about the photos, on their own, you know? Before the writing. I mean, I know that every time they came back from the developer, we looked at them with great, great . . . We found them very interesting. Quite weird too, some of them.

ALS: From the way that some of your writing about the photos is phrased (and I was very conscious of this, in translating), I almost felt as if the objects themselves, especially the scattered clothes, had decided where and how they were going to land. As if they’d done their own mises en scène.

AE: Yes, in a way they have a life of their own, in our stead. At the time, I received letters from readers who wrote, “Oh, I do the very same thing, I take pictures of what we eat in restaurants, the food on the table—”

ALS: The way we photograph so many things now with our phones.

AE: We photograph so many things with our phones now, yes. But with the photos Marc and I were taking, there really was an intention. For us, the scattered clothes were scenes, like paintings, still lifes, and they refer to the sexual scene. Because the scene of sex cannot be represented. X-rated films are something else, they have nothing to do with it. They say nothing about what beings are driven by, what’s inside them. Here, we have a form, that of the “other scene,” as people say in psychoanalysis, another scene.

ALS: Have you read the text by Virginia Woolf called “On Being Ill”?

AE: Maybe. I’m not sure.

ALS: It’s a great essay! At the beginning, in a very, very long sentence, she says something like “It’s surprising, given how common illness is, that it is not to be found among the great themes of literature.” She develops the idea that we have to find another way of evoking illness and other things that can’t be told in a head-on way. You can’t have a list of symptoms or descriptions of actions and gestures—something more oblique is needed.

AE: Yes. That’s it, yes.

ALS: The essay ends with an image of a velvet curtain that has been crushed together in one place where a woman has seized it in great suffering. She’s not there anymore, but the mark of her hand remains.
That’s what the photo is, here, in a sense. An imprint, a mark that resonates.

AE: Yes, it’s the trace that challenges, that makes us ask questions. And the trace, here, is a photographic print.
What can seem surprising is that for months we did these photos for no reason but to have them. And the photos could have served as the basis of an exhibition. You see? But it was another use that I thought of. I suggested it to Marc Marie one evening over dinner and that’s the form it took. We started writing right away, and we respected the rules. I was the one to draw up the rules.

ALS: We see a clear progression from the “hallway composition,” that first photo with the scattered clothes, through to the last one, which Marc says is “too beautiful.”

AE: With the dress that looks like a rock.

ALS: “The sand rose.”

AE: There is no feeling of flesh in that photo, there’s no body in it, none. It really struck me when I started to write about it, around Christmas 2003 or New Year’s Day, I can’t remember.

ALS: One feels it’s the end of something.

AE: Yes. I think throughout the book you feel the development of a relationship. Or rather the decline.

ALS: Is there a photo of Venice? I ask because that was another peaceful time for the lovers, similar to the days at the Institut Curie.

AE: We write about Venice, but there isn’t a photo.

ALS: I retain the “written photos” so much more than the prints in the book.

AE: The Venice text is where I talk about throwing my bra over the balustrade, isn’t it?

ALS: But it doesn’t really fall.

AE: It hovers.

ALS: It drifts over the garden of the cloister.

AE: San Giorgio. Yes.

ALS: And the elevator operator is a monk.

AE: I’ve been back to Venice since. We both went back. I don’t think the monk runs the elevator anymore.

ALS: He took people up to the bell tower and back while praying.

AE: Yes, yes! He sat on a little bench inside, reading psalms.

ALS: I was struck by how much travel you did. You went to Venice in what seems a very short time between appointments.

AE: Yes, the Venice trip was complicated from that point of view. Radiation therapy was every weekday. There was also a system of chemotherapy that I wore, a sort of flask hooked around my waist. The liquid came up through a catheter planted under my skin.

ALS: You describe it in detail. The pack at your waist with the bottle of chemicals, the harness system.

AE: Which I think was quite traumatic for people because it doesn’t exist anymore. They’ve made progress. They’re still making a lot of progress in oncology. They’re getting there. Well, the chemotherapy treatments aren’t as cumbersome.
I didn’t have more treatment after July because my cancer wasn’t, as they say, hormone-dependent. But it was a very high-grade cancer. The previous autumn I wasn’t sure at all whether I was going to live.
I can’t go back and read about it. You find out that you can die, just like that, from one day to the next! And you do find out like that, from one day to the next.
I had other reasons to feel dismayed—well, that’s an understatement. I had a cyst that—I know from my journal—was already there two years earlier, but when I told the gynecologist, he said it was nothing. Even in July 2002, three months before the diagnosis, when it was really showing up on my blood tests, I told him, you know, it hurts. The cyst was painful. He told me, cancer never hurts, which is the worst kind of stupidity.  

ALS: That’s awful.

AE: Obviously I stopped seeing him after. It was a very hard time.
But perhaps what The Use of Photography shows very clearly is that in my relationship with Marc, and even through those photos and the writing, I found a way of living above life, in a sense.

ALS: Yes, I understand.

AE: And therefore above death. And I can’t be sure but sometimes I think that if I recovered, that is why. They say that the state of morale counts for a lot, and keeping my morale up meant ignoring the cancer and thinking about something else completely.

ALS: You were both very matter-of-fact about your cancer and carrying on regardless.

AE: Because when we met, we did not dramatize it at all.

ALS: Where did the book’s title come from?

AE: That was my choice, again. I don’t think it was a good title, I admit that. Because to begin with, what use can you make of photography? Well, I suppose you could say that this was one use. It’s a use and a practice of writing, a practice of life in the same way that writing is.
Did you know that the booksellers at first classified it as a technical book on photography?!

ALS: You write: “In the old missals there was a special prayer for asking what the proper use of illness was. As I think back now, it seems to me that I have made the best possible use of cancer.” And it was a good use of life, as you say elsewhere in the book.

AE: Yes, it was. In effect, it had to do with ignoring the illness in a certain way, even though I knew it was there. Just because I had cancer—breast cancer, moreover—didn’t mean that I had to refuse what was almost a miracle, of love. It was a miracle.

ALS: I’d like to talk about translating descriptions of photos, which were an important part of this book. And photography plays a big role in other books of yours too, such as The Years, or even A Girl’s Story, and certainly The Other Girl, too, which I’m now working on. I’m referring to the “written photos” as you call them—there are no photo reproductions in most of the books. I apply a lot of effort to translating these descriptions, and I tell myself each time that it shouldn’t be so complicated: it should be straightforward because they are so precise. There are shapes and angles, and you say where things are positioned in relation to each other (“perpendicular to,” etc.). The photos in your books are meticulously described.

AE: There’s nothing harder than describing things from reality. These aren’t made-up descriptions.
In The Use of Photography what was very, very difficult is that I was starting from an impression, not just what you see.

ALS: That’s a distinction that I’m not sure I grasp. Though I’m working on it!
I noticed—and it’s interesting to see—how you and Marc started each text from a different angle. I mean, you each chose a different starting point in the photo, or it chose you, and after that, too, the text developed quite differently. Though there were similarities.

AE: But it’s not the same thing at all with The Years. When I talk about a photo in The Years, I describe what she is thinking about, her memory, and how she sees the future, and how she feels in the present. But there’s none of that in The Use of Photography. What we had before us and had to describe were more like paintings. Really like paintings. To describe an inanimate object and to describe a living being are not at all the same thing. That’s precisely what we were up against. These photos are still lifes. It’s presence that we had to describe.

Alison L. Strayer is a Canadian writer and translator. She won the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, and her work has been shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for Literature and for Translation, the Grand Prix du livre de Montreal, the Prix littéraire France-Québec, and the Man Booker International Prize. She lives in Paris.

Annie Ernaux, the author of some twenty works of fiction and memoir, is considered by many to be France’s most important writer. In 2022, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. She has also won the Prix Renaudot for A Man’s Place and the Marguerite Yourcenar Prize for her body of work. More recently she received the International Strega Prize, the Prix Formentor, the French-American Translation Prize, and the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation for The Years, which was also shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize. Her other works include Exteriors, A Girl’s Story, A Woman’s Story, The Possession, Simple Passion, Happening, I Remain in Darkness, Shame, A Frozen Woman, A Man’s Place, and The Young Man.

Illustration: Alvaro Tapia Hidalgo.

 

Jericho Brown is not only a Pulitzer Prize winner but a poet’s poet. The first time I was introduced to his work, it wasn’t even a poem. It was a group of friends ranting about form in the middle of the night. They were poets, and passionate about claiming everything that came with the word, because they knew what naming things could create: worlds. New and ancient. Present and futuristic. They used Jericho Brown as an example. Mentioned a poetic form called a duplex, which Brown invented. And as someone who was solely writing personal essays at the time, I smiled at them smiling and couldn’t help but to envision a building—the one my father lived in around the time I was ten and we’d walk to the corner store for crawfish in the summer. My brain began to churn at the impression of an image.

Poetry informs our existence in ways we’re mostly unaware of until time passes and we can look back and say, “Oh, that’s who I am, and this is how I did it.” Most recently, Brown served as editor of How We Do It: Black Writers on Craft, Practice, and Skill—an anthology of essays and interviews from some of our most prolific storytellers on ways we can find our own pace within the deliberate race.

Over Zoom, Brown and I conversed on what it means to make poems while persisting within the merry-go-round of perception and process, and how to make intimacy your craft’s biggest ally.

Kendra Allen: When I started writing poetry, I was talking to a publisher, and the first thing they told me was we publish poetry for the love of it and you don’t make money. They framed poetry as a dying genre. They were really adamant about telling me to lower my expectations. Which got me thinking: Why do we always romanticize the starving artist? Since you’re someone who has subverted those expectations, I want to ask: What do you think are the risks and the advantages of romanticizing the struggle of the artist and art-making in general?

Jericho Brown: I guess some of the risks of romanticizing art-making seem to me just that you get into the person more than you get into the art itself. If you’re thinking about art-making, maybe that means you’re thinking about the painter, or you’re thinking about the poet more than you’re thinking about the painting or the poem.

No poem is exactly perfect. But poems don’t fail you in the same way people do. You can’t get into idolizing people just because they’re good at something—singing or writing poetry or playing basketball, or whatever.

At the same time, I don’t think we make enough of our endeavor. Part of what you’re talking about, if we move away from the financial aspects of things, part of what poets deal with is just shame. And I think it would do us well to be prouder of who we are and not approach the fact of us being poets with this idea that we’re somehow taking advantage of the world. I think that happens because people find out that we’re poets and they try to shame us. But the fear that poets have of that is much too great considering the fact that we know that poetry has indeed changed our lives and the lives of other people that we know. So we know it has power. I was telling a poet friend of mine that poems are from one to one. One poem reaches one person in the way that it reaches that one person. As long as poems are around, they are indeed touching people. They are indeed changing minds. We don’t know what poems do. We can’t quantify it, but we do know that they work.

KA: There’s that outside shame, but also the internal shame that poets deal with on the page, which makes me think of the revision process. Sometimes it can take years to get the final draft of a poem—sometimes a day (it all depends on what you’re writing). What is your relationship to letting go of words from the first draft to the final draft? What, if anything, sticks from that first draft to book form?

JB: A lot stays, a lot goes. It’s different for each poem. Some poems start out two pages and end up fourteen lines. Other poems start eighteen lines and end up nineteen lines. You just don’t know what’s going to happen.

You have to be indifferent toward what happens. You have to want to have poems, you have to work on your poems, but you can’t get wrapped up in trying to keep a line or a few lines. The important thing is that you have the best poem that you can possibly have. And so you just work on a poem and if it looks nothing like it did in its original form, that doesn’t matter. The point is to have a poem.

I don’t really even notice when I’m cutting lines. Now sometimes I’ll cut a line from a poem and paste it on the side to make sure I have that line, because I might be able to use it somewhere else. But other than that, I’m not counting lines or worrying about taking lines from a poem. I don’t have any affection for one line over another, really.

KA: When you cut them, do you keep them, thinking, Maybe I’ll need these later? Or is it just, Put them in trash.

