Eric Boyd Interview
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Eric Boyd's writing has appeared in Midcult*, Bruiser, and HAD along with anthologies such as The Rose Books Reader and Words Without Walls. He is a regular contributor to Zona Motel. Boyd is a winner of a PEN Prison Writing Award and The Foundry Prize in fiction. He briefly attended Maharishi International University in Iowa before receiving an MFA in New York.
Boyd is currently working on a novel.
Eric-Boyd.comYou and I met in Baltimore at AWP and immediately hung out the rest of the night. Are we kindred souls or are we both just desperate for friends?
I think a little of both, man. Whenever I travel I definitely try to open myself up to running into folks and seeing what happens. That’s a big reason I always bring a pack of cigarettes with me when I go somewhere new, it’s such an easy way to stand around and make small talk. Likewise for the Zona event where we met everyone was pricking their fingers and bleeding on notecards. That’s a good way to sus out who’s cool to talk to. I know writers that swear by their solitude and then ones who are at every reading and its afterparty. I’m sort of in-between. I remember one time I interviewed Henry Rollins and I asked how he managed to stay so busy. He said, “I’m like a dog that has to throw out its own frisbee.” At the time that was the saddest thing I’d ever heard but now I get it. I really have to drag my ass out of the apartment some days so if I’m at something like AWP I do make an effort to find cool folks to hang out with. Was so glad that was the case in Baltimore.
Ikiryō is one of the best short stories I've read in years, maybe ever. Was that one of those where it came out easily? Or was the concept a struggle?
That's a hell of an endorsement. That one was half solicited; I knew the guest editors for that issue of Mass Review and they asked if I'd submit. There was no guarantee the piece would be accepted but they wanted me to take a crack if I was up for it. Stuff touching on my incarceration gets kind of old so that piece was just me trying stay entertained by something I'm usually pretty sick of talking about. The mostly true part of the story is in the left column, where I did actually work as an extra for a film shot in the local courthouse where I'd been years earlier. It was a paid gig, so that was an obvious factor, but also I wanted to prove whether or not I could sit in that courthouse again. I wanted to face it, but by literally playing a role in a film I could pretend I was someone else in a way. Because it was a period picture they did me up in really pale makeup and I thought I looked like a ghost. Running with that, my girlfriend has sometimes noted that I changed after being inside. Not better or worse, just different. And I've always contended that part of me never left jail, never left the courthouse. It's not meant to be dramatic, it's just a fact. You go in, someone else comes out. Combining those two notions into a single story was appealing. I like experimental writing but I don't do it often because it's hard to find a form that serves the words without feeling too gimmicky. The idea of two boxed in columns of text in conversation with each other was interesting enough to get me to knock out a draft within a couple hours. Most of my time with that story was trying to line up specific lines of texts so the same thing happened in each box. "I opened a door" / "He opens a door." Then playing with tense seemed like it would do a lot of heavy lifting as well. The real life person on the left speaks in past tense while the ghost speaks in present tense. In the Mass Review verison the final, center-weighted line is present tense, which sort of shows which "side" has won-- but since then I adjusted that line to be future tense to keep things open.
Your fiction often carries an undercurrent of sorrow, while your journalistic work is consistently funny. What do those two forms allow you to explore about yourself that the other can't?
When I’m doing something nonfiction, especially journalistic, I strongly prefer full blown gonzo style. Humor almost has to come along with that because the world is such an absurd place. I like to write experientially in hopes of making someone feel like they’re there. The reader may not be half as neurotic or stupid as I often am but I’ve found that the more specific you are to yourself, the more a reader will relate it to themselves. I may talk about blowing out the crotch on my jeans and the reader can’t connect to that experience exactly, but they can definitely relate to how one time they spilled ice cream on their new shirt or a cab drove into a puddle and ruined their shoes etc. For things like readings, especially New York readings, I’ve found that a lot of writers like to lean into the ephemeral nature of the event itself. A writer will come up with something just for that reading and never share it again. If you weren’t there, you simply missed out. If I capture some small spark of that feeling for a reader halfway across the country, that’s a win.
Because the journalistic stuff is so often talking to others or covering public events any interiority in the work is reflexive; in fiction, when I’m alone in my little writing closet, there’s more time to reflect. Left alone I can have some pretty gloomy thoughts. But I do try to pepper humor throughout pretty much all of my work, but often what makes me laugh more than anything is taking something stupid very seriously. I did a piece about someone being murdered for a labubu but for me the humor came from playing that completely straight. Sometimes the funniest joke is the lack of a joke.
As far as the difference between the two, I guess my hope would be for nonfiction to elicit a response, while fiction should create space for thoughts. But that's all easy to say after the fact, it's not something I think about as I'm writing.
How is the world filtered for you after being imprisoned?
I feel like there was a push towards cynicism and seriousness that I've slowly inched away from over the years. I'm becoming more myself every day. I'd say that has as much to do with therapy and getting diagnosed with autism as it does the distance from being incarcerated. That was an experience in my life I draw from as much as anything else for my writing. As far as the world is concerned I do find myself biting my tongue when the worst thing someone can think to say of Trump is that he's a felon. It's like, yeah? So was Eugene Debs! It's the context that matters. I met some of the nicest people in the world in jail and discovered some of the nastiest back outside. If that's informed my work at all, it's probably allowed me to not see the world as purely black and white when that kind of binary thinking is my default.
