The Lightning Room With Will Kaufman

 

 Read Will Kaufman’s Selling The Fall in our May issue, then join us while we become the perfect human platonically together.

 Interview by DeWitt Brinson

 

1. How was your childhood? One truth and one lie about it, please.

a) I grew up comfortably middle class in a San Francisco neighborhood with about five million Chinese restaurants and markets. I had a stable childhood, in that my family stuck it out in the same house for twelve years even though my parents probably should have been splitting up when they were getting pregnant.

b) I was a savvy kid, who definitely knew the difference between “Stussy” and Macy’s generic “Stylin'” brand. I watched MTV and My So Called Life and understood my peer’s frame of reference, and so fit in quite well.

2. What would you like to improve about your writing?

Everything. I want to tell stories that engage and enrapture with sentences that challenge and undermine. I want my writing to embody an emotional and ontological ambivalence. Obviously, I’m a long way off. Also, that shit sounds like it would be too irritatingly precious for anyone to ever actually read. Except for Moby Dick. Moby Dick was a nearly Platonic experience for me.

At this particular moment I’m trying to better understand the crafting of plot. I should probably also learn proper grammar and punctuation at some point. And then become a wholly better being so I can potentially produce work that would live up to my expectations.

3. How do you approach reading a book? Do you just start reading or do you have an idea about why you’re reading, do you have a plan?

I read to be a better writer. Unfortunately, that’s made reading a fraught activity. Some books and stories just anger me with their gutlessness, their unwillingness or inability to take any chances. Some enthrall me, with story or sentence or both. Either way, I can’t read more than a few pages before I’m pretty well distracted by the thoughts the material engenders, which means I’m up my own ass, and not learning, which means my plans are shit.

4. What’s the most recent thing that’s made you happy?

Something, I forget what, made Melanie happy, and she jumped up and down the way she used to whenever she got excited, and for a moment we could’ve been twenty-three, fresh in love and moving into our first place together.

5. What is the difference between thinking and writing?

Thinking is chaos, writing is winnowing down that chaos into a singular intent.

6. What is the mother of your writing?

I’d like to say it’s something noble, but in truth it’s necessity. When I’m writing — by which I mean, in the moments when I am actually putting words on the page — my mind is a singular thing. The rest of the time my mind is split, and there’s always a part that’s fractious. It is an unquiet place, and not one where I enjoy spending time. Writing is like meditation or drugs; even if I only get a little bit in a day, it’s still a fix, a moment of calm that I can cling to. Bonus, if I’ve been writing for more than about ten minutes I start to feel high.

Writing is presence, and self, and identity, and worth. So I do it. It doesn’t even matter how shitty whatever I’m writing is, so long as I’m writing.