Lit Hub Asks: 5 Authors, 7 Questions, No Wrong Answers

The Lit Hub Author Questionnaire is a monthly interview featuring seven questions for five authors with new books. This month we talk to:

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Sebastian Castillo (Fresh, Green Life)
Dennard Dayle (How to Dodge a Cannonball)
Geoff Dyer (Homework)
Megan Giddings (Meet Me at the Crossroads)
Ivy Pochoda (Ecstasy)

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Without summarizing it in any way, what would you say your book is about?

Dennard Dayle: Seeing how much humor and treason I can fit into 360 pages without ending up in El Salvador. That, and staying sane and alive in the first U.S. civil war.

Ivy Pochoda: The darkness at the edge of abandon. The deception of marriage and motherhood. The accidental prisons we build ourselves. The horror of luxury.

Megan Giddings: Faith, sisterhood, families, waiting in line for ugly yet popular shoes, loneliness when you’re isolated, loneliness when you love or want to love someone, doors, ghosts, multiple people explode, an abiding love for Liverpool FC, an abiding love for Hunter x Hunter, wanting to be a good person, wanting to die, wellness, love, and grief.

Geoff Dyer: Specifically, my life up to the age of eighteen; more generally, the experience of class in England.

Sebastian Castillo: Sort of like if Don Quixote was 1/10th its length and about YouTube videos instead of chivalric romances. It’s spiritually about that guy with whom you went to school. You know that guy?

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Without explaining why and without naming other authors or books, can you discuss the various influences on your book? 

Sebastian Castillo: New Year’s resolutions; sitting in a room alone; parties and the people who go to them; what is philosophy?; ascetic ambition; abject failure despite thinking you did everything right; regularly saying to yourself “Yeah I’m going beast mode/locking in” despite not doing anything; the final sequence in Andrei Rublev.

Geoff Dyer: I didn’t understand the process I’d been through—11-plus, grammar school, Oxford—until I read Raymond Williams, whose Culture and Society provides the epigraph that opens the book, and E. P. Thompson, whose quote closes it (almost). They weren’t influences on the book as such but they determined the belated coming into consciousness, about forty-five years ago, of the person who went on to write it.

Dennard Dayle: I heard about Pickett’s Charge in middle school and laughed. And laughed, and laughed, and almost got ejected from class, and kept laughing after that. I’m not sure I ever stopped.

Ivy Pochoda: Myths and classics in the original. Ancient and modern cults. Hotel propaganda. Labyrinthine EDM. The desire to make sense and justify too many late nights and the ridiculous need to do so.

Megan Giddings: Nine years ago, I was at the Hollywood Walk of Fame with a friend and we heard someone yell, “get down,” and a few people started running but almost everyone else was fine and gawking at two women with giant pythons on their shoulders and some people in a mix of Party City and homemade superhero costumes. On and off for the rest of the weekend, one of us would say, we died there and now we’re on a new Earth. It was a joke, a weird writing prompt, and something I genuinely contemplated on the plane home. What else? Past life regression, talking to a medium on purpose and talking to a medium by surprise. Michigan. Spirit with a capital S.

The only titled chapter in one of my favorite books. A point of view shift in the Chimera Ant arc to a contemplation that includes these lines: “That is why they yearn/that is why they foster/if they only knew that all one needs in life is the sun, the soil, and poetry.”  Oprah show when I was a child. Harmonies. “And I’m gonna miss everybody.” Hearing the lyric as “See the face of God and Love,” rather than hearing it as “See the face of God and love change.”

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Without using complete sentences, can you describe what was going on in your life as you wrote this book?

Ivy Pochoda: Lonely vacations. Silly heartbreaks. Overwrought emotions. A new life. New freedoms. New fears. New joys.

Sebastian Castillo: I can only write in sentences so I’ll have to forego the injunction: it was ordinary and full of ordinariness: work, friendship, literature, and 3-7 beverages a day.

Geoff Dyer: The usual. Teaching one semester a year at USC, living in Los Angeles, summers in London.

