Douglas A. Martin Is Like Gertrude Stein, with One Crucial Difference
Douglas A. Martin's new novel is Once You Go Back. Next Wednesday, the 11th, he’ll read at the Center for Performance Research.
For our readers who may not be familiar with your work, what's the most accurate thing someone else has said about it?
Once when I read with Wayne Koestenbaum, he said it was "like Gertrude Stein with a hard-on." I think that was pretty true.
What have you read/watched/listened to/looked at/ate recently that will permanently change our readers' lives for the better?
I saw the poet Laura Mullen stage and reinterpret Yoko Ono's "Cut Piece." She did this at a conference instead of giving a standard paper. Everyone should try it.
Whose ghostwritten celebrity tell-all (or novel) would you sprint to the store to buy (along with a copy of The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius so that the checkout clerk doesn't look at you screwy)?
Toni Morrison's.
Have you ever been a Starving Artist, and did it make you brilliant, or just hungry?
Yeah. Before I did sex work, mainly prostitution. It was odd to be mostly satiated body-wise but not in the mind, though that gave me something to write about. Before that, because I really didn't want to go to the bad community college in Georgia my mom said was the best we could do, I went to the state school anyway and lived basically on potatoes and ice-water and sugar for a while, so I had some practice.
What would you characterize as an ideal interaction with a reader?
If I was talking to someone about books and they said something nice about one of mine without knowing that's who they were talking to.
Have you ever written anything that you'd like to take back?
Like letters to people and stuff, but then I basically do. I'll rework them somehow based on how they were received or not, ignored, dismissed, whatever. Then you can always just make a poem or something. Just like if you write an essay but then it's no good for whatever reason.
