Brad Listi was born in Milwaukee. He is the author of the novel Be Brief and Tell Them Everything (Ig Publishing / May 2022). His other books include the novel Attention. Deficit. Disorder., an LA Times bestseller, and Board, a work of nonfiction collage, co-authored with Justin Benton. He is the founding editor of The Nervous Breakdown, an online literary magazine (2006-2023), and in 2011 he launched the Otherppl podcast, which features in-depth interviews with today's leading writers. He lives in Los Angeles.
We met after I wrote a story where I described you as a literary sex machine. Which I stand by. I think what my readers are dying to know is: what's it like to have your face?
It’s an extraordinary privilege.
In a previous interview, you spoke about starting a literary journal The Nervous Breakdown not because you wanted to fill a void, but because you wanted to see what would happen. Which I resonate with very much. Would you say that after you saw what happened with it, that it did actually fill a void you didn't expect or knew you had? And did you create your podcast Otherppl with the same experimental mentality?
It’s important to look at the context. The Nervous Breakdown was founded in 2005-6. Social media was just coming online and becoming mainstream. The iPhone was still a year or two away. Blogs were a thing. The barriers to entry were coming down, and it occurred to me that writers who were previously operating alone, in their little private corners of the internet, should instead band together and form their own publications.
I also wanted, in the beginning, for TNB to feature correspondents from all over the world. That was the vision. I liked the idea of providing an international perspective, and we did end up having several writers on the roll who were overseas, reporting from France and Spain and Germany and New Zealand, and so on.
The site was online for about seventeen years, and it evolved over time and went through a bunch of iterations. A lot of people had a hand in it. It was a collaborative effort. And we published some excellent work and gave a platform to a lot of emerging writers. I feel good about that.
At its peak—and somewhat to my surprise—TNB functioned as an incredibly vibrant community of writers. It became hyper-social. The comment boards took on a life of their own and were a daily receptacle for feedback and commiseration. In addition to being a literary thing, it became a meeting place. A lot of real friendships were forged there.
As for the Otherppl podcast—it was launched a few years later, in 2011. By that point, I was uneasy with social media and growing tired of the experience. I found myself wanting to have an actual conversation with the people who were so often appearing on my screen. I was hungry for something human—something authentic and unscripted.
So I started the show on a whim, putting very little thought into its name—“Other People with Brad Listi”—thinking that I would do ten or twenty episodes and run them as a limited series, and then I would call it a day. And now it’s been almost fifteen years and nearly a thousand author interviews. And I’m still going.
In that spirit, do you view literary magazines themselves being a form of experimentation? And what excites you about alternative forms of publishing now?
I think the digital space in particular lends itself to experimentation, because the overhead is low, and there are no geographic barriers when it comes to collaboration. It’s not that print journals can’t do interesting things in this way too, it’s just that the logistics are a bit more challenging. It’s harder to reach a wide readership.
So yeah. I do think literary journals should function as little laboratories. If you’re running one, and it doesn’t have any kind of avant-garde edge to it, you’re probably doing it wrong. At least part of the approach should be rooted in pushing boundaries and testing limits and making space for new voices and new forms. Otherwise what’s the point?
The good news is, there are a lot of great literary journals in existence right now, operating in this vein—more than I’m aware of, certainly. Zona Motel recently launched, and it reminds me of TNB in its spirit and its collaborative nature. And my friend Joey Grantham, formerly of TNB, now runs an online magazine called R&R, in conjunction with Relegation Books. And Joey has excellent taste and always publishes great stuff.
Be Brief and Tell Them Everything was extremely personal work. Now that you've worked that project out of your body, do you see yourself working on something similar, or do you feel compelled to distance yourself from yourself (albeit, all work is in some way "personal")? I'm very interested in the comedown after completing that.
I love autofiction and autobiographical writing, and this is probably where I belong. In the past I’ve tried to move away from it, but I always come back. It’s a matter of personal taste and a function of my basic creative wiring. I like all sorts of books, but my favorite ones tend to be those in which the writer stands more or less naked on the page. So it makes sense that this is the kind of book that I’d try to write.
Be Brief was a grueling project for a variety of reasons—a father trying to grapple with his son’s disabilities—but I’m happy with how it turned out. I have no regrets. The writing process was hellish and deeply frustrating at times, but the last stretch of it, when it finally came together, was the best creative experience of my life. An enormous relief.
In the end, I think I’m driven by a pretty fatalistic view of things. We’ll all be dead soon. Life goes fast. The end could come at any moment. So what do you really have to say? Make your deathbed confession. Everything else is static.
You seem exceptionally attuned to the emotional frequency of others. And you're filling an important role within our community. But I wonder, with the amount of podcasting you do, does it ever drain you to the point that it takes a toll on your own work?
