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Meghan Lamb
765 Plays9 months ago
Meghan Lamb is the author of COWARD (Spuyten Duyvil, 2022), Failure to Thrive (Apocalypse Party, 2021), All of Your Most Private Places (Spork Press, 2020), and Silk Flowers (Birds of Lace, 2017). She served as the Philip Roth Writer-in-Residence at Bucknell University, and teaches creative writing through the University of Chicago, Story Studio, and GrubStreet. Her work has appeared in Quarterly West, DIAGRAM, Redivider, and Passages North, among other publications. She runs the shadow text reading series Significant Others, a project dedicated to elevating new books and the “behind-the scenes” texts that inspired them. She is the fiction editor for Bridge (a Chicago-based arts publication) and the nonfiction editor for Nat. Brut, a Whiting Award-winning journal of art and literature dedicated to advancing inclusivity in all creative fields. She is also the frontwoman of Kill Scenes, an 80s cinema-inspired band described as "a beguiling combination of The Cure, Depeche Mode, and Tangerine Dream fronted by an unholy conflation of Siouxsie Sioux, Kate Bush, and Diamanda Galás."
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Transcript
Podcast Introduction with Ken Valente and Peter Bauer
00:00:01
Speaker
You are listening to something rather than nothing. Creator and host Ken Valente. Editor and producer Peter Bauer.
00:01:31
Speaker
the chase
Guest Introduction: Megan Lam's Anticipated Appearance
00:05:19
Speaker
show me something
00:05:23
Speaker
This is Ken Volante with the Something Rather Than Nothing podcast. And I have Megan Lam, so excited to have you on the show. And welcome to the Something Rather Than Nothing podcast. Thanks, Ken. I'm excited to be here.
00:05:38
Speaker
Yeah, I always like I try to tell like how I encountered the art of my guests. So I want to tell you a little bit. So I go up to Portland, quite a bit Portland, Oregon and Paul's bookstore.
00:05:54
Speaker
uh which is a union bookstore uh staffed by union workers and what's happened over the last few years i've gotten a lot more into like alternative small press zines and for the longest time i would never like really like dig in there and um
00:06:14
Speaker
They had your book. My partner, Jenny, found it and said, well, this is the one we're gonna get. And then was excited to encounter your music as well and kill scenes that you do as well in encountering your art. I wanted to start, Megan, and ask you about the things you create.
Megan Lam's Writing Journey and Family Influence
00:06:38
Speaker
When did you see yourself as an artist, as a creator?
00:06:45
Speaker
Oh, gosh. I mean, there are many different variations of that question. The answer that I often give for my students when they ask how I first became a writer, they're usually asking how I first became a writer that published their writing, that was writing
00:07:08
Speaker
beyond the shadows of the process behind the screen. And I had been writing and I'd been like on literary magazine and whatnot when I was in high school, but I didn't have, well, I had family members who were involved in opera, but I don't think I ever thought that I would
00:07:33
Speaker
become a writer as a viable creative option for some reason. My mom thought for a long time that I would be a lawyer and told people for a long time that I would be a lawyer, even though I had no designs on being a lawyer when I was an undergrad.
00:07:52
Speaker
And then when I graduated and was kind of floundering for what to do next, for some reason, the only viable careers my parents came up with were, you can be a teacher or you can be a dentist. And I have a repulsion toward mouths.
00:08:12
Speaker
I read somewhere at some point that dentists have the highest suicide rate. I heard that too. And I understand why. Mouths are disgusting. Touching them is abhorrent. I would never want to be a dentist. But yeah. I can't remember if it was my June. No, it was my senior year, definitely my senior year of undergrad.
00:08:38
Speaker
I didn't take writing classes in undergrad. I was a Communication and Culture major at Indiana University, which is kind of like media and rhetoric studies. But I had this class, I forget what the class even was, but the final was to either
00:09:02
Speaker
right in ethnography of different generations of your family. And the professor was really interested in experimental ethnography, like narrative ethnography.
00:09:16
Speaker
She wrote a series of wonderful books about, well, based on interviews with people who believed they had been abducted by aliens that kind of
00:09:33
Speaker
I guess now you might even call it like a kind of auto fiction, but it's basically interweaving like her reportage and like her research with kind of the experience of being in the field and like her personal perspective on it. But I wrote an ethnography of my grandmother, mother and me and kind of like,
00:10:00
Speaker
examined our different like comings of age as women via this fairy tale that my grandmother used to tell me when I was a kid and my professor kind of pulled me aside and was like this is a really interesting piece of experimental fiction you should publish this and I hadn't
00:10:26
Speaker
really been setting out to write a piece of fiction. I hadn't thought of it that way. It wasn't necessarily my first time writing fiction, but I think it was kind of accidentally my first encounter with the kind of fiction I wanted to write by way of me
00:10:46
Speaker
accidentally writing that thing. And for years, like it was really difficult for me to write a follow up story just because I wanted to write something as innovative in its approach to what fiction could be as what I had accidentally written before. But that ended up not only being the first short story I published, but it ended up being kind of my way into
00:11:15
Speaker
thinking about fiction as this expanded thing and as this expanded possibility.
