Jeff Oloizia: Hello and welcome to Writing Forward, a conversation show featuring some of the best and brightest voices from across Wisconsin. I'm Jeff Aloisia. I'm a former editor at the New York Times, a Milwaukee suburbs native, and now I'm a freelance writer based in Madison. Each week I sit down with writers from and connected to my home state for candid, sometimes messy conversations about craft, identity, and what it means to build a writing life rooted at home and away from the traditional center of the literary world. From fiction to nonfiction, poetry to journalism, we dig into what keeps Wisconsin writers moving forward, one word at a time. My guest today is Barrett Swanson. Barrett is a Madison-based writer whose work combines memoir and deep immersion, placing himself inside subcultures and belief systems to explore masculinity, conspiracy, spiritual longing, and the stories we tell to make sense of a post-truth world. His debut essay collection, Lost in Summerland, published by Counterpoint Press in 2021, was widely praised for its emotional honesty and intellectual range. The writer Lauren Groff called it, an essay collection of the very highest order. Barrett is also a contributing editor at Harper's Magazine, and his writing has appeared in publications including the New Yorker, the Paris Review, and the New York Times Magazine. His very first published short story, Annie Radcliffe, You Are Loved, earned a pushcard prize in 2015, and his work has been recognized by anthologies like Best American Short Stories and Best American Essays. Though his writing reaches some of the most prominent literary venues in the country, Barrett writes and teaches from Madison, Wisconsin, and he's a member of the creative writing faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, a perspective that opens interesting questions about place, literary culture, and building and writing life outside traditional publishing centers. And now he's working on a new book, Equipment for Living, Notes on Selfhood After the End of the World, which is forthcoming from Atria Simon & Schuster. I'm Barrett Swanson, welcome to Writing Forward

Barrett Swanson: Thanks so much for having me.

Jeff Oloizia: Just to set the scene here, for context, you and I are friends. We met at a coffee shop in Madison because I had read your book. I recognized you from the author photo. And I did what I think most writers are afraid of doing, which is I walked up and introduced myself. And then almost immediately, we realized that we shared a hometown. ⁓ So I come to this conversation as a fan first.

Barrett Swanson: Yeah, and I'm surprised he recognized me because I ⁓ maybe 10 years younger in my author photo. So ⁓ a lot had changed.

Jeff Oloizia: I wanted to have you on in large part because I admire your work, but also because I think you've built a serious literary career while staying rooted here in Wisconsin. You've published widely, you've won major recognition, you've entered national conversations, and you've done it largely from Madison. So that tension between center and periphery, ambition and geography, I think is something worth digging into and something I want to return to. But first, We begin every episode of the show by asking our guests to share a brief passage from someone else's writing, be it a novel, poem, essay, or article, that for them evokes Wisconsin in a memorable way. Can you tell us what you chose and read it for us, please?

Barrett Swanson: I chose a poem, I believe it's actually an unpublished poem by my friend Josh Kalshure, a poet based in Madison, Wisconsin, who has a book called Tidal from Four Way Books. And this is a poem called The Body of a Walker. it's about, ⁓ among other things, it's about Chris Farley's house. Chris Farley grew up, believe it or not, in Maple Bluff, which is... ⁓ a neighborhood just north of Madison, and Josh and I frequently walked through this neighborhood. ⁓ So I know this house well. This is called The Body of a Walker. And so began a great quest to harvest from my calves' visible veins, as I wanted pride dolloped into me, and it was the simplest pathway, and one I'd never have to face straight on. Plus, it was a beautiful thing. More beautiful even than a barber's hand mirrored display of a fuzz-free neck or even the shininess of a healing knee. And eventually even the tiniest child might happen upon me and know all my routes and then just safely pass me on the boulevard, offer me the simplest wave. To get them, I found a series of subtle hills in a hidden neighborhood whose nerve center was a country club, whose streets lacked logic and traffic. They were heaven to me, and where I did a year's worth of silly huffing and puffing in only three months. And the world in that time calmed for me and stayed as such until my quest was beginning to come into view for others. And then the calm dissipated and failed to underscore my plans, which puzzled me as much as it did my dear friend, whose language always held me correctly. And yet there was nothing smart to say about it. I'd look behind me. spot a sprouted capillary at the top of my Achilles, and what of it? I just go on my way, pump my arms, tense my oblique, and suddenly I be above the main lake, on the steepest of the subtle hills, surrounded by privacy hedge, a tradesman's truck obscuring my path, tracers of oak bent light pixelating the shingling of a house with black shutters and white siding, a famous house. the childhood home of a local hero, a very funny man famous for how he played with his body, how he toyed with it, how he made it fall, how he made it destructive, how he controlled it, how he let it lose control, how he said sorry for it, how he rubbed and postured and owned it, and ultimately, how he put it to bed. And unsurprisingly, like all of us, it was tiny at one point. and then became less tiny and grew into its own right here on this beautiful property with its magnificent yard, its professional garden, its tasteful mailbox, its wraparound three-season porch, the most majestic I suspect I've ever seen, in that I stare into it as I pass to check on who lives there now and if they're sitting, at least partly, in the sun.

