An Interview with Bathsheba Monk

Interviewed by Vincent Francone 

Bathsheba Monk is a writer, publisher, painter, and god knows what else. I knew some of these things about her, but to be honest, my interactions with her have been as a publisher and head of Blue Heron Book Works, the press that has published my books. I knew she’d have plenty of things to say about writing and publishing, and everything else considering she has a blog called Bathsheba Monk Explains Everything. We meet by Zoom (sigh) and I edited our chat for flow, but this is pretty much how it went.

Vincent Francone: These interviews so far have been very informal. I usually ask people to start by telling me who they are so I can write their biography later. But why don’t you give us a little bit of who Bathsheba is. What are your bona fides? 

Bathsheba Monk: Oh okay, well I hate to do that. Okay, so I was born in Pennsylvania. Steel workers family. My grandparents were coal miners, and actually they were from the Ukraine and Poland and that part of the world, so this time we're in now is kind of… you know I don’t really have any relatives back there that I know about, but it’s still on my mind, like I guess it is for everybody. So anyway, I wanted to leave [Pennsylvania] in the worst possible way, because I didn't want to marry a steel worker, and that was my only option as far as I could tell. So, I did join the army to get out. I was stationed in Germany and was…  the army, you know, for those who aren’t in the army—just like in academia— they always think that there's a certain type of person that joins, and in part they’re right, but the thing about the army is they always want you to be educated, and they just keep pushing you to get degrees. Even the general officers… they’re these intellectuals with big libraries. They’re always very erudite and learned men really, the scholar warriors, and the fact is that the army just keeps pushing you. They all have doctorates…. so that's what happened to me. I went to the military. I wanted to get my education, and they made it very easy for me to do that. I majored in history, and then, when I got out I moved to Boston to be an artist. A painter actually. 

VF: Wow.

BM: And while I was painting, I said, You know, this would make a great screenplay. How do you write a screenplay about somebody who paints what they know? Not me, but a character like this. And someone said, well, Emerson College is right down the street. Why don't you just take a class. And I did. I realized that I was really a lot better at writing than I was at painting, so I kind of shifted gears. Then I got my MFA from there for no reason. I just finished things. It’s just my quirk that if I started something to finish. So, then I was writing. This was the late ‘90s. I had a job in corporate America, and I said, Well. I'm going to do this or I'm not going to do it. So I quit, I jumped. I have very mixed feelings about that now [laughs].

VF: The money is nice while it’s there. It’s definitely a tradeoff.

BM: Yeah it is. But I kept thinking while I was there, I'm going to put a pencil in my eye if I don't get out of here soon, so I had to do it. I did it and I was very lucky. Like everybody else, I sent my stuff, my short stories, to these magazines, and I kept getting nice [rejection letters]. You know, ‘Good luck’ [laughs]. And this is something I tell my students, and they don't seem to like it, but it’s the truth: It’s really who you know in publishing. And you don’t have to know them intimately, but you do know somebody. I sent all of these short stories to the New Yorker, like everybody does thinking naïvely that somebody’s going to read them, and I got all these stories rejected. Then, when I meet my husband Paul, he was working in New York… odd jobs, like If a restaurant or club was opening up, he found antiques for them. He gets people down here where it’s cheaper to construct stuff. So he knew a lot of people in the restaurant business. When he saw my short stories… by the time I met him, it was in the early 2000s, I said “I quit. This is pointless. What am I doing? You know, I’ll paint. I can paint people’s dogs, who cares?” But, and this is no lie, he was on the computer, he said, “Well, let me see who I know.” And he sent out emails to his restaurant guys in New York. And within an hour I had two interviews with agents. And I signed with one like in two days, and within a week, I had a publisher. It was a big publisher. So that's how life works.

VF: I didn’t know that about you. That’s interesting. You know, I’m from Chicago. We know all about clout and knowing a guy who works for City Hall who gets you a job. That’s always been my suspicion with publishing, especially with cracking agents and the big publishers. I was wondering how people do it, and sometimes I think it’s a luck game and sometimes I think it’s a persistence game and sometimes I think it’s who you know.

BM: It can be all three. I had, I mean… I backed it up with some good writing, I think.

VF:  Well yeah, I think if it would have been bad writing, it wouldn’t have gone that way.