Teaching Creative Writing: Megan's Insights
00:11:25
Speaker
It feels very backwards in a lot of ways to teach creative writing now and encounter some of my colleagues' ideas of what it means to teach about craft and some of my students' ideas via their exposure to other dialogues that I wasn't exposed to at their age about
00:11:45
Speaker
what craft means because my introduction to craft was, oh, that thing that you wrote is fiction. It is publish it. Okay. And then I kind of learned about writing by way of, uh, publishing and reading literary magazines and discovering my strange peers such as they are. Yeah. I, um,
00:12:10
Speaker
Well, there's something, I mean, just as a little point within it, there's something about, you know, I, I've read a massive amount ever since I was a kid or listened to books. And there's something about, I don't know what you use experimental, but a fiction or poetry, whether it's by the structure or by
00:12:36
Speaker
how it's formed and what it's saying that remains so fresh. You can always read something within writing that is messing or feels edgy on that. And that's something that's so exciting about that within
Exploring Experimental Writing
00:12:53
Speaker
writing. I felt that within your work. When I was reading Coward a book, I was like,
00:12:59
Speaker
I always like this aspect when I'm reading of like, wait a second, you can't do that. You know, like that there's something there that's like so surprising. In your comments, did we get in that and feeling that what you're supposed to do with writing is more heavily defined?
00:13:22
Speaker
uh or you have to fight against that uh some of those structures inform or do you what's your environment where you felt free to experiment um well i um
00:13:36
Speaker
I was publishing for like 15 years before I decided to get my MFA. So I kind of had my own renegade, self-driven education by way of just discovering things. So I was fortunate in a lot of ways to,
00:14:02
Speaker
come about my understanding of what it means to be a writer without this set expectation of what you couldn't do. I always tell my students now that
00:14:17
Speaker
If you aren't constantly trying to get away with something, then you haven't really found your voice or what you want to do as a writer. I like what you just said. I'm sorry. I think that's an important part of the process is trying to do things that shouldn't be done.
00:14:35
Speaker
And hopefully that extends to music as well, although I don't feel like I can really take credit for that necessarily or in the same way in music because it's a collaborative process. Yeah. Writing, writing also more than people necessarily acknowledge or are conscious of is a collaborative process. No book is really written in a vacuum or by one author.
00:15:03
Speaker
It's always written in a kind of echo chamber, even if it's a weird subconscious echo chamber of other voices and other influences and other conversations. Yeah, I had mentioned I encountered your music and I was like,
Music Collaboration: Covering The Cure and Band Dynamics
00:15:25
Speaker
Oh, wow. Oh, in a cover of Short-Term Effect by The Cure. I'm like, okay, okay. I bumped into the right spot. I was excited to see that project. Short-Term Effect, the song, I heard that cover.
00:15:44
Speaker
It's quite amazing, by the way. And I'm so glad that you liked it. We got a pretty across the board positive response. But the critical responses that we've gotten made me laugh a lot. No, no, no, let me let me hear. Here's here's the thing. First, I want to talk about that because like I'm I'm an obsessive cure fan. Right. So
00:16:13
Speaker
When I first saw the title, I'm excited, oh, Megan Lamb, oh, this too, in the band Kelscenes. And I saw a short-term effect, and I'll say, you got some balls. That's not an easy song to, even, what do you do with it? There's some of the stuff in The Cure, which is just, with the mood and the elements, it's just like, oh. But,
00:16:41
Speaker
the song drops into that like you capture it and it's a different version and I was like holy shit because for me that's a tough that's a tough one in my cure head like to like to do so you you hit it and um so I was I was really stoked in hearing that and hearing the other music but tell me about like
00:17:05
Speaker
Tell me about song and tell me about like why why you're doing that and what that's like putting that together in your other music. Yeah, I mean, it was kind of Sean's choice of song. Yeah, I don't know how far back with the band to go. The band originally started as me and Sean
00:17:36
Speaker
13 years ago, wow. But I had, we had gone to undergrad together. We had lived in Bloomington, Indiana at the same time. And Bloomington, Indiana, when we went to school there, had a really thriving
00:18:04
Speaker
like basement show and house show culture. There were always like three or four punk shows going on every night of the week. Nobody ever made plans to hang out because you just knew that you would see whoever you wanted to see at the show or you wouldn't and you'd see them at a different show, which was fun and frustrating. But yeah, we were sort of like
00:18:35
Speaker
always orbiting around each other and friendly in that way, but also never knew when we were going to run into one another because that's kind of how Bloomington music worked. But we both moved to Chicago after undergrad and did a couple other things before that. And in any event,
00:19:05
Speaker
I'm trying to think of when this incident, shortly before I moved to Chicago, I can't remember what we were doing, but somehow I found myself visiting Chicago with some friends and we were doing karaoke and I was singing a bunch of Kate Bush songs. And that was kind of how Sean,
00:19:34
Speaker
got it into his head that he wanted to make a band with me. He sent me this long, kind of awkward, adorable message asking me to be in a band with him. And looking back on it, he says that he
00:19:57
Speaker
didn't expect me to respond favorably, but I responded like five minutes after he sent it. I was like, sure, of course. When can we start? I like got together with him that evening and we recorded our first song. He he had like some like a rough track and like some bits and bobs of lyrics in this little notebook that looks like a video cassette. And
00:20:25
Speaker
I got together with him that evening and I helped him fill in the rest of the lyrics and then we recorded the song after we wrote it. And that was kind of how we went about all the rest of the songs on the album. He'd have kind of a rough track and we'd figure out what else we wanted to happen with it and we'd kind of write the lyrics together.