Jeff Oloizia: I love that.

Barrett Swanson: Incredible? Yeah. I mean, just an incredible poem.

Jeff Oloizia: I can see why you might choose that. Tell me why. But I'd love to hear it in your own words. As somebody who lives in Madison, think that is so evocative. We both are about the same age and grew up with Chris Farley and saw the ways in which, not to ⁓ intellectualize this guy who was a physical comedian, but the ways in which he used his body and his body was used against him for comedy is like... actually a really ripe subject for a poem. ⁓ But it's also interesting because I think when we think about Wisconsin, often in the sort of national consciousness, it's about these sort of pastoral scenes or the Northwoods or something. But at the center of this poem is a country club. Tell me why you chose this particular piece.

Barrett Swanson: ⁓ Well, for one thing, I think Josh is an incredible contemporary poet and so wanted to highlight his work as someone who's also based in Madison and also based in the Midwest. But ⁓ I think Farley, for me, is an interesting synecdoche of maybe the Midwest more generally and how what I like about the poem is that Kalsher seems to be recuperating Farley and almost divinizing him as a kind of martyr for a place and the ways in which he's ⁓ taking his body and making use of his body and almost patronizing his viewers. There's a way in which I think being a writer from the Midwest, you know, I'm frequently dispatched to coastal places and asked to immerse myself in communities ⁓ whose members or whose ⁓ residents have no clue where Madison, Wisconsin is, and ⁓ who assume that I'm gonna come shambling in, shaking the straw out of my hair. And there's a way in which I think I identify ⁓ both with that impulse of Farley's to make use of what he has, ⁓ but then I see something really beautiful about the way in which Josh is recuperating and... resuscitating Farley as a human. ⁓ And something about where that house is situated in the landscape of the Midwest, abutting a country club ⁓ on the banks of Lake Mendota ⁓ in a neighborhood sequestered maybe from national consciousness. This quiet. ⁓ sun dappled place. I'm interested in how he did that.

Jeff Oloizia: I want to unpack that a little bit. ⁓ As I mentioned in the intro, you and I are from the same place. We had, I think, probably similar childhoods that were not sort of traipsing through the meadows as much as manicured lawns in football fields. ⁓ Harper's has sent you a bunch of places, other magazines. You said you make use of it. How much do you embrace that? Are you offended by this stereotype of the sort of bumpkin who gets dispatched to do these things or is it something that you feel a sense of pride about?

Barrett Swanson: I think that there's two registers that I think about it in. The first of which is that ⁓ it is useful, just as sort of a utilitarian journalistic technique. I'm interested in the extent to which that allows, that affords me a certain kind of access that, say, if I was... you know, coming from New York, there's a certain contrail of associations that would be trailing me. Whereas just, you know, coming from the Midwest, I'm an unassuming ⁓ persona. The other element of it is far more personal, which is that, and has to do, I think, with how I approach my subjects more generally, ⁓ which is really trying to see the person inside some frequently dispatched to harebrained ⁓ communities or harebrained situation. I've gone to TikTok mansions. I've gone to utopian communities. I've ⁓ been with anti-war veterans who started protest communities and organic farms. I've ⁓ been buried under rubble at the world's largest disaster preparedness compound. And so when I'm inside these narratives, it's really easy for me to see the people there as avatars for the place or for the industry or for the subculture that they're inhabiting. one thing that I think I've been tutoring in as a midwesterner is ⁓ being able to see someone apart from the sort of adjacent stereotypes that accrue around a person. So those are habits of mine or calisthenics of being that I think are forged when you come from a place that's so routinely maligned in the broader national consciousness. And so for me, it's more of a spiritual commitment or perceptual commitment when I walk into a place. like, OK, you might be seeing me ⁓ as some sort of cheese grating Midwestern who, ⁓ whose parents are obese, like who everybody's watching Fox, et cetera. But I'm going to show you through dint of my perceptual habits that I'm going to regard you far more patiently. And so that produces all sorts of journalistic tactics. I don't like taking pieces where I don't get to spend considerable amounts of time with the subject. Because in some ways, I want them to see me as a person and to forget that I'm just a writer. If the piece goes well, there's a connection that transcends the occasion for my being there.