JB: I think everybody should keep everything. You don’t know what you’re going to need when you’re writing a poem. And sometimes if you’re writing a poem in 2023, you get to a point where you need lines that you wrote in 2003. And when you get to that point, those lines need to be somewhere you can cut and paste them.

KA: I didn’t learn poetic form per se in college, but I did take classes in fiction and nonfiction, where I was taught all these rules. And I remember thinking, Everybody in this class is going to sound alike if we follow all these rules. So when I think about the duplex poems—does that come from you knowing and learning and studying form in order to feel safe enough to bend it? Do you think it’s best to learn form and then break the rules? Or does form hinder you when you’re trying to innovate and do your own thing?

JB: I think it’s a good idea to know everything you can possibly know about what you claim to love. If you have a passion for something, then you should know everything there is to know about that thing. And I have a passion for poetry and poetry resides in form. There’s no way around that. Because every time you have a poem, you either have to speak it aloud, or you have to write it down. Once you write something down, once you’ve spoken it aloud, you have indeed made clear its form. You end up with some sort of formal concerns whether you like it or not. So you might as well like it.

The more you read formal poetry, the more you understand the kind of work form can do. And that gives you some examples of exactly how you can make use of whatever form you’re writing in. And once you know what the forms are, you can subvert them, you can experiment with them, you can turn them on their heads. But if you don’t know them, then you don’t have the same opportunity to do that kind of work.

Whenever you write a poem, you’re not just making a new thing. You’re also making a comment on everything that has been written before it. Poems grow out of all the other poems ever made. When I write a formal poem, I’m making a comment on the past of form, on all the ways that it hinders us and all the ways it helps us. So poems can show us what progression looks like.

KA: I hear you on that. Do you think those comments are conscious? Are you conscious, as you’re working through drafts, of what the poem is in conversation with or an extension of, or does all that come later?

JB: Well, it depends. Sometimes you’re conscious of it and sometimes somebody points it out and you think, Oh, I didn’t even realize I was making use of this other piece of literature. Because some things are so deeply ingrained if you’ve read them enough. They’re so deeply ingrained, you have no choice but to reference them.

Sometimes when you’re writing a poem, you can have a draft done, and reading the draft lets you know where the poem needs to go. You read the draft and you realize, Oh, I should add this thing about The Odyssey. Or I should push this toward these lines that are repeating in a certain way. Maybe this is a villanelle. Sometimes that happens at the end and sometimes that happens while you’re at the beginning of writing the poem. And it’s different every time.

KA: It’s rare that a poet is just as effective on the stage as they are on the page. But you are one of those people. I keep going back to the process, but is this something that you’re aware of when writing—how the words will sound out loud, the rhythms, the pacing, or how you perform a line break versus how you break a line in visual form? It’s almost like becoming a rapper.

JB: I think about all those things and I don’t think about them at the same time. I do want to take care that the line breaks are somewhere in my voice, but I don’t want to overenunciate them. I also think it’s a good idea to try. Sometimes people give a reading and you can tell they’re not really even trying.

When I’m reading a poem aloud, what I try to do is read it as if I am talking to someone. I want the poem to feel like a conversation—a very intimate conversation but a conversation nonetheless—between two people. So when I’m reading a poem, one of the things that I imagine is that I’m talking to one person all the way in the back of the room. And no one else is in the room, just me and that one person. I think about how I would talk to that one person as opposed to how I would read to an audience of people. Those are things that have helped me, if I’m helped at all, with public reading.

KA: Do you have anxiety before reading?

JB: Yes. I’m usually sick before I give a reading—to the point of throwing up. I get very, very nervous. I start sweating, I start fidgeting, and it’s good for me to get up there and open my mouth and just start talking. Then I calm down as I go, but usually right before, it’s hard. But if I can get going, I’m all right, and then I really love it when it’s over.

I don’t mind reading because I always understood that I would have to do it. I can’t imagine a world where that’s not part of what I do, even though it’s not necessarily my favorite thing to do. At the same time, I do love Q & A. I love when people ask me questions. And I love the opportunity to know what I think. Sometimes you don’t know what you think until somebody asks the right question. Then when they ask you that question, you have to answer it as honestly as possible and you find out what you think when you answer.

KA: Do you like attending readings?

JB: I love readings, actually. When somebody’s written really good work, I think it’s beautiful to hear people read. The problem with readings is that you don’t always know that they’re going to be good. But when they’re good, they’re so worth it.

KA: Your writing is simultaneously Southern, Black, and queer, and you work within those intersections very overtly. How does it feel when you’re writing Black, Southern, queer work and White people are reviewing it and commenting on it?

JB: Honestly, I’m always surprised that White people are as interested in my work as they have been. Especially early on as a writer, part of my fear of saying certain things had to do with ideas that I had about race that were inherited ideas. Sometimes it can be difficult for Black poets if you have this idea of yourself as a representative of the race. The question then becomes: To whom are you representing the race and why is what they think so important? And if you’re worried about what other people think, then you’re not able to be honest. You’re trying to be impressive. Which isn’t always a good thing as a poet because you can’t be vulnerable and impressive at the same time.

For me, it’s good not to think about those things so I can focus on writing the poems that I need to write. I just have to tell the truth about that intersection—Black, Southern, queer, and whatever else—that those are the real intersections of my life. That’s what poems show us: they show us just how complex a life is. Poems are complex in the way lives are complex. Lives are not about any one feeling. Poems are not about any one feeling. Poems are always about many feelings.

People who are different from me are welcome to read my work because that’s what literature is for. It’s supposed to help us see who we are by showing us facets of ourselves that we don’t know or don’t expect, and in order to do that, you have to be reading work by people who are not like you. So I don’t have any trouble with people who are not exactly like me reading my poems. I expect it. I grew up reading poems by White people, so I don’t see why they wouldn’t be reading poems by me.

I will say this. Much more than I think about those who are not like me in some way, I think about those who are like me in some way. If I give a reading, I’m always happy to see Black people in the audience—like, Oh, look—Black people came. In particular, there’s a way that I feel a kind of duty or responsibility to be there, at least in presence, when it comes to Black queer people.

KA: How do you know when you’re not telling the truth in a piece?

JB: I think it’s good to be a little nervous, to feel a little queasy, to be a little uncomfortable while you’re writing. Not too much but enough to know that you’re in uncomfortable terrain. If you can sustain that feeling while writing, if you can lose your mind toward language such that you don’t really care what you’re saying, you’re much more interested in how it sounds—if you can hold on to that for long enough, then you end up saying things you didn’t expect to say. And you end up saying things that you would not have said if you were not writing a poem.

KA: Do you work in motion or stillness? Are you one of those people who need to be out in the world, living it? Or do you need to be locked up in the room, stressing until you get it done?

JB: When I’m working on a poem, I just need to be sitting down somewhere working on a poem. It’s nice if it’s quiet. If it’s not quiet, I have headphones and I can listen to the ocean or whatever. And it drowns out the sound and then I can work. But I also think I’m working on poems all the time, even when I’m not sitting in front of a computer. I try to live as much life as possible. I want to fall in love and dance and hang out with my friends. I want to do all that stuff. And the more I do that, the more I have something to write about.

KA: Is there a topic that you wish to touch on in your writing that you haven’t, or a topic that you wish to move on from that you can’t?

JB: There’s nothing I wish to move on from. If I’m still dealing with something, I have to take that as a good thing—the poems are working it out and some things take longer than others. And it’s always good to write new poems about old themes because your perspective on those themes will continue to change the older you get. How you feel about your family. How you feel about your father at the age of thirty and how you feel about your father at the age of fifty are going to be two different things. And you’ll be a poet when you’re thirty and you’ll still be a poet when you’re fifty.

There are a lot of things that happen that I always hope will end up in poems. Right now, I think—I don’t know—but I think I’m writing a book about gun violence, popular culture, and television. And I would like to write some more poems about those things.

KA: Something you said that hit me is the peace you have around your process. I think it’s important for writers earlier in their careers to hear people say that it took time, that it’s time-consuming. Because we try to rush it. We think we’re on a timeline, but like you said, writing actually takes a lifetime. How long did it take you to have peace with the process? Did you struggle with that?

JB: As a kid, this weird thing happened. I was in church and I remember hearing about praying for certain characteristics for yourself. Like patience, for instance. People would say, “Oh, if you pray for patience, then you’ll go through situations that make it hard for you to be patient. And that’s what’s going to build up your patience.”

KA: Did you grow up Baptist?

JB: Yeah, you know how Baptist people be saying crazy stuff like that, and I’ll never forget this. I remember being a little kid and hearing that. And I remember thinking, Oh my God, I just need to be patient. I don’t need to be in a position where I pray for it because if I pray for it, then it’s gonna be worse. So I decided when I was a kid to just be patient. I was so afraid of making it worse. If I was in a situation where I had to wait, I wanted it to be okay that I’m waiting. In order for it to be okay that I’m waiting, I can’t trip. I just have to think about something else.

Things take time, but so what? It’s better to have good and beautiful work. It’s better to have made something that you can be proud of, that you can be excited about. It’s better to do that than to just be putting stuff out here in the world because you’re impatient.

KA: You edited a new anthology, How We Do It. Is there something from another writer’s practices that you’ve adopted and incorporated into your own?

JB: One of the things that I learned is from Daniel Black’s essay. He taught me to pay more attention to how I use Black vernacular and really do everything in my power to make use of Black vernacular in every line. To make sure that the poem gives you the sense of a particularized person speaking. And since the speaker will come from my point of view, of course that person will be Black.

Another thing that I learned is from Rita Dove’s essay, and that is to be able to let go of what I think a poem is and to understand that when I’m writing a poem, I’m always making a new thing. I’m always changing what poetry is. So putting that book together was indeed very useful to me. And I’m glad I did it because I feel like it’s the greatest gift I will ever be able to give to new and younger writers.

KA: I always say I think a class should be taught on how to sequence a poetry collection. Sometimes that feels like the most dire part of the storytelling. What is your approach to sequencing a poetry collection? And what are the similarities and differences between sequencing poetry and sequencing, say, the anthology?

JB: The anthology was about figuring out the themes. I found a way to make the essays open into one another. Someone would drop a hint about something in one essay, and that hint would be the topic of the next essay. I wanted to open things up so that each section becomes its own little tome or its own small book within the book.

When I’m putting poems together, I do something similar. I try to move associatively from the final line of a poem to the title of the next poem. Which I think helps keep readers inside the book. And I try to make resonance happen. I put subjects throughout a book. For instance, the way that the duplex poems don’t appear next to each other. Instead I scatter the forms throughout the book. I try to structure it so that when something comes up, it comes up again a few poems later. Themes go away and come back and go away and come back and intermingle with other themes. I think of a book as a world of ricochets.

Kendra Allen was born and raised in Dallas, Texas. She loves laughing, leaving, and writing Make Love in My Car, a music column for Southwest Review. Some of her other work can be found in, or on, the Paris Review, High Times, the Rumpus, and more. She’s the author of a book of poetry, The Collection Plate, and a book of essays, When You Learn the Alphabet, which won the 2018 Iowa Prize for Literary Nonfiction. Fruit Punch, her memoir, is out now.

Jericho Brown is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Brown’s first book, Please (2008), won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament (2014), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. He is also the author of the collection The Tradition (2019), which was a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award and the winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

Illustration: Vitus Shell

 

In 1981, three brothers of the Hernandez family (Mario, Gilbert, and Jaime), all in their twenties, self-published the first issue of a black-and-white comic book, titled Love and Rockets. The series, quickly picked up by the fledgling publisher Fantagraphics Books, became a foundational work of the alternative comics revolution of the 1980s, which transformed American and global cartooning by introducing a new narrative and thematic maturity to an art form that had traditionally been ephemeral and geared toward children.

