Why Don't You...
On Interviews and Getting All Up In My Head
If you haven’t yet listened to Sam Fragoso’s interview with Annie Baker, please do. Baker is startlingly honest, and I mean that literally. I was folding clothes, hadn't even chosen the episode—it was just the next thing in my queue after whatever grisly murder podcast I had purposely selected. I was startled enough to stop folding, rewind, and listen again. I don’t want to say too much about it for fear of spoiling the experience for you, but there’s an authenticity there that’s rare. If anyone within the reach of this email knows Fragoso or Baker, please pass along my compliments. It was a hell of a thing.
Interviews are on my mind as I gear up to do press for the new comic. I’m not a shy person, not an introvert in the least (as anyone who’s met me will attest) but I do get up in my head about this stuff. It’s a part of the job that elicits a stew of feelings. The sort of vulnerability required to write, to create anything really, is different from the vulnerability required to talk about the work, about the process, or about yourself in that mix. (My heart is beating a little bit faster all of a sudden—my body reacting to even the thought of it. No kidding: I just got a notification from the Apple Health app.) There’s a certain defensiveness in the experience, no matter how friendly the interlocutor, one I suspect is fueled by the spirit of this internet age. As a part of your brain is searching for an honest answer, another is running through all the ways your response could be deliberately misconstrued, and a third is asking, ‘Will this really help the sales of the book/film/show/etc.?’ Is this worth it?
Baker lays all that bare; she risks being considered “difficult” or annoying Fragoso. (To his great credit, he doesn’t just allow for it; he answers her vulnerability with his own.) She appreciates the thoroughness of his preparation but at the same time wonders aloud at the peculiarity of having something she once said parroted back to her as Truth. She doesn’t deny having said it, and likely it was true once, but memory and identity are fickle things, and the perspective of age alters how the light hits both. Of course, for the purpose of an interview, for the purpose of any conversation, there have to be some things we take as given, but her willingness to highlight the absurdity of the exercise, to own her discomfort, and then to light up when Fragoso is willing to ride along is refreshing, a buoy to me just now.
I love her willingness to push back, too. If you know me, you know I can be a lot, and I don’t exactly have a reputation for conflict-avoidance, but there have been moments/remarks in interviews past that I let slide unchallenged and they gnaw at me still. My hesitancy to hit the press circuit probably has something to do with that as well. Fear of signing up to either answer the well-meaning stranger back or grit my teeth and learn to live with another Lego in my shoe. And for what? In comics, anyway, no one seems to know what press, if any, will move the needle.
Oh goodness. Reading back, I’ve descended into something that looks rather unflatteringly like privileged moping. I am fortunate to make my living in the arts, I know. My challenges are hardly those of a coal miner or a policy-maker, I know, but here we are. Bucking up now, I promise.
I’ll say in closing this bit out, though, that I probably ought to own that my efforts to find new ways to market FML (starting with the acrostic in the last email) are not entirely about the current media landscape. They’re at least in part a reaction to the current me landscape. And I think it’s probably okay to acknowledge the absurdity of being so tired you can’t bring yourself to do things the usual way and then making up new approaches that require three times the work. Nothing if not on brand.
xo
Kelly Sue
A Few Things to Call to Your Attention
Being a Hugo Award Finalist >cough cough< this year has put me back in touch with a lovely gentleman named Alasdair Stuart, who I first met on the WEF roughly a million years ago. Alasdair’s free nerd missive The Full Lid is available here and if you’re pop culture enthusiast—and you are, you’re here—I suspect you’ll find something useful there.
Brink Lit has an internship up!
The Wicked + The Divine is Kickstarting a gorgeous new art book - The Covers Version. Get it? Every cover by series artist Jamie McKelvie and colourist Matt Wilson, along with variant covers by a bunch of other artists.
I came across an utterly insane quote from Gustavo Adolfo Rol and subsequently discovered the batshit existence of Gustavo Adolfo Rol.
”I discovered a terrible law that links the color green, the musical fifth, and heat. I have lost my will to live. I am frightened by power. I shall write no more!”
Avatar - Metal… circus? band? “What if Dresden Dolls but metal?”