Jeff Oloizia: I want to come back to that. I'm so interested in your process and the ways in which you sort of embed yourself.

Barrett Swanson: But you want to talk about how my stomach resembles Chris Farley's stomach.

Jeff Oloizia: Yes, exactly. Like I said, we're the same age, so I'm there with you.

Barrett Swanson: No, I was inviting a correction, but you did not disabuse me of that. It's fine. It's okay. Yeah, good.

Jeff Oloizia: We keep each other honest. I'd love to hear about sort of your earliest relationship to writing, specifically, like who were some of the first people, be them teachers, mentors, who made writing feel alive or possible to you?

Barrett Swanson: I grew up playing sports and in high school really saw myself as a sort of consummate jock. I wanted to play division one football. I tirelessly pursued that goal. I was the type of kid who was waking up at 6 AM and wearing ankle weights and doing hill sprints before school, ⁓ sort of self-laceratingly committed to this enterprise. And... ⁓ had some success with it and realized that the brass ring I was chasing wasn't the thing that was going to provide any sort long-term existential nourishment and that I was doing it for all sorts of ancillary reasons. And it was really late in high school when my mom actually gave me this portraiture book of writer. It was black and white photographs of writers like Toni Morrison, Martin Amis, Nabokov. And next to it were curiously similar to how this show begins, their favorite passages from literature. So there's this dour-looking photo of Amos. I mean, he was always looking dour. And next to it was this Baudelaire poem. And I was 16 years old. I did not regard myself as literary. I think I was linguistically inclined. I was good with language, did really well in school with papers, et cetera. but did not see myself as an intellectual. And the top of my head flew off when I read this Baudelaire poem. 16 years old. Probably just bedacked in Nike athleisure or something, sitting on my mom's couch and reading this Baudelaire poem and something happened. The synapses started firing and crackling in ways that ⁓ made sense to me. It wasn't until college that I started really writing, trying it, ⁓ in any kind of serious or or a private way, you know, the public performance of writing for school. I'd always been rewarded for that. I had a teacher named Mrs. Kean who taught advanced composition at my high school and remains ⁓ one of my heart's darlings ⁓ who told me that I could do this and that I was uniquely gifted as a writer. But that stayed with me. That thought lingered into college. then I'm embarrassed to confess that ⁓ Most of my early influences are maybe unsurprising. ⁓ Like Contrast Thompson, Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, ⁓ Baldwin, classic touchstones of new journalism ⁓ were really the thing that got me going ⁓ and were an early indicator of where I would eventually go in my career because that soon transitioned to a preoccupation with poetry and fiction. ultimately did an MFA in fiction. And it wasn't until later in my 20s that I found my way back to magazine writing and essays. ⁓

Jeff Oloizia: I too had a Miss Keen. Miss Keen? Yeah. Really? Well, not in name, but... You did the same thing for me. Yeah. And I just want, you know, I wonder sometimes, my mom was a high school English teacher. I think like she did for me what your mom did for you. Yeah. Do you remember the first magazine story that really like knocked you out and showed you what the possibilities of creative nonfiction or...

Barrett Swanson: That would have been great. There was a piece in Wired that I had stumbled upon by Evan Ratliff about ⁓ the surveillance state and trying to see if he could go fully off the grid. I think Wired had commissioned all sorts of federal agencies to track him down. And it was an experiential piece that I thought was so charismatic and compelling. and ⁓ was precisely the type of thing that I wanted to do. So that was something I happened upon and then discovered the greater tradition of this kind of work, going all the way back to De Quincey, but then up through George Plimpton and Paper Lions ⁓ when he plays quarterback for the Detroit Lions, ⁓ that sort of thing. then, of course, contemporary, more contemporary iterations of this. like Wallace, John J. Mary Sullivan, Wells Tower. ⁓ Diddy and the White Album was another piece that ⁓ so thoroughly channeled the frequencies in my head that I felt like this is something I wanted to do and commit my life to.

Jeff Oloizia: Yeah, that through line is clear and obvious, in I think a really narratively compelling way. You know, I'm thinking about your essays in your book, like Consciousness Raising, where you attend a weekend sort of New Age men's retreat, ⁓ or Disaster City, where you sort of literally entomb yourself in rubble as part of a disaster training scenario. I think there's a willingness to put yourself there physically and emotionally into unfamiliar environments. What is it that draws you to that kind of immersive reporting?