Is it just me, or does every writer have that weird dip after finishing a project, or working on something for a while, where it feels impossible to have another idea for a story. Which has been proven false, every time. But somehow I let myself slip into that place knowing I've been there before. Firstly, am I making sense? Secondly, is this a relatable experience?
No that's for sure relatable, man. In general full length projects have just been impossible for me to finish. I had a story collection that's slowly morphed into a polyvocal novel over the course of like twelve years. I have a trainhopping novel that I've spent nearly ten years researching, going to hobo conventions and talking to people who still hop trains today (shoutout to Kai Carlson-Wee, a brilliant poet). As far as ideas, I did have a really hard time during the pandemic. An old MFA classmate sent me an article about our director and how he was bilking the heiress of the Barnes and Noble empire with all these fake writing programs where he abused DEI initiatives, creating programs designed for marginalized authors just to get all kinds of funding and give cushy jobs to his friends. Being that he'd plucked me out of the PEN Prison Writing program you can imagine how I felt. I was basically like, "Oh so I'm not actually good at this." That dude saw me as some stupid jailbird, like I was just a mark and I went for it. Now I'm 60k in the hole for a program that I was tricked into joining. It took a couple years to swing out of that. This is the first year in a while where ideas have been coming to me.
Were you bummed when you found out networking is tied into being published in credible outlets?
I kind of love it? Treating this stuff as a big game keeps it fun for me. One time at a conference I was on a panel with an editor. I happened to be standing in line behind him for the men's room and I said, "Hey how's it going, you've rejected my work three times." He recounted this story at the start of the panel and said, "Yeah Eric is kind of a weasel but it works for him." Granted he never did publish me (but someone else on that panel did). It isn't that serious. I think the balance is being sincere in your networking. I would never compliment someone whose work I didn't actually enjoy because, from a practical standpoint, there's nothing they can do for me, right? If I'm riding someone's coattails, they need to be walking somewhere I want to be dragged to. In the age of AI I think networking might be the most human experience left for the arts. Eventually we'll get to where we can't tell what's real and what's some robot. But we'll know if that writer is a decent person to be around. "Yeah this story is good but that guy is a total dick so..." And that doesn't mean you have to be at every Zelda and Scott Fitgerald cocktail party-- but be personable over email, have a coffee together at AWP, invite people to your readings or let them know you can't make it. Just basic, "golden rule" type of shit. And then, y'know, again, we gotta be fairly realistic that the vast majority of our readers are also fellow writers, so why not get to know them? When you and I met I was kinda at the bottom. I was up for this huge grant and had just gotten rejected the day before we hung out. It was something I was nominated for, I didn't apply to it myself--this big secret thing I probably shouldn't even talk about now in case I'm ever nominated again--and I didn't get it in the end. After maybe a week of licking my wounds back home I busted out my Hermes Rocket and typed up a list of my writing goals for the year. Places I wanted to be published; things I wanted to pitch; projects I wanted to finish; and some more general literary goals like updating my website. But every single goal has a person attached to it. Whether it's an editor I know or an author that's been published somewhere I want to be and may have some advice, I honestly cherish all the folks I've gotten to know over the years. Actually, I've been slowly working on a Substack series I want to launch this year where I talk to old editors of mine and discuss what in the hell they were thinking to publish me. I'm tentatively calling it "Why Me??" I dunno, I think that's funny. But yeah, I was literally talking to my therapist about this stuff a couple weeks ago and for some reason I coined 2026 The Year of Flowers. Whether it's congratulating writers I know on their recent deals or good reviews, or doing those Zona dispatches--inspired by you, of course!--I like the opportunity to celebrate the culture. I wouldn't want to be a part of it if I didn't love it.
Do you think writing requires discipline?
Flipside of the above question, just because I love literary culture doesn't make writing easy. Shit's a drag. So yeah, my writing requires a lot of discipline. For many years I did daily six word stories / poems on Tumblr, and in the early days of that site I became a recommended blog to follow so I had like 100k followers. I'd take requests for six worders, sometimes doing ten or more a day. That kept me sharp, y'know? Realistically the bulk of those requests was, "I like a girl / boy, can you write six words about that?" and that gets old pretty fast, but it's also a fun challenge. How do you keep that fresh? How do you find ways to keep yourself and the requester happy. But then for the more interesting requests, I could take that idea and turn it into a full blown story later on. Every Fall semester I remotely do a fiction mentorship and I always tell the students that writing is a generative skill. The more you do, the better you get. Even from an inspiration standpoint, you see more connections between things the more you look for them. Speaking to that though, I don't think the meme of "thinking about writing is still writing" is untrue. The greatest teacher, proofreader, and editor I've ever had is time. I don't like stepping away from a story for months or even years at a time, but, those big problems that made me walk away from the work are almost always solved by having fresh eyes. Sometimes there's discipline in not writing. Or at least that's what I'm gonna tell myself.