BM: Right, but the fact is… my agent had lunch with the editor. I mean they routinely had lunch with each other. And then oddly enough, as soon as my book was accepted by this big publisher, I started getting calls from the New Yorker. They were calling me [laughs]. I mean, and this is horrible to say to writers who are coming up, but this is a lot of it. So… good luck.

VF: Yeah, I don’t know about 20th century publishing, but I know about publishing in the last decade or so. Even the big publishers, from what I understand, and I'm sure you can speak more to this, are going to ask you to do a lot of your own networking and hustling. I think we all had this idea of like Scribner’s with Faulkner and Hemingway… and there was this marketing machine that would just be there to sort of like promote these people. And they could just work. They could be drunken writers and never have to worry about anything else. But now you have to be your own publicist.

BM: Yes, you have to be your own publicist. I tell that to all the authors that come to Blue Heron. With me at FSG, they’re a big part of McMillan, a huge publishing powerhouse, and the fact of the matter is that most of the things that were good that I got by way of publicity either I did or [my husband] did. We got the gig. It’s just the way it works. You gotta hustle. And the other thing I have to say about that now is… so that was a 2005 when I got my first book published. Then it was my collection of short stories, and I had a great agent. His assistant—he went to Oxford. I mean they were brilliant. They were real editors. And my agent came from The New Yorker and he worked with Tina Brown, and so they said, you know this isn’t short stories; this is one book. They actually helped me craft it into that, and then my editor, she said, “Well, these are really one story.” It was just vague editorial advice, but it was brilliant. On the money. And the fact is that now that kind of service isn’t there, and the agents don't even have time to do that with you. I know this from people who were trying… their stuff is good, but it needs work, and so what I tell everybody is you have to get a professional editor to help you before you even approach an agent, because nobody has time anymore to do that. I mean I was just so lucky to get in with these guys, but now by the time the agent gets to the publisher, it has to be ready to go. It has to be out of the box.

VF: Right. I work a little bit in Chicago with this place called StoryStudio Chicago, and I just run workshops and things like that. And what we’re doing a lot more in that organization is that sort of thing. It feels like a lot of the services lately are geared towards preparing for publishing as much as writing. There are all these support groups and workshops where you need to get that hard editing done first and then you can start submitting. That’s the game.

BM: Oh, you know, Blue Heron Book Works… we’re a little different. When I see something I'll work with it, but I wouldn't have that luxury if I worked for a big publishing company.

VF: Speaking of Blue Heron… You said to me once that you started as a result of your experience with the big press, which I don't think you’re saying was a bad experience necessarily, but it feels like [Blue Heron Book Works] was inspired by your experiences publishing… Nude Walker, right?

BM: No, it was actually Now You See It… Stories from Cokesville, PA.

VF: Oh, my fault.

BM: That was the first book. They did a two-book deal; the second was Nude Walker. I kind of… you know, I didn’t start out to be a publisher at all, or even an editor, but after I did the second book, I kind of ran out of steam mentally and emotionally, because I’d just put everything into that book. So I thought, Well I’ll do a writing conference here in the Lehigh Valley where I live, because nobody does it and everybody wants to write a memoir, so I partnered with an art center Steel Stacks, the old Babylon Steel mill. Somebody had a vision to make it into an art center, and the PBS channel the station is down there now. They partnered with me to put it on, so it was a really big deal. We had an agent there and speakers to tell people how to access their stories through their senses. That's what I was going for. It was very interesting results. And we had a men’s clothing writer, we had some visual artists who talked about colors and textures and things like that. It was a big success, but you know when you come to these conferences… the people want a book out of it. At that time eBooks were the thing, so I asked everybody to submit a little piece, and this one guy didn’t.  He came up to me and he said “I don't want to submit anything because I’m writing a book” He was a steelworker. And I was like, “Oh God, please no” [laughs]. I just didn’t know what I was going to get, but I said, “Sure. Whenever you’re ready just give it to me I’ll look at it.” It was like a year after that when he handed me his manuscript. His girlfriend was a librarian and had edited for him, so it was in decent shape. And it was hilarious the book. Rigger by Larry James Neff. It was so good, so funny, and it was such a picture of the ‘70s. So I said, “This is great. What do you want me to do? You want me to have an agent?” He said, “No, I want you to publish it.” I said, “I don’t know how to do this,” and he said, “Well, you better find out how to do it. In paper, because my audience is over 60 and they won’t read on a Kindle.” I said, “There’s even less of a chance of that happening.” But his girlfriend was very smart very industrious, and she was savvier than me, and she kind of shot me in the right direction. We figured it out together. He was the first one, and actually that book is still selling after all this time. It’s selling at the Industrial History Museum. And people just find it online. It’s always great when you get somebody who's articulate who can write about a real experience, not just their feelings.