The Roland High Life - new single Always Almost Ready
In September, Fraction & I are going to Peace Out the Aerosmith farewell tour. Do not give me shit about this. (I did recently learn that I’ve been mishearing the lyrics to Dream On for years and I’m heartbroken that it’s not “Sing, Women, sing for the years.” HEARTBROKEN.
Probably everyone knows this already but Soul Coughing are reuniting for a tour. They’re in Portland same night we have box seats for Cheap Trick and Heart so I think we’re going to have to drive to Seattle? I don’t know. I’m freaking out a little. They go on sale tomorrow, but if you want to get in now go to soulcoughingband.com
• Click on the show you would like to go to
• Click on “sign up” next to artist presale
• Enter your info and you’ll get a reminder via email / text that will tell you the password and you can purchase immediately.
I told y’all I’m working on my Italian, right? I’ve starting messing around with Tandem, an app that helps you learn to speak the language you’ve been practicing by chatting with a native speaker. (Bonus, they’re practicing English so you get to be a helper too.)
NYC Public Schools & Civics for all. Some of our Good Trouble/CAAVE books make the cut:
Alex Segura’s follow up to Secret Identity, Alter Ego, is out in December. You can preorder it wherever books are sold!
Ben Acker’s kids’ book has been out for a while, but I don’t care, I love it and I’m plugging it anyway.
Terry Dodson on Off Panel. Adventureman: Ghost Lights HC is past its final order cut off (“FOC”), but there’s not harm in asking your local comic shop to set aside a copy for you.
For those of you following along on my redecorating adventures, here’s the powder room progress:
Why Don’t You…
Diana Vreeland helmed BAZAAR for 25 years, during which she very famously had a column called Why Don't You...
Denise and I laughed ourselves silly imagining our version, so here it is. This might become a regular thing, who knows?
Why don’t you…
Try making homemade marshmallows?
Embroider a secret message on the inside fly of your jeans?
Wear corpse paint to the grocery store on a sunny afternoon?
Keep a secret diary in the persona of a serial killer? Leave its location to your least favorite relative in your will.
Host a perfume sample swap?
Carve a linoleum stamp? Use it to personalize your correspondence.
Have some correspondence?
Lie down in the forest and be consumed by moss?
Sing along to Tina Turner?
Put your fucking phone down while you eat for once, c’mon?
Put pantyhose over your head and take a picture? Text it to your mom, then delete it and say “sorry, wrong thread.”
Make a gratitude list?
Start a zine?
Paint the edge of an interior door a bright surprising color?
Buy gnome figurines in bulk and start randomly leaving them places?
Get into geocaching?
Get your MFA?
Get a tattoo on your face?
Write a thank you note? Mail it. In the mail. With a stamp and everything.
Teach your dog to pick pockets?
Install the Library Extension?
Do one of the above and tell us about it? We’ll publish any that make us laugh in the next newsletter.
xo Kelly Sue
TXT 503-738-1029
For a decade I wrote a loosely connected Lovecraft themed detective story whenever I stayed at the Oregon coast. It didn’t matter if it was a hotel, vacation rental, or Airbnb; if they had a guestbook I added to the story. It started simple enough, your standard noir style story. But as the years went by the main character slowly started to unravel. I even started to draw weird sigils and Eldridge signs on notes and hide them in the rooms. I’d tape notes and the art behind mirrors or between couch cushions or even slipped into “house rules” binders. I have no idea if anyone ever made any kind of connection but I loved the idea of someone who also spent a lot of time at the coast finding these notes as the character slowly slid into Lovecraftian madness.
If I had one regret, it’s that I never took any photos and document the story. Which is why, after a few years of not visiting the coast, I am starting a new story. And this time, I am taking images of everything I write and hide… I even started taking and leaving Polaroids of places on the coast and scribble notes on the back. It makes me so happy, creating this story that maybe no one else ever discovers. It’s the little things, you know?
I met Annie Baker years ago. My now-wife was producing a festival of three different theatre companies performing her Shirley VT play trilogy, and I was doing all the media marketing for it. Absolutely fascinating human and artist; lovely to chat with and very much on a different plans in the best way. Very excited to listen to this and see her movie!
(Also thanks again for the Roland High Life shout-out 🙏)