Luke Geddes

Luke Geddes is the author of the novel Heart of Junk, which has been optioned for television by a Disney subsidiary and received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and Booklist and praise from authors such as Elizabeth McKenzie, Kevin Wilson, Chris Bachelder, and Alissa Nutting, and the short story collection I am a Magical Teenage Princess, which was cited as Roxane Gay's "favorite book that no one has heard of" in the New York Times. Originally from Appleton, Wisconsin, he now lives Cincinnati, Ohio.

Twitter: @neurosescatalog

Instagram: @i_rebuff_a_wealthy_widow

Are there particular films that have influenced your writing?

I'm not much of a film buff but I watched a ton TV growing up and I credit the millions of hours of hackneyed sitcoms I consumed from age 3 to age 18 (Thanks, USA network, for your daily double dose of Wings) with honing my comic instincts.

Discovering the work of David Lynch as a teenager, especially Twin Peaks, was transformative to me, as I imagine it is for a lot of people. (Thank god the local Hollywood Video had all the VHS tapes from the box set! What would my life be like if they hadn't?) It's been a part of my DNA from such a young age that I have a hard time putting into words what it means to me. I kinda feel this way about the Nickelodeon series The Adventures of Pete & Pete, as well.

The first few Todd Solondz movies were also huge for me around the same time. It's funny, people always talk about musical taste being suspended in adolescence, but for whatever reason this applies to me much more in regards to film.

What’s your favorite comic strip or graphic novel?

I don't know if I would call it my singular current favorite, but since I'm reminiscing about texts that spun my brain around as a teenager, Daniel Clowes' Ghost World springs to mind. I don't think the timing could have been any more perfect for when I encountered it, the summer between freshman and sophomore year of high school. I remember I was in the middle of reading it when a friend stopped by my house unannounced (people used to do this before cell phones). I just wanted him to leave so I could finish it. I didn't even try describing or explaining it to him because already it felt so deeply personal, like it had been made just for me.

Is there a genre of music that influences your writing/thinking? Do you listen to music while you write?

I like a lot of different kinds of music but I'm most personally inspired by artists whose ambitions outstrip their technical abilities, e.g. The Shaggs, Beat Happening, Jandek, Half Japanese, The Tinklers, The New Creation, Jonathan Richman, Television Personalities, etc. No amount of training or musical expertise can even graze the alchemical charisma that these artists possess, an important reminder that traditional proficiency shouldn't be the goal and is in fact often quite boring.

It should be well known by now that the literary storytelling of genius songwriting Benjamin Dean Wilson is a major, though recent, influence--so much so that I started a record label to release his sophomore album The Smartest Person in the Room on vinyl.

I typically write in silence. I love music too much to use it as a facile mood-creating tool for writing. When I listen to music I prefer to actually pay attention to it.

Do you have another artistic outlet in addition to your writing? Do you sew? Paint? Draw? Knit? Dance?

I make collage art, all "analog" cut-and-paste style. You can check it out on my website. It was meant to be a low-stakes break from my "real" creative work as a writer, but I find myself falling into the same patterns of self-doubt as an amateur artist as I do as a "professional" writer, beating up on myself for losing my touch, thinking my best collages are all behind me, etc.

What do you worry about?

I worry about the "culture industry" and the often impossible-seeming barriers it constructs against truly idiosyncratic works of art and artists (I mean this in the broadest sense: writing, music, film, etc., etc.). I'm not naive enough to believe the cream rises the top or that the work that gets the most attention deserves the most attention. The institutions that hold some measure of influence over what art gets seen or heard are at best not designed to help those most likely to provide unique voices and at worst actively stifle them. Techbro companies like Spotify, Amazon, Submittable, Netflix, etc., etc., to say nothing of data-mining "social media" platforms, have given the lie to the promise of the internet's democratizing effect on communication and creative expression while offering such irresistible convenience that even I, as I hate myself, continue to use them. They don't have to be as inherently bad as they are: Spotify could prioritize paying artists. Netflix, long ago, once favored personal recommendation systems over algorithmic onces. Submittable began as a "free" alternative to prohibitively expensive institutional online submission managers before pivoting to a system that makes its free "tier" practically useless.

Even most people in my tiny, neglected corner of the "art" world--"literary" fiction--consistently demonstrate that their values align more with monied corporations than individual artists. (I speak from experience having published both a "Big 5" book and a tiny indie one. Guess which was easier to get anyone to take seriously?) And it's hard to blame them (us), given they're (we're) all just trying to survive and create under late-stage capitalism, even if our survival and opportunity to create comes at the expense of others' survival and opportunity to create.

Somewhat related, I also worry a lot about the continued existence of the United States Postal Service, which is along with the public library mankind's greatest ever invention.