A few weeks back I met up with Tom Dibblee, editor for the relatively new online publication Trop. He was kind enough to sit down at a posh little place in Glendale, Capri Jimmie Maddin’s Lounge, have a few drinks, and answer some questions.
Patrick: So you got this Trop thing. How did this come together?
Tom: (laughs) It’s funny. I’m hesitating here because I’ve told this story so many times that I have this easily accessible, streamlined, one paragraph answer. And that answer is: Roger Sollenberger, Stephan McCormick and I were all living in Milledgeville, Georgia, a small college town about a hundred miles southeast of Atlanta. There it is: We were living there and we became friends. (laughs) We were the only people in town who were older than twenty-two, not local, and especially who were writers.
Patrick: So who were the other people in Milledgeville?
Tom: College students, locals. But actually Milledgeville is a really vibrant little town.
Patrick: Why do you think that is?
Tom: I think that rural culture there is intact. Rural culture there doesn’t feel like it’s dying.
Patrick: Much like Southern California’s might…?
Tom: I’m actually thinking more of the rural Midwest and rural Northeast. Rural parts of those places feel beleaguered to me, but the rural South went through its beleaguered phase like a century and a half ago. They got it down and the place is still intact so it feels, even, on the up and up. It’s an optimistic rural place. Like the worst is over. So yeah, it’s vibrant. It’s 18,000 people and it is rural, but because of Georgia College it had a handful of bars and restaurants.
The Trop was Metropolis Café, a Greek restaurant owned by an Indian guy named Deepak. He was at the time twenty-six. But before I met Roger and Stephan I knew maybe a few baristas, a couple of farmers, and then I started going to Metropolis because it’d just opened and Deepak was around my age and not from Georgia. We were fish out of water together. So I spent about six months hanging out there every night, just shootin’ the breeze with Deepak and the rest of the staff.
Then, one day Roger showed up. I was sitting at the bar at Metropolis. This was during the World Cup and I’m drinking beer and it’s 1:30PM, it’s 110 degrees out and there’s this guy sitting next to me and we start talking and he goes, “Where’re you from?” and I say, “San Francisco,” and he says, “Aw, yeah, I know a few people out in San Francisco.” And I’m thinking, “What the fuck?!?” I was holding myself back from pounding my fist on the bar. I’m thinking, “No one here knows anyone from San Francisco! Who the hell are you!?” So we talk for a while and the game ends at, whatever, 3PM and we make a date to meet up later. And by later I mean, like, 5:30PM that same day. (laughs) So I walked home, took a shower and kinda sat on the couch for a little bit and then walked back and Roger came back a few minutes later. It turned out we were both working on novels, and both sort of feeling marooned. At this point it’s the dead of summer in Milledgeville. The college has cleared out, there’s no one around. You see the same six people every day at Metropolis. So I was extremely glad to meet Roger. And then, sometime after that Metropolis installed a stage and we decided to start putting on shows.
Patrick: So Trop started as a performance collective.
Tom: Yeah. Our first show was an awards show. This would have been February of 2011. It was right around the Academy Awards and we put on a show where we gave ourselves absurd awards, just as an excuse to deliver absurd acceptance speeches.
Patrick: That would be the writing aspect?
Tom: Yes. Roger won “Most Culturally Sensitive Man.” He came up with his entourage and delivered this long speech about being a culturally sensitive man. But Stephan McCormick won for “Most Haggard Bastard Alive” and wrote a twenty-minute speech about the origins of haggardness in the French Revolution. We all said to him that if he delivered this twenty-minute speech it might kill the entire show, so he tore through it as fast as he could and scattered pages around him dramatically, and it wound up being an epic performance. It went over very well.
Patrick: It’s interesting that that was the first of Trop, but Trop is still doing that in a way, where you have this, not a new kind of non-fiction but maybe a skewed kind of non-fiction. This sort of “It could happen but it hasn’t happened.”
Tom: Fake non-fiction is one way to put it. It’s funny, especially now that we’ve started to take submissions, looking at what a short story is and what the fiction in The Weather section is, there’s a sensibility to that fiction. I think that… (pauses) Y’know, I don’t know how to describe it.
Maybe it’s that, when we started scheming, we all were going to have columns, and that’s all the site was going to be. It was just going to be a bunch of columns and these were essentially our silos for creative writing. Some were going to be pure fiction and some pure non-fiction. Mine was classic in-between and a couple others were in-between too. So we, rather than trying to categorize these columns, decided not to worry about it and call it quasi-fiction. These columns are not planned out. You have to figure things out on the fly. It’s like you’re improvising a novel in front of people, on stage. So for me as a writer, I needed the versatility to go in and out of both fiction and non-fiction. And Roger definitely did this too. At first he’s writing about a grocery store, then he catches a plotline and sees it out. He’s talking about this guy who lived near the grocery store and it became a short story. But I think embracing quasi-fiction was about giving us the versatility to let our columns be what they were going to be.
