Matt Bell is an author, English professor, and editor. He currently teaches creative writing at Arizona State University. In this episode live from the conference floor at AWP 2023, we’re celebrating the one-year anniversary of his indispensable book on the craft of writing, Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts. We also discuss his dystopian novel, Appleseed, and and his admiration for climate writing that restores hope for humanity. Listen to the full episode to find out what Bell means when he advocates for ‘radical revising’ and his mission to conceptualize revision as a process that can transform a draft into a novel, rather than an assignment needed to be completed for school. We also discuss his dreamy ten-plus-year relationship working with Soho Press (shout out to the indie stalwarts!), and some of the advice he gives to his students: 1) allow readers space to figure out things for themselves, 2) experiment with non-traditional writing structures, and 3) work through tangly writing problems together. Finally, Bell ends this episode with advice for gaining inspiration for your next work and the unfortunate discovery that you can learn what your agent truly thinks of you through their editorial notes (writer beware!).

Published Date: December 14, 2023

Transcription

Phuc Luu: This has been a live recording of the Effing Shakespeare PODCAST by Bloomsday Literary at the 2023 AWP Conference and Book Fair. We're thankful to be the official podcast for AWP for a third year and have invited a gallery of guests that you don't want to miss out on. As always, please subscribe, rate and review so we can continue to bring you interviews of amazing writers sharing about their amazing work. Enjoy.

 

Interviewer:

Matt Bell is here. Today we're going to talk about Appleseed. You wrote a book called Appleseed. You may have heard about it. My favorite description of it is a how not to manual for humanity's salvation. That's a good one. And yesterday he had a book birthday, his craft book, Refuse to Be Done, A Guide to Novel Writing, Rewriting and Revision. It came out yesterday, yeah?

Matt Bell:

Yeah. A year ago yesterday.

Interviewer:

A year ago yesterday?

Matt Bell:

Yesterday, yeah.

Interviewer:

WTF? What am I doing with my life? It's been a year.

Matt Bell:

It's been a year.

Interviewer:

Where he says that you don't write a novel one time, you write it two times and then three times. So if you're out there just thinking you can write a novel once, Matt Bell is going to tell you you can't do that.

Matt Bell:

Well, I think if other people can do it, they should, but I can't.

Interviewer:

Okay. I love it.

Matt Bell:

Yes.

Interviewer:

In addition to that, he's the author of the novels, Scrapper and In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods, which I would like to turn into a song at some point, as well as a short story collection, A Tree or a Person or a Wall. And I'm sure this has been mentioned to you, but it sounds like that unfortunate slip-up from the president who shall not be named in the press conference, one of many unfortunate press conferences, a nonfiction book about the classic video game, Baldur's Gate II. And he's a native of Michigan, which I'll let slide. I'm from Ohio.

Matt Bell:

No one's perfect.

Interviewer:

No one's perfect. And he teaches creative writing at Arizona State University.

Speaker 4:

Awesome.

Interviewer:

That's a lot of stuff, man.

Matt Bell:

It's a lot of stuff.

Interviewer:

You've been doing a lot of things-

Matt Bell:

Yeah.

Interviewer:

And drinking gin.

Matt Bell:

And drinking gin.

Interviewer:

And it's lucky.

Matt Bell:

Yeah, it is lucky.

Speaker 4:

I think drinking the gin helps.

Matt Bell:

I think so too. It's medicinal, right? Especially quinine-

Speaker 4:

Yeah.

Matt Bell:

I'm not going to get scurvy. You can get scurvy writing novels.

Speaker 4:

Exactly. Exactly.

Matt Bell:

I'll be the first novelist to die of scurvy at the desk.

Speaker 4:

Yeah, while you're typing away on the high seas.

Matt Bell:

Yeah. I should write more books on boats.

Speaker 4:

I think that'll be helpful. Books on boats with gin, gin and tonics.

Matt Bell:

Yes. I'd watch that podcast too actually. That seems like a great-

Interviewer:

That sounds great.

Matt Bell:

... great residency.

Interviewer:

All right. Okay, let's start with your craft book. Tell me what it means to be a radical reviser and then tell me how you found your way to Soho.

