Describe your latest book.
My current book is a collection of personal essays called
Everything We Don't Know. Told in the first person, each story explores a different part of my life and a different theme: love, fear, aging, parental relationships, searching for meaning, feeling lost. Together, the essays tell my story of growing up in middle-class America and how I found my way.
I'm working on a book about rural California right now, which has been fun. The story weaves a recent road trip I took with a historic boat trip a local historian took in the 1930s in order to present a profile of place. And I'm currently finishing a travel book tentatively titled
Tanoshii: Travels in Japan.
What was your favorite book as a child?
I've always tended to have multiple favorites because the world's filled with so much great stuff. As a child, my favorite books were Dr. Seuss's
Horton Hears a Who! and
Green Eggs and Ham. In middle school, I really liked
The Old Man and the Sea, even though the book's title made it sound as boring as watching paint dry. Later, I fell for C. S. Lewis's
The Chronicles of Narnia and early Choose Your Own Adventure books like
Forbidden Castle and
Underground Kingdom.
When did you know you were a writer?
It happened in stages. I grew up drawing all the time; I was the proverbial drawing kid in class. Later I journaled and wrote bad high school poems and lyrics for songs I never fully composed. When the subject of school assignments interested me, I could enjoy writing papers, but I realized I was a writer when the urge to write became particularly strong during my earliest undergrad years.
I grew up in Phoenix, Arizona. In college, I journaled consistently and tried to write narrative nonfiction. After I found one of
Edward Abbey's books in a mall in San Bernardino, though, I recognized that this was the sort of narrative I'd been trying to produce. I was in college in Tucson then and had traveled to California's Inland Empire on Christmas break to explore some old-growth forests in the mountains there. I drove all over the Southwest in those days, bushwhacking woodlands and wandering around the desert, and I slept in my truck to save money on hotels. To pass the nights while car-camping, I found bookstores or diners. A bookstore in the mall had a book by this grizzly looking geezer who was standing in a stand of cholla cactus that looked exactly like the kind I had just left in Tucson. When I sat to read the book in the store, I realized: this person knows my world, and he was trying to explore and understand our place in it just like I was. Cactus Ed became my first literary model. When I discovered writers like
Joan Didion,
Luis Rodriguez, and
Annie Dillard, things started to click. In 2000, the urge to write completely overtook my urge to draw; I started writing every day, and my transformation into low-wage, overeducated, literary barista/adjunct was complete.
What keeps me going now, and what keeps me learning and improving, are writers like
Colson Whitehead,
Roxane Gay,
Hua Hsu,
Natsuo Kirino,
James Baldwin,
Luis Rodriguez,
Jhumpa Lahiri,
Gerald Early,
Junot Díaz,
Ellen Willis, and
Fuminori Nakamura. When I look at my bookshelves, they remind me, as much as my constant typing, that I'm finally doing that thing I tried to do all those years ago.
What does your writing workspace look like?
According to my wife, Rebekah, it looks like "a hoarder's den." Lately I've been writing in a semi-finished room in our basement. It's a cozy, brightly lit lair, and we're going to eventually cover the walls with wood and deck it out like a Japanese izakaya, because I'm obsessed. Right now, the room is filled with all the decorations and posters and Japanese whisky I've gathered to do that, with a chair and table in the middle, beside some shelves crammed with books. We use a small room upstairs as an office, but lately I've stayed very productive in the basement. Maybe I thrive on thematic clutter.
What do you care about more than most people around you?
Grilled fish, especially fresh sardines and mackerel. Also, matte book covers. Matte feels so good in your hands.
Share an interesting experience you've had with one of your readers.
I don't get many messages from readers, but I love when they send emails about how essays have affected them personally, or I find people have written about my stories on their blogs. You write alone and edit together, but it's mostly just you and the words, so when you see your essays or stories with another person, it means a lot.
