The Lightning Room with Jasmine Sawers

Welcome to the Lightning Room, where DeWitt Brinson & Simon Jacobs take turns asking PANK authors extremely difficult questions about their work.

December interviews come courtesy of the mind of DeWitt Brinson.

***

Read Jasmine Sawers story How to Commit Suicide in our March issue, then join us as we enter adolescence and howl at elderly hamsters.

1. What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done but are not ashamed to admit?

Entering adolescence.

2. How do you deal with your destructive emotions?

I allow them to consume me until I am a howling abyss.

3. What did you do the last time you knew a friend was in an abusive relationship?

Proper friendship is at least partially defined by not spreading the other party’s intimate business in public spaces.

4. Why does being human mean that we will hurt someone, that we will hurt ourselves?

Because it’s hard not to slip away when you’re more than half water.

5. Where were you when you decided to write this story?

In front of the cage of an elderly hamster preparing for its imminent death.

6. You title the first choice of suicide as a flying leap, but if she thought you would really fly if she leaped then she couldn’t die from falling. So was she:
a) planning on dying by flying up into the air where there isn’t oxygen and suffocate
b) flying into an airplane
c) some other choice

If her intent was unclear in the narrative, then I have failed as a storyteller, and I must go live alone in the woods to think about what I’ve done.

***

DeWitt Brinson is a poet. That guy, he does it all.