Megan Giddings: Leipzig, Minneapolis, speaking poor German poorly, multiple deaths, too much anime, walking into every place and evaluating exactly how haunted it was, Kiki, Hedgebrook, earth-fire-water, growing house plants, therapy, yellowjacket infestation, acceptance, salt-pepper okra, ubers and taxis and surprise conversations, Lahai, taking an edible at Universal Studios so I wouldn’t find the Lazy River disgusting, forest fire air, soccer, walking around in fog (literal not medical not figurative), love, the kind of friendships where we tell each other we love one another but not loudly in public, teaching, riding trains, crying.

Dennard Dayle: Holy hell everyone’s going crazy holy hell everyone’s going crazier holy hell everyone’s dying holy hell they’ve reached a new level of crazy previously thought impossible where is Batman oh well maybe i’ll try skating hey this is fun.

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What are some words you despise that have been used to describe your writing by readers and/or reviewers?

Dennard Dayle: I wish they’d skip my charm and beauty reaching the page. It’s very unprofessional. And distracts from citing the Black experience. You need to type “Black experience” at least twice to discuss me. Black experience Black experience Black experience.

Sebastian Castillo: ‘Too sexy,’ ‘titillating,’ ‘moan inducing,’ ‘inflamed with desire,’ and ‘sexually lustful.’

Megan Giddings: Timeless, didactic, slow, timely.

Geoff Dyer:Unstructured.

Ivy Pochoda: Gritty and dark have become empty descriptors of my work.

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If you could choose a career besides writing (irrespective of schooling requirements and/or talent) what would it be?

Ivy Pochoda: I still want to own that hotdog cart and sell you all the stoner hotdogs of your dreams. (I also wouldn’t mind petting seals for a living.)

Megan Giddings: I have always thought that I would be a superb manager of a struggling AMC Theater.

Dennard Dayle: I’d find creative and spiritual fulfillment as God-Emperor of Earth. I was never God-Emperor of Earth as a child, and it’d be a nice reparenting experience. Failing that, professional dancer.

Geoff Dyer: Any kind of lower-league athlete. A musician (non-classical).

Sebastian Castillo: I have a writing career?

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What craft elements do you think are your strong suit, and what would you like to be better at?

Megan Giddings: Honestly, I don’t know if there are craft elements I think are my strong suit. I am not being Midwestern here—I am mean and exacting to myself. I don’t need to read Goodreads, I am my own biggest hater. I think every book I could get better at every part of writing. I have to work very, very hard to make anything feel worth publishing. If I must choose, I am most pleased by my paragraphs. Everything else, we will try again next time.

Sebastian Castillo: Honestly, I’m allergic to the notion of ‘craft,’ and find it the language of business people, bureaucrats, and committees. The work is both what it does and what it says; they’re the same.

Dennard Dayle: I hear I’m funny. As for flaws, I’d simply like to write faster. Some people land each trick first try, but I need two years locked in the library basement to get it right.

Ivy Pochoda: I can describe a plot but not a person. I can tell a story, but I cannot (easily) craft a plot. I know where I want to go, but I get lost on the way.

Geoff Dyer: Structure is my great strength; dialogue is not.

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How do you contend with the hubris of thinking anyone has or should have any interest in what you have to say about anything?

Geoff Dyer:Many books could be written by anyone. Mine could only be written  by me—no one could dispute that I was uniquely well-qualified to write this one.

Dennard Dayle: Indulging it. If I’m due for a Macbeth-level humbling, let’s get it over with.

Ivy Pochoda: I’ve answered this before in this space and nothing has changed. The hubris is the fuel to my fire. It’s what gets me up in the morning. It’s what keeps me going when things are tough. There’s not a lot I can do about what people actually do have interest in—but I’m inspired by the fact that they should have interest and that’s enough for me.

Sebastian Castillo: The artists I love don’t worry themselves with this question—so neither do I!

Megan Giddings: We are living in an age where some of the dumbest, most hateful motherfuckers are jumping on TikTok and holding cameras too close to their faces and saying absolute nonsense and people will watch it and say oh, that’s insightful. If I want to write my weird books, well, at least that’s a little more dignified.