RM: Do you read many lyric essays—John D’Agata, Lia Purpura, Jenny Boully, Nick Flynn, et al.?

 

JJS: Yeah, I try to keep up, and I like all the writers you mention, although these days I have to do so much research for my own work, there's hardly any time for extracurricular reading, which sucks. D’Agata and I know each other. I was actually the editor at Harper’s of the piece that went wrong and ended up launching him on the whole…

 

RM: You were the guy who rejected the Vegas piece “on factual grounds”?

 

JJS: Well, yes and no. I was his editor. But the decision to kill the piece wasn't mine to make; that came from above. Of course, D'Agata's whole  M.O., which is to tell you outright and unapologetically that he's played with certain things, left the magazine no choice. But that’s all just...politics. He and I have since figured it out.

 

RM: That’s an interesting distinction between you and D’Agata, which is that you’re working within the confines of magazine journalism, where you have fact-checking, you have deadlines, you usually have to go out and do reporting and interviews. Do you enjoy those strictures?
 

JJS: I like seeing how far I can push them without making them snap. But I never knew anything else. My first piece for The Oxford American was fact-checked, and I never really wrote for anybody who didn’t fact check. So that makes you obedient, but it also makes you resistant. From the very beginning, you’re trying to see, Okay, how can I carve out areas that they can’t really check—where, in fact, there can be no checking—but that at the same time, seem to fit within the perimeter of nonfiction? That ended up seeming to me like fun territory to mess around in. And there are a few pieces that have it as their technical impetus or whatever. My “Violence of the Lambs” thing was meant to be the pushing of it to a sort of reductio ad absurdum. I haven’t really gone back to that level of craziness since.