You have to stand by your work at the end of the day, and honestly, if this book didn’t make me laugh, I wouldn’t have let it go to print.
I want to take things seriously, because these are serious things I’m writing about, but life is so funny, so ridiculous, and so bizarre—and the more bizarre I made the book, the more the book looked like real life.
All someone needs to do is open a window to a place like that and let me peer inside, and I’m intrigued.
I’m into spiky fashion and queer leather and outrageous looks and every so often an element of club kid. But different. I see queer fashion and the role it plays for me as one of adornment and resilience. Leather is another layer of skin, very protective. And spikes are a deterrent. So it’s a kind of armor.
Why would I want to write about my love affairs, my dinners with eminences, and my published works when the primordial North occupied such a crucial spot in my mind?
[Digging] reflects . . . for me, rather than a resignation, an active embrace of the dirt, the mud, the worms, the fungus, the bodies. The best way out is through . . . this kind of thing.
It made sense to me that writers or artists should utilize constraint in our present world of seemingly limitless possibility.
I love gossip in poems, and I love to see friendship performed in pieces of art, so I don’t know how to create things like that without those kinds of references.
With comics, for better or worse, you can’t really hide from who you are. You’re spending so much time working on these things that you can’t keep up a persona for that long.
Communing with the mineral/rock world is also another way for me to contemplate time, and to understand that the destructive/creative geologic processes are always underfoot.