PLU Open Mic Interviews: Zeke Greenwald

Who are you and who do you write for?

I am Zeke Greenwald, son of Mark and Marcia. My father was a tire store owner; my mother was a mental patient. When I set out on this path of the arts, they were worried that I would be destitute, but within a few years of my leaving the house, they themselves went bankrupt in a spectacular, and very Lear-like fashion. That somehow made my mother sane and my father insane. I think a parent is right to be distressed if their child turns artist. But finances ought not be the reason for their concerns. If your child sets out to be an artist, weep for them for they will spend a lot of time horribly alone. 

When I write what I write, I write it so that it might be read and understood even by those who do not know me, perhaps from cultures that are not my own, perhaps in times that are not my own. I write for those armed with hefty dictionary and heftier imagination. I try to write the kinds of things that would console and entertain me if I were to have found them in some book or the other. Perhaps this is what certain proud authors mean when they say, they write just for themselves. 

When did you first know you wanted to be a writer?

I don’t remember the first time I went swimming, nor do I remember learning to swim, but I was told I had lessons as an infant. I don’t remember my first airplane ride, but as a child I saw myself in photographs as a babe on distant beaches and I knew that babe had flown to get there. When I was nineteen, I sat down to try to write a novel about my father’s tire store. I never finished it. After that I tried to write a book about a spaceship that doesn’t want to leave earth because a girl flirted with him there once. After that I tried to write a book about a gruesome character named Strokeyes McKenzie, who worked in the fashion industry. Children were afraid of him; he wore leather. Yet even when I sat down to write, as a nineteen year old, about that tire store, I told myself that this garagey novel shouldn’t end up like the one about the teenage rappers I tried to write in high school. 

What advice would you give to aspiring writers?

I think the first thing a writer should ask isn’t what kind of thing ought to be in my book, but rather what is in books? I think then closely studying classic books in their original languages is very important. 

The best book on how to read books is Vladimir Nabokov’s Lectures on Literature. He talks about how to go about reading masterpieces of fiction in an objective manner. Good readers don’t relate to characters; good readers don’t mind if a book doesn’t answer to their immediate desires and concerns about the world; good readers don’t read works of fiction for life advice or world views; good readers put themselves aside and see what an author has to show you. 

How do you react to criticism of your work?

Last year, I wrote an essay about the time my friends took me to an edgy Berlin sex party called, “Pornceptual.” They promised me it would be shocking and perverse, and although there were a lot of naked people bouncing up and down to thudding music, I found myself bored. So I wrote this long essay about it and my boredom. Then I showed it to the very friends who took me there. About the one girl I had said she had bad breath in the essay, well, when she read it, her response to this relatively long, many faceted piece of writing was, “I don’t have bad breath!” Then I showed it to a girl, who I described as having pudgy biceps, her response was, “My arms aren’t fat!” I suspect, even when the critic isn’t the one being written about, they’re still like to respond as my friends did once, whenever they see what they think are their own pudgy arms or halitosis being enlarged upon. 

What do you miss most about the pre-pandemic world?

One time, some interviewer asked Vladimir Nabokov, when he was an old man, what he missed about the olden days of his early adult life. He said the thing he missed most was baggy trousers. Oh progress, oh the pants had become too tight!

How has your work developed over the last 12 months?

Before, I was writing poems just when they occurred to me and I was mostly writing ballads because I really liked A Shopshire Lad by AE Housman. So I was writing my poems singly, not connecting them intentionally with stories or themes. I was only writing in one meter. Then in the last year or so, I started writing in other meters, and I started writing groups of poems around certain themes. Besides that, I think I’m becoming more competent. I just turned thirty. I think my work is more consistently good these days. 

What does the future look like to you? 

I was talking to my aunt Ellen on the phone a few months ago. Her one daughter had recently got a good job in Los Angeles as an assistant to a talent manager. Her son had just had some surgery so he could keep playing competitive tennis at the university where he was learning some subject that was getting him internship offers at large banks with most well known and hated names. She asked me what it was I intended to do in this life. She knows that I write, but seeing how I am obscure and singularly unsuccessful, and getting on to middle age, she asked me and understandably so, what it was I intended to do with this life! Somehow under duress of this long distance phone call, I came up with something kind of brave. I told her that I intended to live life fully in the face of uncertainty. In response, she said only that uncertainty is what hurts her the most. I agreed with her, I said I want nothing more than to be brave, but yes even then it hurts me too. 

What importance has other people’s art had for you and your creative process?

There’s too much emphasis put on influence. If you read every book James Joyce ever read, you wouldn’t end up writing like James Joyce. With that said, I spend a lot of time reading other people’s work. My creative process is a sketchy kind of fly by night thing. I don’t think it will be helped by reading other people. The books that I have read however, have been important to me, more than most things. When it is three in the morning and I am not close to home, when the wind is blowing and my jacket is not warm, then I say to myself, “‘tis bitter cold and I am sick at heart,” and I am suddenly inured to the hardship as if I suffered with a friend. 

Have you looked at different ways of expressing yourself or taken on a new medium?

I’m writing a play right now. I usually am writing something in prose in addition to my poetry, but I struggle a lot when I write in prose, so my progress is slow. A few months ago, I wanted to make a movie, I wrote a script for a short film, but then I found myself too indigent and too unfriended to make even a tiny little film. I guess, literature is a more faithful companion, it takes but free time, pencil, and notebook. 

Tell us about someone’s work you admire.

I admire Horace. He can write a poem and it can plead with some friend of his to please come relax and drink wine with him. It is so devastating because he’s pleading that his friends think about his death and then consider again his ambitions; and then he opens a box full of perfumed ointment, so he can perfume his hair. Then there are lyres and flutes and singing and like he says: minuentur atrae carmine curae, with poetry lessen darker cares. I also love Herodotus a whole lot. I love Ovid. I love Nabokov. I love Voltaire. I love Thomas Carlyle. I love Shakespeare. I love Homer. I love J.D. Salinger. I love Flaubert. 

Where can we find more of your work?

I’m very glad that I have made a good friend with Genna Rivieccio, editor of the Opiate. She published a poem of mine back in 2015 or so and we met at a reading in Brooklyn around then. Now I just send her all of my work, as a friend, and she picks what she likes and puts it to some use in her Satis House of a literary magazine. I think of myself as her Pip. Here’s a link: https://theopiatemagazine.com/tag/zeke-greenwald/