CONVERSATION with Keith Rosson
by C. Christopher Hart

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I’ve known Keith for a number of years and he’s always busy with something. His writing style is bold, uncompromising, and uniquely human. In AVOW, his ongoing zine, he writes personal essays that range from hilarious to bizarre to heartbreaking, visiting all stops in between. In this conversation, we catch up a little on what Keith is up to, his thoughts on the world of publishing, print versus digital, and the merits of a good forty winks.

CCH: You write, you paint, you do design work, you're in a band; do you sleep?

KR: I've been blessed or cursed with insomnia since I was little - it's not even that I don't sleep, but I seem almost incapable of sleeping at NIGHT. That window of time between midnight and 6 am is when I seem to have done my most consistent and creative work for about the past ten years or so. Difficult to hold down a "straight" job at times, but I'd rather go to work tired and know I've gotten a ton of shit done the night before. I'm a huge fan of the "disco nap" - 2 or 3 hours of shuteye before you get up to do more lines of coke and dance to Bread or whatever. Though in my case, it's "take a disco nap, get up, drink another pot of coffee and listen to the new Off With Their Heads LP about a million times." Yowza.

CCH: Punk is a massive influence on your work in general... you're in the band NECKTIES MAKE ME NERVOUS, but the Punk aesthetics are in your writing and your art, too. What was your first true exposure to Punk?

KR: That'd be from a mix tape a kid made me, sometime in junior high-around 1989/90 or so. If I remember right, it had the Accused, Attitude Adjustment, Christ On Parade, Violent Femmes, the Exploited, Jerry's Kids, Dead Kennedys, and the first Fugazi 12".

Fugazi's got a song on that record called "Bad Mouth." Listening to the tape, I became utterly, totally convinced that the refrain in that song, "There's no movement," was actually "The gnome woman." I sang the song to myself like that for about a year before I finally found the album. Try listening to it sometime, you'll know what I'm talking about.

First show was a month or two later, I think - Gas Huffer, Lupo and Crackerbash at a closed-down coffeeshop for three dollars. Some guy on speed swung glow sticks attached to strings around the entire night, for hours, even when the bands were setting up. After the show, a pretty college girl invited me, a total stranger, to a party. I was fourteen, acne-riddled, and totally floored. After that, I was pretty much sold on punk rock, you know?

CCH: You and I were introduced because we hung in similar crowds and had a few things in common... notably theatre and comic books. You were trying to get me to listen to punk records and I tried to get you to listen to fusion jazz. I remember that you were more successful.

I'd heard of zines before I met you, but you were the first person I ever knew doing their own. Tell me about the ones you did before AVOW... I remember one in particular had you dressed up like a redneck on the cover.

KR: The first zine I ever did was as a sophomore in high school. Did it with a kid named Collin, who was a year or two older and who was the biggest influence on me as a teenager, both as a person and as a sort of gateway into punk. We called the zine CHICKEN-POX BLOOZE because we'd both just gotten over them. When you're 15 and 17, respectively, chicken pox are no fun, man. Scarring in more ways than one, you know? I had blisters on the INSIDE of my eyelids.

So we did a zine, and it was a pretty standard "kids in high school doing their first zine ever" kind of affair. Lots of dark magazine photos with "funny" captions above them, drawings, contributions from friends, etc. A lot of filler. We stapled a condom into each issue, which is retrospect was almost monumentally stupid, and I shudder to think that any horny kids actually used our possibly-punctured condoms to get busy.

After that I did a few issues of DRIVE-THRU LOBOTOMY with Tres - more of the same, but there were a few cohesive pieces here and there. Think we did four issues of that. That was my introduction to the idea that you could use a zine to get free records.

I started AVOW when I was eighteen. The first issue came out in Seattle, with my friend Alex. After that, Alex moved to Washington to go fishing and I moved to Newport with Nathan Beaty. I did AVOW and he did a zine called WHITE SPACE. I was great living with Nathan because he was just so goddamned prolific - I think he did six or seven issues and a bunch of other one-shot comic zines in the same amount of time it took me to do three issues of Avow. The issue you're talking about is an issue of WHITE SPACE, where we satirized bumpkins. I dressed up like a redneck, complete with a flag and a stupid mesh hat. We took a bunch of pictures of me waving the flag and flipping off the camera in front of a huge truck in the Fred Meyer parking lot. Ah, the impetuousness of youth.

CCH: Yeah, a couple of years later, kids with skateboards were still talking about that issue. I was always impressed by that.

You still do AVOW, which remains this sort of catch-all for your ideas, stories, essays, and art. Some kids might find zines quaint in a world with MySpace, LiveJournal, and all manner of blogging, but it remains fairly vital. What keeps it alive for you and the readers?

KR: Well, to be honest, AVOW's taken somewhat of a backseat to my other endeavors over the past year or so. Been a lot more immersed in design/illustration work and writing straight-up fiction, as compared to the "personal non-fiction" that I do in AVOW. It's not to say that AVOW's dead by any means (I gave up that idea when I got the thing tattooed on my pasty white body, you know?), but that issues come out less often. Currently at work on #22.

As far as what keeps it fresh and vital to the readers, I have no idea. As far as what keeps zine culture sharp and relevant in a blossoming era of blogs and online journals and shit? Well, for one, and I probably won't make any pals with this one (and my hypocrisy will be flaring neon-orange, considering where and how we're conducting this interview), but I think that the majority of blogs and journal postings and all that are basically done by lazy, self-indulgent people with an immediate gratification fix. The only difference between those people and kids who make zines is that zine folks are forced to consider things like editing, layout, composition, cultural relevance and page counts/printing costs. There's a glut of eye-wateringly bad zines out there today, but they're still done by people who took the time to create something tangible, a physical document.