The Hernandez brothers, or Los Bros Hernandez as they are popularly known, are the sons of Santos and Aurora Hernandez, who had six children in all (five boys, one girl). Mario was born in 1953, Gilbert (known as Beto) in 1957, and Jaime in 1959. Santos Hernandez was a working-class Mexican immigrant, working variously as a painter, a traffic cop, and a farm laborer. Aurora’s roots were in the borderland of Texas and Mexico. Both parents had an artistic streak. Santos was an amateur painter, Aurora an enthusiast for comic books who had fond memories of the comic books she read as a youth, which she often imitated.

Unlike many parents of the 1950s, Santos and Aurora indulged their children’s love of comic books, then seen as a disreputable medium. The Hernandez house was awash in comics: the Uncle Scrooge comics of Carl Barks, the Archie comics of Dan DeCarlo and Harry Lucey, the Little Archie comics of Bob Bolling, the Marvel superhero comics of Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko. Later, there were the underground comics of Robert Crumb and S. Clay Wilson, along with the French science fiction stories of Moebius (available in the magazine Heavy Metal). All the Hernandez kids drew homemade comic books, and even in their earliest work they showed an astonishing mastery over visual storytelling, internalizing and synthesizing the styles of the major artists in the field.

From the start, Love and Rockets was a showcase for Los Bros Hernandez to create comics that presented their personal concerns in the idiom of comics. Mario, the least prolific of the brothers, crafted stories mixing goofy science fiction tropes with political satire. In the first issue, Jaime introduced Maggie Chascarillo and Hopey Glass, the stars of what would become a decades-spanning roman-fleuve now known as the Locas cycle. Latina punks and sometimes lovers, moving through stories that shifted effortlessly from realism to science fiction, and interacting with a multiracial cast that eventually totaled hundreds of distinct characters, Maggie and Hopey were the driving force behind one of the most ambitious narratives ever produced by an American storyteller. Gilbert’s first Love and Rockets story was a witty superhero satire, “BEM,” a romp through the storytelling cliches of Marvel Comics. But by the third issue (fall 1983), Gilbert launched into his own massive graphic novel, now known as the Palomar cycle. Initially centered around the fictional Latin American town of Palomar and starring the hammer-wielding matriarch Luba, the Palomar cycle was as ambitious as the Locas cycle: spanning many hundreds of pages and countless characters, with plot tendrils that extend for more than a century and range from Palomar to Southern California, it is a saga of enormous complexity and emotional depth. Both the Locas cycle and the Palomar cycle are life works that continue to expand page by page and story by story to this day. Love and Rockets is still being published by Fantagraphics, which keeps the graphic novels of the Hernandez brothers in print in multiple editions. To mark the fortieth anniversary of the first Fantagraphic issue, the publisher has just released an eight-volume reprint of the first fifty issues (which includes many articles and interviews with the cartoonists).

Given the anniversary, we thought it would be a good time to sit down and talk to Los Bros Hernandez about how it all started.

Jeet Heer: I want to go back to the beginning, before you guys were even born. Because, in Todd Hignite’s book on Jaime, there’s this amazing photograph of your parents, from 1952, in Mexico. They’re holding Mario. They’re both looking very stylish and jaunty. Even your dad is walking a bit like some of Jaime’s characters, with the pants up. So if you don’t mind, I want to ask about your parents. We could start with your mom. Because your standard comic book story, like Robert Crumb at the back of Zap Comix, has the big fat mom tearing open the comics, saying, “Don’t read these filthy books!” And there are so many cartoonists who have that story, but your mom was different.

Gilbert Hernandez: This is literally how it began. She was taking a message to an office, maybe a doctor’s office. She said she was sitting on a window seat and there were a bunch of comic books laying there, and she picked up a Captain Marvel book, opened it while she was waiting, and saw a three panel progression, very Kurtzman-like, where Captain Marvel is very tiny, then he’s closer, then he’s closer. Which is a comic I’ve never seen, that doesn’t sound like Captain Marvel to me, but anyway. She said she was instantly intrigued. So she kept picking things up. She went to the local market, and comics were a dime then, so it wasn’t like you were poverty stricken if you bought a comic. And that was how she started collecting. She liked the style, the art of it, and the stories. But she did gravitate toward Captain Marvel, the Spirit, Plastic Man, all the better comics, she really liked those. And that was the beginning.

Jaime Hernandez: And this was when she was little? I never heard this story.

Gilbert Hernandez: Oh yeah, she told me. She was twelve or thirteen, around there. Because her drawings were at fourteen. I imagine this was right before.

Jeet Heer: I remember reading somewhere she would draw Doll Man, as well as Captain Marvel. So it sounds like she was really in the weeds, in terms of knowing her stuff. Is it true her mom tore up her comics?

Gilbert Hernandez: Oh yeah. Our mom had to hide hers under her mattress like a Playboy! Her mom didn’t like it. She thought it was crowding the house. She had no judgment toward comic books themselves, just junk in the house. But Mom would swap ’em, do the whole thing.

Jaime Hernandez: Yeah, she’d go to a trading post, regularly.

Gilbert Hernandez: She stopped reading them when she got older and started dating my dad.

Jeet Heer: But she has this history of being a comic nerd. So interesting to have a mom like that. Crumb and others have these stories of their parents telling them not to read comics, whereas your mom was encouraging.

Mario Hernandez: Mom was real supportive with comics. And we got away with a lot of stuff with entertainment. She did her damnedest to keep us all alive after my father died. But they were both inspirational. My dad told my mom, “Hey, give him some of those funny books. These little savages are making too much noise. Get some of those funny books that you used to like.”

Gilbert Hernandez: Mostly, it was to keep us quiet, to calm us down. There were five boys. We’re yelling and wrestling and fighting and going in and out of the house. And Dad just says, “Come on, give ’em some paper and stuff to draw with, and they’ll keep quiet more or less.” It probably was only for a half hour or something, but it felt like all day.

Mario Hernandez: We read these comics over and over at dinnertime. My mom was like, “Get you some comics and shut up and go eat dinner.” And so we’d have a stack, we’d get in line. I’d get a stack of my comics that I wanted to read. Then these guys would come in behind me, and we’d all be there with a stack of comics, chowing down on tortillas.

Jeet Heer: So there are five boys and then a sister. And you guys had cousins next door. How many cousins were there?

Jaime Hernandez: Six cousins next door and then we had cousins in different parts of our town too. Nobody had less than three or four kids.

Gilbert Hernandez: And that was on Mom’s side. On Dad’s side, it was like a billion relatives, we don’t even know!

Jeet Heer: I think that’s a very specific sort of Latino-Hispanic experience. Or immigrant experience. I also grew up with next-door cousins and we had family within a couple of blocks, and my oldest daughter is always saying, “How much family do you have?!” ’Cause there’s always some new uncle or cousin coming out of the woodwork. Whereas I think that, not to generalize, but White people don’t have that experience to the same degree. I feel like that’s left a mark on you guys. You both have these hugely populated universes filled with many characters who all have some kind of connection. Do you think that left a mark?

Gilbert Hernandez: I didn’t even notice until Dan Clowes said in an interview, “If you look at the Hernandez brothers, they grew up with so many people around them, there are always crowds of people in their panels. And me, I have to fight to keep ’em out of the panel!” He grew up a loner, so his stories are all about loners. Whereas we balance so many different characters and personalities on one page or panel. But it was normal to us.

Jaime Hernandez: Also, besides family, the neighborhood we grew up in had plenty of houses with six kids. It was common.

Jeet Heer: Lynda Barry is sort of like that. In the sense that she had this Filipino family, and people living with their grandmother, with their aunt. She also has a very crowded universe. Back to your mom. You said she started dating, and that’s usually the end of comics fandom for normal people. Like once you discover sex, that’s it. But she seems to have an artistic sensibility. At least if she remembered all that stuff.

Gilbert Hernandez: She was very drawn to good technique. And like I said, that’s why she gravitated to the better comics in the ’40s. Because she loved how awesome a Spirit page was. And she didn’t know it at the time, but she liked people like Reed Crandall and Lou Fine. She loved that type of art. Jaime can tell you more about it. She would actually copy that style of art. The drawings weren’t exactly panels, but she would take a tiny head and blow it up to an 8.5 × 11, and draw it. And some of those drawings are actually worth looking at. She doesn’t want anybody to see them, but . . .

Jaime Hernandez: I own them! I promised her I would never show them. Even though I’ve shown a couple people. But the thing was, when she showed us, she said, “These are drawings I did of my favorite superheroes.” And we’d ask, “Who is that!?” And she’d say, “That’s the Black Terror. That’s Rusty Ryan. That’s Captain Triumph.” And we were like “Who?” But it was amazing because they look like movie star portraits. Like if you bought eight-by-tens of your favorite movie star, but it kind of worked. In my head I was like, “Wow, this is glamorous!” There’s a lot of shadow and she took from Reed Crandall. I was like, “So this guy is Doll Man? He’s like a doll? What the hell?” But it was so romantic!

Gilbert Hernandez: On the one hand you’d have Doll Man and Skyman, and you think that’s just the old days. Then you’d have Black Terror. There’s nobody more modern with a cool name like that! And once we finally saw the comics, they really had a strong appeal for us. I didn’t care to read them, I wasn’t interested in the stories, but I loved looking at them. The covers, they’re fascinating.

Jeet Heer: When I work out the dates, you guys were born in the ’50s, so it’s odd to me that so much of your work is evocative of that earlier period. But your mom was the bridge. There’s that great cover from Matt Baker, Canteen Kate, that Jaime paid tribute to. I was like, how did Jaime see that cover? Or even become aware of it? Because that wasn’t around. Let’s talk a little bit about your dad as well. He was a painter?

Jaime Hernandez: So we’ve heard. We’ve never seen his work.

Jeet Heer: None of that survived?

Gilbert Hernandez: I don’t think so.

Jaime Hernandez: It’s probably in Mexico. But from what we’re told, he was a painter, a traffic cop. He did a million jobs when he was young in Mexico. And Gilbert, being older, would remember Dad clearer than me. Because he died when I was about to turn eight years old. I still remember Dad clear enough, but the memories are starting to become still pictures now. As time passes.

Gilbert Hernandez: Even before he instigated us drawing together on the floor, he encouraged it. I didn’t know he was a painter or had any kind of artistic interest. Our mom—this is like thirty years ago, after Love and Rockets—she’d once in a while start talking about something from the past that we had never heard before. What? He did what? “Oh yeah, he was very good at watercolors. I told him to save them but he didn’t want to.” So anyway, when we were little, we would lay on the floor, and he would tear up a big paper bag and tell us to draw. And if we didn’t know what to draw he would say, “Okay, draw this, a person’s head. And help the little ones!” He always told me and Mario to help the smaller kids. Not that we helped any, because they could draw on their own, except for our smallest brother, he was too small. But that’s how that started. And once we started drawing, we knew this was a good thing.

Later on, I was really into the Myron Fass reprint books, which were copying the Creepy and Eerie books from Warren, and what they would do is add blood to really shitty black-and-white monster stories. I thought, This is insane! This is crazy! So I would draw hacked-off limbs and things like that, and Dad would say, “Why are you drawing all that blood?” And I’d say, “Oh it’s a monster.” And he would say, “Why don’t you draw something nice, like a lake, or trees?” In my head—I was already a stubborn idiot—I would say, “Why would I draw that? I’m drawing limbs severed! And I get to draw blood squirting!” I wouldn’t say it out loud. But then he would say, “Okay, keep drawing, but think about nice things to draw.” He was saying elevate it! Grow up! But that’s one thing a young rebel doesn’t wanna hear: grow up. You wanna keep doing what you’re doing. Anyway that was the last conversation about art that I remember having with my dad. I pooh-poohed him and he pooh-poohed me and that was fine.

Jaime Hernandez: The interesting thing about that, though, your conversations with Dad were very sparse because his English wasn’t that good . . .

Gilbert Hernandez: Actually by then it was decent. He was a lot better toward the end of his life. He could communicate a little better then. We had regular conversations. He couldn’t remember to say “draw” or “illustrate.” He’d say “write,” which meant draw or paint.

