Last fall Jenny Magazine published one of my essays, “Dark Matter,” about a solo motorcycle trip I took to West Texas. This week they published an interview I did with them recently which covers my favorite writers, current projects, and other nuggets like the beginning of this anecdote about the first story I published:

The first story I published was called “[truh luhv]” and was in the English department’s student literary journal where I was in grad school. That semester I’d been in my first creative writing class and quickly figured out there were three groups of students in it: desperate housewives with a tragic story they just had to let out (typically a divorce or dead pet); slumming lit crit students taking the class as an elective (and to prove to everyone none of this was that hard); and the actual creative writing majors. So we’d read each other’s stories — anonymously — and at least a couple of times during each class one of the desperate housewives would have to say, “I can tell a woman wrote this … because it really, really spoke to me.” That got pretty tiresome and reductive so I wrote a male-female relationship story — “[truh luhv]” — and when done I flipped the gender of the two main characters without changing anything else. When we discussed it in class, sure enough, one of the housewives said the story had to have been written by a woman because it really, really spoke to her. So for about five seconds I felt pretty great, having vindicated my own sense of self-righteousness and superiority.

Be warned: This is not a story with a happy ending.

(Read the full interview.)

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