Matt Bell:

So I think for me, revision was always one of those things we were asked to do in class. You'd workshop something, you'd turn it in, you'd do a revision. But I realized, especially once I started writing novels, that I had not been maybe taught to revise like what practically you did. So some of the things that led to Refuse To Be Done was just trying to learn practically what I could do to take the really rough stuff of a first draft to make it into a book people could read. My first novel, In the House, when I finished drafting it, I finished writing the book and then went in the backyard with a bottle of whiskey, not gin. And my wife came home and I was drunk in the backyard like sad. And she's like, "What happened? Are you okay?" And I'm like, "I finished my novel."

So I just knew it was so bad that something had to be done. So some of it was just realizing what that could be. And I do think it's actually really freeing to know that you're going to revise heavily, that you're going to change a lot of things, that you don't have to get everything right the first try. It's maybe impossible, at least for someone like me, to get everything right the first try. So I think that's really comforting.

For Soho, Refuse To Be Done is the fourth book I've done with Soho, so I feel really lucky to work with them. My editor, Mark Dote, and I have worked together a long time. I think we started working together in 2012, so we've been working together for 10 years, which feels really lucky.

Interviewer:

Oh, nice.

Matt Bell:

But when that book I was sending it out to agents and agents were nice but not biting, and I thought maybe I'll send this to some presses on my own. Soho was one of the places that took submissions and I knew Mark's work and I did eventually get an agent. And five days after I got an agent, Soho offered on the book based on my submission. So I called my agent and was like, "Hey, I think I sold that book I sent you. Do you want to negotiate it?" And I've worked with that agent for 10 years, Kirby Kim, who's great.

Interviewer:

Yeah, yeah.

Matt Bell:

It's kind of a funny ... I got really lucky there too, right? Because if I hadn't got that agent right before that, I wouldn't have one.

Interviewer:

So did you say to Kirby, "This means you pay me," right?

Matt Bell:

Yeah, absolutely.

Interviewer:

And Kirby was like [inaudible 00:04:51]-

Matt Bell:

Whenever he makes money, he gives me 15%. It's nice.

Interviewer:

I love it. That's amazing. So a lot of what we do on the podcast is talk about the publishing journey and I would love to hear more about that editorial relationship with Mark. How did you know, number one, "Oh, this is going to be good. I like this guy?" And number two, how did you manage to stick with him? Because we've heard so many stories where they find their agent, sorry, they find their editor and then they switch to another press or blah blah, blah. It seems like 10 years is a long time in general for any relationship, but it's super long time for an editorial relationship.

Matt Bell:

I think that's true. And honestly the rest of Soho is pretty stable too like the same marketing people have been there the whole time, the same publisher and associate publisher. So I feel I've had a really close long-term relationship with everybody there which makes it really easy.

I think Mark's a really fantastic novelist himself. He's published two novels with Grey Wolff that are really great. I actually had published a short story of his at a magazine I was editing, so I knew sort of his aesthetic as well.

Interviewer:

Oh, that's great.

Matt Bell:

So it wasn't completely fresh in that way and he just really got what I was doing and he was willing to ... So the first book we did is really a deeply weird book and I think we let it be weird and we kept it weird. And I think another person, I mean I don't know how you'd make that book into something more marketable, but also it was good that we weren't trying.

Interviewer:

He wasn't trying.

Matt Bell:

Yeah. It was just make the book more itself and I think that's been true of all of them. Also, Soho as a place has given me, I think, a lot of room to run. They bought the second novel we did when I was still writing it based on a conversational description of it. I didn't show them any pages. They put a lot of trust in me and they don't do craft books. Refuse To Be Done is the only thing like it on their ... I think they partly did it to do the book with me.

So yeah, it's really great to have a place that you can have that kind of long relationship with. That's I mean really the goal is to have these lifelong ... If your agent and your editor and, man, maybe even your publicist or something are with you over 10 years, no one has that. And you save so much time, you don't have to relearn each other. It's exciting.

Interviewer:

What would we call it? There's the EGOT and then that's like what? Come on. Give me some acronyms. What would that be? Publicist, publisher, editor, and what was the other one? Agent?

Matt Bell:

Agent. PEAP? Got that, PEAP?