VF: Larry’s book sort of reminded me of… and I kinda had this in mind when I was writing mine [Like a Dog]; did you ever read that book Rivethead?

BM: Yes, yes, I did.

VF: Ben Hamper.

BM: Yeah, I remember that.

VF: I mean it was funny and it was work stories and it had commentary. I just remember that book fondly as being a pretty smart and funny book.

BM: Well, flash forward five years there was a young man in our town, an actor, and I met him somehow and he had a book that he was about working on about Lee Iacocca. And he has a brother who has managed a hotdog stand around here, called Yocco’s. They’re kind of famous. They’re not very good, but they're famous. This guy [Billy Ehrlacher] he worked there and he did this Candide-like book about working for a small family company where everything was incestuous and a little corrupt [Tales From the Hot Dog Grill]. It was fiction, supposedly, but I think a lot of it was true and very funny. The minute it came out, he was fired [laughs].

VF: [laughs] Just coincidentally?

BM: The guy said, “I heard you wrote a book about us.” He was fired on the spot.

VF: Well, I mean, I hope he landed in something better.

BM: I think he's writing another book.

VF: Well then, no. He has not landed on something better. He’s a writer now, so he's into something much worse [laughs.] We should talk a bit more about Blue Heron. You’ve put out some interesting books. Not all of them alike. I've only looked at some of them. Obviously, I know my two books, but I’ve read Misdemeanor Outlaw by Jim McGarrah. And I know you also have a bunch that I’ve been meaning to pick up. There's a pretty varied list. It doesn't feel necessarily like you’re lacking a singular vision or aesthetic or anything; it seems like more like you’re open to a lot of things. Is there any kind of idea behind that?

BM: Yeah, I really want people who might not have a big audience. I mean, the thing now in publishing, and also in the movie and TV industry… they want to know what your numbers are. They want to see how many did you sell before, how many followers do you have on social media. That’s a big thing, and who’s going to buy this? Who’s going to know about it? But I find a lot of stories are kind of ordinary. I know how they’re going to end, and I just want to be surprised. I want a different story, you know. It’s like I always say, I don't want any abuse stories. I don’t like abuse stories unless you were abused and then joined the circus to get over it. Then I want to know what you did. I want to know about lived lives, because that’s interesting, and it’s interesting to people because everybody wants to know what other people are doing. Like your book, Like a Dog, those are wonderful work stories. I’ve never worked in a bookshop. And I’ve certainly never worked in a mail-sorting room. I’ve had worse jobs… 

VF: I’m sure. There are worse jobs.

BM: But it’s interesting how it works. Everybody has a story. I wish I could get more diversity in my lineup, because I’m very interested in people who don’t look like me, what their story is. That’s kind of what I’m looking for. What’s it like to be you? I want to know that. And the big houses won’t always touch that. They have their own idea of what things should be. That’s fine, but it’s not what my mission is.

VF: I wonder if publishing is going to do what I feel like Hollywood is doing, where what used to be considered prestige or indie cinema is streaming as a TV show, and it feels like Hollywood is increasingly becoming a place to make Marvel movies and things like that, which have their purpose and I’m not knocking it, but it’s like… if you want to see what used to be kind of like a quirky indie thing, you can see that on Netflix or Hulu. And that’s okay with me. Netflix and Hulu might take a chance on some other weird things Hollywood won’t. That might be what publishing is going to be. You have a guaranteed This is going to sell; We can see who this is for. This feels very similar to other things that have made money. And it’s a quick turnover without a whole lot of thought. So there’s now another place for smaller stuff. Maybe there’s a place for niche presses that are going to take on little oddities like my books and the stuff you’re talking about.

BM: Right. I think in a lot of ways it’s a shame, because it really waters down our culture, and you know storytellers feel like they can’t tell their story because either nobody would understand it or it won’t sell. So what does that mean? We’re just homogenized. I don’t want to live in that kind of society.

