Self Exposure

I am really excited to have found my way back into this. It's just a rambling conversation with a friend.

I admit I didn’t really feel drawn to Holly’s book and waited till I had finished the other Autofocus books before I got to hers. There was something in me, probably inherently misogynistic, that didn’t want to give space to this story of mothers and daughters even though I am a mother with daughters. I find myself looking for escape when I read, not in the form of sci-fi or fantasy usually, but i...

Caleb Caudell released his first book of autofiction, Hardly Working (Bonfire Press, 2024) detailing his daily struggles as a low-wage worker, and how the drudgery of that grind adds up to larger existential commentary. Caleb is chronically unhappy, pessimistic, and hopeless when it comes to the future. I don't want to sugar coat it. This book is hard to read. Unrelenting in its documentation...

Shane Anderson's book appeared in my store. I don't know how it came to me but as I was restacking on a glum June day, I found it,  After the Oracle Or: How the Golden State Warriors' Four Core Values Can Change Your Life Like They Changed Mine  (Deep Vellum, 2021). It's an unmistakably self-helpy title and I don't have any connection to basketball, but I was intrigued about th...

Forrest Muelrath is having a moment with the release of his first book, a slim novella called The Valeries (Expat Press 2024). I read the interview Forrest did with Expat's founder and notable Self Exposure mention Manny Marrero, which I found edifying, and which deepened my understanding of both men. This interview is the Yang to that interview's Yin. It's spontaneous, unplanned, and...

Josh documents the recent reading at the KGB bar in NYC, organized by Pig Roast Publishing. We talk about meeting writers like Jesse Hilsson and Derek Maine IRL, about tone deaf moments, and episodes we're planning for the future.

Brad Listi, best known as the host of the otherppl podcast , tried to write a few different books before he settled on the unique form of Be Brief and Tell Them Everything (Ig Publishing, 2022). It is a book written in defiance of the idea of writing the perfect book: a collection of punchy paragraphs; a document designed to release thoughts, impressions, loose recollections; a middle aged attempt...

You'll either find this episode juicy or uncomfortable, probably both. At one point, a mother and her adult son come into my store while Kat and I are recording and, while browsing for vintage homeware, are forced to endure our deepest admissions about sexuality, gender, and whether we'll ever be happy. I know this is totally unprofessional. I know it's a mistake to record while the st...

I reached out to Tyler Dempsey of Another Fucking Writing Podcast and Tyler of LoFi Lit . We were moving in such similar circles and I wanted to officially give us a chat space to chum around, support each other, and complain about fucked up shit. The name I gave our chat is Filthy Headphones and Dead Air. We talked, early on, about the overlaps between our podcasts and how there’s room for all of...

It felt good to talk to Graham about his second book, I Have A Gun. It was lovely to have Derek there. The conversation went in weird directions. We talked about our racist grandparents. At times it felt like an impromptu support group and I know this is dangerous. Is it dangerous? Doesn't every practitioner of something painstaking want to talk to other people who do the same thing and bond o...

If you've only encountered Uzodinma Okehi through his recent Twitter persona, you might characterize him as a pest. He's a frequent poster, but he's known more for his replies and responses, which sometimes seem to take indie lit writers and presses to task for being precious, disingenuous, or faux humble. It's a tightrope to walk, especially because Uzo is part of that world, and...

Michael Wheaton and I talk about weed. We talk about using it as a tool for our writing and our parenting, and moreover, we talk about featuring this part of ourselves in our writing. Both of us have young children, but they won’t be young forever. Soon they will piece together what that smell was wafting through their childhood. In a way, this conversation and Michael’s latest book, Home Movies (...

It’s remarkable ZH Gill is among us at all, let alone producing heartfelt and hilarious prose about his, shall we say, misadventures. ZH goes into depth about his struggles with mental health, his time in a psych ward as a teen, his terrible depression at 19, and his manic jag at Oberlin which almost ended in marriage. What a beautiful person. What a big hearted baby bear. ZH talks about the peopl...