Barrett Swanson: I think that you could probably attest to this, but people who know me well know that I'm neurologically predisposed to stay at home. ⁓ I feel like I have the nervous system of a small child. And there's a way in which these sorts of pieces ⁓ shove me into the world and into ⁓ scrutinizing the extent to which my assumptions about the world match up with the lived particularities of an experience. And there's something about that I find incredibly compelling. I'm sure, you know, a Freudian wearing horn-rimmed glasses could talk about the extent to which the journalistic premise of going into it and seeing myself as a protagonist of an experience makes it easier and more tolerable when I go into environments where I'm buried 16 feet underground or when I'm made to endure primal scream therapy in the woods at a men's retreat or, God forbid, to spend time with TikTok influencers across a four or five day period. Every encounter that I have is for the peace. And so there's a sort of intellectual and an emotional buffer that is really fruitful. And it's... ⁓ I think it makes me more willing to do things that I wouldn't ordinarily do.

Jeff Oloizia: Yeah, as someone who sort of is self-described ⁓ predisposed to stay at home, do you find that being forced into those situations is more invigorating or is it ⁓ taking a lot out of you?

Barrett Swanson: It's totally invigorating. ⁓ But as you know, doing similar kinds of work, part of the task is remaining so open and available to what is happening, ⁓ a kind of social temperament that is a perpetual yes. Anything that's happening in front of you, you're saying yes to, which means becoming so tenderized. toward the conversation and the person in front of you. And it's a weird enterprise whereby people are getting unutterably vulnerable for you and with you. ⁓ But the nature of the assignment requires it. It's not like I can then diarhetically unburden myself of my own stuff, right? So there's a weird kind of therapeutic function that I think a writer like this serves where you're holding. the stories of so many people. This is particularly true when I went to Sobrew, which was Bonaru's sober encampment. There's about 150 sober individuals who, for reasons that are still unclear to me, go every year and endure the drug-laden Mecca that is Bonaru and hold space for one another to... They have 12-step meetings five times a day. They go to concerts together. They listen to this music, which as a prerequisite, I thought you had to be stoned to like, but apparently not. And they're this incredible community. It is a great fortune of my life that I got to spend time with this group of people. And incredibly intense environment. ⁓ Manchester, Tennessee in June. is a Dantian kiln of unbelievable skin varnishing humidity and heat index of 110 degrees. So you're more or less just damp the entire weekend. Your socks are soggy from sweat. I met some unbelievable people. And I remember driving home from that. encounter and the entire ride home, I was basically in tears. Just because of the number of stories that I heard and how much ⁓ pain was in that community and how much ⁓ joy was in that community in spite of it.

Jeff Oloizia: I think if you do this kind of work right, emotionally it asks a lot of you. And I know this is getting into like, ⁓ know, Leo and Tom Hardy talking about like sleeping inside bears on the side of the revenant. Like it's not that serious, but. Right, exactly. ⁓ But I am curious about it. think like similarly, I feel sometimes that my writing self is my most sort of empathetic, curious self.

Barrett Swanson: And we're not that attractive.

Jeff Oloizia: which is a feeling you want to chase.

Barrett Swanson: Yeah, increasingly, for there was a little while where I stopped doing magazine pieces because it was so exhausting and I've started doing it again and I realized that the perceptual habits that I have when I'm on assignment, it's a spiritual discipline. ⁓ Every encounter, every conversation is alive with the frequencies of possible meaning. That this might be, there's a kind of or mercenary way of thinking about it, a journalistically vampiric way of thinking about it, which is like, this is gonna be good for the story. But if you're faithfully attuned to what makes a good story, which is to say, how can I best capture the ethos and emotional resonances of this place, the good story is coexistent with what does this mean? What does this moment mean at this particular moment in history? What does it mean for the people who are here? And... It's the closest thing to ⁓ a spiritual discipline that I've found is how to genuinely pay attention to somebody in the most selfless way I know. How do I emotionally chameleon myself to the person in front of me? And it's exhausting, depleting, but incredibly rewarding work. And I feel like the best pieces I've done And the best writing I do is an after effect of that kind of attention, really trying to understand the contours of a person in a place. I would say it's kindred, I would imagine that it's kindred to the experience of having a near-death experience where you're so grateful to be alive and ⁓ newly attuned to all the wonders and splendors of the world after that. And then you feel yourself coarsening. to the banalities of the routine and the everyday. And I feel that after going on assignments sometimes. I go come back and be like, yeah, I should do laundry or that person just cut me off. But when I'm ⁓ reporting, of it is potential material. of it is ⁓ freighted with zinging with significance, which is just like a ⁓ wonderful way to enter the world.

Jeff Oloizia: You said something that I want to go back to about the necessity of saying yes as you are reporting, ⁓ which I largely agree with. I'm wondering, have you ever started to report on something and said yes and then thought sort of halfway through, like, this might be too much for me?