VF: That that’s definitely a problem. I'm also wondering about the MFA thing, because that’s a complaint that MFA programs get all the time. Maybe an easy or lazy criticism is that they’re churning out writers who all write the same thing. Cookie cutter MFA style pieces. People say short fiction and novels in America are all too similar because we’re training writers to write… I guess Raymond Carver was the big example for a long time on how to write a story. So they churn out replicas of that and neglect the more adventurous European weirdos and Latin American stuff that I like. Not 100% fair, this criticism, but you know… a publisher might not want Rodrigo Fresán or Flann O’Brien in America, because it’s not like what we’re supposed to be writing. And then writers don’t know that they can do anything other than what they’re taught to do. Part of me thinks that criticism is bullshit. Because there's always going to be interesting stuff coming out [in America], but I don't know… you went to an MFA program.  Did you study fiction writing?

BM: Actually, I read more in that program than I think I've ever read before. I graduated in ‘96 from that program and you know, the thing is that I was in the last program that had what they called “comps” at the end. It was the last comps class where I actually had to read like 35 books and then answer questions on these books to get out. So, all of a sudden I was exposed to all the stuff that I didn’t have any guide through. I just had to read it after the program and then answer the questions. That was enormously wonderful, but yet… the actual classes themselves, they were useful because they forced me to write where I wouldn’t ordinarily find time to do it. But there was a certain conformity, like you know What are you doing here, what are you trying to do? And who are these people? We don’t know who these people are, we’ve never seen people like that, because at that time I was writing about my relatives in the coal region who were all immigrants. And they’re like, Who are these people? Are you making fun of them? I said, no. I love them, in the abstract and in person. I love the fact that they exist. But they [the MFA program] did try to force you into a more conventional way of being. There was a woman who was also in the program who was not right out of college. Most of them were kids right out of college, and this other woman and I were both working in the world for quite a while and she had this great stuff from Nebraska, and she had this fabulous… I mean I've never been to Nebraska. I have an idea of what it's like. But she was writing these stories about her father who owned a motorcycle, a Harley. And they would go to these, not conventions, but things where everybody had similar interests. And she would make a vignette around her and her sister around a campfire having fun by the Harley… there was this part about waiting for waitress to get off work and seeing who didn’t have anyone waiting and they’d… kidnap her! I said, “You’re sitting on a goldmine here!” And she had these fabulous stories about motorcycle gangs with the Hells Angels, and then somehow she got beaten down into writing about, you know, feeding birds at the feeder [laughs] you know, ruminating about that and it’s like… What? 

VF: That's unfortunate. I mean, when people talk about MFA programs in that way, part of me wants to push back on it, because I want to hope that a lot of writers who come out of MFA programs are doing really weird stuff that doesn’t quite fit in, but maybe those are the training wheels and, eventually, you get your training wheels off and then you can start working on something that’s a little closer to what you want to write after you’ve gotten some basic chops. I don’t know… I studied poetry instead of fiction, but there were definitely stifling comments. I had one instructor who said, “This just isn’t the kind of poem that people write.” [Laughs.] What do I do with that? Like, tell me what I should do— should I just chuck it? I guess people like seeing things they’ve seen before, even though they probably wouldn’t admit it. I think a lot of us do kind of want to see more of the same when we find something we like. Because either it doesn’t challenge us or it’s something we understand or we’re just not sure if we can relate to something that’s too foreign.

BM: One thing, though, that is good about an MFA program is that if something isn’t working, your story, no matter how weird, no matter how out there, if everybody says that… [Laughs]. And I have a real prejudice against having people who don’t know what they’re talking about criticizing writing, because they don’t have a good alternative. Even though in an MFA program nobody knows what they’re doing and they all say is, This section doesn’t sound right. Then you know that there’s something wrong there that you have to go back and somehow fix it. I found it very useful.

VF: It’s interesting that you had this comps thing, because we didn't have that. We read a lot during the MFA program, and I was an English major before then. I had a pretty good amount of reading under my belt. But we didn’t have this requirement to read much more. Some of my peers, they had a certain background and grew up reading… I have no idea. They might’ve felt, Well, this is what I read and now I'm studying creative writing because I want to be a writer like the writers I’ve read. And they used to complain about the few reading assignments like they thought, I’m going to come here and do nothing but write and talk about it, so when they had to read… and we weren't being quizzed or anything like that on it, we didn’t have to write analytical papers breaking down stories through theoretical lenses, but still, the complaints would come in, and it felt like they didn’t want to read. Not that widely, and I always thought that was one of the better things I got out of studying literature. I was introduced to a lot of writers I wouldn’t have read otherwise.