Interviewer:

We're here with [inaudible 00:07:15] Bell, the only AWP PEAP Lifetime Achievement Award Winner. I don't know if this is going to stick. I'm going to work it. You know that I'll drill down on this and make it happen long term.

Matt Bell:

I was trying to figure out if you had publisher, editor, translator ... What's an S? You get PEST. We could put a little different thing together.

Interviewer:

Yeah, there is another one. You get an EGOT with an N. It's like the EGOT and then the N is like a fucking Nobel or something.

Matt Bell:

Oh yeah.

Interviewer:

And there's zero people on the planet.

Matt Bell:

Ishiguro writes a Broadway musical or something.

Interviewer:

Yeah. Or Lin Manuel Miranda starts writing ... What do you have to write next? I don't know. We're going to fix this in post, [inaudible 00:08:01], I mean Matt.

Speaker 4:

[inaudible 00:08:01] if only in draft.

Interviewer:

Okay, good.

Matt Bell:

We'll make it [inaudible 00:08:10].

Speaker 4:

We'll make it all work.

Matt Bell:

A Venn diagram where nothing touches. We'll do it.

Interviewer:

I love it. Okay. I want to talk to you about your teaching. I've got three questions in a row. I love doing this.

Matt Bell:

Great.

Interviewer:

Keeps my guests on their toes. Okay. I want to know the best piece of advice, the piece of advice you love to give to your students, the one that you find is the most useless that's like a conventional piece of advice that people say and then the like, "Ah, shucks" but also very true. What do you learn from your students?

Matt Bell:

Absolutely. I think there's lots of things I'm always, always saying to students, but one of them definitely comes to mind right away as I talk about the reader does not want your logic. I teach novel writing a lot and there's all this explanation that's in most novel drafts, which is like a character does something, then the writer explains on the page or too much-

Interviewer:

I don't know what you're talking about. I would never do anything like that.

Matt Bell:

Too much info dumpy kind of stuff. But I think that's like the scaffolding of the book and it's really them reading the book to themselves as they're writing it. A character acts and explain the character action. But all that has to come out and when it comes out, it makes the space for the reader to act. And when a writer hasn't given you room to react to things, what are you even doing?

Interviewer:

Yeah, that's good.

Matt Bell:

And I'm always trying to show them where that's happening, but it's totally, it's fine. It's part of drafting. My drafts are full of that too.

I don't remember what the second one was. The useless piece that of advice I give them?

Interviewer:

That's the second one. You're good. You're doing great.

Matt Bell:

No, I think a thing that I probably harp on a lot and that I feel like I've learned a lot myself is really the traditional structures of narrative. If you don't know how your novel should be structured, let's try a three-act structure. Let's try a Freytag pyramid. There's some of these things, but of course a lot of the books I like are wild and do totally different things.

So in the absence of a plan, let's try one of these plans but also, man, do something else. So it's sort of a weird if you don't know what to do, try this conventional thing but maybe there's something more interesting. Part of that I think I've gotten really obsessed with is students are always trying to make things proportional and symmetrical. If you have three point of view characters, then they'll be like everybody gets a hundred pages. I'm like, "You don't have to do that. That can be a different shape." And so that's the pushback against the sort of how you deviate from the plan sort of matters.

And then I'm learning things from them all the time, but I've been teaching these novel writing courses for 10 years and the pitch to them is that they're generative. Everybody starts at zero when you write novels together as opposed to work shopping existing novels. So then you see the problems at the stages. Everybody hits this problem at 10,000. Everybody hits this problem at 30,000. But then I of course have gotten to watch that too, getting every 18 months, to have 10 really smart young novelists in a room writing novels together. I see some of those drafting things in my work in a way that I could not in the past, things that are like it's okay that it's like this now because it's going to work out. And also you can avoid some stuff that everybody does because I just watched 10 years of students do it.

Interviewer:

That's kind of a jerk thing to do.

Matt Bell:

Yeah. It's good. It's tricky. I smuggle them some government money in healthcare and they teach me how novels work. It's fine. It's a good trade.

Interviewer:

Whatever makes you sleep at night, Matt. I mean-

Matt Bell:

Almost nothing, yeah.

Interviewer:

That and gin.

