Have you always wanted to be a writer?
Could you name a few writers that interest you at the moment, or who have influenced your writing?
Where did you grow up? Does this place influence the setting of your book or overall themes of your writing?
Why did you write this book?
What do you hope the readers will take away from it?
What is the process in which you begin writing a book? Do you create a first draft by hand or typed?
Have you ever experienced writer’s block? If so, how do you overcome it?
Do you enjoy readings and tours?
Do you welcome feedback from readers and/or the media in any form?
Are you working on anything new and, if so, what can you tell us about it?
a discussion with Kirk Read
Writing for me has always boiled down to embarrassing, unrequited love.I started writing when I was thirteen because I had a crush on a college student. I kept a journal documenting every time we talked, every time we had a meal, every time he gave me a hug. I was writing in spiral notebooks and didn’t even bother to hide them very well. I’m fairly certain my mother read them, which is fortunate, because as a result she helped me come out and was extremely encouraging of my writing.For the longest time, I wanted to be a lawyer and then I dated one and that was the end of that ambition. From the time I was fourteen, I knew I was a writer and that I would go insane if I didn’t keep writing. It was generally accepted among my family and friends that I would do that. Everyone seemed to accept that I was stubborn enough to keep at it, which is what it takes to make the transition from writer to author - a hell of a lot of keeping at it.
I read a mixture of non-fiction and fiction. The main thing for me is voice, so I like to read people who have really distinct ways of telling stories. In high school, I was totally obsessed with reading plays, so most of my biggest influences are playwrights: Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, Sam Shepard, Lanford Wilson, August Wilson, Eugene O’Neill, Clifford Odets, Lillian Hellman, Charles Ludlam, Spalding Grey, Jane Bowles. Some of my favorite writers that I’ve read since then are: Flannery O’Connor, James Purdy, Michelle Tea, Pam Houston, David Feinberg, Sarah Schulman, Edmund White, Truman Capote, Pat Califia, Allen Gurganus, Andrew Holleran, Jim Grimsley, Dorothy Allison, Alice Walker, John Preston, Evelyn Waugh, Eudora Welty. There are probably a lot of people I’m accidentally leaving out here. There are tons of wonderful first books that I’ve loved by people who never get a second one published.
I grew up in Lexington, Virginia, which is the setting for my first book, a memoir about being openly gay in a small southern high school. I have always considered myself a southern writer in the sense that most of my own values come from the place I grew up. Writing thank you notes, understanding the politics of Sunday socials after church, knowing when to wear khakis and when to wear jeans. This stuff is in my blood forever. Since I moved to San Francisco in 1998, my writing has drawn even more from my upbringing in Virginia. Several writer friends told me that would happen - moving away gave me a perspective on my roots that made me feel more connected to all those early memories.I have lived in New York, DC and San Francisco, but it seems that most of my writing ends up being about people in Virginia.
I wrote the book because the publisher, Tom Payton, asked me to write it. The poor thing had to convince me that it would be a good idea to commit to a big scary full-length project, bless him. For me, that meant leaving San Francisco and moving to a tiny cottage in an isolated town on a lake in northern California. In other words, I had to get away from the social clatter and temptation of the city and really focus. That’s a hard thing to do when you’re in your twenties. I’m glad I did it, because since then I’ve met dozens of people who all say they want to write books or that they have an unfinished book or that they’d like someone else to write a book telling their life story. As if. I wonder how many of them will sit down and do it. I know it was hell for me to finally do it.
My biggest hope is that gay teenagers and people who work with teenagers read the book. I really hope that somewhere out there, teenagers are secretly reading this book, hiding it in their rooms, working up the courage to come out to their friends, families, and teachers. I really hope it helps those people in some way. I hope they raise hell at their schools.I hope readers who aren’t gay teenagers enjoy it and come away with another idea of what it’s like to be a gay teenager than the predominant notions that all gay teenagers are victims, runaways, suicide statistics and celibate or confused. There are lots of all those kinds of gay teenagers, but there are also teenagers who are clear about who they are, who are sexually active, and who are coming out younger and younger in their schools.
With "How I Learned to Snap," I started with an outline and treated each outline item like a homework assignment for the next morning. My first drafts were a mixture of typing and handwriting. Generally, the more emotional stuff tends to come out in handwriting. Also, sometimes when I take writing field trips into the forest or on an inflatable boat on a lake - obviously, that stuff is handwritten. It’s obscene to take a laptop too far into nature. I’ve always loved writing near water. Rivers, lakes, the ocean. I like sitting with a notebook in front of the water.
There’s only one way I find cures writer’s block, and that’s a pretty old-school method: Sit Your Ass Down. I wish there were an easier way. I go through periods of writer’s block, which is for me usually a symptom of fear or laziness. I’ve done the whole thing where I go to bookstores and buy books on writing - books that purport to turn writing into a "How To" science. But it all boils down to sitting down and turning down the volume on the rest of the world and disappearing into the flow of words. It can be a really frightening thing, standing at the edge of a writing period, unsure about whether to do it. For me, discipline and deadlines have both helped a lot. I’ve spent several years writing for newspapers, so deadlines are good for me. I seem to write better when someone is yelling at me that something’s late.
I love doing readings more than anything in the world. I do as many as I can and often work out new pieces of writing in front of an audience. I guess that’s my theater background. I love bringing a sense of theater into bookstores, because I’ve been to so many painfully boring readings. I like telling jokes and stories and jumping around and, hopefully, being entertaining. I started doing readings in high school as part of a writing independent study I did each semester. It was a scheme to get me out of first period so I could sleep late, but I got a lot of writing done, and it meant that I did readings to present the semester’s work.
Since the book came out, I’ve been getting several emails a day and real letters from readers, which is amazing. I’ve heard from some gay teenagers, which is gratifying enough to make all the madness - and there is a lot of madness in publishing a book - totally worthwhile. I love getting emails and letters. Sometimes people send weird little gifts - funky plastic jewelry, mix CDs, books, whatever. Someone gave me a brass lion they’d carried in their pocket all over the world to protect me while I was on tour. It’s so amazing and humbling to hear from people that way, because it means there was a heart connection in terms of how they read your stuff. I’ve been writing goopy fan letters to people I admire from afar for years now. It’s always scary and I always imagine that the recipients are too busy and jaded to care about my silly little letter. But then I get a letter from someone who says they were nervous about writing me and I’m like "Hello! Writers live for that stuff! Don’t be shy with kindness!"
I’m always writing short pieces, many of which I perform or read aloud. I will probably collect my shorter pieces soon. I’m working on a novel and don’t want to say much about it because with new projects, there’s the risk of talking it to death. I talk way too fast and way too much, so that’s a big risk. I’m trying to shut up and sit my ass down.