My Next Ghost is a growing collection of mini-interviews with people I like (small pool). Just a few scattered questions. Less “what’s your creative process?” and more, “have you ever seen a man slip on a banana peel?”

Alexander Chee

Current location: Seat 19A, on a Delta flight from Boston to Baltimore for AWP.

Eight-word memoir: This should be a novel, he said repeatedly.

What was your first concert and what did you wear?

Asia. Sunday, August 21st, 1983. I found a concert archive with all of the concerts at this one arena. I was with these two brothers I played D&D with. I don’t remember what we wore. If my mom had anything to say about it, I wore a maroon polo shirt. She was relentless about dressing me in that color.

Have you ever stolen anything?

Yes. In high school. I typically shoplifted gay pornography or the novels of Gordon Merrick with lavishly colored painted covers of their promiscuous gay male protagonists in bathing suits, sold often at Waldenbooks or in grocery stores in the 1970s and 1980s. They were popular with women as well as boys like me. They would be my introduction to a number of things.

Do you get tipsy or do you go from sober straight to drunk?

Tipsy, but people often don’t realize I’ve been drinking. I hold it pretty well.

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“I just read a scene where everyone was gathering at the home of a woman who’d died, very private art collector, no children so her god child inherited, and they’re all realizing she stole things from all of them, a klepto. It’s hilarious and sad and really shrewd.”

—sent to our mutual friend the photographer Michael Sharkey,* who wanted to know what I thought of the Alan Hollinghurst novel The Sparsholt Affair.

* Blaise here. Incidentally, I spent yesterday afternoon with Michael Sharkey and his husband Jeffrey. We talked about Alex, and our old collegemate Kiran Desai’s new book (they recommend it), “The Great Muppet Caper” (I recommend it), and what our kids’ poop looks like (our kids are dogs). We probably talked about you, too.

Roller skating or ice skating?

Roller blades. Back in the 1990s in Brooklyn, you most likely saw me on them in Prospect Park or in the East Village.

What’s your desert island book?

I have novels I’ve reread so often but if I were to really just be alone for the rest of life with one book, or at least alone until rescued, it might be Baldwin: A Love Story, by Nicholas Boggs, a biography of James Baldwin, or A Great Unrecorded History, by Wendy Moffatt, her biography of Forster. Or it might be this most recent O. Henry Prize anthology, edited by Edward P. Jones. I’ve loved every story so far, which never happens.

What was your favorite toy when you were a kid?

A Gumby doll, and when we lived in Guam when I was a small child, my father would throw it in the pool, saying “Gumby’s drowning!” and then my brother and I would race to save him from the bottom of the pool. Pokey was also thrown in, but I loved Gumby.

Alexander Chee is the bestselling author of the novels Edinburgh and The Queen of the Night, and the essay collection How To Write An Autobiographical Novel, all from Mariner Books. A contributing editor at The New Republic and an editor at large at VQR, his essays and stories have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, T Magazine, The Sewanee Review, and the 2016 and 2019 Best American Essays. He was guest-editor for The Best American Essays of 2022.

He is a 2021 United States Artists Fellow, a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Nonfiction, and the recipient of a Whiting Award, a NEA Fellowship, an MCCA Fellowship, the Randy Shilts Prize in gay nonfiction, the Paul Engle Prize, the Lambda Editor’s Choice Prize, and residency fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the VCCA, Leidig House, Civitella Ranieri and Amtrak.

He is a full professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College and lives in Vermont.

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Previously on My Next Ghost

Clifford Thompson

Current location: In Park Slope. And in my head.

Eight-word memoir: Shy black boy, secretly gregarious, loves to create.

What’s your favorite song they play in Key Food?

I think I heard Stevie Wonder’s “You Haven’t Done Nothin’” there once. Hard to beat that.

[Clifford Thompson is a neighbor, and we often run into each other at the Key Food grocery store.—Ed.]1

Without context, what’s something you wish you’d said?

“I don’t like that.” Applicable to so many situations. I wish someone had pointed this out to me decades ago.

Who was your first crush?

June Smith. She was in ninth grade when I was in eighth. She played the violin. Needless to say, I’ve written about her.

When you were a kid, what’s one thing everyone else had that you really wanted?

One of those big cars you could sit in and pedal. My cousins, who lived next door to me for years, had one that they kept in the basement. One day when I was maybe five, I walked into the basement via their backyard and tried to get it. My uncle caught me. I cried.

What is today’s report?