Barrett Swanson: Every single time I go. Every single time I go. And it's usually the night before I start reporting where I will text an editor and be like, this was a grievous mistake. You should not. be, I never sleep on assignment. Never sleep well. So I'm always distressingly under slept. I don't eat well. I'm a mess on these things. I show up raccoon-eyed to the assignment. ⁓ And yeah, it's usually the night before I was like, I don't know how to do this. You know, I was trained as a fiction writer. I got an MFA in fiction writing. as I said, like very sensitive person and always worry that there's nothing there and that the story that I think is there is not there, which is always the case. It is inevitably, invariably the case that I'll go and I end up writing something completely different than what I had pitched. Or if it's even in the same phylum of what I pitched, usually the camera's gaze turns back onto me. And there's a moment of self-implication. ⁓ that's when I know the piece is working. If I'm somehow implicated in the very thing that I'm critiquing. because I think that opens up space for the reader to feel implicated in a kind of safe way. And then now we're having a different conversation. We're not just sneering at some harebrained subculture. We're not just ⁓ gleefully laughing at this poor, bald, bearded writer who, for reasons that are unclear to everyone, has decided to bury himself in rubble. Now we're having a conversation about what depths of imagination we owe to one another and what feels possible in terms of changing how we think about something, which is not, I don't think that that's much rewarded in contemporary culture. ⁓ And if my pieces are working, if my essays work, I'm performing that on the page to make the athleticism of introspection feel possible for a reader at the same time that I'm scrutinizing something in the culture. So it's a kind of triangulation of the critical gaze.

Jeff Oloizia: One thing I love about reporting is that the sort of aim is understanding in a way that I wish like everyday conversation was. Many people take the tack that the point of a conversation, especially with somebody you don't agree with, is to convince them of your take or to have them see the light. But if we came into these things just wanting to understand and listen to the other person's perspective, like we might end up in a better place. And that's the whole game when it comes to doing these pieces.

Barrett Swanson: think about that all the time when I'm reporting, that how frequently and how deliciously easy it is to misapprehend a person, to conflate a person for their ideas. And whatever else I feel called to do in my job as an essayist and doing this long form magazine stuff is that the disentangling of a person from the ideas, ⁓ is it possible to hold those things separately? Is it possible to remember that the person in front of me once played with their toes as an infant and had someone peer over their crib and look at them as a wriggling mass of humanity bundled and swaddled? Like, can I hold the full spectrum of that person's humanity in front of me? And then what sorts of debts of perception, characterization, dramatization, thereupon do I owe that person. And so that's something I thought about a lot in the TikTok piece, where I stayed with, you know, cohort of college-aged men who are making gobs of money and who are enlisted in an industry that ⁓ rewarded them for the most inane, outlandish, ⁓ sometimes sexist behavior and who are frequently prone to saying things that were Jejune, immature, ⁓ wrong-headed. And I frequently would just remember, like, these people are my student's age. And so what sorts of obligations do I owe them to faithfully characterize the whole person and not just the inane thing they said to their buddy while in my presence?

Jeff Oloizia: Yeah. That's something I really appreciate about your writing. You've gone in these situations like I'm thinking of the TikTok influencer's piece or again, the men's retreat where these things could be ripe for skewering, ⁓ but they don't end up in that place. I've been thinking a lot recently about ⁓ when the New Yorker dispatched George Saunders to cover the 2016 election and he sort of spent time on the Trump campaign trail. And what a gift to have a writer like that, cover that. Someone who is not gonna make caricatures of the people and will write about it with empathy and we're in a weird place where like I think a lot of people don't actually want that. Like they would be disappointed if they read that piece and it wasn't somehow confirming their suspicions about people. know, but that's not very interesting to me. You know, I think we share this certain Midwestern cultural backdrop where you're maybe not encouraged to make yourself the center of attention or to reveal family secrets. ⁓ And yet personal essay, especially the way that you practice it, often asks for a level of vulnerability that runs counter to that instinct. ⁓ You know, the essays in your book touch on deeply personal experiences, suicidal ideation, your brother's traumatic brain injury and the psychic visions that followed, your sobriety journey and experiences within the sober camp at Banru. Did this level of self-disclosure come naturally to you or is it something that you had to learn or even struggle to allow yourself to do?