00:20:48
Speaker
It's a lot more of him putting together the track in advance these days because we don't have quite as much time. And also there's the whole thing where I moved out of the city and moved around and did other things and came back two years ago and
00:21:10
Speaker
I was coming, the band, it existed as different iterations of itself in my absence. So I just kind of messaged Sean. I was like, I moved back to Chicago. I don't know if you'd be interested in working together again, but I could maybe like do guest vocals on a song here or there. It's like, what are you saying? We started the band together. You're back in the band.
00:21:37
Speaker
Yeah, this is our fifth album that we're putting together now. I'm not sure how the covers are going to end up in relation to the album.
00:21:57
Speaker
I know that we have kind of a series of covers, one that's already recorded by Snowy Red. It's actually like his cover of Mark Boland, David Bowie song that was unfinished that they worked on together. Oh, really?
00:22:18
Speaker
I love Mark. And we have two other mystery covers that Sean apparently has the tracks for. And he won't tell me what they are until he's done with them. But in his words, I'm going to shit myself. So hopefully they're going to be good. Hey, talk about a talk about a teaser here. We that's all the information we got with Megan. But
00:22:45
Speaker
He said, like, one of them, I'm going to shit myself, like, oh, wow, that's so good. And the other one, I'm going to shit myself because it's funny. So I don't know what that means, but I'm looking forward to finding out. Well, we'll have links so everybody can stay in touch with what those will be and they can make their determination.
00:23:09
Speaker
No, I really dig on the sound and the music. And I just had this recent thing that I've been trying or maybe thinking about a little bit with dancing in goth clubs.
Goth Scene Experiences: Dancing and Freedom
00:23:28
Speaker
I'm 51. I've never been a big dancer, but I like to dance. It's been more like an opportunity when I get out. And I had a conversation with a guest, the singer, Pieda Brown, and we just ended up talking about dancing. And I started to think about it more. And I went out this past weekend. I had one of the most amazing weeks and intense weeks that I've had in my day job working in labor.
00:23:57
Speaker
For labor unions, but also like on the weekend went out two nights in a row to a goth club and like Danced and I gotta tell you like for me. It was a bigger It was two things both in my head in my body, right? Like I just like danced in like really enjoyable really good environment but the other thing was to was like I
00:24:21
Speaker
There's this freedom that exists in goth music, in goth scene, both in gender or celebration of darkness, which is in turn a celebration of life. There's this deep freedom in that environment that I had been in before that just felt so good. And I was like, man, I'm liking just creating a new habit of going out
00:24:49
Speaker
dancing at a goth club in the thing is to megan was like kind of like the freedom of association and talking to people look it's portland oregon not everybody's a gem right like it's it's who knows right but it was like a friendly and open in a way that i don't just felt really good um so i've been diving back into that and on the time
00:25:16
Speaker
talking about the cure and such. But for me, it was far more profound than like, hey, I like that cure song. And it was like a deep experience. So I'm excited to connect into that and then to listen to that music. Because it's far more, for me, it was far more important just recently for me. And so the main point is I went dancing, Megan. Yeah.
00:25:46
Speaker
Yeah, I was going to say, I'm sure you weren't the only 51-year-old there. Well, but that's part of what I love so much about some of the shows that we've been playing over the last two years is that there's
00:26:04
Speaker
I feel like a lot of diversity, at least in the Chicago, um, like dark music scene, I see people of all different races, like everyone from like age 21 to like 61. All right. 61. Good. Good. Good. Good.
00:26:25
Speaker
I doubt you were even remotely the oldest person there. No, no, they didn't like I wasn't I was like throwing it because I was thinking about in the context because The number was only important in the sense that this is an idea. I'm embarking on now and I would like Late 20s. I lived in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I used to go to a great goth bar And another thing too is
00:26:54
Speaker
I don't drink anymore, and I drank then. And so now it's not drinking and more energy expenditure, and it isn't the club drinking for me, so it's different in that way.
00:27:11
Speaker
really dig on the environment. And in Chicago, when you mentioned Chicago, I adore Chicago. And I think the industrial, maybe dark wave scene there, some of the history of Chicago. And music in Chicago just has a great, great feel for me. And I think industrial, I think goth. And is it a pretty big scene there still?
Chicago's Music Scene: Challenges and Opportunities
00:27:36
Speaker
It is, but it's a, gosh, it's a really,
00:27:42
Speaker
really competitive. Well.