Jeet Heer: So the language around the house. Was it Spanish among the adults and English among the kids? A mixture of Spanish and English? Your grandma was there as well. How were you guys communicating?

Jaime Hernandez: Mostly Spanish, with her. But we were taught mostly English, by the time we got old enough to go to school. Dad wanted us to be English speakers, so we wouldn’t be made fun of. My mom said, “Why not teach ’em both?” And he said no, just English. He got a job where he wanted to speak English and impress the boss. So it was hard to go back to Spanish. From what I understand, we spoke Spanish as little kids, but that went away pretty quickly. I can’t prove this, but I remember being really little, like four, and having a conversation with Dad, and I understood him. But I didn’t know Spanish, or maybe I did and didn’t know the difference.

Jeet Heer: I’ve seen that a fair bit. Some of my cousins would spend time in India when they were little, like three or four, and come back knowing the full language and be able to speak to their grandparents. I think that’s totally plausible. It’s interesting that’s in the 1950s, when in 1954 Eisenhower ordered Operation Wetback, which deported around a million people. Prior to that, people were going back and forth across the border all the time. It was more fluid. Did you guys feel that or sense that at all? That there was more xenophobia, or more “Speak English!” in the air?

Gilbert Hernandez: It only came up when we would go downtown with our dad. He loved to show off his boys. It always worked. He was so proud of us. Some guy would stop him and say, “Those your sons?” And he would say “Yep!” And the guy would say, “Oh you’re a lucky man.” He thought we were going to be ship captains or generals in the army. But no! We were just a bunch of artists! I would only get that sense, though, when he spoke to people. He would say, “Don’t say anything, I’m going to talk to this man.” But his English was broken, so he’d have trouble. And I think Mario helped him out a little bit. But that was the only time we had to act differently in the White world. Which we never thought about with our mom. And then you go to school and start to learn about racism, from other students, other kids. You’re like okay, this guy is an idiot. Because from the very beginning, once I encountered racism, anyone who was a racist toward me or anybody else, well, they were just dumb. Because I knew the kind of people they were making fun of. People who were super nice or friendly or loveable. Jaime, did you feel any of that?

Jaime Hernandez: No, nothing really more than, the older I get, I think back on how White kids would stare at me when I was trying to be their friend. Sometimes they would look at me like, “Why are you talking to me?” Or, “This is weird.” Or maybe I was just obnoxious or something.

Gilbert Hernandez: Or they thought, Oh you’re normal. I think that was part of it too, sometimes.

Jeet Heer: The other element of the family, and I think this will help us get into both comics and also punk rock, is the importance of the older brother. The older brother is always the guy, the one who introduces you to things and shows you the world. In a way that your parents don’t quite do. I guess that’s what Mario was like. You were the pioneer—the guy who knew the work Ditko and Kirby did for Atlas comics, and then later underground comics, and then music.

Mario Hernandez: It was anything comics. If I saw a comic on TV, some kid reading one on a TV show, I wanted to know where I could get it because I was always looking at newsstands. Anything that was drawn—Cracked, Mad, even joke books with illustrations. I ditched summer school to go sit in the library and just look at The New Yorker. I became a historian.

Jaime Hernandez: Let me just say one thing about that. In our house, it was trickle-down. Because Mario would teach Gilbert everything, and then Gilbert would teach the rest of us. Or me. And our middle brother. And so I would get it from Gilbert, which I now understand was a little easier than getting it from Mario.

Jeet Heer: So it was like a hierarchy. So what was the order? Mario, Gilbert, and then Richard?

Jaime/Gilbert Hernandez: Ricardo.

Jeet Heer: Then Jaime. And Ishmael, and then Lucinda. Do you remember how old you were when you started to make your own comics?

Mario Hernandez: We were tiny. My dad would tear open the paper bags and give us crayons, pens, or whatever, and we’d just sit there and scribble on those and then it took off. And I remember my first comic. It was called The Fabulous Two. Really rolls off the tongue! I must have been at least six, maybe seven. And it was done on stenographer paper, the only paper I had. So I just folded that in half and made a little comic.

Gilbert Hernandez: Do you remember who the Fabulous Two were?

Mario Hernandez: Captain America and Daredevil.

Jaime Hernandez: And Radioactive Man.

Gilbert Hernandez: Your own Radioactive Man.

Mario Hernandez: Yeah, that was mine. You got to get your own in there.

Jaime Hernandez: I remember that. It was Radioactive Man and Daredevil. But Captain America shows up in the comic and says, “Take that!”—and he’s socking the wall or something.

Mario Hernandez: And I didn’t write dialogue, so I just wrote these lines in balloons to make it look like dialogue.

Jeet Heer: So you did Radioactive Man before The Simpsons?

Gilbert Hernandez: Before Marvel, actually. In the Emissaries of Evil . . . no, that was Daredevil. Or Avengers?

Mario Hernandez: Number six. Like I said, a historian.

Jaime Hernandez: I wanna go back to the Mario thing, about how it was easier to learn from Gilbert. Because Mario was cut off from us little kids. I was part of the little ones. Mario didn’t want much to do with the toddlers. So he would stick with teaching Gilbert stuff. Sometimes it would just stop there.

Gilbert Hernandez: Originally he was forced to do that. Because our parents would say, “Mario! Show him how to do it!” And he’d be all, Ugh. He’s four years older than me, so I can understand it. He was already a kid who wanted to do his own thing, and here’s this little guy who doesn’t know what to do. I’d set up my little army soldiers and just knock ’em down, that was it. And our parents would say, “Well, show him how to play!” So then I learned to set up scenes. I’d have the army, my little soldiers, the troops on each side. I’ve told this story many times: the first issue of Fantastic Four in 1961. Mario looks at the cover and says, “See, there’s a monster coming out of the ground, and there’s a guy made of fire around it, and there’s a lady, she’s invisible, but she’s trying to get away, and then there’s a guy who makes his body into rubber, and he’s tied up but he’s getting out of the ropes.” Then there’s the Thing, flipping over a car or whatever, and Mario says, “That monster there? He’s the good guy!” KA-BOOM! It completely changed my way of thinking about telling stories. Because it’s not like Frankenstein, where you see him murder people in the movie, and then maybe you feel sorry for him. No, the Thing was always good! And that’s what got me, that he was always good.

Jeet Heer: The genius of those Kirby and Ditko comics is that they took the monster comics, but then made the monsters into sympathetic figures. It’s so interesting that Mario figured that out right from the start. Another interesting thing, and the only comparison is maybe Crumb, is you guys were never just into superheroes. You were picking up Archie, Little Lulu, Uncle Scrooge, Carl Barks’s comics. And, to me, that’s very evident in your work. The way you internalized the basic vocabulary of comics. Can you talk about that? About how thanks to your older brother, all these comics were around the house.

Gilbert Hernandez: After a while it became the medium. We loved superheroes, and the characters, and the comics, and the drawings. The colors. Everything! But the medium was what drew us. Especially Mario. He was even into looking at the ads in comic books and figuring out who drew it. There was a back cover with Roman soldiers that was around forever. It took us a while but we figured out it was Russ Heath. It was like a game, trying to figure out who did the drawings. And sometimes we couldn’t figure it out. Like Neal Adams is easy to spot, because of the style. There was a Schwinn commercial, with a kid smiling, and it’s so Neal Adams. I didn’t know that cartoonists could be ad men as well. But it was the technique and medium that really drew Mario. That’s who we learned it from. And that’s what our mom was into. The drawing, basically.

Jeet Heer: I think that’s a very distinctive thing. A lot of cartoonists talk about Kirby, about Ditko, but as far as I can tell, you guys are the only ones talking about Dan DeCarlo and Harry Lucey. How is it that you were aware that there’s something here that artists can use, and no one else was?

Jaime Hernandez: To me it wasn’t so much a discovery as the fact that I like those comics, and I guess I unconsciously took from what I liked about them. Every year Mom would bring out this bag of comics in the summer and we would read the Archies and Dennis the Menace, and the older I got, I kept going back to the comics that I liked more than others. I didn’t know who Dan DeCarlo was, I didn’t know who Harry Lucey was. But I liked how they did Betty and Veronica annuals, and Archie. And there was a comfortable feeling with these comics. I didn’t look at them from an artistic point of view, like studying them or drawing them. It was more how they made me feel. With [cartoonist Bob] Bolling, and Little Archie, it was like, “Wow, this is full of mood and feeling.” That was the main thing that I got from them. Besides that, they were good storytellers. So I tried to put that in my comics. I want people to feel good when they read my comics, no matter how mean certain characters are.

Gilbert Hernandez: They allowed us to project. Whereas Marvel and DC were already set up with where they were going, what they were doing. Archie comics were so simple and funny and breezy. I felt that I was in Riverdale, with them, hanging out, oddly enough. It has nothing to do with my life, but the way DeCarlo and Lucey, and maybe even the writers—it just gave me a feeling of being there, more than any other comic. Turns out that this was good storytelling from the artists. It goes back to that. There are some Harry Lucey splash pages, and DeCarlo splash pages, they’re the masters of opening a story, up there with [Will] Eisner and Kirby. They’re just damn good artists and storytellers.

Jeet Heer: There’s also a sense that they’re dealing with non-fantastical characters, everyday people. And those Archie cartoons, I guess Kirby was a little bit attentive to fashions, but those Archie cartoonists, they really paid attention to what young people were wearing. The other element I want to talk about, and this also speaks to Mario and his role, is music. You guys grew up on the stuff that everyone did in the ’60s, like the Beatles, but punk rock was the thing that scrambled your minds, like in 2001: A Space Odyssey. That seems like the monolith, what you touched and what made you something different. Can you talk about how that music affected you?

Gilbert Hernandez: It started with Mario and I sharing a room. He was a teenager in the late ’60s, so he was listening to underground stations, the FM stations. He would bring home albums and talk about groups. And I was completely bored. To me, it was just a bunch of farmers playing rock. And something like Jimi Hendrix was just too offensive, it was just too noisy, it wasn’t pretty singing. So I didn’t really gravitate to it until I heard Sly and the Family Stone, and I thought, I like this. So I started listening to music. But it wasn’t until he bought a T. Rex record that was so warped we couldn’t listen to the first songs. So we just listened to the middle of the record on both sides. We made fun of it at first, because it was so simplistic, and we were listening to more sophisticated bands like Yes and ELP, groups like that. But we eventually came around to T. Rex and thought, This is kinda cool! Then we sought out the other glam bands—Slade, Mott the Hoople—those bands made an impression on us. We liked that better than the regular rock on the radio. Later, when it came back as punk, it was dirtier, more political, it had more to say. But it wasn’t that strange to us. We thought, Oh, it’s that music again, but it’s all revved up and crazy and loud. We were at the right age. I was twenty-ish, Jaime was in his teens. The freedom of it. The arrogance. That’s what got us going.

Jeet Heer: What about you, Jaime? Because, for you, punk is the music, but it’s also a whole milieu, a whole culture, the people and the attitude. Like Gilbert said, it seems to have made such a powerful impression.

Jaime Hernandez: I had graduated high school before I heard any punk. Or most punk. You know, I’m out of school, I have no idea what to do with my life, but I was ready to do something even if I thought my life was over. And punk came at that time. It was also a time when I was rediscovering old comics and putting my spin on them, but I didn’t know what to do with them. So I was at a pivotal moment between high school and Love and Rockets, and the music was just there. Gilbert saw some bands, and he tells me, “We gotta go to L.A. We gotta go check this out. This is fun.” And when we finally got into it, it was like, “Okay, I don’t want to do anything else.” Then I got into the fashion, the whole style. But the fashion, coming from a working-class background, I would try to find straight-leg pants at K-Mart. But it was the first time I was part of a “thing”—a whole revolution. I wasn’t thinking about the rest of my life, about feeding myself or whatever. I was just like, this is fun as hell! So I started to create characters to fit that world. I didn’t know if I was going to do anything with it. But it was something I preferred to draw, more than anything else. I liked my little punk Archie world. And I don’t mean Archie, like the characters go on dates. This was more like my experience, my real life.