Patrick: If you want content weekly that sounds like a much more comfortable place to be.
Tom: For me that’s exactly how it was. At first I was writing one column post every two weeks and my life wasn’t eventful enough to supply a column with real information, so I would use really minor events and just fly off the chain to make them worthwhile. It wound up being about driving to Nevada, and once I discovered the Nevada thing, I didn’t want that discovery to end, so I made it about driving towards an eternally receding Nevada.
Patrick: Is that a way of filling in the gaps of where life could have been exciting?
Tom: It’s just a lot easier if you’re trying to draw on your own life in a recurring way, and frequently, you then need to be able to turn a story about walking into a dude’s kitchen into something. If you are confined to non-fiction that’s going to be hard.
Patrick: And boring.
Tom: And boring. Writing like this has become the case I make for fiction. When I’m talking to people and they’re telling me “Oh, I’m working on this and that, I don’t know if it should be creative non-fiction or not.” Well, to me, it’s about giving yourself the wider range of possibility that fiction makes available, so that you can make a story about walking into a dude’s kitchen worthwhile.
Patrick: Allowing yourself to be tangential. Even if that tangent is one where the thing never happened.
Tom: Yeah.
Patrick: Trop has a number of serialized novels going now. You have your own most recent one, Nightmares of Hell.
Tom: I have a couple of fake books going. The first one is My Bad Man Memoir, which is an idea that came up when we were doing our Trop retreat.
Patrick: What was that about?
Tom: Evan Allgood, Roger Sollenberger, Will Torrey and I spent a couple weeks in a house in Chincoteague, Virginia and wrote a lot and worked on the website. Will is from San Antonio and he has what became known as a “bumpkin voice,” which is a voice he uses not all the time but a lot. So we’re spending two and a half weeks straight in a little house with the same people writing a lot. And drinking a lot. And not doing much of anything else but those two things. And we slipped into one of those funny vortexes you only get in when you spend a lot of time with the same people in a confined space. And the soundtrack to that vortex was Will’s “bumpkin voice.” (laughs)
The way I would describe it is Will being incredulous at the modern world. Not knowing, for example, what “mocha” is and trying to order a “mo-cha” at Starbucks. Being really intent upon getting his free drink at the mini-golf place. Being certain that every drink he ordered came size large. In any case, the bad man memoir that I started to write was originally his idea. It was his “bad boy meth memoir” that he would recite into his voice-recorder. And I was the number one fan. We all asked him if he would actually write it. He talked about making it a Twitter feed at one point. We all really wanted him to do something with the bad boy memoir. He didn’t want to, though, so finally asked him if I could do it myself. I changed it so it seemed like my idea though, the “bad man memoir” instead of the “bad boy memoir.”
So I’ve got two excerpts from My Bad Man Memoir and more coming. But then I started getting into the idea of writing fake books, which is just fun. It just adds to the absurdity of it. If you’re just writing a four-hundred-word short story, that’s one thing. But if it’s four-hundred words, and it’s about something way, way less than walking into a dude’s kitchen, and the presumption is that it’s part of a one-hundred-thousand-word book, you’re giving yourself a lot more ammo to play with. So I started creating other fake books. I have My Bad Man Memoir, Nightmares of Hell, The Head and Neck Consultation Suite: A Bad Health Memoir, and then I also have Deleted Sex Scenes, which is a compilation of sex scenes that didn’t make it into any of those other memoirs. Both Sex Scenes and Head and Neck are forthcoming.
Patrick: One of the things that I think is really interesting about these fake books that if you were to write them enough how would they not become books? Wouldn’t they stop being fake at a point?
Tom: That’s a good question. Nightmares of Hell I could see myself going on with for a while. I’m not sure I could hold the attention of the reader (laughs) much beyond six or seven four-hundred-word excerpts. Fake books might have a shorter shelf life than real books.
Patrick: Speaking of keeping readers’ attention, being an online publication now, has that been difficult? You guys didn’t start that long ago.
Tom: Well yeah I’d say the whole project has been a challenge. Right now the main challenge is, at first we were all writing everything ourselves. We identified as a collective. But then, to keep the site growing, and to enable ourselves to have lives outside Trop, we had to expand, and find other writers, and open up a bit. So what I’m doing is looking around. Evan Allgood tends to approach people he’s seen at readings in Atlanta, but I look on Twitter. When I find something I like by someone who seems like a good fit, I reach out.
