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May 31, 2019

Interview with Accomplice Joe Milazzo
Interview

Interview with Accomplice Joe Milazzo

by CCM
written by CCM

1. What’s your favorite song to dance to?

I’ve been known to throw shapes to “Navvy” by Pere Ubu (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g34pRtqiNCQ).

2. Describe your personal hell.

Any open office plan, but especially one in which foosball and/or ping pong tables are described as perks by executives who refer to themselves as disruptors.

3. What’s something that always makes you laugh?

Rolling up sumo wrestlers in Katamari Damacy.

4. 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 the dawn of Western civilization, the time of the first ancient Sumerian city-states, with the hope of preventing some foundational errors (e.g., accounting).

5. What’s a gif that you can relate to?

buster-keaton-is-known-for-his-stunt-work-and

6. You’re hit by lightning. What happens?

My soul passes into the body of an ER Season 3 DVD set; simultaneously, Patrick Dahlheimer, Ed Kowalczyk, and the two Chads (Gracey and Taylor) each cash another royalty check.

7. It’s snowing outside, how do you feel?

Pacified and/or swaddled in atmospheric CBD.

8. What’s a cat picture you can get behind?

catbox.jpg

9. Where did you write most of your book? Why?

At home, with a kitchen in close proximity. Of course, home changed frequently in the years during which I worked on the book. Sometimes home was the house in which I grew up, sometimes it was an efficiency just barely within my grad student budget, sometimes it was an extra bedroom converted into a space designed specifically to support my writing. Crepuscule W/ Nellie is a domestic novel, and the circumstances of its making were largely domestic as well.
10. What are your struggles and strengths as a writer?

Finding ample time to read, think, and write is the biggest of my struggles. My biggest strength is the community of fellow creative individuals (not all of the writers) who help sustain me.

11. Tell us a little about your writing process. What works, what doesn’t, what doesn’t but you still try anyway?

If I’m not taking a walk every day, I’m probably not writing. So I walk, I observe (selectively; attentiveness entails some ignoring), I make notes in the form of text messages I send to myself. I tell myself this is me “having ideas,” which is really to say: thus I purge myself of ideas that would be premises or ambitions so I can get closer to the language and the possibilities wound up in each word. I also tinker with other forms of artistic expression so as to make myself miss writing and want to return to it. Still, I don’t always feel the discipline’s absence. And, even when it is present, I still try to fill it, knowing this is a mistake, not knowing what particular lesson being mistaken — again — will impart, nevertheless confident that making it will teach me something.

JOE MILAZZO is a writer, editor, educator, and designer. He is the author of the novel Crepuscule W/ Nellie (Jaded Ibis Press) and two collections of poetry: The Habiliments (Apostrophe Books) and the forthcoming Of All Places In This Place Of All Places. His writings have appeared in Black Clock, Black Warrior Review, BOMB, The Collagist, Prelude, Tammy, and elsewhere. He co-edits the online interdisciplinary arts journal [out of nothing], is a Contributing Editor at Entropy, curates the Other People’s Poetry reading series, and is also the proprietor of Imipolex Press. Joe lives and works in Dallas, TX, where he was born and raised. Learn more at www.joe-milazzo.com.