The print zine is a totally archaic format now. Which is sad, because there is just nothing better than coming across a really good piece of writing in print, or trying to figure out how someone manipulated a photocopier to get the effect they did in a page. It's a question of static versus warmth. In that same context, there's something intrinsically rad about cassettes, about mix tapes, finding old vinyl in record stores. The same reason I prefer buying music in a physical format is the same reason I think a print zine inherently kicks a blog's ass up and down the block.

CCH: What do you want to do in fiction that you can't do with "personal non-fiction?"

KR: It's not even a question of wanting to do something in one that I can't do in another - they're just totally different animals. I've found that it's much more difficult to write a fictional story about a father/son black-market taser sales team than it is to write a little anecdote about the time a girl hit me in the arm with a sawhorse when I was drunk.

The AVOW stuff, there's not as much of a creative aspect there, really - you live life, then write a little story about it. Fiction is so hard for me because it's an entire house built out of the fog - it's ALL made-up. So I'm working from scratch to begin with, AND I have to remember those weird intangibles like pacing, plot, dialogue, character development, blah blah blah. It's hard to keep all that in mind and keep things mildly succinct, not go on a 150,000 word tangent.

That's all I meant: I admire the shit out of fiction writers, because the act of writing GOOD fiction is like pulling a sasquatch out of one's ass - it seems nearly impossible to me. Magic in its purest sense.

CCH: I've spent some time with you and your band NECKTIES MAKE ME NERVOUS. I've talked a little about this with other bands with writers... how does getting attention, getting your records out and so on for a band compare with the process of getting attention as a writer?

KR: Well, there's 25 years worth of a network behind us, being a punk band. The template for getting a record out there ourselves, getting it distributed and reviewed, was already laid out long before we formed this band. Someone who was tilling the ground of some other genre, say a country western band or something, I have no idea how they'd go about "networking" or getting their music out to folks. Is there an underground DIY network for country bands?

I think that the fact that I've written for bigger punk zines like Heartattack and Razorcake, and have done a bunch of art for other bands and labels, helps us out to some degree. There's a minor amount of name recognition there, I guess. Not much, but some. As far as getting attention as a writer, I can't really say I've ever gotten a whole lot of attention outside of the punk scene. Pretty much every attempt to break into any kind of mainstream or indie literary scene has been soundly squashed. Trust me, I've got the rejection letters to prove it.

CCH: That's true, but you have THE BEST OF INTENTIONS collection of AVOW pieces out there, a great book... but having a book published doesn't seem to mean as much as being pulled behind the curtain, categorized, and having someone with money behind you.

I think that part of the problem is that there are too few readers right now. And that the people who read tend to only read one genre or type of book. I think most writers would almost kill to have something with the attention a DA VINCI CODE gets, but would hate writing that sort of book. I'm sure not going to write something like that.

So is marketing killing books, with companies putting all their juice into one blockbuster? Or is it just the fact that it's harder to get people to read in a world with so many distractions? It may be both, but which one would you say is the bigger danger to the new writer?

KR: Again, you're talking to the wrong guy if you're looking for the inner-workings of the book world - I've got that stack of rejections that are as tall as my knee, remember? But a friend of mine, who does work in the publishing industry, recently told me that roughly 50% of the people in the US regularly read anything that could be considered literature. I thought that was a pretty generous estimate to begin with, but I suppose it makes sense when you consider how wide of a field "literature" falls under. That includes EVERYONE, from your Dan Browns, Tom Clancys and Jonathan Kellermans, down to your Chris Harts and Keith Rossons. And yeah, a lot of those readers probably don't stray too far from their favorite genre: crime novels, blockbusters, spy novels, romance, etc.

So when we look at it in that context, the average "literary" writer's already got a few huge strikes against her, you know? But as far as just how difficult it is to get a consistent readership, or garner any amount of attention to their book, I really wouldn't know. The AVOW Anthology is such an insular kind of deal; back issues of a print punk fanzine gathered into one volume. Random House is not exactly sending me fevered emails with a book like that. So, again, my familiarity is so nominal that I don't really have much room to comment either way.

But if you wanted me to get cynical, I'd say that for many of us, our attention spans have devolved so drastically to the point that blogs, Myspace comments and paragraph-long news clippings on the Interweb are about all we have time for anymore. But I will ALSO tell you that I go to the library all the time, check out ten or twelve novels and short stories at once, by writers I've never heard of, and at least 75% of them are excellent. Despite the crying that I hear from other writers, there is no shortage of incredible books being published today. But I also know that most books, from hardcover to paperback, run from $10-30, and people obviously aren't as willing to take a chance of the purchase of a novel by an "unknown" writer as they are taking that same chance at the library.

If nothing else, this documents why libraries kick ass. Hit up the goddamn library; if you like the writer's work, buy his or her book, keep your eye out for other titles from them. And I know that, for the self-published author, libraries accept gifts from them. Chances are good that if you send your public library a copy of your novel, it'll be filed in the shelves soon enough. For some authors, that might not matter that much; for a library-dork like me, it'd be considered an honor.

If you’re interested in getting to know Keith’s work and ask for information on how to get the latest issues of his zine AVOW (highly recommended), you can hit him up at his MySpace page:

http://www.myspace.com/keithrosson

You can

You can find his AVOW anthology THE BEST OF INTENTIONS at:

microcosmpublishing.com

And Keith’s band NECKTIES MAKE ME NERVOUS has a MySpace page as well:

http://www.myspace.com/theneckties