00:27:44
Speaker
I mean, it's not a competitive scene in the sense that there isn't camaraderie between musicians because I feel like it's a very generously engaged community, but there's just like so much going on. It's so hard to break through past a certain level. I feel like anymore, I know tons and tons of musicians who are kind of parallel to us or like
00:28:13
Speaker
in a friend group with us, but when I'm trying to find a headliner for a show where someone who's going to get people out to a show on a weeknight, it's really, really difficult. You mentioned Milwaukee. Are you originally from Milwaukee?
00:28:30
Speaker
So I have a story in my life where I head west. So I grew up in, I was born and grew up in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. But I lived in Wisconsin for 12 years. When I was in Milwaukee, Wisconsin,
00:28:46
Speaker
was studying philosophy. So I'd be credentialed for my podcast studying Masters in Philosophy at Marquette and a bunch of my other time in nearby Madison. So I'd head into Milwaukee quite a bunch. I love that music scene. I'm a metalhead too.
00:29:06
Speaker
Oh, nice. Yeah, yeah. I was excited to get to Milwaukee because it was such a different scene and music scene and really enjoy the metal there. And when I get out, I'm in Oregon now, when I get out here, I was shocked.
00:29:27
Speaker
and excited by how big metal was in the Pacific Northwest. It's like I'm really big into doom and stoner metal. Um, so there's a lot of that out here, but when we talk in Chicago and Portland, we're talking to two good music scenes here. Yeah. And Milwaukee. I adore Milwaukee. So.
Defining Art: Megan's Philosophical Take
00:29:52
Speaker
All right, Megan, I got a big question for you. Big question.
00:29:58
Speaker
What is art? What is art? Oh, my God. Art is like, I don't know, like a strange spasm of the brain on one hand and on the other hand, it's like a
00:30:28
Speaker
a practice that you get into that's the only way life is livable. So some combination of those two things. And sometimes those two things that artists feel like they mesh together, sometimes they feel like they're combative with one another. But I think in sometimes at the same time, sometimes
00:31:00
Speaker
in in spurts there it can be both things yeah that dynamic that you described makes a lot of makes a lot of sense to me i haven't heard it described in that way i like that um so uh
00:31:17
Speaker
Tell us about the most recent book, the one I found in the great bookstore, Powell's, Coward. Tell us about that.
Personal Reflections in 'Coward' and Life in Spokane
00:31:27
Speaker
Yeah, and I have to ask out of personal curiosity, is that the first thing I've written that you've read?
00:31:34
Speaker
Yes, I love that. That makes me so happy. A lot of people like if they see my novel for sale at a place and they also see that more novella length book, they they buy the novel because it looks like the bigger more important book, which I
00:31:58
Speaker
Nothing against my own novel. That press in particular is my favorite small press right now, Apocalypse Party. Ben DeVos is such a great guy in so many ways. Also great taste in music. Oh, good to hear. Also a metalhead. All right. Coward is definitely the most personal and personally exposing thing I've ever written.
00:32:27
Speaker
So it, I feel very tenderly toward it. It was written kind of with a person in mind, the first person I ever had like a, I don't want to say a crush, like a first person I was ever in love with, like in much in the way.
00:32:46
Speaker
the female adolescent character is in this book. But she's still one of my best friends in the world and she lives actually a couple blocks over from me and my husband, Nai, are really close friends with her and her husband and we still hang out all the time.
00:33:11
Speaker
I know she has a copy of this book, and I think she has read some of it. She hasn't talked about it with me yet. I'll be very curious to hear from her eventually, maybe someday, but. The podcast needs a little intrigue. Drop that in there. That's cool. But yeah, sorry, I interrupted you. No, no, no, I'm excited to hear about your response to it. No, I.
00:33:38
Speaker
Yeah, I bumped into it and grabbed it and quite, you know, I I've been just not to just expand just a little bit on the show. I've had the ability at times
00:33:52
Speaker
When it comes to writing, the writers that I've had on writers and poets, they always feel like this strong energy or experimentation or deep importance of what's talking about or transgressive or open and experimental. And there's so much energy in that. I think sometimes if people get
00:34:14
Speaker
Cynical or stodgy around literature. They're just not looking at the right section or they you know, they're caught up in in in some habits so um in describing the book as you said with being personal and What was it what was it the piece that you were excited about? Me again. It was that
00:34:41
Speaker
Do people veer away from it? Or was it, like you said, is they go to the other thing? You're excited to hear that? Oh, I think it's just that it's short. It's a skinnier book. People like the big book. Right, right, right. Well, if you buy Tolstoy and you calculate it per page and you got a good used book price, it's like, this is half a cent, half a cent a page. I'm getting value. Go into Coward some more. Yeah.
00:35:12
Speaker
Um, yeah, I mean, yeah, it's been...
00:35:23
Speaker
It's my most recent book that I've published, but it feels like I published it very recently and also feels like a long time ago, in part because I published, I'm realizing I published three books during the pandemic, which, what a time to publish three books.
00:35:47
Speaker
But that's part of why time feels so amorphous in relation to these books coming out. But yeah, it was kind of like two different projects that I had wanted to write for a while were something related to the experience of living in Spokane for the weird brief window that I did where
00:36:16
Speaker
There were the forest fires, especially in the latter part of the summer. And there was literally like black smog engulfing the whole sky. And it looked like it was like the dead of night in the middle of the day. And we had to keep our windows closed and stay inside. And it was like 110 degrees and we didn't have air conditioning.