Patrick: Has that been successful?
Tom: We just started doing this two weeks ago, and we’ve gotten a few new people that way, and I think we’ll find more. I think that’s my new strategy. To canvas the other online literary magazines out there in search of people who would be a good match. I like that better than submissions because we do have such a specific sensibility and aesthetic, the sort-of fake non-fiction thing and kind of a we-don’t-do-that-much-pure-humor-writing-but-there’s-a-lot-of-humor-anyway thing
Patrick: I’ve noticed there’s humor all over the site.
Tom: There’s a good amount of it. I think part of that is from being performative. Part of it is just being who we are and who we’ve chosen to be friends with.
Patrick: If someone wanted to submit to Trop how would they do that?
Tom: Just reach out. There’s a general email address on the page and we accept submissions for The Weather. That’s [email protected].
Patrick: Trop’s reviews and interviews include people like Jesse Ball, Ben Marcus, and there are a few others from that camp. Do you guys have a focus for your criticism?
Tom: We just brought on a new reviews editor, so this could change. But before, most people who were writing reviews for us were writing more than one or are were going to write more than one for Trop. We were generally doing everything in-house, so we wound up reviewing people that we were individually interested in reading and thinking about. Though we did at one time have a mission statement for our criticism that we would review younger American writers. People who we saw occupying the tier that we were all trying to get to.
Patrick: What’s that tier?
Tom: Many of us are working on first novels. So we wanted to review the people who had a novel or two out. People who were where we wanted to be. Speaking for myself with my criticism, I just wanted to know the terrain. But that actually wound up being complicated because reviewing debuts of literary fiction is a more sensitive task than reviewing, say, Jonathan Franzen. You can say whatever the hell you want about Jonathan Franzen.
Patrick: There’s already a body of criticism.
Tom: Right. But if you’re writing about someone who just got his first book out you have to be more tactful. And so, if you’re reviewing a lot of debuts and second efforts you wind up with too much positive criticism. It started to feel like we weren’t really flexing our critical muscles. I know for me, after a few debuts, I was like, “I’m not doing this again.” Because I want to be able to write within an expanded frame and not have to be delicate.
Patrick: Do you feel like you’ve been too sweet? Too precious to debut novelists?
Tom: I believe what I write in my reviews. But if I were reviewing someone’s third or fourth book they would be different reviews, more like talking to a friend than to an elder.
Patrick: Which is interesting coming from someone who is involved in a really new publication. This is a new publication talking about new literature from new writers. It sounds like infants grabbing at infants.
Tom: You’re waking up in the morning and working on what you hope will become your first novel and you’re struggling and you want to pull your hair out and then you sit down to write your review of a first novel. (laughs) If you have any kind of self-awareness, you’ve gotta–
Patrick: Because it’s not just about being kind to the other writer. It’s also about being kind to yourself.
Tom: It’s respecting the effort. With someone with their fifth or sixth book out you’re still respecting the effort but you know they’re all right. And for you, the would-be debut novelist, a fifth or sixth novel is distant enough that there’s no sense that you’re secretly talking about yourself. If you’re an aspiring first-time novelist writing about Jonathan Franzen, there are just too many leaps involved. But if you’re sitting there talking a debut (puts on voice) “In first novels this this and this,” you’re immediately talking about yourself.
Patrick: Speaking of which. You have all these fake novels and tons of reviews and all this other stuff up but you do have a book you’re working on.
Tom: All of us do. This is another reason I think for the fake non-fiction, for the humor, and for the performative aspect. The original group of us that started with our columns, we all had novels going or short story collections we were working on. We all wanted to do this but we didn’t want our columns, our writing for Trop, to replace our books. We wanted it to be what at the time we naively called “low-pressure, complementary” writing. And it became… (laughs) It’s not low-pressure. We’re trying to make it good but let it maintain a more playful feeling.
I think for me doing a playful “fake book” is a way of compartmentalizing. I have a very specific Trop style that keeps my writing separate from what I do in the novel. I think that part of that is making sure my Trop writing doesn’t take away from my novel. Another part of that is that my novel is happening in private while my Trop writing is happening in public. From the time I finish a Trop piece to the time it goes live is a matter of days. It’s immediately public. It feels like there’s an audience sitting right there. I’m conscious in my Trop writing that I’m writing to that audience and writing in such a way where with my novel I know I have as much time as I want to sit with it by myself and make it right.