Jeet Heer: It also seems like there was this attitude, which is important to understand for people, in terms of this whole idea of where doing your own comic comes from. The punk attitude is that music doesn’t belong just to professional bands with managers and record companies behind them. You can make your own music, and go on stage and do it yourself. Punk seems like it’s the crucial element that makes you guys take that step in the first issue, as a self-published thing. It gave you this DIY attitude.

Jaime Hernandez: Yeah, by then it was like, okay, let’s do this. What the hell? If we fail, we fail. We don’t have far to fall. But it was like the world was ours to do whatever we wanted.

Gilbert Hernandez: It inspired us to move forward. Because we’d seen fanzines before. There were comic book fanzines and science fiction fanzines. But we mostly read the comic book fanzines. Then fanzines showed up in the punk scene, but we already knew about them from comics. At first, we figured our comic would be a fanzine. We told ourselves, “Oh it’s a fanzine, we’re not professionals.” Covering our asses if people didn’t like it. But luckily, it was seen differently. What was fortunate for Jaime and me was that we had been drawing since we were kids. So by the time we got to Love and Rockets, we could put out the book ready to go. Not a lot of people could do that.

Jeet Heer: There’s that, but there’s another element. I’ve seen a lot of fanzines from the ’70s, and most people’s idea of a fanzine is Wally Wood and witzend. Let’s have barbarians, but you can see their tits, and let’s have spaceships, but you can see their tits! Whereas, even in the very first Love and Rockets, it’s coming out of that fanzine world but it doesn’t seem like the same thing at all. There’s an added element, which is that you aren’t just guys who are reading comic books and science fiction or in that world. There’s something different.

Mario Hernandez: By the time we were starting Love and Rockets, we were already tired of superheroes and science fiction. We just used them as stepping stones to make it a little more popular. So people would look at it, and when they’re sucked in, then you hit them with the real stuff. Like these guys did and then they just took it from there.

Jeet Heer: I want to get to the underground comics. It seems like Mario was on the ground floor in terms of Zap Comix. How did that stuff hit when you first saw it?

Mario Hernandez: Are you kidding? I loved those cartoons from the ’30s so much, the Fleischer cartoons. Then all of a sudden, here it was in a comic book. That style knocked me out. Crumb was funny and original. It was another one of those “Hey, you can do whatever you want” moments.

Gilbert Hernandez: Underground comics had a whole different attitude, a whole different kind of freedom.

Jaime Hernandez: Another part was I could see, maybe punk helped, I don’t know, but I could see that there was always something bigger than us, something bigger than what we had, our little world. That no matter what I did, no matter how I much stuff I tried to put in my work, I knew there was a bigger world that didn’t care. That helped me think about the scope. And make the work better. Like I want to reach those people that don’t care.

Jeet Heer: In the late ’70s, the situation with mainstream comics like DC and Marvel was bleak. So much so that a top artist like Kirby moves to animation. What was your sense of what the underground scene was like in the late ’70s? Was it a vital path forward? Or something that just had happened before?

Gilbert Hernandez: I was aware of it before. As a kid I wasn’t allowed to look at those comics, but Mario would sneak them in. And I thought they were horrible! I thought, This is vile! But I did like the freedom, that grown men could do these stories. Then I realized it’s all humor and satire. When I started getting older, I thought, Okay, this makes sense. Crumb, Gilbert Shelton, Robert Williams, S. Clay Wilson—all these artists were making crazy good comics! And they were popular!

Jeet Heer: A lot of people talk about how they first heard Dylan, and they realized they could sing themselves. Or they first heard punk rock, and it convinced them that they could do music. And you hear that from a lot of cartoonists. The first time you see Crumb you think, I can do that, I can draw what’s on my mind. And that’s a liberating thing. Was that your experience? You see that and think, I can do anything.

Gilbert Hernandez: Well, only because they were doing it. Because I knew nobody could draw like him. He’s Crumb! And nobody could draw like Gilbert Shelton or Robert Williams or even S. Clay Wilson. They were individuals. They were powerhouses. So it was more just the spirit of “Yeah, they’re doing it! See what I’m gonna do too!” I tried to make early underground comics, but I had no feel for them. They were just awful. Just lousy. They were one-pagers. I was trying to be outrageous. And I realized those guys made crazy stories because they had crazy thoughts. I didn’t have those crazy thoughts, I had my own crazy thoughts.

Jeet Heer: The other thing out there at the time is Heavy Metal. What did Moebius represent to you guys?

Gilbert Hernandez: He was a terrific artist. What he did was make science fiction funny again. It wasn’t stiff and boring. He made it a goof. You had a character going through a science fiction world who didn’t take it too seriously. There’s so much humor and fun in those comics. We took his way of doing things and brought it to our way of doing things.

Jeet Heer: That’s an interesting point. When I think about Moebius in Jaime’s early work, especially in that first Maggie and Hopey story, the way things are drawn, I remember seeing a little pattering of dust behind a scooter that looks exactly like Moebius. But you’re saying it was more than drawing licks. It’s a sensibility.

Jaime Hernandez: Well for me, since I was younger than Gilbert, a lot of the undergrounds passed me by. Until I was old enough to buy them myself. I knew Crumb, I knew Wonder Wart-Hog. But Heavy Metal was the one where I was like, “Oh these guys are doing what they want.” Even if a lot of it was just space adventure. By the time I was a teenager, like fifteen or sixteen, I remember thinking, Okay, this is the way I draw, I can draw anything I want, if I put my mind to it, I’ve arrived at who I am as an artist. But then I started to learn pen and ink, because my brothers told me, “You know, they don’t use ballpoint pen in comics.” Now they do, but I remember thinking, Oh shoot! Now I gotta learn how to do this dip pen! And it took me a while. It was like I was drawing with a twig. But I was influenced by different artists because of their ink styles. Before Moebius, I was really into Barry Windsor Smith’s style. So I would try to do my own versions of that. But what you see in Love and Rockets number one is the end of me experimenting with my Moebius phase.

Jeet Heer: But you also did a bit of figure drawing in college. And your teacher was Bernard Deitz.

Jaime Hernandez: Yeah, Deitz. A real asshole.

Jeet Heer: But he taught you something!

Jaime Hernandez: No he did, he brought something out of me I didn’t know I had. So that was helpful. The whole time I was in art class, my whole fucking life I was in art class, I would sit there and say I just wanna draw comics! None of this is gonna help me draw comics! It did, but I didn’t think that at the time. So I waited all that time until I was allowed to. And that’s why Love and Rockets took off like a shot. Now I could do exactly what I want. I don’t have to listen to what my teachers say. I don’t have to listen to what other artists are telling me. And that was the best thing in the world for me.

Jeet Heer: That helps explain a lot of the energy in that work. I was rereading that first story, and it’s crazy how much is already in there. Not just Maggie, and Hopey, and Rand, but there’s a reference to Izzy. And I think there’s even a reference to Speedy. So a punk universe that you’re going to expand into thousands of pages is already there.

Jaime Hernandez: That first issue was my whole life. My first twenty-one, twenty-two years on earth. That’s why that’s all there.

Jeet Heer: With Gilbert, I wanna talk about his evolution. Because you’ve also been an artist who’s done a lot of different things. In the first issue you have “BEM,” but also a lot of stuff that in some ways you return to later. The underground, the fantastical, surrealism. But then, what issue was Heartbreak—’83, ’84?

Gilbert Hernandez: ’83, yeah. There’s a section in “BEM” that’s very Palomar-like, even though it’s pretty surreal. I don’t know. I just was screwing around. I was already a little cynical. I was thinking about what kind of comics I could do. I didn’t want do Spider-Man. I didn’t even want to do underground. I didn’t want to just copy Moebius. So I decided to use my personality and draw science fiction stories in different styles. “BEM” was laying around for six months, and then it was time to put up the comic. It was the closest thing I had finished. That was how it started, but once we did the first Fantagraphics issue and we had more pages to fill, I went to the Palomar part of the story. There’s a festival, kids running in the street, people getting drunk, sexy women, people yelling at each other, and I thought, That’s where I wanna go. Screw the monsters! Even though monsters are so much fun to draw.

Jeet Heer: The thing with “BEM” is that stuff is so formative, in the sense that you come back to it. You do a lot of playing with genre. Obviously that first Heartbreak Soup story is a kind of breakthrough. We’ve talked about your family. You had a lot of uncles and aunts and a grandma. Did you grow up with stories about the old country? How did these family stories feed into your work?

Gilbert Hernandez: Directly, I think. Our mother and her sisters were born storytellers. And they loved telling stories to kids. We would be home from school and sometimes our mom would take a break from the housework, and she would talk about her childhood. And it was so fascinating to me, a different world. To her these were fond memories. To us it was like a movie! There were so many surreal elements, at least in our heads. So we built a story about these folks, her uncles and cousins and aunts. The way she described them, she was very loving toward them. I brought a lot of that to Palomar.

But what Jaime did was free me. He did Maggie and Hopey with a little science fiction, and I was sort of in that same boat. Not quite as accomplished as Jaime, because he was already doing it. But I had thirty-some pages to fill with issue three. So I dropped all the other stuff and did the Palomar story. Which had science fiction elements in it. But then I kept dropping more of it. I wanted it to stand alone as a story without those crutches. The science fiction, a little bit of magic realism, I kept just enough, like a good old movie. I used movies as an editing device. I said to myself, Okay, they wouldn’t have this in a real movie, but they might have this surreal ghost story, that might be in a movie. I was making this stuff up. That’s how my brain is—a hamster in a wheel, you can tell.

Jeet Heer: Well I’m glad! The point you made about how Jaime freed you up. Also maybe pushed you to do more personal work. You’re brothers, you’re working on this comic series together, doing your own stories, for such a long time. From the reader’s point of view, it seems like you’re egging each other on. I think about Picasso and Braque, working together in a studio. They were like two mountain climbers, each pulling the other one up and going higher. Is that true for you guys? Maybe Jaime can talk a little bit about having Gilbert as an inspiration. What that might’ve opened up.

Jaime Hernandez: Besides that Gilbert taught me everything I knew since we were little. I liked that Gilbert was there because I had a partner to say, “Alright, we’re making comics! Cool!” He was someone I could trust. And when Gilbert would take off telling a really good story, I would say, “Oh, shit. I better pick it up!” Not saying, “I’m going to do a better story than him.” More like I had to keep up with the quality that he was doing, and I had to make sure I was gonna still have my place.

Jeet Heer: On that point, you’ve mentioned before that you think Gilbert has a wilder imagination, and it feels like, from the outside, Gilbert will often go to fairly dark places, in terms of dealing with really tough things, like sexual abuse. But you’ve gone in that direction as well. Is there some inspiration to take from Gilbert’s bravery, in what he’s willing to work with?

Jaime Hernandez: Yeah, I would say so. But it’s also in the sense that I better think more about grown-up things. Because I could be pretty lazy. As in I don’t wanna do a whole story about real life. But mainly it’s about keeping up with the level of the work.

Jeet Heer: I want to talk about the church a little bit because one good thing about Catholicism is it gives you an imagination. And in both your works there’s a whole mythology. Not just science fiction or the Marvel mythology, but the mythology of religion. A sense of demons and things like stigmata.

Gilbert Hernandez: The reason there’s so much in our comics is that we grew up Catholic. In church you’re bored with the sermon. So you start looking around at all the religious imagery. What is this, a Sam Raimi movie? It’s crazy but still cool looking as far as images go. Then we’d go to a market and see the same thing. We saw that stuff a lot growing up, especially being Mexican American.

Jaime Hernandez: We believed in the devil more than we believed in God. The devil is going to get you. God’s not going to do anything, but the devil . . . he will do something.

