New Version of My Newsletter

Conversations, #1

Hello everyone,

Here’s the new version of my newsletter. The Conversations Series is what it sounds like—transcribed conversations with people I like. Not interviews. Not journalism in any sense. Just a little talk about whatever’s going on. They’ll come out Sunday afternoons because Sunday afternoon feels like a good time to read a long talk between two friends. I’ll probably do this for the next couple months then try something else.

First one’s with my friend Nathaniel Kennon Perkins who lives in Mexico City. Nate’s the founder of Trident Press and has written some very good books you all should read, my favorite of which is his latest, Wallop. Buy that book read it. Buy it for your friends.

Here’s me and Nate on tour:

Here’s another photo of me and Nate on a book tour. We’re on the left of this shot.

I hope you enjoy our talk.

-AG

PS. Other quick things.

• I’m having a holiday sale of all my books, tour merch, shirts, hoodies, posters, mugs, stickers, pins, Hello America tapes and tape players, etc. That’s here.

• Been listening to a lot of Bill Callahan records. He’s great for these big snowy drives through the country. “Seagull” is my favorite song right now.

• Got interviewed by PopMatters about the new book. Looking forward to seeing how that came out. I’ll post a link when it does.

• My label Hello America released a couple new things. Go listen to some stories.

CONVERSATION SERIES, #1

ADAM GNADE + NATHANIEL KENNON PERKINS

AG: Hello from Kansas! What are you doing right now?

NKP: I just finished eating dinner. Nothing fancy. Rice, beans, eggs, and tortillas. Inexpensive protein. And a simple dinner means you have more money for a fancy dinner later, hopefully somewhere next to a beach.

My apartment is a mess. A whole family of plumbers were here all day, trying to solve the problem of why I haven't been able to take hot showers. They said the line from the tank on the roof of the building—not drinking water, but water I use to bathe, wash my dishes, and brush my teeth—was clogged with leaves, spiders, and cockroaches. I will use that new, cleaner water to mop away the footprints they left across the floor, and I will clean up the kitchen, probably listening to an audiobook about the history of the CIA as I do so. This past weekend was a holiday weekend (The Anniversary of the Revolution), so the garbage collectors haven't come for a while. When I hear them ringing their bells outside, I will take the trash down and put a few coins in the tin can that they have attached to the side of the truck with bailing wire.

I always thought of moving to another country as a great adventure, and it is, but what you forget about great adventures is how much time you still have to spend feeding yourself, keeping things tidy, working. That tedium doesn't disappear. But there are these moments in between, like last weekend, where I went with friends to a pilgrimage site and danced under a holy ahuehuete tree before climbing straight up the side of a mountain to a giant statue of the Virgin Mary. Or this upcoming weekend, I will visit my friend Jorge for a few days in the small village where he lives in Puebla state. Maybe we will hike or have a bonfire or drink mezcal. In those moments, you think, "I wish this was my life," and then you remember that that's exactly what it is.

Since October, when I visited you and my friend Max (who also lives on a farm), I've been thirsting for the country, to be outside of this huge, noisy, crowded, concrete city for a while. To see the horizon and the sunset every day. But I remember when I lived off-grid in the mountains of southern Colorado for a year, all I wanted to do was visit New York. Just dumb I guess, but it's impossible not to want it occasionally, even if I've put in so much time and work and money into getting my papers in order here. I see pictures of your place, and I fantasize about being somewhere like it. But you've been there for a long time now, and maybe you sometimes fantasize about being elsewhere. Somewhere with fewer chores to do. What's the image or place that pops into your mind when you fantasize about being somewhere else?

Garbage bells are ringing.

AG: Yeah, I think about cities. I fantasize about living in New York or LA. A lot of concrete. No farm chores. No animals to take care of. But the reality of it is I would be miserable. I want to be in the country. But it's just... you know what I mean, any place has its difficulties specific to itself. On the farm we have wind knocking trees over, predators killing the animals... it wears me down. I'm definitely worn down at the moment. The past couple weeks have been a lot. Especially after the election. Have you noticed anything different in Mexico City after Trump's win?

NKP: It's hard to say if anything's really changed or not yet, or how exactly it will change, but things aren't good. Nor can I figure out if the tension I've been feeling is really present, or if it's my own worry that I'm projecting onto my surroundings. In the two or three days after the election, I felt like people in the street or on transportation were looking at me differently. I wasn't sure if it was disdain or curiosity or pity or what. Maybe they weren't. Of course, there's talk about the promised deportations and the threat of tariffs, what those will mean. My anxieties take me to dark, dark places that are too horrible to write out.