Recently, an Australian jazz organist and researcher named
Darren Heinrich emailed me after reading my
Threepenny Review essay about organist Jimmy Smith and the allure of record company vaults. Darren studies at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, and he's a talented musician interested in Jimmy Smith's groundbreaking styles and some of the other organ players who emerged when Smith got popular. Objectively, this is awesome, because in terms of historical research and narrative histories, bebop and other mid-century styles completely overshadow organ jazz. There's just not a lot about it. Personally, it's exciting because one essay introduced two people on opposite sides of the planet who, to steal Darren's words, share a love of Jimmy Smith's record
Crazy! Baby. I love that. His thesis is due in 2017. I hope he lets me read it.
Tell us something you're embarrassed to admit.
Admitting that I thrive in a cluttered unfinished basement isn't enough? The shame!
Introduce one other author you think people should read, and suggest a good book with which to start.
Martha Grover's memoir-in-essays
The End of My Career. It's one of the best books I've read this year, largely because she has such a strong, compelling voice. For me, narrative voice is half a book's appeal, and not just because I forget so many specifics of great books and movies. I want an entertaining personality to guide me through their stories and mind, someone smart and funny, all-seeing and unique. Grover is it. And she and the press, Perfect Day Publishing, live here in Portland, Oregon. Fresh beer is better beer, so I like to drink locally. Books travel through time and space without spoilage, but when you have two huge talents like these in your backyard, it makes you proud. You want to support them so they continue to thrive.
Besides your personal library, do you have any beloved collections?
I used to collect a lot of things:
Star Wars toys, early
Thrasher magazines, vintage Hobie and Hang Ten surf clothes, and old diner glasses. I loved this stuff, but I eventually liquidated most of it. Now I buy refrigerator magnets from places we visit. I collect Doug Fir and other concert posters from around town; I tear them off the light poles and hang them up at home. And I buy mid-century piano trio jazz records, like Ahmad Jamal, Mary Lou Williams, and Billy Taylor. It's the only thing I buy consistently on vinyl, because I like to play it quietly when friends come over for dinner, and a lot of it isn't widely available digitally. It's also fun to search record store bins in different cities to discover music I didn't know existed. That's how I discovered
Portland's own Lorraine Geller and the incredible Billy Taylor, and they stole my heart.
What's the strangest or most interesting job you've ever had?
I had a blast working the door at some of DJ Anjali and The Incredible Kid's gigs here in town years ago. Not strange, but interesting.
Have you ever made a literary pilgrimage?
Yes, to the site of
Haruki Murakami's old jazz club in Tokyo.
I wrote an essay about it for
Harper's, mostly because I wanted to preserve the Murakami-like texture of the adventure, and because I wanted to understand the influence jazz has had on Murakami's life and writing. He's deep into it. I also looked in the window of
Dylan Thomas's beloved White Horse Tavern in Manhattan once — didn't even order a drink. I saw where that got Thomas.
What scares you the most as a writer?
Yikes. Besides people actually reading my book, many things scare me. Tied for first place would have to be (a) me not clearly and fairly seeing all the sides of a topic or perspective that I'm writing about in an essay, and (b) not seeing past my intrinsic bias about race, gender, and class. As a nonfiction writer, you collect all the info and all the conflicting accounts, including your own, and try to come to your own accurate, educated conclusion about what's true. But the truth is a slippery thing, especially when you're a part of the story.
If someone were to write your biography, what would be the title and subtitle?
Who Let Him in Here? Or:
Hey, You Have Chocolate on Your Face.
Offer a favorite sentence or passage from another writer.
"At three in the morning Jamie's eyes came open. Headlights on an entrance ramp cut across their flight and swept through the bus, and momentarily in her exhaustion she thought it was the flaming head of a man whipping like a comet through the sleeping darkness of travelers, hers alone to witness." – Denis Johnson's
Angels
Share a sentence of your own that you're particularly proud of.
From my essay in the book about the word "rad":
Because as Carl Sagan said, “You have to know the past to understand the present,” and Confucius before him: “Study the past if you would divine the future,” which resembles in content but not origin that famous line in Ecclesiastes 1:9, “There is no new thing under the sun,” which bears witness in today’s contempo garage bands who ape Thee Headcoats who aped The Kinks, just as The Kinks aped rhythm and blues, for homo erectus is descended from apes, and so too will future thirty-somethings with receding hairlines spend way too much time dissecting the films and vernacular of their now retro youth while begrudging the cruel nature of time and, in turn, reveal their own uncoolness (not a word) by completely draining the cachet from an actual word by thinking too much about it, which is somehow antithetical to cool, even though to appear cool you have to think a lot about what you’re going to wear and what you’re going to say and how to style your hair.