00:36:43
Speaker
Oh my god. And it still just smelled like burning everywhere. Yeah. And I felt like I was going insane. I did too. And yeah, I wanted to write something about that. And sadly, I only lived in Spokane during that period of the summer where it's probably the worst time to live there. Oh my goodness, yeah.
00:37:13
Speaker
It's a long story, but when I moved out, that was like, the day that I left was like the first nice day that I'd had there. It was like October and the leaves were turning and there wasn't black smoke in the sky. What could have been, what could have been. Yeah, yeah.
00:37:37
Speaker
I mean, I guess we feel most tenderly about a place the day that we're leaving it, but I...
00:37:44
Speaker
I always felt like Spokane in many ways feels like Midwest Rust Belt town in the Pacific Northwest, depending on what you consider the Pacific Northwest. So I really wanted to write something about fires in Spokane, especially since my first novel deals with an underground fire.
00:38:11
Speaker
different kind of fire but I wanted to write that and I wanted to write a book about this like kind of first relationship I ever had even though I don't know if anyone would consider a relationship where
00:38:34
Speaker
It was like a deep friendship, but the relationship was kind of through this imagined, well, just like it is in the book, like this kind of weird role playing over the internet. And I, I don't know, at some point in the pandemic, I think
00:38:55
Speaker
I think it was the experience of feeling like all of my friendships were taking place over the internet and everything existed in this kind of ether, this ether of liminal contact. I think that somehow was what gave me the idea of synthesizing these two books that I had wanted to write for a while.
00:39:26
Speaker
And what more natural time to sit inside and communicate over a dark screen than when there are black fires consuming the sky and you can't go outside? Before, I'm going to ask you to read a little bit from Cara, but before that I wanted to talk about, I had that
00:39:50
Speaker
deep visceral response to the fires that you're talking about. Um, and then in the summer there in the deep heat and the apocalypse, as far as my brain, just like, um, how I saw it, like I was, I was in, um, mid valley and in, in Oregon, right. And I, I think about in terms of natural disasters, right? So I grew up on the East coast.
00:40:16
Speaker
uh hurricane once in a while you get used to a hurricane and you and when i lived in the midwest tornadoes which scared the shit out of me more than anything in the entire universe they scared the shit out of me but they're also kind of exhilarating oh i i'll look at them i'll look at video like i can watch it um oh could not be more fascinated
00:40:39
Speaker
scared of living shit out of me to my core and then like out here so i so there's these fires going on right and it's during the pandemic and the fires were so extreme i forgot a pandemic was going on honestly i was like we're going to be burnt to a crisp but it happened because
00:40:56
Speaker
So you remember I grew up in those different geographies and this is the first time this happened in Pacific Northwest where these fires and how they're blowing like towards like the cities and they're like winds better shift things need to change because these things are blowing across.
00:41:12
Speaker
And I was like walking around I like I asked people because like you ask people always live there and i'm like Oh, so like what are you doing? They're like we've never seen this before but in my head at that time. I thought that this is something maybe Everybody reacted to and once people said that to me that like they had no clue I was like i'm so scared right now i'm like but can I talk to somebody about what's going to happen or what we should be doing because i'm looking at it and the fires are blowing this way and then
00:41:40
Speaker
winds died down and shifted and all that stuff. And there was still all this smoke, but I was like, so weirded out and freaked out by it. I was like, people, like, what do we do? Like, like hell's coming. So I remember those fires. It makes you realize that hell was there all along. Talking to the,
00:42:08
Speaker
I'm talking to the quick, the quick writer, uh, turn that phrase. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So, um, so, uh, you're gonna read us some coward.
Reading from 'Coward': Megan's Writing Style
00:42:20
Speaker
Sure. Um, yeah, I'll just read a bit from the beginning. Um, I was debating whether to read one of the dead body parts, but I'll just read a bit from the beginning.
00:42:37
Speaker
The sky is burning up again the way it does each August, like some ritual, some letting out of blood. It smells a bit of blood, of iron, say the people from this town. Some say it smells like ore, dark sediment, charred skin. Meanwhile, the factories that used to make their own gray streams of sediment stand still and silent, gathering the drifts.
00:43:06
Speaker
It always starts out with the blonde hairs of the hills standing on edge, bristled and ready with their bleedy scabs of brush. The smoke begins to rise, a shimmer hover over cracked soil, snake skins, and the ache stretch skeleton ribs of old rail lines. The shimmer turns to shadows, turns to ash. The sky turns gray, then darker gray, then black.
00:43:36
Speaker
The mountain forests burn, the winds rise, winds of clouds of hot debris of smoldering destruction carried through the high plains.
00:43:48
Speaker
Don't worry, someone tells you, for you haven't lived through other Augusts here. No, you do not know. No, you are not used to this. They come in August. Yes, they burn their way through August, and we stay in wait until September, but it passes every year.