Patrick: One of my favorite columns is “Charlatans of Pop.” Where’s this Hesiod James? Where does he come from?
Tom: Hesiod James comes from his own universe. He’s from Virginia. I think he’s twenty-nine or so and as far as I know he’s been a professional musician for coming up on a decade. But he’s a sideman. Meaning he’s a bassist who plays for country stars that you’ve heard of and he rotates around. He was playing for one guy this year then I saw him a year ago play for another guy out here in Lancaster. But Hesiod James is interesting because he’s an autodidact. Can you tell that from the column?
Patrick: Sure.
Tom: Yeah. He is an at-the-top-of-his-game country bassist. And he’s also a front man for his own band too. Hellens. Hopefully they do well. I’ve listened to their music. It’s really good. But think about the normal course of events for a literary twenty-something who’s writing a book. Think about the normal kind of trajectory, you know when you’re a teenager you read Catcher In The Rye and Hermann Hesse then when you’re in college you maybe discover, I dunno, like, Pynchon and maybe Roland Barthes or something like that. And then maybe you have a David Foster Wallace phase and then you maybe decide you need to read a lot of “the great books” and then you want to read the contemporary fiction so you know what’s going on. Hesiod James, being an autodidact, is not like that. He has his own trajectory. He’s really reading the classic texts. Like Plato’s Dialogues is just the beginning. He’s referring to stuff that I don’t think anyone else on Trop could possibly pick up on. He’s dropping names of minor characters from minor tragedies that are barely even referred to on Wikipedia. (laughs)
Patrick: But also sometimes comparing those characters to The Beatles or The Beatles’ manager.
Tom: That’s him. He reads that shit while waiting to do sound-checks.
Patrick: What should we be reading right now?
Tom: I like The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers. It’s about Iraq. Powers is an Iraq vet. It’s such a good case for fiction. If you think of my case for fiction being that you can tell a story about walking through a guy’s door into his kitchen, and if you have fiction at your disposal you can possibly make that story good, Kevin Powers has a heightened case for fiction. He makes Iraq real through fiction. What happens is gruesome. It is extremely gruesome, heart wrenching, and sad. But the beauty of the book is that it makes the gruesomeness of the war, and what happens to the protagonist, through the way Powers sets up the plot so that you care so much about the character… he makes it real. What happens to the protagonist is something that you probably read about in the paper. But Powers makes all the shit about Iraq in the newspapers register. Just by tying it all to a plot. Having that gruesomeness happen to a character that you’re emotionally wrapped up in.
Patrick: And not to get too precious about this but that sounds like an argument for fiction is that you can take those things people would gloss over–
Tom: I think that’s exactly it. I think that’s exactly what Kevin Powers does. The Yellow Birds brought Iraq home for me. It’s what lodged the war in my consciousness as much as it could for someone who wasn’t there and has met a couple of people who have been but really is very much removed. That was a book that lodged Iraq in my consciousness.
Patrick: So fiction can matter.
Tom: I think Kevin Powers’s The Yellow Birds is a case in point for why fiction matters.
Patrick: As you know, Black Clock is a Los Angeles based publication, of course we have contributors from all over the place, but you’re here in Los Angeles. You have a number of Trop folk out in the world. Is there anything about Trop that is about Los Angeles?
Tom: The fact that we’re spread out is a reflection on Milledgeville more than anything. Milledgeville is the kind of place where if you’re in your mid- to late-twenties and you’re working on a novel you might want to hole up there for some time, to get a lot of writing done. But you might not want to live there forever. It’s good for a little while, but the people who pass through Milledgeville tend to disperse. And really half the point of the site, for me, was to be able to keep on working with friends I don’t live near anymore. We all dispersed, but we get to keep on collaborating.
As for LA, it’s been easier to start something here than elsewhere just because of how warmly received we were. The literary community in LA, my experience has been that when I meet a literary person, whether that’s someone who’s got a couple books out or someone who’s trying to get their first going, they’re just glad to meet another literary person. You’ve got the resources of a huge city, but the literary subsection is small enough that everyone’s welcoming and glad to meet you right off the bat. I barely realized Trop was real until I mentioned it to people and I was really encouraged and heartened by how the literary community here, just upon catching wind of a new online literary magazine from someone they’ve never heard of, just how happy they were that that was happening. That it existed. That something literary was coming out of LA. And it put pressure on me though. Like, people were happy to hear about Trop, and I’m thinking, “We better make this thing good!”
By Patrick Benjamin
an Associate Editor for Black Clock and an MFA Writing candidate at CalArts