I'm far from being an expert on Mexico. In fact, I think it's pretty much impossible for anyone to be; it's such a complicated, diverse place. I can't say how people feel or what they think. I've been rereading Paul Theroux's book about Mexico, On the Plain of Snakes, which was written during the first Trump administration. In it, he writes something about how people tend to have a general understanding that the state is corrupt and violent, so why would a corrupt or violent state in a neighboring country be so surprising? I'm sure he says it better than that. I tried to find the quote, but the book is long and I hadn't marked the page.

I've also often been thinking about what the dictator Porfirio Diaz said, "Poor Mexico, so far from God, so close to the United States."

The main thing I've learned over the last few years is that US-Americans, in general, have very little concept of what or how Mexico actually is. Trying to adopt a non-ethnocentric understanding, or at least accepting that you don't understand and probably never will, is a far better strategy than the failure-prone approach of pretending that you do, which the U.S. has a long history of, all over the world. Who knows what will happen? Things are complicated and the actors are unpredictable.

In my opinion, one of the best things any US-American could do is take Spanish classes. Thank god the world is bigger than just the U.S.. It's time for us to make better connections with other parts of it, but in a sincere, intentionally non-exploitative way. That's the shit that gives me hope.

AG: I remember things feeling very tense in 2016. Here in Kansas it doesn't feel like anything's changed except when I'm around friends and they're... there's something heavy on them even if they're not up front about it. Of course my friends are the kind of people who take this sort of thing harder than most. I mean, I'm that kind of person. But here... it's like nothing happened. All the election signs are still up. No one's being rude or different or tense about things. I don't know. Maybe it's too early to tell. I'm writing about it. A book, I mean. Writing about the year as it happens. I'm working on it at the end of the night. I make myself... I'm not sure what you'd call it. Whiskey, some very hot water, a few Luxardo cherries and some of the syrup, and I sit down to work for a short time. Maybe an hour and a half, maybe two hours. This is very different than how I usually write. What are you working on right now?

NKP: I think that writing in new ways is important to the process, even if those methods are spurred by horrors. Every few months I have to change the way I write, whether it's on a computer or in a notebook, in the morning or at night, at home or in a coffee shop or the park. What once worked stops working, and it becomes time to scramble to find the new thing.

I apply that same approach to the projects I work on, so I have a ton of things I'm picking away at right now. I just switch between them when it feels right. This last year was really fucking hard, like the hardest I've had in a long time, so I wasn't always able to work on much that I couldn't finish in one sitting. As a result, I wrote a lot of poems. Maybe I'll pick the ones I like most and make a book or a zine out of them. I've often gotten offended when people referred to me as a poet, but here we are. I've also been drawing these little comic journals, usually four panels each, and posting them on my patreon (patreon.com/nkperkins). Maybe they'll turn into a zine too. A story collection has also been slowly accumulating. I don't have super serious plans for any of that stuff yet. Just enjoying working on things when the inspiration comes. The other part I'll figure out later.

The real project is this novel, which I started almost two years ago, right after I saw you at the Las Vegas, NM Zine Fest. Or maybe before. I can't remember. Now that I have a less demanding job, I've been able to pick it up again, and I'm getting close-ish to something. Or at least I hope it's something. I'm like 10,000 words or less away from having a working draft of it. I told myself I'd finish the damn thing by Dec 1st, but I don't think it's going to happen. The scariest part about writing novels, for me, is dedicating so much time to them and not knowing if they'll be good or not until they're finished. In 2021, I wrote the same novel two separate times, and it sucked both times. Then I turned it into a screenplay, but I couldn't tell if that sucked or not, so I buried it in my hard drive, planning to look at it in 2025 or 2026. Hopefully this project isn't a repeat of that.