Jeet Heer: That comes across in the comics. The classic story “Flies on the Ceiling,” where you don’t necessarily know what God is, but we know what the devil is. This goes back to something you guys have been saying. This part of your life—your family, your stories, the religious imagery that you saw in church and in even the marketplace—you put it in the comics. On one level that’s common sense. But there are a lot of people in the history of comics who didn’t bring their life into their comics. Or some did, like Kirby, but in an allegorical form where his working-class background is in the Thing. “We’re going to put our world into a comic.” That seems like such a key decision.

Gilbert Hernandez: What it is, we’re so self-absorbed, we simply wanted to do our story instead of Bruce Wayne’s. That’s all. And nothing against Bruce Wayne or Peter Parker, because we love those comics. But we’re just so full of ourselves that we thought the way we perceived things growing up was more interesting. So we absorbed them in our comics. Our brains work better when we’re telling our own stories.

Mario Hernandez: There’s a part in one of Jaime’s stories where Izzy opens a drawer and finds a Jesus head in the drawer. That’s true. In my mom’s drawer. When you go sneaking in Mom and Dad’s drawers, you know? She had a statue in there and I remember not wanting to touch it for years.

Jaime Hernandez: It had this crown of thorns and one time I went to pick it up and it pricked my fingers.

Mario Hernandez: When I saw that in the story, I thought, Geez, he knows how to scare the crap out of people!

Gilbert Hernandez: You know that scene in Carrie? When she’s looking at Jesus and his eyes are lit up? We never made it that far, but I wish we had because it’s scary in the movie. That’s what we grew up with—Jesus, staring at you.

Jaime Hernandez: I remember that scene in the movie. And then later in punk, Exene [Cervenka] from [the band] X. She was obsessed with Catholic imagery. I remember thinking, This is from our childhood. So that kind of helped me get back into that stuff.

Jeet Heer: A question you guys get a lot and I don’t know if there’s a standard or pat answer, but the women characters are very realized. Especially, rereading Jaime’s stuff, it’s very much the case that at least early on, the women characters are much more plausible and fully imagined. And it took a while to introduce a similar complexity for Ray and the other male characters. How were you able to do that when so many others couldn’t?

Gilbert Hernandez: It’s just wiring. Jaime and I are wired similar in that way. In the comic books we read, besides the superhero stuff, the girls were the heroes. Archie Comics and Harvey Comics, Lois Lane comics. Personally, I gravitated to those, and I liked that the women characters acted differently in their own comics. Plus I like drawing women characters. Why would I draw a guy if I could draw a woman? And my job is to make that woman a character as interesting as any guy that I would write. It got so bad that guys were almost eliminated from Love and Rockets. So we had to start bringing them back in. Jaime writing Ray, and I started bringing in male characters because otherwise it was going to be an all-women planet.

Jeet Heer: It’s something in the culture that you guys broke with and I don’t know if there’s any good explanation. I think somebody once said that Jaime is more in touch with the female part of himself than other any man is.

Jaime Hernandez: It doesn’t hurt my manhood to hear that. If I am, then good. I’m one up on the other guys. My ex-wife said that I was just really tuned in to it. If a woman tells me that, then I know I’m doing something right. What’s interesting is that, when Gilbert actually told me to draw women, I was too scared because I hadn’t drawn a woman since I was a little kid. I thought my mom was going to get mad or whatever. But I wanted to draw them. I mean I was a boy, thirteen years old, going, Ooh, look at those curves. The same as any young boy, but it was something that I just couldn’t do because I didn’t know this person. And it was important for me to know the person. So I think that’s where it started, when I was like, “Well, I can’t just do these drawings. They have to be characters.” I didn’t have a take on how men act or how women act. It just turned out that way because it had to be more than just drawing.

Jeet Heer: It’s interesting the way you said it. You draw these characters and then you think, What is their story, what’s their personality? In comics it seems like the writing and drawing go hand in hand. And when you draw a character, there’s so much that’s already implied in it. Even in that first drawing of Luba, which isn’t even a Love and Rockets story, it’s a “BEM” story. There’s something with that character that seems like you investigated it. Is that usually the process? You draw somebody, you start asking questions like, Who is this person that I just drew?

Gilbert Hernandez: Well, for Luba, I was simply drawing the type of science fiction-y, exploitation pinup girl that was in a lot of the European comics. It was normal to have a character like that. But once I started writing her, since she was in the story and she was a villainess, I got to draw her as bitchy as I wanted to. Then I found I could build on that. The end of the story, where she starts a revolution, was a minor throwaway thing. But I thought, That’s more interesting than the thirty pages that I drew because it was fun. So I took Luba and put her in the Palomar story, and it was a small connection from “BEM.” That’s another weird way our brains work. We take something that we did before and then make an entire graphic novel collection with it.

Jeet Heer: That’s also true in the first Heartbreak Soup story. I was rereading it recently and was struck by how many characters you introduced that you later pursued after you finished that story. Did you start thinking, I want know more about this character? What was the process of building the world out?

Gilbert Hernandez: I jump ten years in the next Palomar story. Luba’s dating this guy, and as I said, I like writing Luba because she’s such a contradiction all the time. And the more people were reading, the more people asked, Why does she have to look like a pinup? And I’m like, ”You come from a mainstream where it’s all pinups. So what are you talking about?” There was a weird prejudice toward what we were doing in Love and Rockets because people were feeling, especially through Jaime’s stories, that this story is their story. So when they would see somebody that bothered them, they would say this doesn’t belong in my world. I took that as a challenge. I’m going to keep her and I’m going to make her better and make her the most important character in the whole series. That was a conscious decision. You can’t tell me I can’t draw her like that. You can’t tell me that if a woman down the street looks like Luba, she’s a lesser person. She’s just as much of a person as any of the other characters. And for me, that’s how it works. For each and every character I put on the page—no matter what they look like, the guys with balding heads or paunch bellies, the girls putting on weight, whatever it is—they’re a person first.

Jeet Heer: Want to talk more about the prejudice against Luba as a character? Is it an ethnic thing? Like she’s too much of a Latina woman? Why do you think there’s such a resistance to that?

Gilbert Hernandez: It’s just personal prejudice. Those people wouldn’t like someone like that in real life and they sure as hell don’t want them representing them in their comic. I think it’s that simple. I don’t think a lot of people are aware of it. They just get a bad feeling. And right away it’s “Oh, well, this is bad. This is a cliche. This is a male fantasy.” But after a while people backed off because I de-glamorized her by having her be a mother to a bunch of kids. It wasn’t a big deal. It was my artist’s interpretation of how to do something like that. You tell me not to do something, I’m going to do it more.

Mario Hernandez: Jaime said every time somebody asked when are you going to have Maggie lose weight, he’d put another ten pounds on her.

Jeet Heer: Some artists might feel oppressed by having such passionate fans that are also trying to tell them what to do. Out of my insanity, I occasionally leaf through old issues of The Comics Journal, and I was looking through these interviews from 1980 and ’81, with Gil Kane and Dennis O’Neil, and I was reminded that you guys were doing a lot of spot illustrations for the magazine back then. This is my only claim to fame: I was at least aware of you guys before the first issues of Love and Rockets.

Jaime Hernandez: That was interesting ’cause they really liked Gilbert’s, but they didn’t like mine. And it was because I kept sending them superhero drawings. And they were like why are you sending superhero drawings. I was like, “That’s what your fucking magazine is!”

Gilbert Hernandez: Magneto was on the cover!

Jeet Heer: Jaime did that illustration for The Comics Journal of Robin as a girl. Which had a huge influence. I’m pretty sure Frank Miller is on record saying that inspired him for Dark Knight Returns. So spot illustrations are also a part of the history of comics. They finally figured out how to solve the problem of Batman and Robin being gay. You just make Robin into a girl.

Gilbert Hernandez: Or bring in Aunt Harriet.

Jeet Heer: That’s right, bring in Aunt Harriet. This is a bit of a self-indulgent question for Gilbert, just because of my interest in Gasoline Alley. In a couple interviews you mention Gasoline Alley as an inspiration, and I’ve always wanted to know more about that.

Gilbert Hernandez: Frank King—he was the man. Well, actually, Dick Morris ends the story. Mario would read books on the history of the comic strip, and I was fascinated by it. That’s how I caught on to Gasoline Alley. It was just about this guy and a gas station. The main character [Walt Wallet] finds a little kid, a baby on the doorstep [Skeezix]. He has to take care of this baby over the years, and that’s how the strip changes. That little kid grows up, and as a man, Skeezix says, “I’m a forty-year-old man and I haven’t done anything with my life.” He laments it. My head exploded. Oh my God, I thought, this is awesome. But the thing is it’s not a time jump or a flashback. And that’s important. Nobody ages in a Marvel comic, because they have to be cartoons and toys. Frank King, he earned that, making Skeezix grow to be a man and then Dick Moore taking it over. That was mostly the thing. That it was earned.

Jeet Heer: That’s true for both the Locas cycle and the Palomar cycle. Just the fact that these characters have been around for so long and have aged and gone through these experiences. That’s such a powerful thing and it’s something that you were thinking about fairly early on when you’re doing these stories. “I’m going to be with these characters for a long time.” Was it the same for you, Jaime?

Jaime Hernandez: Yeah, but I was taking it one step at a time. I didn’t have a long-term plan and it wasn’t until I started thinking about Maggie having a family, that she had a mom and dad both still alive. And she’s got a sister. When you start adding family members, the world grows and their world becomes real and so aging is part of growing up, period. The past and the present leading into the future. I started to know them better. I know Maggie’s story before she was born. Like Gilbert said, these people are real, you know?

Jeet Heer: One of the most powerful stories you’ve done is when we find out Maggie has a brother in Browntown. At some point you said that you know what Maggie’s life is like and you can imagine what she’s like at forty or fifty. But you didn’t know what Hopey was going to be like. Then you figured it out. What was the process of figuring out what Hopey was going to be like when she’s fifty?

Jaime Hernandez: When we were punks, we had all these friends. Then we fell out of touch. But twenty years later, out of the blue, they started coming back, appearing in our lives again. I started to understand what happens to punk rockers later in life. They either stay punk or move on. Hopey was one of those characters who I couldn’t imagine living to old age, until I saw it in my friends. That’s basically it. I couldn’t imagine some of the characters growing up. But now I can picture them all growing old.

Jeet Heer: Most of your story is set on the American side of the border. But you did a Mexico story in “Flies on the Ceiling.” Have you ever thought about doing more on that side of the border?

Jaime Hernandez: The only thing I can think of is Izzy goes back to Mexico. I have a plan for a new Hopey/Izzy story. Izzy befriends the little boy that was in “Flies on the Ceiling.” He’s a grown man now and his dad has died. The man that Izzy fell in love with. But that’s it. So far I don’t have an actual story.

Gilbert Hernandez: I’ll help you out, Jaime. That kid’s name is . . . Beto!

Jeet Heer is a national affairs correspondent for The Nation and host of the weekly Nation podcast The Time of Monsters. The author of In Love with Art: Françoise Mouly’s Adventures in Comics with Art Spiegelman (2013) and Sweet Lechery: Reviews, Essays and Profiles (2014), Heer has written for numerous publications, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The New Republic, the Guardian, and the Boston Globe. With Chris Ware and Chris Oliveros, he has coedited the Walt and Skeezix series reprinting Frank King’s Gasoline Alley comic strip. He has also written introductions to many books of comics, including the works of George Herriman, Harold Gray, and Milton Caniff.

With older brother Mario and younger brother Jaime, Gilbert Hernandez cocreated Love and Rockets #1 in 1981. It may have been a very small, black-and-white affair, but forty years later, the series is considered a modern classic and the Hernandez brothers continue to create some of the most startling, original, and intelligent comic art to be seen since the 1960s underground boom. Gilbert lives in Ventura, California, with his wife and daughter.