00:44:10
Speaker
Don't worry, they insist, for you look skeptical. Don't worry. It is natural. It is a part of life. A cleansing process. Yes, a learning process. How to learn to wait, to wait in hot, dark rooms, looking out windows, till it's safe to go outside.
00:44:33
Speaker
Outside among the shadows of the factories the zombies gather in their certain alleys certain streets they've marked with piss and shit and needles and used big gulps that were filled with who the fuck knows what the streets that everybody knows do not go down. Inside among the shadows of a curtained room
00:44:57
Speaker
He lies naked and pale across the bare slab of his mattress. He has it out again, the picture that she sent him.
00:45:07
Speaker
that he knows he shouldn't keep of her, of them, Kate Maclean's perfect breasts. The perfect breasts are as they always are and always will be, rounded, pointed, and resplendent in the dim light, glowing globes of milk glass in the dim light, bowls of soft fog in the dim light, cusps of cold skin there but not there, here held in his pinched hand in the dim light.
00:45:38
Speaker
He runs the other hand over the slick bulge of his belly, feels the pain of it digesting what he just consumed. A meal of cigarettes and condiments, whatever shit he left in the fridge, whole jars of olives, pickles, tube of yellow mustard, a few desperate scrapings of some old congealed marmalade and something else that tasted sweet but now tastes sour.
00:46:06
Speaker
He feels so full and so unsatisfied. He hisses in between soft teeth. His mouth reeks of Virginia slims and pickle juice.
00:46:19
Speaker
The room is dry waves of the sealed warmth, but he feels wet with what he doesn't understand, with longing or with loneliness. No, no, it isn't loneliness, he thinks, tapping his raw nails on the Polaroid's ridge, wishing but not wishing she was ever there.
00:46:41
Speaker
The perfect breasts are there. The perfect breasts are what he has. The perfect breasts are smirking at the seething of his belly bulge. He knows that Kate McLean would say, why are you doing that? What do you want? What are you doing? What is wrong with you? It is this, the raw new nerves, the underskin itch.
00:47:08
Speaker
It is this, the shining scabs of his scalp, the cragged lines of his chin. And this, the sad, inevitable swelling of his cock. And this, the weird rise of a pain that has no surface. Was that your answer to what is art?
00:47:34
Speaker
Yeah, the weird rise of a pain that has no surface, that seems like a pretty good answer. Yeah, yeah, um...
00:47:44
Speaker
I struggle after a great reading. I just want to say thank you, Megan. Thank you for that. Oh, thank you, Ken. It's my honor. Thank you for appreciating it. Yeah, yeah. On the show, in doing it over a few years, when I started, I didn't know
00:48:07
Speaker
like what performances or what experiences would be there. Um, but I've been really excited. Um, I actually released a spoken word episode. I'll try to track down and get over to you. You might, you might dig it short. It's like 10 minutes, but, um, I've had that in the shows and, um, I've had like,
00:48:28
Speaker
three Dublin poets and spoken word and other authors. And it's just like these discrete amazing things of performance that I adore. And of course music being more typical with the songs. So
00:48:47
Speaker
How's the book doing? Where's it getting? It's not doing well, Ken. It's not doing well. I'm not saying if it's number three. I'm not saying anything. All right. All right. I asked the author a question. No, not if it's number three on the Amazon list of dark zombie visceral. No, not on that list.
00:49:16
Speaker
What are people saying when they encounter it? Yeah, I like that as a litmus test for how it's doing rather than who or how many people have read it. Well, that's the thing. Not enough people have read it for me to, yeah, and really,
00:49:47
Speaker
squinting my way through an answer to this question. Well, how about this part?
Vulnerability in Writing: Personal and Professional Growth
00:49:53
Speaker
You had mentioned the level of a personal and putting that out there. Let's just talk about the initial effect of you doing that. Was that a leap for you? Writers are brave, but was that a jump?
00:50:24
Speaker
thinking about this. I've been thinking about how, I don't know, I think part of, I don't want to say what I'm grieving or what feels strange about this book for me is that I almost needed a
00:50:44
Speaker
Well, and I don't want to say a test to myself, but it was maybe a challenge to myself in some ways. Like my last book,
00:50:56
Speaker
Like a lot of it was me trying to kind of bridge the gaps in a relationship that I knew was going to end. And it was kind of a book full of vulnerability and self exposures, but they were self exposures related to a marriage that I realized by the end I was going to have to say goodbye to. And this is a more
00:51:27
Speaker
well, feels like a more direct kind of self-exposure. Like I was very conscious and very anxious in my novel, Failure to Thrive, of writing toward these territories, writing about this place that I didn't grow up in, kind of...
00:51:47
Speaker
as a way to like synthesize elements of my own background and my own interest that I saw in the place that my ex-husband grew up. So it felt like there was a lot of myself in that book, but it was like a lot of myself by way of writing about others, and myself in terms of
00:52:12
Speaker
finding an efficacious way or the most efficacious way and the most responsible way of writing about others or maybe examining myself by way of writing about others. I like examining. Examinating. Yeah, I mean.
00:52:35
Speaker
Maybe that's another word entirely. I think that's part of my compulsive problem, examining way, way, way too much. It's like some kind of syndrome.