I’ve come to see the podcast as an extension of my creative life. There’s the writing, and there’s the show, and they work in symbiosis. If I’m being honest, the podcast is the more natural fit for me. It comes more easily. I love being a writer, don’t get me wrong, but I’m not someone who can only do that. For one thing, I’m always trying to make a living. I have to work. I don’t have the luxury of focusing solely on books.
And aside from that, I’m genuinely interested in the work of building community and being of service to other people. This is something that the writing life on its own doesn’t tend to provide in an immediate sense. The work is solitary and requires isolation, and readers will then find the book one by one or, at best, in small clusters. There’s a beauty to that intimate exchange, and the world certainly needs it. And I really enjoy the process—but I can also feel its limitations.
The artists that I admire most deeply—the ones who seem like magicians to me—are those who find a way to create community around their work. That or their work somehow inspires the spontaneous creation of community, as well as—and this is crucial—the creation of art by members of the community itself.
This, to me, is the highest and best outcome of any artistic undertaking: when the artist creates art that inspires fans of the art to get together in person and make art of their own.
Musicians tend to be best at this. The live music experience in particular can be fertile ground for this kind of unfolding—festivals and tours, and so on, a bunch of human beings in the same space. Best case scenario, the exchange becomes reciprocal and generative, a real collaboration. You see this with Taylor Swift and Beyoncé. You see it with Phish, The Dead, and so on. These communities are very powerful.
You occasionally see it in other art forms, too—I’m thinking, just as one example, of the Coen Brothers and The Big Lebowski. Whatever you happen to think of the film, the fact is that it spawned its own festival called Lebowski Fest. It mutated from the screen and became a kind of social and philosophical and creative human phenomenon with its own force and identity. This is the sort of thing that I’m talking about. This, to me, is how an artist and a work of art achieves its highest levels of purpose and success.
So I guess this would be a long-winded way of saying that my work on TNB and Otherppl is a kind of earnest and middling attempt to create a sense of community among writers that is somehow generative. I’m always sort of reaching for that experience, but I don’t think I’ve come close to realizing it.
And on a related note, I have to mention how much I love improvisation. If hosting an interview show can be considered its own little mode of creative expression, I think that being good at it has something to do with the ability to improvise well—to be alive in the moment, to be a good listener, to respond in real time to what’s being said and felt and implied, and to also be attuned to the needs of the listener at home. My work on Otherppl is all about trying to cultivate this skill.
When I’m in conversation with a guest, and it’s going well—when things take off in an unexpected direction, say, and it gets funny or weird or emotional, or all of the above—it’s so thrilling! There is nothing in my creative life more satisfying than this experience. For me, a dialogue with another human being at this level of intimacy and spontaneity delivers the same kind of depth charge that great literature does. To me, they’re very much related.
And beyond that, the show reminds me how fundamental the act of conversation is to the human experience. It’s a vital exercise of the mind, and it's our primary means of connection with one another (though digital life is causing it to atrophy). The proliferation of podcasts—especially two-way interview shows—is, I think, a response to our present circumstances and this basic human need. The reason why so many people are making podcasts these days is because A.) it’s easy to do; B.) it’s a rare occasion in which people are in dialogue with one another in the absence of smartphones and other digital distractions; and C.) it feels good. It satisfies a core need that might otherwise go untended.
It's extremely hard to coordinate in-person interviews with any regularity. Marc Maron, for example, being based in LA makes it easier since the people he interviews on WTF either live in LA or come through semi-regularly. After the pandemic, I see your move to doing most interviews over Zoom as keeping up with the current state of communication, sort of like you did with TNB. Do you feel anything is lost doing interviews on the phone or Zoom instead of in person? Do you still offer that to writers you want to interview?
Yeah, the pandemic, coupled with advances in technology, shifted the approach. I do all of the interviews remotely now. In a perfect world, I’d have a studio somewhere, away from home, and I’d go there and record in person. And I’d have a producer to help me schedule, and so on. But that’s not my reality.
Ultimately, I don’t think it matters much. People are so accustomed to talking online. It’s a normal part of life at this point. Probably something is lost in the distance—the energy of immediate human exchange, and so on. But it’s also possible that something is gained. Writers tend to speak with me from the comfort of their homes. The interviews might turn out better as a result. It’s hard to say.
In the end, when it comes to remote recording, what’s most important to me (aside from good conversation) is the sound quality. I’m neurotic about the sound of my show. Few things bother me more than shitty audio. Advances in technology—new podcast platforms for remote recording, affordable microphones, more sophisticated built-in microphones in computers, along with AI mixing—all of this stuff has made a difference. I want the show to sound professional. I feel like I owe that to my guests. And I certainly owe it to my listeners.
More on the technical side: whenever I see a book as "a series of vignettes" I'm like, okay here we go, someone has brain diarrhea and wants to keep every spot on the side of the bowl. But you actually did it. Be Brief and Tell Them Everything should be taught as a class for people who want to do vignette-style narratives. You are deftly skilled in the art of flow. How did you know how to arrange things correctly, while being able to reach all around in subject matter at varying lengths, and yet keep it cohesive?