BM: Well that’s too bad. The first time I read The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien it was like the scales came off my eyes… it’s like, You can write stories like this? I didn’t know you could. That just opened me up completely. The best class I had was called Writing Like a Writer. We had to imitate styles. Like Cheever. Cheever, who was a fabulous descriptive writer, and we had to do our own Cheever paragraph. These are real skills to learn: how they did it, how did they transition? Another class was Reading Like a Writer. [That teacher] was very into the technical thing, so you didn’t just start spilling your guts on the page. You actually built some skills. I went to school for painting in Boston for a couple years, and it was actually the same kind of thing. You would paint with a painter who was well known. And you would have to pick up some of their style, and so there was a whole Boston school of painting that came out of that. You couldn’t just go in there and just say, Well I’m gonna spill my guts on the canvas. I think it’s true of all the arts… you have to imitate for a while, and then you can go out and do your thing. 

VF: I think we use our influences. Maybe unconsciously. Like a Dog was very much reflective of what I was reading like at that time. And I don’t think I could do it again, and I don’t want to, but that’s always been a thing with me: I don’t want to do the same thing again. But… okay, Kurt Vonnegut’s one of my favorite writers, and he wrote the same book; he just kind of kept putting out different versions of it.

BM: Right. I agree with you.

VF: But I love it, so I don’t know if that’s ever a concern.

BM: Writing the same thing? I think we all write the same book even if we know it or not. You go back to the same things. You have to have a different take on it, and as you get older you change, but I think you still write the same thing.

VF: Well that’s actually reassuring, because then maybe I shouldn’t fear going back to the well.

BM: You only have one well. You can have a slightly different take on it. You know, I’m interested in race and class. And the changing human landscape over physical landscape, that’s always interested me a lot. I always have to write about that, no matter what I’m writing: a play or my novels That’s just what interests me. I can’t pretend I'm interested in… I don't even know, like, mother-daughter relationships or something.

VF: I agree. People have their themes, even if the books are different. All my favorite writers… it’s hard to pick a favorite book by a writer I like that much. Maybe it’s not that there’s one book that you think is better than the others; maybe it’s because they’re all part of a continuum. It’s hard for me to choose a favorite Vonnegut book. There are three or four that keep competing in my head, but maybe it’s because they’re essentially different commentary on the larger theme that he was exploring. Moving on… I know you've done some teaching…

BM: Yeah well, I think I found that I’m not really good with freshmen. I make them cry. It shows up in these weird things like Rate My Professor. They get to rate you at the end. What’s that all about? I realized, you know, the schools are starting to look at students like customers, and so they get to leave customer reviews.

VF: Like Yelp.

BM: Yeah, right. And I’d rather not subject myself to that. I’ve only had two moments in teaching that were worthwhile. I can’t speak to teaching. I don't think I’m talented at it unless [a student is] a talented writer, and then I get interested and engaged. Otherwise I found with freshmen… I [taught] at a small college around here, and it was freshman comp and you had to have a theme. And fiction was taken, so I said Okay I’m going to do the reality show. This was like in 2007. We did Wag the Dog and… I forget, that movie now where Jim Carrey’s under a bubble.

VF: The Truman Show.

BM: Right. We did some movies and we did some books, and I was using two philosophers, which sounds kind of heavy, but it wasn’t really. It was Spinoza... 

VF: Jesus! Spinoza’s hard enough.

BM: Well, it was like, Are you part of another reality? How do you create your reality? That’s really all it was, just basically a Locke and Hobbes kind of thing. Do you create your reality or are you part of a God thing or some nature thing? A lot of jocks took my class because they thought it was going to be easy. Like the whole football team, you know, freshman junior varsity. I have my own prejudices, it turns out, but there was this one football player who turned in the most brilliant piece that I have ever read in my whole teaching career. It was Spinoza and Locke in the stands of the Boston/Yankee playoffs [laughs]. Was it meant to be that Boston would finally win a World Series or was it their training? It was freaking brilliant, and I couldn’t believe it. He was the only one that got an A in the whole class because he was the only one who clearly made the transition from classroom theory to real life. And his mother called me up, of all things, and said, “You changed his life. He’s now going to law school. He’s going to be a whole different person.” That might have been the first time I taught in a college setting and I was like, Teaching is cool! That was kind of the last time... [laughs]. Years later I said, This is not rewarding for me.