Barrett Swanson: It's interesting because I distinctly recall being in my mid-20s writing fiction and being in the MFA for fiction and not even liking writing in first person. I don't think I wrote a single story in first person during graduate school. Same. And yeah, what's that about? I think that I... have a certain, I had a certain hesitation about revealing this stuff, but then realized that it was precisely that hesitation that was an artistic opportunity. I'd realized I'd been fighting a war with my hand behind my back, that I wasn't actually going into my own experience and that in going into my own experience, I was able to access topics, places, ⁓ relationships that would have been impossible had I just been Content to not reveal anything about myself in a piece or to the subjects that I was writing about ⁓ Forward me it was a way in it was a way into Writing about those things and then more practically and this is something that I talk about with my students is that You know, I think this type of work encourages ⁓ a misconception which is that when I'm writing in an essayistic mode, you're getting the comprehensive version of selfhood ⁓ every single time. And anybody who does this work will tell you that you are the self on the page that the piece needs. You can see this across every great essayist, from Didion to Baldwin to John J. Maris Sullivan. Thanks. ⁓

Jeff Oloizia: Swanson.

Barrett Swanson: Each piece requires you to go into a place of yourself that's different. ⁓ Sometimes that's a more humorous register, sometimes it's a more tragic register, sometimes it's a more sardonic, cynical, skeptical register. And each time, it's every time for me, it is serving the possibility that I can put reader, writer, and subject on the same playing field. Because I've seen what happens to me as a reader when a writer can do that, where I feel so thoroughly enlisted in the emotional ⁓ risks and rewards of that encounter that, gosh, it doesn't seem to be an artistic ambition that interests me anymore except doing that. Because I recognize its rigors, and I recognize its dangers. Because you can really whiff doing that. ⁓ We won't talk about which pieces I felt like I whiffed in, but I think that you can. But it also feels like the only thing worth has it as doing this kind of work.

Jeff Oloizia: Yeah, it feels like a careful calculus to me because if you do sort of implicate yourself in a way that feels unearned or that the story doesn't call for, that is a whiff. But also, it feels like a real act of generosity when somebody shares.

Barrett Swanson: And for me, that's something I try to locate before I even go. I won't choose assignments unless I can see some, even in the far distance, some connection to something that's unresolved or irreconcilable in myself. ⁓ Because then it takes on a different dynamic. I'm going to lend it far more time and attention because it's working something else, working out something for myself as I'm doing. reading 20 books on masculinity in advance of going to a men's group retreat.

Jeff Oloizia: ⁓ Do you have other criteria in terms of determining like what makes a Barrett Swanson story and something that you feel like you're the right person to write?

Barrett Swanson: I wish I did. It would make the task easier if I had the next story. I don't. I really don't. think it's just, does it feel alive to me? ⁓

Jeff Oloizia: I want to just widen out a little bit. As mentioned, you teach at UW-Whitewater. You recently co-founded a literary magazine, Either Or, with your students and Nick Gulig, who doesn't know it yet, but hopefully will be a guest on this show at a later date. I know that you're a generous reader. You invest in other writers. And there's a phrase that I continually come back to, ⁓ which is literary citizenship. the idea that writing isn't just a solitary production, but you're participating in an ecosystem. How do you think about your role in that ecosystem? Another way to phrase this ⁓ might be like, how do you balance ambition, your own work, your own voice with service? And is there tension there?

Barrett Swanson: I don't even think about it in those terms. ⁓ I think about being an undergrad and my own frustrations with the creative writing curriculum or what was offered to me or what seemed possible at that moment. Not that I didn't, I had amazing ⁓ professors in undergrad, very encouraging, but I think about what would have been useful to me. ⁓ We started this magazine in large measure because we felt that the creative writing curriculum on offer, both at our university and more broadly in any undergraduate program, was deficient in preparing students for all the possible avenues that one could find their way into the literary world. As you all know, that involves starting podcasts, writing grant applications, ⁓ building out literary events.

Jeff Oloizia: world.

Barrett Swanson: ⁓ running a magazine, working on magazines. And so that intrinsic hustle of this discipline, we felt like we could formalize it as part of the curricular offerings given to creative writing students. Even more acutely, ⁓ we've had students at UW-Whitewater who are exceptional writers. And so I think Nick and I felt that we owed it to that caliber of student to build a curriculum that was worthy of their talent and wanted to bring more opportunities that we had hustled to earn to them. so as much as I think about the magazine as an occasion to celebrate writers that we think are doing some of the most interesting and ambitious work in the country, I'll be frank, this is not for them. It's for our students. It's for our students who are brilliant, who are talented, and many of them are first-generation college students who come from impoverished rural parts of Illinois and Wisconsin, and sometimes all across the country, and whom we know don't have summer internships in New York or San Francisco or Chicago. That's not on offer for them. And so we wanted to build a literary institution that had that as part of the curriculum, an in-house apprenticeship in literary publishing where they are interacting with the best writers in the country. And we've been so fortunate to have marquee writers like Sheila Hetty, Lauren Groff, Claire Vaidwockens, Becca Rothfeld, Hermione Hobie, Greg Jackson. ⁓ so many, Joanna Klink, Jane Wong, Clody Rose Clevenance, ⁓ Sadia Hassan, these writers who are at the top of their game and who heard about us starting a small magazine out of the University of Wisconsin Whitewater first issue. And without hesitation, they heard what we were trying to do and they selflessly, generously gave their stories, poems, and essays to us. And that affirmed. my belief that, yeah, that this is a community. You know, the perennial response I got when I sent out some of those emails was, God, I wish we had this when I was an undergrad. And so I don't think about it as service. I just think about my people, my students, and what I want for them and how talented they are. This is not an act of charity. This is not an act of service.

