What’s your favorite song to dance to?
“Untitled” from In The Aeroplane Over the Sea. I’m ’90s trash.
Describe your personal hell.
I have a recurrent fear of losing my ability to speak and form words, or anything messing with my brain’s language centers. I’m aphantasic, so most of my inner life and memories reside in words.
What’s something that always makes you laugh?
Iggy Pop singing “Surfin’ Bird” to his cockatoo, Biggy Pop
You’re sucked into a bad movie and you have to choose a point in history to live out the rest of your years. What time do you choose and why?
I’d go back to any time when New York was dirty and affordable. Now it’s just dirty. It was my home, and the first place that I felt embraced as a human, and where I felt that potential was everywhere. I can’t live there anymore, and I miss it all the time.
You’re hit by lightning. What happens?
I fall down?
What’s a gif that you can relate to?
It’s snowing outside, how do you feel?
Cold.
What’s a cat picture you can get behind?
My favorite picture of my evil cat, Sylvia.
Where did you write most of your book? Why?
A coffee shop in Little Italy, Cleveland. I lived in a really shitty apartment and I had a crush on the barista.
What are your struggles and strengths as a writer?
I wish I could quit poking myself in the eye with this ink pen.
Tell us a little about your writing process. What works, what doesn’t, what doesn’t but you still try anyway?
I wake up at 5 or 6 every day and write for about 2 – 3 hours. It’s before the internet and my phone and life bother me. There’s an incredible peace in being the only one awake, and looking up from your screen only to realize the sun came up while you were deep in your work.
ALEX DIFRANCESCO, author of Psychopomps, is a writer of fiction and nonfiction whose work has appeared in The Washington Post, Tin House, Brevity, and more. They are a 2017 winner of SAFTA’s OUTSpoken Competition, and were long listed in Cosmonauts Avenue’s Inaugural Nonfiction Prize. They have recently moved to Ohio, where they are still trying to wrap their head around “Sweetest Day.”