Matt Bell:

Yes, yes.

Interviewer:

Those are the two things.

Matt Bell:

Yes.

Interviewer:

Oh my gosh. Okay. In diving into some of your work in preparation for the show, I happened upon your Denis Johnson essay which I found very moving and this is the fan girl portion of the show. So I'm going to try to keep it all together. But I was really moved in that because you were saying that your relationship with Denis Johnson's work was that you could show up all of the good stuff and all the shitty stuff could show up and be okay on the page. And I feel that way about your Substack that every letter is ... This is the honest truth for me as a writer and whatever you can take, whatever you're coming to the table with and you can take away from it, it feels like that's what you're doing. Where did that come from, that level of generosity?

Matt Bell:

I'm thinking about Johnson specifically. Some of the stuff in the last story in Jesus' Son, Beverly Home, part of is he's working in this home for people who have disabilities or diseases and stuff. And he talks about everybody just being openly a mess. We're all there together openly a mess. And I think, man, it's messy being a writer. It's messy being a person. And ideally we want to be able to be those things. You want to be able to be yourself and the parts of you that are laudable and the parts of you that aren't are often really connected.

So I don't think it does us a lot of good to sort of pretend that we're always put together or that everything is sort of easy for us. I think showing the parts of your writing process that are difficult or don't work or the things you're not good at is probably more useful for students than what I think of as a traditional kind of mastery model where the teacher's just a person who has it all figured out and you just ambiently learn by being around their genius, which was definitely a mode of pedagogy I was taught in.

I mean it's nice to be around geniuses but I also feel it's easier to like, "This is how I work through these problems. Here's a way you can work through these problems." And I think writing the Substack has been a really great way of concretizing some of my own thinking about things. One I wrote, maybe the last one I wrote, I think was something I've been thinking about for 10 years and talking about, but I'd never written down. And there was stuff in that ... I was thinking of a different one, but the last one I wrote was about action. And I was thinking in there about how-

Interviewer:

That's the gin. That's the origin of the gin.

Matt Bell:

The gin, I'm talking about the gin. Yeah, that's what I'm talking about.

Interviewer:

The gin tweet.

Matt Bell:

I was talking about maybe when you're writing or reading, it's easier to picture body motion than just picture your faces. And I was like, "Is that just my brain?" You know what I mean? When you describe facial expressions, what do you see? But when you describe a person's body in the world, maybe you can see them leaping or gambling or clambering or whatever they're doing. And I had a bunch of people write me and be like, "Yes, that's exactly what it is. You don't see pictures when you read." And I was like, "Weird. I've had that thought for 10 years but not expressed it." And so you don't get to bounce the idea off anybody if you don't share it. And same with some of the things that you're not good at. By talking about it, people give you solutions to them which is often they're solvable.

Interviewer:

Oh, that's dirty little secret.

Matt Bell:

Yeah. You confess so people will help.

Interviewer:

Holy shit. That's really good. It's not just naval gazing? [inaudible 00:14:46].

Matt Bell:

Yeah, [inaudible 00:14:45] navel gazing.

Speaker 4:

[inaudible 00:14:46] writing in community sounds like interdependence?

Interviewer:

Oh my God.

Speaker 4:

Yeah, craziness.

Interviewer:

We are solving all kinds of problems today. I feel like we did a good job getting out of bed.

Matt Bell:

Yeah.

Interviewer:

This was worth it.

Speaker 4:

Yes.

Interviewer:

Okay, let's move on. We've solved all those problems. Can we solve climate change?

Matt Bell:

No, but-

Interviewer:

God damn it.

Speaker 4:

We were close. So close. We were almost there.

Interviewer:

Okay. Let's talk about Appleseed and the role of a cli-fi fiction writer. You wrote this enormous multi-plot line narrative about a world that has suffered immense decline, calamity, much like the real world we live in that is in its demise, not to put it too-

Matt Bell:

Maybe, yeah.

Interviewer:

Where do we put this fiction that you're working on in the real world? What's the role of you as an artist in the midst of this?

Matt Bell:

Yeah, man, you're always trying to figure it out. I think one part of it that's just for me maybe, or starts for me, is that I really think of novel writing as a mode of thought, a mode of inquiry. Writing a book for five years is a way to think about something for five years that while I'm fixing commas or moving characters around, I'm also thinking about the issues of the book.