Describe a recurring or particularly memorable dream or nightmare.
Wow, that's a tough one. When I'm working hard on an essay, I sometimes dream about revising, which sounds neurotic. It's never a particular passage or sentence, just the act of moving blocks of text around and trying to shape a narrative. The dream text appears as jumbled, angry-edged black and white. I know a lot of writers experience this. Your unconscious works to solve problems while you sleep, which means you're never really off the hook.
My daydreams repeat more than my night dreams: me in Kyoto, wandering around and nodding to friendly strangers and eating yakitori; me driving the long bright roads of California's rural San Joaquin Valley, inhaling the rich scent of tilled earth and manure. I love those places so much it kills me.
What's your biggest grammatical pet peeve?
Rules. That and having to remember the difference between a compound sentence and a complex sentence when students ask me after summer break. Sometimes I forget! When I told one student that I was more used to breaking grammatical rules than following them, she said, "Oh, no. I might have gotten the wrong person." A+
Do you have any phobias?
My wife is an arachnophobe. That's enough phobia for both of us. If I see spiders in our house, I gently move them outside without her knowing they were ever there. When she finds one on the ceiling or wall, she finds me and says, "Aaron. You need to come." I know what that means. We speak in arachno-code. It takes a lot of restraint not to congratulate myself by playing Sam and Dave's "Hold on, I'm Comin'" every time we do this. She found one in our stairwell the other night and stared at it for nearly 10 minutes until I got out of the shower. I asked her: "Did you just stand here by the stairs this whole time?" She said, "Yes." She wanted to make sure it didn't escape. She made it sound so logical. Sorry, love, I know it's embarrassing, but it's too good a story not to share!
As for my own fears, I don't have phobias about earthquakes or cell phone towers or anything like that. My greatest fears are my own stupidity, my own emotional needs, my tendency to neglect those I love because of my narrow social existence and habit of alienating myself. Those aren't irrational fears. They're based on reality. You can see that in my book.
Name a guilty pleasure you partake in regularly.
I eat a piece of dark chocolate right after I wake up. I no longer feel guilty about it, and that freedom is its own type of pleasure. I block celebrity news so hard that the last bit that penetrated my defenses was the 1990 cancellation of the TV show
ALF, which was a crusher.
What's the best advice you’ve ever received?
"Read for theme." Meaning, read to see the story's larger, universal subject beyond plot: death, aging, fear, parental relationships, etcetera. That advice revolutionized the way I not only read personal nonfiction, but wrote it. Thank you, Professor Who Shall Not Be Named!
Write a question of your own, then answer it.
Q: Would you like lettuce and cheese on your al pastor taco?
A: {
stunned silence}
Top five books of wonder and wander
Looking at this list makes it clear how much I enjoy stories where people wander and explore, sometimes where they aren't welcome, and books that involve journeys: road trips, hiking trips, escapes, and interior explorations. Same goes for stories where people wrestle with reality and truth.
Norwood by Charles Portis
Joe Gould's Teeth by Jill Lepore
Always Running by Luis Rodriguez
Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye by Marie Mockett
The Roads to Sata by Alan Booth
÷ ÷ ÷
Aaron Gilbreath is an essayist, journalist, and burrito enthusiast. His essays and articles have appeared in
Harper’s,
The New York Times,
The Paris Review,
Vice,
The Morning News,
Saveur,
Tin House,
The Believer,
Oxford American,
The Kenyon Review,
Slate,
Virginia Quarterly Review,
Narratively, and
Brick. His essay "\’ra-di-k?l\" from
Hotel Amerika is a Notable Essay in
Best American Essays 2013, and "Dreams of the Atomic Era," from the
Cincinnati Review, is a Notable Essay in
Best American Essays 2011. He lives in Portland, Oregon.