Together with his brothers Gilbert and Mario, Jaime Hernandez cocreated the ongoing comic book series Love and Rockets in 1981, which Gilbert and Jaime continue to this day. Love and Rockets has since evolved into one of the great bodies of American literary fiction, spanning four decades and hitting countless high-water marks in the medium’s history. In 2017, Jaime (along with Gilbert) was inducted into the Will Eisner Comic Industry Hall of Fame. He lives in East Hollywood, California, with his girlfriend and two cats.

With younger brothers Gilbert and Jaime, Mario Hernandez cocreated and self-published the first Love and Rockets zine in 1981. The Hernandez brothers’ anthology title became Fantagraphics’ flagship comic in 1982 when the independent began publishing it, and Love and Rockets has since become a long-running, internationally acclaimed comic book series. Mario drew and wrote the occasional story for Love and Rockets, such as “Somewhere in California,” and still contributes writing, story ideas, and dialogue. In 1993, his one-shot solo comic, Brain Capers, was published, and he worked on projects such as Mr. X, Citizen Rex, and the anthology Real Girl. He won an Inkpot Award in 2012 and lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife and children.

All art by Love and Rockets

Photo: Carol Kovinick Hernandez

In October 2021, Diane Williams published her tenth book of fiction, How High?—That High (Soho Press). In 2000, she founded the independent, not-for-profit literary annual NOON, which she continues to edit and publish each year with the help of a small team of dedicated editorial assistants. Her personal literary archive, as well as the archive of NOON, was acquired in 2014 by the Lilly Library.
NOON is one of the last print journals to accept only submissions sent by mail. The address of a Manhattan postbox—care of Diane Williams—is provided on the journal’s website, along with instructions to include a stamped, self-addressed envelope for reply. No cover letters or previous publishing credits are necessary for consideration, and Williams reads every submission that comes in. NOON is also one of the few print journals that fully earns its physical existence—it’s a carefully designed, handsomely produced object, with full-color reproductions of visual art alongside its elegant pages of text.
Like her books that came before it, How High?—That High is challenging, surprising, unsettling, and very funny. I’m convinced that Williams—as a writer and as an editor—has access to some hidden, ancient source of energy and inspiration. Reading her work, and the work she publishes in NOON, unfailingly encourages me to write my own: it’s like a little lever has been cranked in my head. She gives attentive readers the sense that anything in life can be written about in a dynamic, heroic way. The horizon expands with limitless possibility—the most sublime gift.
Williams and I spoke by email in September 2021.

Kathryn Scanlan: When did you start writing?

Diane Williams: I could say that the inaugural year was 1965, when I studied with Philip Roth at the University of Pennsylvania. I had a story in The Pennsylvania Review that I was proud of, “The Goddess,” in 1967.

KS: In an interview with John O’Brien, you mention studying “English literature, and sculpture, and drawing, and many ‘ologies’” at the University of Pennsylvania. Did you have the idea at the time that writing stories was something you wanted to do, or was it a surprise to discover your interest in it? Had you read Roth’s work prior to signing up for his course?

DW: I thought of myself as a dancer during those years. I also loved life drawing and creating likenesses of family and friends. I do not remember measuring my interest in writing. And it may be difficult for you believe just how empty of ambition I was back then.
Prior to studying with Roth, I had likely read Goodbye, Columbus, and then following the course, was keen to read all of his books during the sixties and seventies.

KS: Do you still think of yourself as a dancer? Because I remember that from other interviews—that you were a gifted modern dancer who began practicing at the age of eight—and it’s pleasing to me to think of you as a writer who dances but also as a dancer who writes stories. Your work has the poise, discipline, physical grace, and sudden, disruptive turns I associate with demanding, rigorous dance—something like the Martha Graham technique, which has been described as “powerful, dynamic, jagged, and filled with tension.” To me, the compact, expressive, irreducible quality of any story by you suggests a completed movement, a piece of performance art.

DW: You can’t know how much I appreciate your finding the presence of vigorous dance in my writing—and I wish I could think of myself as a dancer. I love to feel ready to dance, and certain music makes movement impossible to resist and certain stories do too.
Here’s the chance to offer a wonderful quote from Martin Buber on the subject (from Tales of the Hasidim):

A rabbi, whose grandfather had been a disciple of the Baal Shem, was asked to tell a story. “A story,” he said, “must be told in such a way that it constitutes help in itself.” And he told: “My grandfather was lame. Once they asked him to tell a story about his teacher. And he related how the holy Baal Shem used to hop and dance while he prayed. My grandfather rose as he spoke, and he was so swept away by his story that he himself began to hop and dance to show how the master had done. From that hour on he was cured of his lameness. That’s the way to tell a story!”

KS: I love this and I think it speaks to the sort of madcap struggle toward vitality, deep feeling, engagement, and stimulation that I find in your storytelling. Thinking about your characters, I picture a heavy sleeper, roughly roused, running headlong into her day on earth, pursuing pleasure, love, and meaning in a manner sometimes manic, frantic, even desperate, and often without a clear view of her object—but there’s the sense, as with the rabbi’s grandfather, that animated, agitated, emphatic speech can cure her (our) condition. Do you consider the act of writing to be curative? What about the act of reading or listening to stories?

DW: Well, I hope that some of what you say could be true, and I identify with that provoked character on the loose that you describe, except that I don’t ever sleep deeply.
I do think that the act of writing is curative. It is for me when I can yank the wrath or pain out of myself and put it over there, after having stabbed or stirred it to suit my purposes and whims. Reading and listening to stories—the great ones—is soul-preserving.

KS: Do you think you understood that early on, and that’s why you returned to writing later? I ask because given your talent and interest in other artistic mediums, I wonder what it was about writing stories that brought you back to it—and with so much ambition?

DW: No, I never understood art’s curative powers early on. I knew that I could write while at home taking care of my children. So my choice was merely practical. And it was clear to me I needed another difficult challenge beyond childcare—but the outsized ambition that soon over-whelmed me? Where did that come from?
I have a rehearsed answer that I have given, but I am still moved to ask myself this same question, while waiting for more clarity, as the demands and the character of each era of my life change—and especially these days when I feel especially whipped or emptied.

KS: For whatever it’s worth, from my perspective it seems like you’ve always been ambitious, even as a young person when you say you were “empty of ambition,” . . . I imagine it being thwarted or suppressed instead. I think about your dance teacher encouraging you to pursue your practice professionally, and your parents forbidding it, for example.

DW: Well, I was aware of feeling pride and I was quite startled by my parents’ dramatic and negative response. Was I ten or twelve? My dance instructor at Penn, Malvena Taiz, also pressed me to become a professional dancer, and my writing teacher, Jerre Mangione, encouraged me to pursue graduate work with John Barth at Johns Hopkins. Apparently cowardice intervened—or my indoctrination—that I should study instead to remain a shadow figure in my own life.
But I realize that I do not have a well-clarified concept of my own ambition. I tend to think of ambition as thrashing effort fueled by thoughts at the forefront of my mind, of the kind I experienced during the eighties, when I harried myself with slogans to keep on at the impossible task. On the other hand, if ambition can be described as the quiet acceptance of an obligation to work doggedly at difficult work, even the work of being dutiful—then, yes, I have always been ambitious.

KS: Even when you started at Doubleday after college, you’ve talked about how there were separate tracks for men and women who wanted to be editors: men were given editorial assistant positions but women had to be secretaries first. To resist the indoctrination when you did—later, after you had a family—seems to me even more impressive and heroic. You say “cowardice,” but in my view your path as an artist is the exact opposite! And it seems like this struggle contributed to the urgency and intensity of your work—its bottled-up energy and the sense the author is writing to save her life.

DW: Your description is very generous, but I remember viewing competition with other avid people as an ugly option and it made me feel afraid.
But later on, in mid-life, the bottled-up energy—rage?—was undeniable, and yes, I did feel as if I was writing to save my life.

KS: This makes a lot of sense to me—there can be that grim aspect of competition and it seems reasonable to want to avoid it. Do you think of ambition and competition as necessarily related or joined?

DW: They are certainly related, but not necessarily joined. NOON is the product of the pleasure I take in featuring my colleagues’ strong work, and I am always touched by how the other NOON editors, all of whom are ambitious writers, rejoice when we hear of a contributor’s success and notice. Yours!—for instance.

KS: I think one of the achievements of NOON—in addition to its crucial support of work that might not otherwise have a platform—is the sense of community it builds among its contributors and editors. I’m always hoping and cheering for the achievements of NOON fellows. I’ll ask it tongue-in-cheek because I doubt it has an answer, but how did you cultivate this? From my view, it has a lot to do with your strong editorial presence.

DW: I doubt there is a clear answer. You may be right about what you surmise—I just don’t know. I will also add that our NOON staff is a remarkable team of brainy and exceptionally bighearted people.

KS: I keep thinking about something you said in a recent podcast for the London Review of Books: “I think of myself often as she. What does she think? What will she do? And I pay tribute to her, or I find fault, and I see that I have these exorbitant goals and I’m very surprised, more often bewildered, because it’s very hard to do what she wants me to do.” This feels like an accurate description of the ambivalence and exhaustion of ambition, and it makes me think of something you’ve said about dance that also feels applicable to writing: “I loved choreographing and improvising, and pushing myself beyond what I thought I could physically endure.” Are there things you do to sustain or replenish yourself in order to continue your difficult work?

DW: There is the employment of habit. I am a writer—I write. I wake early these days, 4:00 a.m., and I write six days a week.
Oh, I know what I do. I goad myself—I will buy a prize for you if you finish this book.
Long ago, I told myself I didn’t care what the goad was—tawdry and base, too shaming to share here, or dignified and lofty.

KS: I wondered if looking at art might be something you do in this way, as reprieve or refreshment?

DW: Great art enlarges the spirit, I know that. Another refreshment I can count on is a day spent without specific intent.

KS: “A day spent without specific intent”—that makes me think of the sewing you’ve taken up in recent years and talked about elsewhere. From an interview with Annie DeWitt: “I bought colorful spools of thread . . . and I just started to sew every which way. I know nothing about doing this in the prescribed manner . . . I tell myself that it is not possible to make a mistake. This is perfect:— no plan, just stitch forward, playtime.”

DW: Yes, that still is exactly my view of my needlework—where in the evenings I can take refuge.

KS: Yet your writing—while being deliberately, meticulously worked—also has this feeling in it: playful, abrupt, unplanned, very free. It’s a lot of fun to read and I get the sense you have fun composing it. Do you ever make yourself laugh out loud while writing?

DW: I am very glad you find my fiction fun to read! It is a high compliment. And yes, I may laugh while composing—but this is not necessarily a sign of triumph. The next day I am often baffled by the very same passage and it needs to be stricken.
My novella, though, On Sexual Strength, when I reread it, can get me laughing. I find absolutely everything that Enrique Woytus does or says hilarious.

KS: I do too! The form of that novella—broken into short, titled sections or chapters like “Both Were Busy with Their Penises,” “I Knew I Liked Sex,” and “I Was Actually Horribly Weakened,” for example—is perennially exciting to me and I think it amplifies the hilarity. You first used this strategy ten years earlier, in The Stupefaction. How did you arrive at this approach? Was it a way to maintain the energy of your stories in a longer work?

DW: I arrived at this approach because it was the only tactic I could think of to sustain the project . . . I would have to fool myself into believing that I was writing stories. I discovered—and it was a delightful surprise—that the chapter titles in The Stupefaction create, when read on their own, a sort of parallel narrative or chorus.

KS: Would you be able to talk about your first collection, This Is About  the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time, and Fate? I’m interested in how it came to be published, how long you worked on it, how you felt about its publication . . .