It's the Donna Haraway phrase, staying with the trouble, staying with that. Writing a novel is one way to stay with the kind of trouble. So that's useful on its own. I do think it's also a facing into a thing instead of facing away from it. I came out of the research of that book feeling not maybe more hopeful exactly but less anxious. I at least understood the problem and I understood ... I think the solutions are kind of known. It's just whether we're going to do it or not. And that made me feel calmer, right? It's a political problem maybe, not a science problem. The science, we have stuff we could be doing and we are doing.

Interviewer:

That's an interesting turn.

Matt Bell:

And then I think there's also the characters in each part of the book are trying to make the world better in the way they understand the world they live in. And I think that's a hopeful gesture, to do what you can to improve the world as you encounter it. It seems to be part of that and-

Interviewer:

That's generosity. It's more generosity.

Matt Bell:

Yeah, and the book can be smarter than the characters. Protagonists have tunnel vision. They can only see what they're interested in. But with that long timeline, the book can have a wider lens on that answer of what should we do. So I think that's part of it.

And I think the other thing for my particular book is I had this note on my desk at the time I was writing that said, "Go big with wonder." And I wanted the reader to feel the wonder toward the natural world in every stage of the book. So even in the kind of degraded 50 years in the future or the far future sort of glaciated America, there's not a whole lot alive, to make those places beautiful and sources of wonder because I do think it's our sort of wonder for the world that will make us want to save it. If the world is a thing you don't like or aren't interested in, why would you save it? But the everyday sort of wonder that the world offers is I think the closest for me like emotional link every day to why we should care for the places that we have.

Interviewer:

Yeah. I mean it's the same premise for National Geographic.

Matt Bell:

Absolutely.

Interviewer:

Or a zoo. Make kids interested in the shit that's going on in the world around them.

Matt Bell:

Those charismatic animals at the zoo are one of the entries into loving the world before you can go to ... Most of us aren't going to go to the Arctic Circle, but we can imagine a polar bear there or something. Right?

Interviewer:

Or go see the penguins.

Matt Bell:

Yeah.

Interviewer:

Okay. I'm feeling good. I'm feeling hopeful.

Speaker 4:

Okay, great.

Interviewer:

That makes two people at this table.

Matt Bell:

I will say I think I have discovered writing this book and what I'm working on now that I have a utopian heart. I believe the world can be a good place. I believe we can make it better. I believe the world is a good place and we can care for it. And then I have a dystopian plot brain where it's like, "Let's make some shit go wrong" because that's writing books. And I think I'm maybe trying to mirror those things. Can I write a book that is more like what would it look like if we were living positively? What would we look like if we did that?

There's a great book coming out this year that I've blurbed by a guy, Nick Fuller Googins called The Great Transition that depicts a transition to a post fossil fuels economy. And it's really plotty and fun, but it also shows you how it could be done.

Interviewer:

Oh my God.

Matt Bell:

And I feel it's the really important climate book that I know is coming and I feel like that's the work. I'm really glad that's happening in climate fiction. That's a better ethos than my book has.

Interviewer:

Right on. We started the day, as I said, with V.V. Sugi Ganeshananthan, and she asked us an important question that I told her we would pass on to other smarter people than us.

Speaker 4:

Yeah.

Interviewer:

So we're going to ask you. She needs to know how to start the next thing because I did that thing, "What's next for you?" And she was like, "I don't know. I'm going to sleep. I know I'm going to sleep, but I don't know how to start the next thing." Because she just got off publishing a book that took her 15, almost 20 years, to write.

Matt Bell:

Yeah, her whole adult life. Right?

Interviewer:

Yeah.

Speaker 4:

She can start a residency so you can give her a couple of days to sleep.

Interviewer:

I think what we need is for you to solve her problem as well.

Speaker 4:

Yes.

Interviewer:

That's the theme for today. What do you do to-

Speaker 4:

Climate change and then [inaudible 00:20:00].