VF: Yeah, I didn’t intend to be a teacher, but I am and I don’t hate it. I’ve had worse jobs. And it’s beneficial to come to teaching after working other jobs because there was a period when I first started adjuncting and I noticed that there were people who went from college and grad school to teaching… they never… maybe they made coffee or flipped burgers or something, but they never worked in an office. They never had a shitty menial job in a factory or warehouse. And there’s some benefit to that. Sometimes I’ll finish a day that maybe wasn’t the best, but I’ll think, I can’t believe they’re paying me for this. Sometimes I feel like I get away with a lot. I was known as the guy in the adjunct office to go to when the copy machine jammed, because it just stumped everybody, how to fix it [laughs]. This inscrutable piece of machinery! I was like… you open a drawer and you pull out the paper. It’s really not hard, but if it wasn’t in a textbook, they didn’t know what to do.

BM: That's interesting. I think you’re probably a more natural teacher, though. 

VF: I have my days. It’s taken me a long time to figure out what I’m doing. At first, you’re flying blind. 

BM: I get the feeling you’re a beloved teacher.

VF: Eh. Half of them, maybe [like the class]. But the others… maybe they’re bored because they’re not English majors and they have to take my class, because everyone has to take a writing class, and some of them, I think, are more grateful that I don’t assign Shakespeare. I try to give them readings that I think they’d like. More contemporary writing, things by Ta-Nehisi Coates and essays on Black Lives Matter and so forth, because it’s on the news and we should be talking about it. But their fear is, Oh God I’m gonna have to read Shakespeare [laughs]. What else you got for me? Any other thoughts on publishing or writing that you want to share? Any advice, besides the wonderful advice you’ve given?

BM: Well, this probably more for beginning writers, but before you find your voice… This is a sports analogy, but when you’re an athlete… if you’re in the groove, things slow down. Like if I played basketball and it feels like things are slowing down, I can see this pass. I can see what’s open. I can see where everybody around me is. And I think writing is the same thing. It’s like you should slow down life a little bit. And you have to observe everything and know what's important to notice, but when you start to see what’s there and what to keep and what to edit out, that’s when you begin to find your voice. That’s my big word of advice.

VF: That’s good. That’s the hardest for a lot of beginning writers, figuring out not only what to write but what to take out.

BM: Sometimes it’s the perfect phrase, but you have get rid of it because it doesn’t serve your story. That’s my only advice to people: just slow down.

VF: It’s essential. Slowing down, observing, being cognizant of what’s working. Sounds simple, but that’s kind of the game. I think you even once said it doesn’t really matter what the subject matter is. If it’s great writing, it’s great writing. That’s what I gravitate towards these days. Language and what people are doing with it. The last couple of books I read were novels where they have a plot I could sum up in a page. Voice driven. That’s interesting to me, at least lately.

BM: That’s something that’s hard for me, because I’m very plot driven in my own writing. I can make an analogy. I like classical music and I listened to the Dvořák “[From the] New World Symphony.” And I never got it. I was like, No beginning, middle, end… I need a plot. It’s not there. And then at the Lehigh University, they brought the Prague symphony in to do the symphony. I said Well, this is it. I’m going to listen to this. If I don't get it, that’s it. I got a good seat right in the middle, and all of a sudden… I got it. It was like a wall of sound and it was a different kind of beauty than Mozart, which is definitely plot driven. I got it. I heard all the different strings and all the different streams… You can hear the voices. Like, Oh my God, this is it. and I think I’ve been ignoring a lot of writing that’s like that, because I was looking for the plot when, in fact, the plot was the wall of sound coming at me. The wall of ideas. I mean, it has to be very well done to succeed. But I think of that now, because my eyes were open. You can do it like this; it can just come at you, and have different flavors and emotions and sounds and you’re still making your point; you’re still getting across what you want to get across. It doesn’t have to be linear, so maybe it’s because we’re in the digital age, now, you know [it’s time] for us to think differently about things.

VF: Maybe. I mean maybe the immediacy and the truncated tweets and so forth are making us think differently, and maybe write differently. But I mean, I have nothing against the good old-fashioned mystery novel with a tight plot. I can’t understand how people do that. I’m really bad at that. Making a good plot… it’s hard.

BM: I can see that. That’s what everybody has problems with. But that’s for another day.

VF:  Indeed. Well that's about it. I can let you off. I think this is more than enough.

BM: Thank you so much. This is was fun.