Jeff Oloizia: Thank

Barrett Swanson: I should, everybody should be doing this. If you're a creative writing professor, you should be trying to bring these opportunities to your students. It feels less like an act of service and more like an obligation to do right by these people who love the humble spade work of putting together phrases and sentences. Right now, and we have so many things encroaching upon the sanctity of language and desecrating basically everything that I've committed my life to, I'm willing to stand with hands and fists and defend it ⁓ for those young people who want to do it too. And so that's why we started it. To characterize it, think, service or literary citizenship or something like that. What I I understand the premise of the question, but I kind of want to push back on it because it's like, this is just born of affection for. my students, and affection for the divine pious aliveness of language. And that really, to me, that's a sacred practice that is being sickeningly trampled upon. Sorry. Now the soapbox is out.

Jeff Oloizia: You're very humble, I think, to say it's not service. I understand your point. It's taken. I do think as someone who went to a grad program that had a literary magazine that I worked on, that is a ⁓ tremendous thing to be able to offer, ⁓ just in terms of professionalism, learning to be part of that ecosystem. Also, if you're someone who's going to be submitting your work, to understand what it's like when a piece comes through the slush pile and the hands it has to go through and the time that it takes. And, you know, this is a larger conversation, but I do think that there is a sort of common ⁓ ethos among MFA programs that you separate church and state and you don't talk about the sort of professional aspects of writing. I do think that's a mistake. I do too. If we're going to be offering a degree that ⁓ comes with very little sort of tangible... When I say tangible, mean ⁓ material benefit. Then we have to at least set our writers up for something. I agree.

Barrett Swanson: I agree. mean, that, I mean, if I'm telling the full story, it was lying in bed at night and feeling this puncturing disquiet about the fact that our students are graduating, our first generation students are graduating from a program without maybe having some of the professional experiences that I know would equip them with the skill sets necessary for greater success in the life of editing, publishing, and writing. So the extent to which it was a selfless selfish enterprise was owing to maybe quelling my own kind of ethical queasiness about that and building a space where I knew that they would have new opportunities professionally and academically if they pursued grad school afterward as a result of it.

Jeff Oloizia: Yeah. You want to do a quick speed round? Alright. Here, it's Watson.

Barrett Swanson: Sure. Am I do I have to do like, you know, just free associate? Yeah, let's. are we going to discover that I have a fear of like, ⁓ tube song?

Jeff Oloizia: I quite possibly. The aim is pithiness here. ⁓ So it's a good writing exercise. ⁓ Favorite magazine story of all time.

Barrett Swanson: ⁓ god, I'm just gonna say no. I'm not gonna, I need to think. Two are coming to mind immediately, and they're relatively new, which is ⁓ Rachel Kodziganza's piece about Dylan Roof for GQ. Incredible. Incredible piece. ⁓ Waiting with bated breath for her collection of essays. ⁓ And more recently, Nancy Lehman wrote a trip. ⁓ ⁓ that she took with her daughters for Harper's that I thought was just so funny. I think she's incredible. An incredible writer.

Jeff Oloizia: Yeah. Yeah. Do you have a favorite Wisconsin cultural tradition?

Barrett Swanson: Hmm. don't even think it's, think it's probably Norwegian, but I was just telling a friend about this, that, know, kipping eggs? Forward Easter, I was a boy growing up, my uncle's hard-boiled eggs, and then you decorate the eggs, and then you kip them, ⁓ is like slamming the butt of the egg against the butt of someone egg and seeing which one cracks. ⁓ my...

Jeff Oloizia: No.

Barrett Swanson: uncles who believed themselves to be incredible wags though. Their idea of humor is just that you get louder and drunker. ⁓ They would do all sorts of things every year like ⁓ take an egg shell and fill it with cement so that their egg was always the winner. So keeping eggs is great.

Jeff Oloizia: Yeah, it's not doing much for the idea that we're not sort of provincial bunkens here. They're like, yeah, like, those writers in the north and keeping it.

