So I don’t have terribly specific influences, but looking back I can see bits and pieces of things that sparked for me, and set off a longing to do the same for other people. Poets like Rilke, Donne, Millay. Madonna’s confidence and charisma transfixed me. Same with PJ Harvey and Courtney Love—the whole Riot Grrrl era, which I watched from the sidelines, reading zines and going to the occasional show, was nevertheless important to me. David Fincher, Sofia Coppola, Michael Winterbottom, Wes Anderson. I have a very clear memory of reading a story on the Yangtze River in Spin when I was in school. More than the piece itself I remember stopping in the middle and flipping back to the byline so I could imprint the name in my memory. I almost never did that, but I was so struck by the writing and what she was able to do with the story. I thought, God, I’d love to do that. The name was Elizabeth Gilbert. Graham Greene was a revelation to me, both because he seemed to want to swallow the world and for the balance of feeling and control he achieved in The End of the Affair. That’s a book I would read out loud, over and over. Very early on I was drawn into the McSweeney’s community, and the sense of camaraderie and shared purpose galvanized me, it made me feel a part of something outside of my world in Toronto, where I didn’t really know any writers. Some of the writers they published, like Lydia Davis, David Foster Wallace—just awe. 

AK: You’ve also been heavily involved in The Rumpus community, which publishes such great essays. What would you say is the importance of the Internet for genres that, until recently, haven’t garnered as much attention? 

MO: Internet culture seems prone to giving established forms or ideas a novelty that we can all congratulate ourselves for recognizing and endorsing. The “longform” and “longreads” thing is strange, as though we need a hashtag to understand literature or journalism in this new context. Though maybe we do—my first job, around 2000, involved endless powerpoint rules for how to write on the Internet, and the first one was always to make it short. No one quite knew what it was for, but in-depth attention or thought seemed easy to rule out.