sTgSunfish

Hi Tom! A brief encomium, then some questions. I’ve been a fan of yours since 2005, when I read “Surviving High School” as a (high school) freshman; I have no doubt that it helped me, well, survive high school. That essay, along with your profile of Michael Stipe (I, too, am from Decatur), made me want to write creative nonfiction. As I’ve worked to find my own writerly voice, I’ve frequently revisited your writing for inspiration, especially for how it manages to have moral weight without being moralistic (to my ears, at least), and how the prose is both incisive yet consciously artistic. So thanks for that; you’ve made my reading and writing life so much more fulfilling.

A few writerly questions:

1. How do you approach the final line of an article? “The Falling Man” and “American Dog” have fucking killer last sentences. Do these come to you at the beginning, middle, or end of the writing process? And how much do you work to “set up” the final line in the sentences that precede it?

2. Lately, “Michael Stipe has Great Hair” is being cited in a some academic, lit-crit essays about literary truth (especially with all the recent DFW hubbub). Do you think it’s ever appropriate for a creative non-fiction writer to bend the truth if it makes a more “truthful” point? For you, is there a difference between literary truth and capital-T truth?

3. When you’re writing, do you imagine your work as an argument? And if so, who is your audience, ideal, real, or imagined? Something I struggle with in writing is whether I should try to write arguments that convince me, or ones that I think will convince my audience. It feels cheap to write a piece that is both appealing to and targeted at left-liberal audience, which is why one of the things I admire most about your work is how it exposes and exploits the cracks in our “liberal” myths about, say, Obama, Jon Stewart, etc. Do you ever have this debate with yourself? And if so, how do you resolve it?

4. So, I don’t think I’m saying anything too controversial when I say that Esquire runs a lot of trash content alongside excellent feature writing. Does it ever bother you that your writing might appear on the page after a pithy piece on an outfit that 90% of people can’t afford? Or is that kind of content just part of the bargain for publishing? Or am I just being a pretentious ass and need to learn to deal with the fact that people can enjoy both kinds of writing, even if they’re a page apart?

5. Of all your writing, which work do you think is the most underrated?

EDIT; Ok maybe I asked more than my fair share of questions. But it's not often I get this excited about an AMA.

Thank you! I do understand what you're saying. And now I can start calling myself a "frustrated academic."