Matt Bell:

Maybe there's a couple of things, right? One is that every book has its own unfinished business. There's a thing like that book couldn't do or you couldn't finish in that. I know my first novel is a really closed sort of world, the people, it's just this family really. And as I was finishing it, which I think I was finishing it during the 2012 presidential election which feels like a lifetime ago in a different world-

Interviewer:

Did people even have phones back then?

Matt Bell:

But I could feel like the book didn't have room for some of the things I cared about politically or culturally. It was too tight. So the next book was set in Detroit, and it was really contemporary and I think really about violence in America and trauma and things that that book couldn't do, but it was a really angry book. It was angry to write. It was angry to read. I think that book is almost unfriendly in some ways. And I thought I don't want my books to feel like this. I don't want to feel ... Like Appleseed's about serious things, but I don't think it is a grind to read.

Interviewer:

No, it's actually not.

Matt Bell:

And I think maybe my second book is a little bit, and some of what I'm writing about in this book, the new one I'm writing, is [inaudible 00:21:01] about climate refugees and things like that that are part of Appleseed but are not the focus of it.

And you can just feel I want to write books that are maybe more attempting to be utopian, to do utopian thought as opposed to dystopian thought. So one of the ways is what's the thing that book could do tells you some of the marching orders for the next book. I also say it makes me feel less anxious publishing if I'm already down the road on another thing. So I started the novel I'm writing a couple of years ago when Appleseed was on submission. It'd been out for two weeks and I woke up and I was like, "I better start writing a book." So I think some of it is that.

I do have a lot of things fail between books, though. I would rather be writing than not writing. So if things fall apart, it's okay, but I'm more myself on a day I wrote than when I didn't. So I'm always making something and I just accept that not all of it will turn out.

Interviewer:

Does your agent, does Kirby ever look at you and be like, "No, man?" Or no, you don't tell your agent?

Matt Bell:

I don't tell him. I get it on the road first.

Interviewer:

You're like [inaudible 00:21:57].

Matt Bell:

Yeah. I do not ... Every once in a while, he's like, "You could write a book about this. It'd be really good." I'm like, "I could but I'm already writing this crazy secret book."

But Appleseed, if I called him and be like, "I think I'm going to write a book, and it's a retelling of the Johnny Appleseed folk tale, but he's a fawn from Greek mythology," he'd be like, "Don't. Don't do that. That's a bad idea." Because it is a bad idea. And all my books are kind of bad ideas. So I think that the proof is the book. So usually after about a year of working on a book, I'll write up a little synopsis and I send it to Kirby just that this is what I'm doing. And he always writes back, "We'll make it work," which is not exactly like a vote of confidence but-

Interviewer:

No, so does Kirby ever-

Speaker 4:

But what other option does he have?

Interviewer:

Yeah. That's right. But we have always made it work, so I feel like-

Interviewer:

Kirby's the Tim Gunn of agents to have.

Matt Bell:

It's good, yeah.

Phuc Luu:

So if you're looking for Tim Gunn energy, go hit up Kirby Kim.

Matt Bell:

I was just talking to people at lunch about you don't really know what your agent says to editors about you but you hear back when you talk to the editors a little bit. And when we were selling Appleseed, all the editors had their own ideas of what could be done or what could be changed. And he must have told them this because every editor said, "Oh, Kirby mentioned that you're a problem solver." And I was like, "What does that mean?" They're like, "Oh, I think the book is screwed in this way and he's like, well, Matt's a problem solver. He'll be glad to figure that out."

But it's just interesting what his pitch is for what I'll be like to work with, "Matt Bell, problem solver, will be willing to fix the third act of this novel if you need it to be."

Interviewer:

That's awesome.

Matt Bell:

Yeah, that's all I-

Interviewer:

They have little cards they profile, author profile. "This one needs kid gloves. Matt Bell will solve your problem." I want that on your business card.

Matt Bell:

Absolutely. Problem solver.

Interviewer:

I want it to be like, "Problem solver/PEAP award winner."

Matt Bell:

Yeah, that'd be good. I think that'd be nice. There's that 30 Rock episode where Tracy and Jen are the problem solvers that go around and try to fix everything. I feel like I just need one of their T-shirts.

Interviewer:

Okay, we'll work on it.

Matt Bell:

Work on it. That and a gin next year.