00:52:48
Speaker
But yeah, this book felt different. I think after I wrote and published that book that was kind of examining myself by way of others, I needed to write something that was more of a directly personal self-exposure. And not only is it kind of an exposing personal book, but it has... So the long story short,
00:53:18
Speaker
had, I had wanted to work with my friend Devin Stikonis, who had been talking about doing this art project where she wanted to go into morgues and do kind of
00:53:40
Speaker
still life drawings, I guess you'd call them, of the bodies. But she wanted to draw them in such a way that the counters of the flesh resembled landscapes. Because she deals a lot, well, now she deals a lot in the intersections between
00:54:01
Speaker
landscape and the body. But this project, as she was conceptualizing it, felt in some ways like the germination of a direction that she's now going more and more in. But I thought, oh, landscapes and bodies and corpses, like this is perfect for the book. Like if you come up with some good ones, maybe that could be the cover and maybe we could even do some illustrations like that.
00:54:30
Speaker
But she didn't end up getting to do this project. They wouldn't give her permission to illustrate the corpses. So I said, well, just draw me like I'm a corpse. I'm kind of a corpse-y double-jointed arm in hand. So I'm also naked on the cover of my own book. And I was like, whoa, I mean,
00:54:57
Speaker
it's a good enough book. But like, we think like, that'll get people to buy it and read it. But apparently not. But it's you as a court, it's you as a corpse. So it's you know, there's that that distancing. So I yeah, I it's
00:55:23
Speaker
It's difficult to write the book that you really wish you had had when you were a younger adult. Feeling good about the fact that it's out there in the world for people to find, but feel like no one has the capability to find it.
00:55:48
Speaker
sometimes the curse of publishing with small presses and sometimes the curse of being the kind of writer who is stubborn about doing their own thing. But yeah, I'm still struggling, honestly, to reconcile what the book means to me and what I would like for it to be able to be to other people and
00:56:17
Speaker
its lack of ability to find an audience. But I've also been trying to keep in mind that people don't always discover things when you expect them to discover them. It's been the same with our band. Like our band has existed in effect for 13 years and people are kind of like just starting to discover us and we're just starting to take off in a way. And
00:56:47
Speaker
To one end, it's very exciting, of course, but to the other end, I, and to a much greater degree, Sean, or like, well, where have you been this whole time? People have talked about our last album, assuming it's our first album. It's like, no, we made three other albums. They're real albums.
00:57:10
Speaker
uh you can still listen to them yeah yeah they uh i uh there was one cool thing i was thinking about chicago i've forgotten um did uh been wanting to do more scenes from the podcast and there's like one issue i call it a rear issue and maybe it is but um i don't know if they still have it over there but it was on the shelves at uh quimby's bookstore oh i love quindies yeah yeah i don't know so if you're uh
00:57:38
Speaker
traipsing around a few traipsing around that area maybe poke in I don't know if it'll still be on the shelves is from a couple years ago, but anyways gorgeous wonderful Lovely bookstore Quinn bees. Thanks for having the podcast seen on on your shelf So I get to get out another issue or two to have it be you know
00:58:00
Speaker
irregular printing schedule the podcast is a great bookstore like places to discover things and like oh yeah it's an invaluable resource I would say you know like I went there and um
00:58:17
Speaker
I think it's the type of story where you have like particular type of mind, curiosity, never seen this before and wanting to be an environment where you see a hundred, 200 things that you never seen before. But I found this like, like it's where I could find a book.
00:58:33
Speaker
uh... independent published in the book was kathy acker in seattle and it was like a study of the writer kathy acker and what she did in washington and what she did in seattle and how she was involved with riot girls and i'm like yeah that's the rabbit hole i'm glad somebody put all that together in the interviews
00:58:54
Speaker
And it's that type of thing with the bookstore. I never know that fucking things exist, like Kathy Acker in Seattle. There's, you know, how many copies of it. But it's exactly on that point. You're there at Quimby's, you're like, or Paul's where I found your book, right? Like, I'm like, how else do you encounter? You're like, oh, what is this like wonderful, curious thing? And so, yeah, shout out to Quimby's and the great, great, great bookstores and everybody. Make sure you check out
00:59:24
Speaker
You know, Megan Lamb's work, the one I found, Coward, and the music from Kill Scenes. Megan, I do have another big philosophical question for you. And yeah, it is the titular question from the show. And the question itself is, of course, is why is there something rather than nothing?
01:00:06
Speaker
I think, well, I guess my short answer is in the interest of developing a shared language or a sense of community around something to feel less alone. But also to explore the evolution of a something like what something becomes over time,
01:00:36
Speaker
rather than just living in this atemporal nothingness or this. Yeah.
01:00:52
Speaker
That's probably as close as I'm going to come to finding my ways with my question. But yeah, there is something rather than nothing to bridge the gaps, to fill the void, to bring us together both in liminal temporality and to help us
01:01:20
Speaker
see where we've come from and where we might be going. I like what you said about like, you know, for I heard quickly with the temporality and like space and time and that comes up like being placed in space and time that there's something there rather than. Avoid like existence within space and time. Yeah, I I dig on that question.