Barrett Swanson: Yeah, what do you want me to say like ⁓ yeah practicing the fibonacci opening the chest? ⁓ The Lambo leap No,

Jeff Oloizia: Do you have an all-time favorite Packers player?

Barrett Swanson: Good question. I don't know. I don't think that I do. ⁓ Don Mikowski was the quarterback when I was growing up, and I do have a soft spot for him.

Jeff Oloizia: The Magic Man. Unproblematic among Green Bay quarterbacks.

Barrett Swanson: I know he's the last one. Him and Bart Starr really holding up the...

Jeff Oloizia: I had a Don Mikowski poster in my bedroom as a kid, which is now, I think, a sort of famous poster. They did this series, and it was like him in full magician's garb. And it said the magic man on it. And he was pulling a rabbit out of a hat. Yeah.

Barrett Swanson: Wow, great. I had the very classic cardboard cut of Michael Jordan in my room growing up. then an Emmett Smith poster. So this is dating me squarely in the 90s.

Jeff Oloizia: Yeah, I had an Emmett Smith poster as well. What is the one thing you can't sit down to write without?

Barrett Swanson: I mean, paper and pen. Like, I really have now stripped down the process to its bare essentials just because I'm an obsessive tinker of sentences. And so when I was writing on the computer, I found that I was almost tripping over myself to get a sentence right before I could move on. And so I had to train myself out of that by writing longhand. Usually I try to keep that as unglamorous as possible, so like a legal pad and a big pen. And all I want to do is follow the burst of linguistic energy for as long as that voltage takes me. ⁓ So I don't, you know, I have no... talismans, have no trinkets, have no shrines or Yankee candles. It's built so can do it anywhere at any moment.

Jeff Oloizia: Is there a magazine or magazines, literary or otherwise, that you think people should know about? Harper's. Yeah.

Barrett Swanson: And not, I mean, sounds unutterably self-serving because I'm a contributor for them, but when I was a young man growing up and they were consistently and remain ⁓ one of the few places that is doing the most ambitious and exciting and ⁓ brave work. And it was... ⁓ It changed my life when an editor there reached out to me and said, do you want to do something for us? That was, can't think of a more existentially validating moment in my career as when I got that email. Just because for me, they were the high-level mark.

Jeff Oloizia: We'll do one more. Cool. What's the thing that you most wish your students understood about writing?

Barrett Swanson: I think I wish stay under, wow, that's a good question. Because there are a few things I want to say in response to that. But I'm acutely conscious that this is supposed to be some lightning round. I'm flattering your ridiculous format here. I had Laurie Moore as one of my thesis advisors when I was at UW Madison getting a graduate degree in fiction writing. And Laurie would occasionally

Jeff Oloizia: That's okay.

Barrett Swanson: offhandedly say the most brilliant and transient thing. something she said that was both reflective of her work generally, but also the things that she admired in our writing when we submitted it, was that you really have unlimited amounts of time to make every sentence the most brilliant, humorous, ⁓ empathetic thing that it can be. And that is a challenge that I embrace every time I sit down to write, that ⁓ language is really the shape of your consciousness. And the energy that you bring to bear on language produces energy in the reader. And I frequently exhort my students to remember that. your readers could really be doing anything else than reading you. the culture is inviting them to pursue all sorts of far more deliciously passive entertainments instead of engaging with your sentences, be it watching Succession or doing MDMA or listening to a podcast, And therefore, you have an artistic burden to animate that sentence and say something that is true and will live on their nerve endings. And that is a responsibility. The art of making sentences, making phrases is a responsibility. That you're establishing a genuine and precious communication with someone who's on the other end of the line. And to treat them with sensitivity and respect. I can think of no other thing that I do with my life that requires more energy and attention. ⁓ I feel incredibly lucky that this is how I get to spend my time.

Jeff Oloizia: Barrett, thanks so much for doing this.

Barrett Swanson: Thanks so much for having me.

Jeff Oloizia: And that's it, episode one in the books. Big thanks to my guest Barrett Swanson and thank you, the listener, for tuning in. You can find Barrett's writing in Harper's Magazine and at BarrettSwanson.com. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a rating or share it with a friend. And don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss new episodes. They come out every Wednesday, so mark your calendars and listen in. You can reach me anytime at jeffaloizia.com slash writing forward. That's J E F F O L O I Z I A dot com slash writing forward. I'd love to hear from you. This episode was recorded at the Madison public library with support from Dane arts. Our executive producer is Anya Van Wanktennog. The theme music is by the Lola Ombre. Our logos and episode art are by Tim Burton. Thanks again for tuning in. In the words of quick trip employees everywhere, we'll see you next time.