RM: There’s this line from your review of Kurt Cobain’s box set, where you quote a lyric about sitting in grandma’s trailer eating “mashed potatoes and stuff like that,” and you write, “If you don’t hear a universe of insurmountably sad memories in this usage of the phrase ‘stuff like that,’ well, be thankful.” So, clearly you’re trying to act as a bridge between two worlds, the world of mashed potatoes in the trailer park and the world of, like, people who lunch at Per Se. But does that bridge go both ways? Back when you lived in Manhattan would you ever call your old friends and be like, “You will not believe how fucking weird these people are”?

JJS: Not that often. No, I think that would be to paint a false picture, because I already felt very far away from that world. I’d already been through a lot of different chambers—going to Ohio, more of an urban environment, then going back south, but deeper south, a more isolated part, but also a more culturally aware part, living over seas a couple times, then the Oxford American experience, which got me thinking about the south and the kinds of places I grew up in, in a kind of self-conscious, abstract way. So, by the time I got to New York I was just some other kind of weird creature. There was very little of that kid left. That was one of the many things that made me want to write about it.

RM: Are you sorry there isn’t more of a publishing outlet for that type of sentiment—other than Oxford American, Texas Monthly, and a couple other glossy regionals like Garden & Gun—for that reversal to be made (i.e. somewhere that doesn’t tacitly regard New York City as the center of the universe)?

JJS: That was the idea at the Oxford American in its early days, and that’s part of what drew me to it. And the Sewanee Review, it had once had those kinds of hopes for itself. Yeah, I was drawn by the idea of a southern publication that wouldn’t think of itself as some kind of appendage, but instead speaking outward from some kind of center. But looking back, I think that was maybe kind of ridiculous. Even at The Oxford American, even early on when things were kind of heady, if we hadn’t looked at The New Yorker and said to ourselves, This is a superior magazine, and what they’re doing can be learned from, that would have been sort of asinine.