01:01:49
Speaker
And for me, it's like creativity too. So like I say, the show is art and philosophy and liberation. And for me, I think they're all the same thing, like inquiry and exploration with art. Megan, people gotta find your stuff. And where do people go for the kill scenes, for Megan Lamb writing for your stuff?
01:02:19
Speaker
Well for kill scenes my band we have
01:02:25
Speaker
We're on Bandcamp, we're on Spotify, we're on Apple Music, we're on all the things. There's some sites somewhere, I forget what it's even called, that like brings all of them together. But we're on all of the streaming services, but Bandcamp is probably the best place to find all of our things and buy the albums. And I,
01:02:55
Speaker
My latest book, Coward, is on Spite and Deuvo. My novel is though an apocalypse party. My collection, all of your most private places,
01:03:20
Speaker
should be, or at last I checked it's still available on Spork. Sometimes, I've heard people tell me that they've struggled to get my book on Spork sometimes, but
01:03:36
Speaker
Ostensibly, my last collection can be purchased from Spork Press. My novella that I wrote before that, Silk Flowers, sadly is out of print. But if you make your way through my oeuvre and you really want to go back that far, I can send you a PDF. Wow, that is absolutely wonderful.
01:04:04
Speaker
What about kill scenes, where to find you play a bit in Chicago at all? Yeah, we do. And we've been starting to tour a little bit throughout the Midwest.
Kill Scenes: Band's Fifth Album and Future Plans
01:04:18
Speaker
We're hoping at some point to make our way out further east and further west, but we all have
01:04:27
Speaker
have day jobs that make that difficult. And we all have jobs with radically different schedules. But yeah, we play all over Chicago. We're taking a break for a few months from playing shows while we work on the fifth album. But
01:04:47
Speaker
Yeah, we try to update our shows on Bandcamp so you can find where we're playing there if you're in the Chicago area or in the Midwest or maybe if and when we branch out further.
01:05:07
Speaker
I was interested about the, you had the single to cover a short-term effect. I just thought about that song, you know, prior to getting on here. And I was like, that's a cure song, which this isn't usually the case with me where I just, I've never really cured what the lyrics were. That's something that's really strange for me to say, particularly for a cure song. But it's one of those songs like you find off that,
01:05:33
Speaker
that area and pornography and faith where it's it's all mood and feeling and it's it Robert Smith's a beautiful poet writer. Yeah, it's it has like
01:05:47
Speaker
It makes you feel a certain way and it really precisely evokes a feeling in an atmosphere. But if you try to interpret it, if you try to break it down, it really, it feels very indecipherable very quickly. It really resists interpretation. But I think we all like that about the song.
01:06:09
Speaker
I know because it's a really different thing because you know when like a ballad of lament and we know the cure lyrics where you're listening and hearing about the story that's there and there's some of those atmospherics where like
01:06:23
Speaker
Because I looked up, I had literally typed in, what is the meaning of a short term effect? Like it's something I would never do. And I did that. And I was like, well, you know, it's it's it's impressionistic and just dig on the song and the feel on that one. So, yeah. Yeah, I mean,
01:06:50
Speaker
My personal, I don't want to say interpretation because I don't know that it's a song that even wants to be interpreted, but I think I started to align that phrase with my experience of the madness of liminality, the pandemic.
01:07:12
Speaker
The pandemic is the short term effect. Yeah, that's what it is. That wasn't about it was a presage of the the horrors of the pandemic and smoke in the air.
01:07:25
Speaker
Megan, such a blast to have you on the show and to learn about kill scenes in your writing and talk some of Chicago.
Chicago Art Scene: Ken's Admiration and Personal Favorites
01:07:36
Speaker
My favorite art museum in the world is in Chicago, the Art Institute. I adore that museum so much and really like Chicago. But yeah, thanks for coming on to the show and kicking around on something rather than nothing. Yeah, thank you so much for having me.
01:07:56
Speaker
I hope that the Killscenes does, despite the disjointed schedules amongst everybody, but there is a wonderful goth bar called the Coffin Club. I know, no. I've wanted to go there for a long time. I see bands playing there all the time, like, oh, it looks so sick.
01:08:17
Speaker
It was really good. Now, I had I had been to this particular place. It was called the Lovecraft bar before that. And I don't remember being as big. I think they might have expanded it. Then it was closed. And then I went to the coffin club a couple of times and it was full like went too late to try to get in.
01:08:38
Speaker
but on Friday and Saturday made it in both times and yeah really really digging on that and with your interview coming up uh short-term effect it was like a nice nice full vibe so um yeah to the kill scenes at the coffin club even even saying that that's the steps that's the sentence the kill scenes at
01:09:00
Speaker
I'm already hyping ya. Alright, so thanks so much, Megan, and really look forward to hearing some more of your music and your beautiful writing. Oh, thanks so much. Yeah. Have a good rest of your Monday. You too. Bye.
01:14:33
Speaker
This is something rather than nothing. And listeners, to stay connected with us and our guests, visit somethingratherthannothing.com
01:14:45
Speaker
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01:14:59
Speaker
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01:15:27
Speaker
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