Finishing and publishing the translation of Mat Guillan's novel What You Don't Expect from Me was a huge undertaking and I'm really proud of it. My first real translation work was in this trilingual Peruvian anthology called Poesía Súper Contemporánea de Perú y Estados Unidos. It came out in 2015 or 2016 and was edited by Noah Cicero and Jorge Alejandro Vargas Prado. I had a lot of fun working on the two little poems they asked me to do, and I continued off and on in the following years, translating journalism, poetry, and short fiction. Mat's novel is the first full-length work I've translated. It was so much more difficult than I thought, but I really learned a lot and kind of got addicted to the feeling. I'm working on something sort of similar now. It's too early to really announce it, but last year I read this hilarious novel by another Argentine writer who we both know, and I went crazy for it. I read it a second time, out loud to my girlfriend. I thought, "This needs to exist in English," so the author and I started making plans to do it. She really did the translation, and I'm just playing the role of English-as-a-first-language editor, which also involves referencing the original text and trying to find ways to talk about things that have little cultural context in the U.S.. It's the best.

Add to that my full-time job, Trident Press stuff, and some freelance journalism and design jobs, and I'm pretty busy. Sometimes I feel like I'm not actually a writer because my last book came out almost five years ago, but I'm working on stuff. Feeling that way has also made me think a lot about how important it is to have an artistic practice that isn't tied somehow to your sense of identity or your money or social circle. It's important to do art just to do art, even if — maybe especially if — nobody will ever see it. So I've been painting a little, too. I just put on a bad movie and paint aliens and devils and hot dogs floating in outer space. Do you have something like that? What's your art that you don't show anybody?

AG: I know I should have something like that. Art no one sees, I mean. It would be healthier to do something just to do it. Good for the heart and all that. But my work schedule isn't very healthy. I think it was... I guess 2020, yeah, 2020, right in the heart of the pandemic that I decided I would do a book a year until I was unable to anymore. Because I mean something will stop me eventually. Life throws curves and stones. But for now I'm able to finish a book a year and I'm planning to keep at it. I say it's unhealthy because it takes everything I've got and really drives me into the ground. Sometimes the strain of the work puts me in bed for a few days or drives me out of my mind a little. But I like doing it and I can do it, so I'm going to continue. Sometimes we like or even love what's bad for us, right? But it's also good for me in other ways and I'm okay with how that balances out. It would probably be smart for me to stop doing Hello America and close the HASC shop in town. And there's the farm too. I kind of fuck myself in a lot of situations by adding things that I can't handle. At the moment I'm busy from about 6:30am until I sleep. It's pretty dumb. Not a smart way to live and I'm probably drinking too much at the moment. But I also like overloading myself until it feels like the wheels will snap off. Every once in a while they do—snap off, I mean—but I think I need the tension and the sense of danger. What are you up to this week?

NKP: I just got back from a quick trip to the north of Puebla state, where I drank pulque with my friend Jorge, looked at trees, and walked around on country roads. I told you that the last time I was there a woman put a curse on me. I was walking along, fully peaking on mushrooms, and this lady scratched a sign in the dirt, pointed gun fingers at me, and slammed a stone into the middle of the sigil she had drawn. I tend to get superstitious, and I felt like that curse followed me for a long time. I think it's worn off now, and nothing spooky happened while I was out there this time.

Now, I'm back in the city, and I'll just be running errands and working. There's constantly shit to take care of. I'm not traveling for the Thanksgiving holiday or anything. I only have one day off, and I'll probably spend that working on other projects. I think there's some sort of non-Thanksgiving dinner or party planned with my girlfriend's family, though I'll remain hazy on the details until I'm actually there. I'm sure the food will be excellent.

My major goals are to write, go to the gym, and drink coffee. Just live life and try not to be too stressed by it.

What about you? Do you do Thanksgiving or something similar? Any plans?

AG: Thanksgiving is a weird one. I don't like it. But I like the food. I mean I love the food. Especially stuffing. I just can't get with the idea of the holiday. Plan is to eat with Elizabeth and Jessie's family and I'm always down to eat and see family. I think for the most part it'll be business as usual. I mean my weekdays and weekends are pretty much the same thing. I work all the time, but it's work I want to be doing and it gives me the freedom to move around at my own schedule. Hey, Nate, it was so nice talking to you. Thanks for doing this. It's always great hearing what you're up to. I feel like you're really doing it right. How about as we close out you give the readers a book recommendation and a music one. How's that sound?

NKP: Thanks for asking me to do this. It was fun.

A book that I enjoyed recently was Battles in the Desert by José Emilio Pacheco, recommended to me by a friend with great taste. I think it's one that everybody reads in middle school or high school here, but it was new to me. It's a shorty.

A band that I've been listening to a lot this year is Onda Vaga. It's like, rumba/cumbia/reggae/folk rock/tango from Argentina and Uruguay.