DW: This Is About . . . took three years to write, and a big bunch of these stories appeared in Gordon Lish’s Quarterly, but nonetheless he did not opt to sign up the book at Knopf.
He said my fiction was just too eccentric and he did not want to jeopardize the many other books he planned to put forward. (In later years, he claimed to never have said this, so his decision remains mysterious.)
He also predicted that I would “crumple up” with all the rejection I’d be sure to receive. I have not ever forgotten his exact words crumple up.
Kim Witherspoon, who was just beginning her career, agreed to be my agent—said she loved the stories—and then wrote to say she needed to withdraw her offer because she feared she’d be unable to sell the book. So I pleaded with her to reconsider. She agreed on the condition that I would not blame her if we were unsuccessful.
This was an easy bargain to make and we quickly sold the book to Mark Polizzotti at Grove Weidenfeld!—which was the outcome I had prayed for.
Everything about that publishing experience was stellar, was thrilling, and the book received a wide and positive critical response. But unfortunately Grove then underwent considerable upheaval, as it acquired new owners, and its staff was all changed out.
I was assigned a new editor, and the company was still eager to publish my second book, but Grove was sold yet again and there was more chaos.
And even though my second book—Some Sexual Success Stories, Plus Others in Which God Might Choose to Appear—fared even better than the first, the new editors were not interested in my next book, The Stupefaction, which Gordon Lish was then delighted to take on at Knopf. But before this book launched, Lish was fired.
So there was no open road forward. The Knopf staff that took on The Stupefaction made it clear to me that they would do absolutely nothing to support the book or to promote it.

KS: Terrible! But not that surprising. Do you think the book suffered as a result, in terms of its visibility and reception? Do you have a sense of why Lish was keen to publish your third book after passing on your debut? How did you come to be published by Dalkey Archive after that (Excitability: Selected Stories and Romancer Erector)?

DW: Somebody commented then, I can’t remember who, during that period, that Knopf liked to create Fabergé eggs and then crash them. As for Gordon Lish’s change of mind—he is and was notoriously mercurial. I didn’t wonder too much about his turnabout. Also, he had been consistently—throughout those years—supportive of my fiction, and he continued to publish it with frequency in The Quarterly.
I was a great admirer of Jack O’Brien—his mission and his courageous independence—and he had a high regard for my fiction. I was very lucky that Dalkey Archive Press was in the world and that Jack came to my rescue.

KS: When you were writing your first collection, did the fact that you were raising small children give you a sense of renewed or increased appreciation (or reevaluation) of language—witnessing their learning of it, teaching them how to speak and write?

DW: I have never thought of this before! What an interesting question. Raising children certainly brought extra drama, dilemma, joy, boredom, and continuous interruption.
I taught myself to work under all and any conditions. I do think my language was more naturally lyrical in those days, though I cannot be confident why.

KS: I often think about what a rare privilege it is to be able to send work to an editor who also happens to be an important, groundbreaking contemporary writer—and she will read it! Do you feel like the work of editing and producing NOON—every year for the past twenty-one years!—is a way to take a break from yourself, from your own writing, or does it feel closer than that, like a relation to or extension of your fiction? Does working on NOON influence what you write?

DW: Well before inaugurating NOON, you know, I edited StoryQuarterly for twelve years, so this vocation has become second nature.
I use the same timeworn, straw African carryall—which holds the necessary accoutrements for the job—that I have been using for thirty-plus years. It’s where I keep the blue folder for the rejection slips, the pouch that secures the Scotch tape, and the miniature silver knife—a letter opener—that was gifted to me by Gordon Lish, as he said offhandedly, “Here! You need it more than I do.”
As I weekly take up the stacks of submissions, this ritual brings to mind other earlier times when I read stories alongside Anne Brashler for StoryQuarterly—we had fun. And NOON has been so lucky to have had succeeding teams of brilliant and dedicated editors.
But evaluating submissions is a difficult and grave responsibility, and as an author who has submitted my own fiction for years and years, and who undergoes profound apprehension while waiting for the verdicts, I feel keenly the obligation to read these submissions right away and to respond right away.
Does editing influence what I write? Likely it does. I am inspired by the fiction we publish.

KS: There’s a feeling of coherence or unity in every issue of NOON that’s a testament to your vision and your sensibilities as an editor. There might be a conception among some that everything in the journal is heavily edited by you, but I know that you also publish work that has received very little in the way of edits. How do you view your role as an editor?

DW: Editing NOON offers me the opportunity to be in conversation—sometimes extraordinary communion—with other writers whom I admire. I consider this a great gift and a privilege, and if we can deepen effects, enhance the power of a piece, we aim to do this.

KS: Laura Sims wrote this about your work: “Can we allow ourselves the freedom she offers of beginning at the physical end? Some readers may not be able to accept this and similar challenges inherent in Williams’s work.” And in an interview for The Paris Review, Iris Murdoch says, “You have the extraordinary experience when you begin a novel that you are now in a state of unlimited freedom, and this is alarming.” If freedom is the ideal of art, why do you think it can be so challenging and frightening?

DW: Freedom feels like a fine thing if one also feels safe, but what about vertigo, which is certainly related? I loved to feel dizzy when I was a girl. Did you ever spin around in order to fall down dizzy?
As an adult, of course, for me, dizziness foretells physical or mental trouble, the exception being those stunning and positive psychological reformations that I have experienced, that have initially caused loss of balance. This sort of untethering—if it occurs at the end of a tale, I find it invigorating.

KS: I don’t remember trying to make myself dizzy, but I loved the exhilaration of swinging too high on a swing set or riding a horse too fast, or a bicycle, which gave me the thrill of possibility and danger I think you’re talking about—the invigoration of untethering. It makes me wonder if fiction is a way to actively pursue disorientation.

DW: Yes, I can agree with that!

KS: Laura Sims also wrote: “Williams’s relationship to religion has heavily influenced her work; she acknowledges that she has been ‘devout’ in the past—she attended synagogue as a child and still writes under the influence of the gorgeous prose and richly embroidered stories of the Old Testament.” I absolutely see this in your work and wondered if you’d be able to speak about it. Do you still read the Old Testament? Or is its influence more of a lasting, heavily made impression from childhood?

DW: I am not sure I can speak to this—the timeless lore and me. I’ll try.
Why do good people suffer? Will I be rewarded if I am good?—I want to be good. Why are we here? Are there alternate worlds? There must be a tyrant in charge—Is there?
Sadly, also at the forefront of what I learned as a child was: We are stubborn. We are hated. We are persecuted.
Yes, I still read the Old Testament. I love the Psalms  and the Song of Songs. And there are certain stories I return to often—for example, Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac, Jacob in combat with an angel, Jacob stealing Esau’s birthright, Jonah and the whale. I love Jonah and the whale. I may return to this one because of the narrative complications. There are so many.
Whenever I’d think of the whale tale, I could not remember its ending, and I’d have to rush to check.
I need to locate the large, lavish edition of the book that I inherited from my father, which is illustrated. Its pages are edged in gold. I love to read this edition because the print is large and welcoming, and its design promotes the notion that one has a storybook in hand.
Jonah is aggressive and brazenly insolent when in conversation with God, and he remains defiant and miserable and God is furious and scolds him.
I am no Biblical scholar, but I once read somewhere that this tale had an origin quite different from the majority of the others and may have been imported from non-Hebraic sources.
My mother, it was said, descended from a long line of rabbis, although several of my relatives I knew well were quite unrabbi-like. They were hysterical, superstitious—a bit crazy, likely driven nearly mad by the relentless pogroms.
Mother was born in Poland and possibly lived in a village of the sort that Isaac Singer so masterfully describes.
Once when an uncle visited our home and saw several carved, wooden African fertility figures that we prized, he ran out of the house screaming that we worshipped idols.
My mother’s father was dignified and devout, but hardly spoke to me. I only remember that he looked like an American Indian and that he brought us eggs and butter in a brown paper bag whenever he visited. He and my father argued about religion—perhaps in Yiddish. I didn’t understand a word.
My father was one of the founders of a reform synagogue, Solel, in Highland Park, Illinois, and remained active as a leader in its community to the end of his life.
Our rabbi then was Arnold Jacob Wolf, who was charismatic, challenging, and a political activist. His sermons and lessons were provocative. I was heartbroken when he refused to marry me because my husband-to-be was not Jewish.
And my parents’ deep unease about my marrying out of the religion was the beginning of the end of my interest in this sort of organized thought. I also began to deeply loathe saying vehemently the same thing as everyone else was saying during services, especially when it entailed a placating and obsequious refrain. The whole regimen became unbearable and untenable.

KS: Do you also consider psychology and psychoanalysis to be influential on your work? I’ve seen you reference Freud’s writings, but are there other texts you find valuable?

DW: Yes, certainly—psychology and psychoanalysis are influential in my work.
How does one research and study what should not be known, but must urgently be known?
I think that analysis and the best fiction composition are absolutely convergent in their purposes.
I have also read, as thoroughly as I was able, the writings of Carl Jung and William James—and many others, including Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow, Alice Miller, and James Hillman.

KS: In several interviews you’ve mentioned “the ideal text,” a concept I love and am always trying to remind myself of when I work. Would you be able to say anything more about what the ideal text is to you? What do you think makes for timeless fiction, or fiction that survives the death of its author?

DW: You are right—this is the best question to ask all of the time. I ask it as a prod, as I write and as I read, especially for NOON.
Oh—but it would be wonderful to have the key to what makes art eternal. For instance, what is it that constitutes the sublime?
I love Joseph Campbell’s description of the sublime: In a conversation with Bill Moyers, he said, “There’s another emotion associated with art, which is not of the beautiful but of the sublime. What we call monsters can be experienced as sublime. They represent powers too vast for the normal forms of life to contain them. An immense expanse of space is sublime . . . you’re climbing, until suddenly you break past a screen and an expanse of horizon opens out, and somehow, with this diminishment of your own ego, your consciousness expands to an experience of the sublime.”
And Emerson’s essays are filled with exciting notes on this subject. And there is Robert Alter’s wonderful book The World of Biblical Literature that pursues the question. He posits that so much of this text has survived for millenniums not just on account of its sacred nature, but because of other fundamental characteristics.
The authors of Genesis can be both playful and subversive, and they are “able to imagine moral dilemmas and ambiguities of motivation with uncanny complexity.”
Alter quotes Gabriel Josopovici, who states that the most typical features of Biblical narrative “bring us face to face with characters who can be neither interpreted nor deconstructed. They are emblems of the limits of comprehension.”
Ethical monotheism, Alter writes, “was delivered to the world not as a series of abstract principles but in cunningly wrought narratives, poetry, parables, and orations, in an intricate patterning of symbolic language and rhetoric.”
The question you ask deserves much more time and attention than what I can offer here, but I did attempt to describe the challenge in fine-grained terms—how best one can move, word by word, through a composition—when I taught writing.
It is, of course, easier to identify what does not fall into this category—the banal, the boring, and the belated, but this is obvious. And certainly splendid workmanship and language are necessary, and courage.
All together, impossible.

KS: Often when reading your work, or the work of other writers who excite me, I have a visceral reaction—my heart beats faster, my breathing changes, sometimes I get goosebumps or chills or have to stand up and walk around. There’s a current of energy transmitted that I feel electrified and revived by. Do you ever have a similar reaction when reading? What could this be about? What does the central nervous system have to do with reading?

DW: This is the best salute to receive. Yes, I experience this. And I have experienced it reading your work.
Acoustics and cadence play a central role for certain, but I may not be able to address this subject better than Robert Graves does in his book The White Goddess: “The reason why the hairs stand on end, the eyes water, the skin is constricted, the skin crawls and a shiver runs down the spine when one writes or reads a true poem is that a true poem is necessarily an invocation of the White Goddess . . . or Muse, the ancient power of fright and lust.”
Could this be true? Well, I have thought it is for very a long time.

Diane Williams is the founder and editor of NOON. She is the author of ten volumes of short fiction and the recipient of four Pushcart Prizes. Her most recent book of stories is How High?—That High, published by Soho Press. 

Kathryn Scanlan is the author of Aug 9—Fog and The Dominant Animal. She lives in Los Angeles and is the recipient of a 2021 Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her third book, Kick The Latch, will be published by New Directions in 2022.

Photo: Sarah Wilmer