Hooo, boy. You may be sorry you asked. It adds up to one fat cliché, I’m afraid. But: How do we, how do I, find meaning in human experience that counteracts time and transcends the oblivion awaiting my loved ones and myself, and how do we, how do I, reconcile the horrors of life — particularly in this era — with the joy I feel (when I’m not just feeling sad) in creating and simply living? What is the irreducible human experience, and how do we capture it? This sounds abstract, maybe pretentious, but I struggle with it daily. That is today’s report. I should really, to quote Chrissie Hynde, just stop sobbing.

Jazz June: A Self-Portrait in Essays

By Clifford Thompson

Self-reflection and an examination in essays of what it means to be human

Jazz June: A Self-Portrait in Essays traces a life, not by recounting its major events but by going deep into its representative moments: the moments of wonder, hope, fear, uncertainty, humor, love, and epiphany that make up human experience. Along the way, as a son of a widowed mother, as a young man in the big city, as a husband and father, as an aging empty nester, and as an artist, the author discovers, with each new role, more of who he is. A lover of the arts, he offers creative reflections on literature, music, and film; a Black American whose life is informed but not defined by race, he embraces Black culture while remaining defiantly himself.

“Clifford Thompson has skillfully captured in words a distinct era of American history, the specific feel over time of two major cities (Washington and New York), an intimate glimpse of the complexity of race and masculinity, and the small details of family, love, ambition, fear, fatherhood, and aging that make up a life. It is a charming, quiet but powerful, well-crafted collection.” —Dinty W. Moore, author of Between Panic & Desire

“Clifford Thompson is an essayist of the finest order.” —Jerald Walker, author of How to Make a Slave and Other Essays

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Clifford Thompson is the author of What It Is: Race, Family, and One Thinking Black Man’s Blues; Love for Sale and Other Essays; a novel Signifying Nothing; a memoir, Twin of Blackness, and Jazz June: A Self-Portrait in Essays. He is the author and illustrator of the graphic novel Big Man and the Little Men. His essays on books, film, jazz, and American identity have appeared in Pushcart Prize Anthology, Best American Essays, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Threepenny Review, The Iowa Review, Film Quarterly, Cineaste, Oxford American, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. He has taught creative nonfiction at Sarah Lawrence College, the Vermont College of Fine Arts, Bennington Writing Seminar, New York University, Columbia University, Queens College, and Gotham Writers. Thompson is a painter and a member of Blue Mountain Gallery in New York City. He has been a fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities since 2015.​

PREVIOUSLY, ON MY NEXT GHOST

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Introducing our very first next ghost...

Janet Steen

Location: A sweet little hollow in the Catskill mountains of Upstate New York.

Eight-word memoir: A good hair day and nowhere to go.

What’s one thing you swore you’d never do again, but then you totally did it again?

I swore I would never buy another piece of shitty fast-fashion clothing off the Internet that I’m 100 percent sure is not going to be anything like the picture, and yet I did it again. And again and again and again...

Was there a project you did in grade school that you were really proud of?

I was very proud of the wooden key holder I made in sixth grade that was in the shape of a key. It was a little meta masterpiece before I even knew what meta meant.

What’s a movie that makes you cry, and is it a Meryl Streep movie?

“Ordinary People” is a movie that always makes me cry. It doesn’t have Meryl Streep in it, but it does have Mary Tyler Moore.

Have you ever known a crazy animal?

My cat Lorenzo (RIP). He liked to drag his favorite stuffed animal into the living room in front of guests and hump it passionately. He was also the most aggressive cat I’ve ever known. When my daughter was born I was afraid he might kill her but he just kept to himself and got really depressed.

Have you ever fainted in a public place?

Yes, some years ago in the middle of a small party, I fainted after having stayed in the hosts’ hot tub too long. I also vomited on their newly redone patio. People in the area still talk about it.

Janet Steen has written fiction, journalism, criticism, memoir, and is now mostly in love with the essay form. She worked for Esquire, Time Out New York, Details, and other print magazines back when print magazines were a thing. She edits books and other things made of words on a freelance basis. For a while she was co-curator of a popular reading series in Brooklyn called Murmrr Lit.

Two by Janet Steen

“‘Everything happened so fast.’” That’s what we say in these situations, as though we know the beginnings of things.” — Letting The Story Go: Field Notes From A Brutal Time (Literary Hub)

“When [Denis Johnson] died last year, at the age of 67, I wondered if I could locate the cassette I’d recorded the interview on all those years ago. Eventually it surfaced, on a dusty ancient Sony type-1 normal bias, and there, suddenly, was Denis — before books like Train Dreams and Tree of Smoke.” — Lying Down In The Dirt: Interview with Denis Johnson (Longreads)

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