Probably it has something to do with the fact that I spent more than a decade with the material. There was a lot of failure, a lot of confusion, a lot of false starts and do-overs and rumination. And then, when I finally settled in and wrote the version that now exists in print, the pandemic was happening, and we were in lockdown, and I had a stretch of about four or five months when I wrote almost every day. It happened slowly but steadily. I remember being very concentrated, very methodical, very disciplined. And the hermetic realities of lockdown ended up being good for me. Obviously the pandemic was a horror show, and I was fortunate to avoid the worst of it. But the truth is that the quieter, more streamlined nature of existence during that time helped me get the work done.
I don't usually cite people's work in interviews this much, but I was deeply moved by the section in your book where you attempted to discuss death with your child after a visit to the museum. Our generations have seen the negative impact of implanting a strict dogma via organized religion at an early age, and yet there is something to be said of laying a foundation of understanding when it comes to the mysteries of the world and our existence. While being a source of knowledge for our children, we can also be a source of honesty in saying "I don't know". One of the painful parts of being a parent is coming to terms with the fact that you do the best you can and hope for the best, but at times I feel like that's not enough. In your opinion, what seems like the best approach to finding a middle ground in conveying the importance of a spiritual life and morality without instilling hardcore religious beliefs?
My approach, for what it’s worth, is primarily rooted in action. I feel like what I do and how I behave is far more important than anything I could possibly say.
If I had to classify myself, I’d call myself Buddhist—I’ve meditated my entire adult life, and I’m an avid student of Buddhist psychology, which to me feels apart from any kind of formalized religion or tribe. I’m interested in human suffering and how to deal with it. And the Buddhists have a lot of wise things to say in this regard. To me it reads like lucid common sense. It’s fairly similar to Stoic philosophy.
I appreciate Buddhism’s practicality and the fact that it's about action, not ideology. It’s about practice and logic, not blind faith or submission to any kind of god. And the Buddhists, over the centuries, have, in my view, created a very elegant and sophisticated map. So: things like the Four Noble Truths, the Eightfold Noble Path, the Buddhist precepts—it’s this stuff, along with daily meditation, that is most important to me. Meditation in particular. The deceptive simplicity of it: sitting on a cushion, getting quiet, confronting your own heart and mind. It can sound easy, but it’s extremely difficult to do—especially on a daily basis, year after year.
I should add that I’ve said very little to my kids about any of this. I rarely talk about this stuff, unless someone asks. I learned my lesson early on with my daughter, as I write about in Be Brief. Nobody needs to hear me unpack the Diamond Sutra, or mansplain the illusion of death. I’m painfully aware of my own limitations. If one of my kids comes to me with some big existential question, I’ll do my best to answer it. And if I don’t know the answer, I’ll say so. Otherwise I’m inclined to keep my mouth shut.
What I have told my kids—my daughter in particular, as she’s older—is that their spiritual life is their business, their responsibility, and they should take it seriously. My wife and I have tried to expose them to different traditions—they’ve attended Episcopal school, they’ve been to Catholic churches and synagogues and so on. And all their lives, they've seen me get up in the morning and go out to the garage to meditate, and again in the afternoon or evening. I’m fairly sober. I’m a vegetarian. They’ve seen me reading books and trying to make art. They’ve seen me hiking on a near-daily basis. I’ve tried to demonstrate a certain discipline, and a reverence for the natural world, and so on. Hopefully that’s enough. Hopefully they’ll take the bits and pieces that make sense to them, and they’ll forge their own paths. I don’t believe that a meaningful spiritual life happens otherwise. As a parent, you can shine a little light here and there, and you can lead by example. Otherwise, it has to be self-directed. It has to come from within. Anything less, and the pursuit will probably lack authenticity and a solid foundation. It will crumble in the face of serious hardship and death. That’s my view.
As a society, it's clear we've moved from typography to imagery as the center of our culture when it comes to social interaction and intellectual pursuits. Been that way for a while now. But I don't really believe books could ever die, just swing from a niche luxury interest to mainstream, back and forth. Am I delusional? And if I am, can you make me feel better about it?
No, I tend to agree. Books aren’t going anywhere. There will always be readers, to greater and lesser extents. Books provide a vital service to human beings, and one that isn’t easily replicated. It’s a bridge between consciousnesses across time, a window into other people’s inner lives, and it allows for a level of complexity and depth that surpasses other art forms. Literature is a very elegant technology. And even if the number of serious readers dwindles dramatically, I think there will always be people who are driven to write down their stories. Human beings are, for good reason, a confused and frightened species. We don’t even really know where we are. And the mess we’ve made of the planet is embarrassing. We have a lot to sort out. Some subset of our population is always going to be driven to the blank page.