Craig Mod & Lynne Tillman:
I’m sitting down to write this from aboard a train bound to leave from New York City. I visited for the last day, met up with a good friend, and following an afternoon spent walking the city streets we both went to hear Craig Mod talk about his book: Things Become Other Things. Craig was sitting down to chat with Lynne Tillman, another well-respected author who I’d heard of but not actually read myself (though I got a copy of her latest anthology book, Thrilled to Death while there at the event).
The talk was held at a cute little book shop in Brooklyn called “Books are Magic” — a place I’d not even heard of, but quickly learned there’s actually two of these cute little “Books are Magic” spots, and that my friend and I initially arrived at the incorrect, closed one. Thankfully, the correct fantastical literature location was only a jaunty 15 minute sprint-walk away, and we still made it to the event in time.
This was last night, and the first book event I’d personally attended. On the ride back home today I’m reflecting on it in effort to share a little of what it was like, along with the small “glimpse” it gave towards a pair of creative humans interacting as friends. The event was live-streamed to the internet (you can watch the recording here), so I’m now leaning back in my train cafe car seat and re-listening to the audio of Craig and Lynne talk. Hoping to catch a few tidbits I can share with y’all here.
(This focus on leaning-back and re-listening very nearly sent me on the incorrect train down an entirely incorrect Amtrak corridor, but I ultimately made it home safe, so that can be a story relegated to another day. Make sure to read, then read-again which train you’re getting on, folks!)
A first thought: It’s interesting to watch two very “different” friends sit down and chat — separated as these two author friends are by several decades of life, potentially many thousands of words they’ve written, by the sides of the planet they call home, and more. All this, and they chose to sit down and share some of this visit in front of a book store sized audience. From the talk, it’s clear two author friends can learn a little more about one another during a night like this, too. I don’t feel like all that strong of a writer, so it was special to sit “party to” a meeting between good folks (good writers!) such as these.
Early on, Craig and Lynne talked about how you typically only get to see a “slice” of someone in the times that you meet and interact with them. And how reading a deeply personal book written by a friend, like Things Become Other Things, you can actually get a clearer picture of who that person is on the inside than even through firsthand interaction (how they think and feel and interface with the world’s stimuli, on a broader scope). You sit down, get a quick “telepathy trip” inside their brain, then finish the passage thinking to yourself: “who is this person I thought I knew?”
Lynne described how Craig strikes her as being more “optimistic” than she is, but also pointed out how despite the sort of gregarious, uplifting energy she said pervades his writing, she also can see how he had to prioritize solitude, asceticism, and restraint in order to go out on the focused walks and talks that become his books. To clear out the mental space to know himself, and others better.
Lynne was generally amusing as she spoke on her own experiences as a storied author, and with how she’d known Craig over the years. Her conversation and answers interspersed decries against concepts like healing, sharing, and loving (“loving people is kind of anathema to a writer”, she says at one point) — however, her presence didn’t seem as cynical to me as those words would imply.
Craig shared how he’s seen Lynne’s own love and care out in the world as she interacts with others (noticing and appreciating little details of their clothing, or asking thoughtful questions to the people she meets). He admitted she makes him feel like even he could be much kinder in how he interacts with people. I actually got to see some of this, myself. I had a short interaction with Lynne after the event - interrupting her one-patio-over dinner after the talk had finished to request she sign my new copy of Thrilled to Death - she was accommodating and sweet about the whole thing.
Something from Craig’s life that may have seemed mystifying to Lynne is his “Special Projects” membership program. People pay him a small sum each month to support his ongoing art, his works, his cross-Japan journeys, etc. In exchange, they get access to specific bits of his writing, the ongoing process, and the thoughts he shares (or a discount on a new book, access to an archive of his older writings, etc). At one point Craig asked how many folks at the event were SP members, and a third or more of the hands in the room went up.
Lynne called that extraordinary, and commented how “you must have the expectation that these people are actually interested in what you do.” It was a funny moment - even a little awkward - but it highlighted how much these two thoughtful writers experiences’ may have differed. When Lynne began her writing in earnest, could an author have had an “ongoing support club” that followed her efforts and supported her along the way? Almost certainly not as easily as today’s technology enables Craig to. It made sense to me that a more immediate, and in some ways “intimate”, author/reader relationship could seem odd and a little extraordinary to her. Is it self-indulgent? Is it narcissistic? Is it bizarre? All questions that got slightly posed, in one way or another.
Craig was affable about the little moments of dis-belief, and described how he’s taken these fans “voting with their dollars” as a good indication that they’d like to hear about the ongoings of his life, or his shared thoughts. That they’ve pledged their support of whatever he decides will be his life’s work. This is something that an author with a self-published, straight-to-your-pocket-computer pipeline can cater to and count on, probably in a way that pushing and prodding each novel or piece of work past a publisher couldn’t.
The way Craig approaches the world, the things he believes in, they’ve been additive to my own life and the ways I think about it in the last few years (empathy, focus, nuance, abundant care of many sorts to keep individuals from falling far down into society’s deepest recesses, just to list a few areas). The world is scarce with things and people that have the impact on me that these do, and I’m grateful I can support him in the process of putting that sort of work further and further out there. I’ve gotten to pick up many little insights and enjoyments along the way.
During the Q&A portion of their talk, I got to ask Craig a question:
You gave an interview on Tim Ferriss’s podcast a month or two ago. In that talk, you shared how your time with John had been meaningful to you in-part because of how he interacted with others. You’d really learned and gleaned a lot of how to open yourself up to others and open them up to you from him. Do you have any lessons about that from John that you could share with us?
He answered:
I mean, honestly, what people respond to is simply the work he’s put into caring about where they live. So, if you really want people to be moved, learn something about their neighborhood, their town, their city. That’s a big part of it.
And then, in Japanese it’s a little different than in English because you’re not going to start speaking like Victorian English to people, but in Japanese you can kind of speak in this elevated bizarre register that maybe the farmers normally don’t get addressed in. And so that’s like another way of just signaling respect through language and word choice.
Really, I mean fundamentally it’s just about knowing the place, the ground that you’re standing on. Knowing something about the history of it, and your questions kind of relating to that. I think for most people that’s something that they don’t experience that often. Someone caring.
And Lynne added:
I just want to say that [it can be different] in America, because the people move in America, or at least they used to so often. Relative to when I was living in Europe, people stay in the same place for a long time, where America was not.
Maybe now with the, well, “what we’ve got going on now” with the horrors of it, maybe people won’t be able to move as much and all of that. I think it’s very different when people are tied to place, in a way that they’re not so much here.
My good friend Ethan accompanied me to the event yesterday, himself a newfound appreciator of Craig, and he spoke about attending the talk feeling like this:
Before now, Craig and his work had really only been an encouraging, special idea for us both (Ethan hadn’t heard Craig’s voice prior to the talk — “in my head, he’s got that Californian surfer affect to him”). Now, we got to experience a little bit of Craig and that special-ness in the flesh. Heard his decidedly non-surfer voice, seen his smile and heard his laugh in the room amongst everybody else’s. Watched him re-connecting with a long time, different, and maybe still mystifying friend. Witnessed the little moments of natural human awkwardness that came with doing that re-connecting in front of an audience, and how he diffused them with his own Mod-ness.
Ethan cheekily said “Yo man, that’s like, a thing becoming another thing.”
Cheers,
~Mike