Jesse is back to talk more in depth about our connection to one another. Jesse edited my forthcoming book from Pig Roast Publishing, The Bottomfeeder, and we talk about that experience and my anxiety about releasing such a personal book in the future. It's good to have friends you can count on and Jesse is an earnestly supportive member of our scene. He's also an incredible writer with a s...

If you're listening to this episode, it's likely not the first time you've heard an interview with Kat Giordano. About to release their 4th book (a collection of poems called Thumbsucker, with Malarkey Books) Giordano is indisputably a part of the outsider/indie lit scene. And yet… and yet they feel outside of the outsiders. Part of that comes from being non-binary. Part of that comes...

Josh and I have our first 1 on 1 conversation and it could not have gone better. We talk about the genre of autofiction from a lot of different perspectives. Josh is an obsessive reader and writer of autofiction. He's working on an extended project called Autoportrait, which is made up of a mountain of seemingly unrelated declarative sentences about his life. The cumulative effect is sort of m...

This is an important episode. Derek sings a heartbreaking Jawbreaker song at the top. We talk about Blake Butler and his book, Molly. We talk about memory and how hard it is to conjure images when you think in language. We talk about our old faces and dumpy keisters. We talk about losing people and being constantly on the verge of loss. We are writers. We are parents. We are friends.

This episode can be played as a drinking game. Every time Rudy and I find a pop culture intersection, you drink. I would never play it because I think all games are pointless. I also think most of our listeners are drinking just fine without a gaming element. But I leave the choice up to you. Rudy Johnson is a quiet legend of our scene. He’s collaborated with his childhood friend, William Duryea,...

Early on in this conversation, I noticed I was breathing like an athlete and wondered, in some remote part of my mind, why the adrenaline and ragged nerves? Possibly it was the fact that we were back. Carla was back in the store with me and we had the TASCAM out and the headphones on. The guest, Nathaniel Duggan, wrote a book that seemed to me to be as good as any poetry book that ever won an awar...

The best food novel I've read this year is Ric Royer's Niagara Falls, NY . It's much more than that. It's also a novel about coming home to a desolate place during the pandemic, regaining personal momentum, and it's a book about the history of Niagara Falls, specifically the utopian dreamers that tried to form it and failed. But the food is what sticks for me. It's the grea...

D’urban Moffer is much more than a writer, though he is that as well. His book, American Kashayas is available from Expat Press. I’ve not read it personally, but he describes it as thick, 500 pages. I know D’urban has another “real” name and that he lives with his partner in Ohio. When I saw him perform in Chicago, and I use the word perform instead of read on purpose, he wore an elaborate mask an...

A few days before my conversation with the filmmaker Malcolm Macmaster, I had a crisis of confidence concerning my little corner of the indie lit scene. I watched two episodes of the superb Misery Loves Company reading series, one devoted to Pig Roast Publishing, the other to Back Patio Press. I went in thinking, these are my people, but slowly I felt something in me grow morose and then rage fill...

Jesse Hilsson noticed my presence when I joined the scene. He was the first person to DM with me and, because of his encyclopedic memory, he was able to fill me in.  Imagine me as Donny, the character Steve Buscemi plays in The Big Lebowski. There was a permanent duh on my face, which the internet concealed, but Jesse could sense it and he reached out.   I became aware of Caleb through his misanth...

Alex Kazemi seeks representation from a bigger press. He is interested in more than indie clout and has never been anyone other than who he is: An ambitious Cancer. The first thing I notice about Alex Kazemi is that he started our interview in a Scream mask but quickly took it off when our producer, Carla, mentioned video was not being recorded. When Josh showed up on the call, Alex said, Yo Josh,...

I have never wanted to read a book as much as I wanted to read Adam Johnson’s book, Cialis Verdi Gin and Jag . In fact, I wanted to read it so much, that when I saw Gwen Hilton tweeting about her copy, I asked to buy her book and that I’d pay for her copy of CVGJ too. She agreed and a couple weeks later I had them both in my Berlin apartment. Both books changed my life in profound ways.  Encounter...