Interviewer:

Dude, I feel really bad about that gin. We tried a couple of places on the way back from lunch to find good gin.

Speaker 4:

Yeah, we were-

Interviewer:

There was a nice man at the Masala restaurant who said, "Check out 7-Eleven," and we were both like, "7-Eleven sells alcohol?" But we're from Houston. What do we know about Seattle? Maybe they sell hard liquor at 7-Elevens. They did not.

Matt Bell:

Those bastards.

Interviewer:

We could have gotten-

Matt Bell:

You should have gotten those canned gin cocktails or something [inaudible 00:24:24].

Interviewer:

Yeah, we could have gotten ... or I think they had even-

Speaker 4:

Those are the worst.

Matt Bell:

Yeah, they're really bad.

Interviewer:

... rose in a can. How would you have felt about that?

Matt Bell:

I could do a rose. I'm flexible.

Interviewer:

We should have done it.

Matt Bell:

I mean my [inaudible 00:24:35] is that I'm thirsty. You know what I mean? It's like the solution to it is wet things.

Interviewer:

Look at this problem solving happening right here. I'm thirsty. I need a wet thing.

Matt Bell:

Yeah, it's easy. That'd be my liquor store. Just call it Wet Things. That's not going to work. I felt myself get canceled right there. Take that out of the podcast.

Speaker 4:

Too late. Too late.

Matt Bell:

It's live streamed. It's already out. We've done it.

Interviewer:

He got boosted at the top and canceled-

Matt Bell:

At the same time.

Interviewer:

... all in 30 minutes.

Speaker 4:

We'll rework that.

Matt Bell:

Exactly. Revision again.

Speaker 4:

Yes. Don't worry about it. Don't worry about it.

Interviewer:

Revision. We should have known. This guy, he's going to need to do it three times.

Matt Bell:

Absolutely. Yeah.

Interviewer:

We'll come back tomorrow. Saturday, it'll be great.

Matt Bell:

We should really just do it every day until ... That'll be three drafts.

Interviewer:

It'll be perfect.

Matt Bell:

Yeah. There we go.

Interviewer:

Okay. Done.

Speaker 4:

So what is the tastiest thing you have overheard doing AWP?

Interviewer:

Hashtag overheard at AWP.

Matt Bell:

Well, I would say as soon as I got on the boarding line for my flight here, there was a young guy in front of me talking to a young woman, and all I heard was a conversation was like, "Have you read my novel?" And I was like, "Oh, oh no. You met a person in the line to get in the plane to AWP and then sat next to him for three hours when they have not read your book. They haven't heard of your book. No one's read anybody's book." But I was like, "You're a bad actor. You can't be asking people those kinds of questions."

Interviewer:

Did you step in with your Superman and be like-

Matt Bell:

Absolutely.

Phuc Luu:

No, not today.

Interviewer:

Absolutely.

Phuc Luu:

Get behind me, Satan.

Matt Bell:

No. I took a picture of him. I Google reverse image searched it. Then I gave him a one star review on Good Read, so it was fine.

Speaker 4:

Excellent. That's the way.

Interviewer:

Amazing. Doing the good work. Doing the good work and [inaudible 00:26:14].

Matt Bell:

Whatever I can to, absolutely, just slowly crush another writer's spirit.

Interviewer:

We're going to give him a badge. Your business card is overflowing now.

Matt Bell:

Yeah, I really have a lot of duties. It's good.

Interviewer:

You do and you're writing.

Matt Bell:

Yeah. Trying.

Interviewer:

Well, keep doing the good fucking work that you're doing out there. It was an absolute pleasure to have you on the show.

Matt Bell:

Oh, you guys were so much fun. This was great.

Interviewer:

Thank you, Matt Bell.

Matt Bell:

Thank you for doing it. Thank you for having me.

Interviewer:

Have a happy AWP.

Matt Bell:

Yeah, thank you.

Phuc Luu:

Effing Shakespeare is a production of Bloomsday Literary, hosted by Kate Martin Williams, Jessica Cole, and produced by me, Phuc Luu. Our trusted and hardworking intern is Elena Welsh. With special thanks to Juanita Lester and the AWP staff without whom this would not be possible.