1. There’s that old saying that every joke holds some truth to it. On page 4 of Heavens to Betsy, you mention that you began writing this story as a “pretend book,” but during the writing process, you found some truth to the narrative, something that mattered, and the book became more serious. How often does this happen to you as a writer? And is this—that the writing process can reveal meanings as you draft—part of why you choose to write?

Something like that happens with most of the things I write. I have to kind of trick myself into taking them seriously and committing to them. I have too many projects that have gone nowhere, entire novels that agents disregard and independent publishers don’t want. I spent years working on them so they could hang out together inside my computer’s hard drive, and no one will read them when I’m gone or even before then. 

When I undertake a writing project, it usually starts with an idea that’s the stupidest thing that’s ever entered my head. Sometimes I get a couple pages in, then go and run the vacuum, or whatever, and don’t feel like returning to it later. Other times, I get a couple of pages in, or farther, and I’m doubting myself all the way, but I write one sentence I didn’t see coming, which redeems everything else I’ve put down, and infuses some dignity into what I have taken on. A good idea grows out of the bad idea, and I like it enough to want to build something around it that honors its potential. 

This happened with HtB more dramatically than with other things I’ve written, because I really didn’t think it would come to anything. I intended for it to be twenty pages of me being a complete shithead for no reason. I wanted to print it out and distribute it to Little Free Libraries so the people who built them would get mad at me for dumping my literary yard waste into their glorious LFLs. 

I don’t know for sure what that moment was in writing HtB exactly, where I surprised myself by liking what I wrote enough to persist with it and get serious. I think it happened many times, for example the page that’s about how when a bad thing almost happens it’s almost as bad as when the bad thing happens. Or maybe it’s not almost as bad, but it’s still bad. A close brush with death is better than death, but it’s not as good as not brushing death in the first place. I wrote that part down and realized it was true and that the trajectory of what I was writing had to change. 

Also, for the record, I don’t regret writing the unpublished manuscripts I mentioned before. There is a lot to be said for undertaking such a thing and seeing it through to the end. I learned a lot from writing those failed books that everyone hates. 

I can’t afford psychoanalysis, and so instead I send annoying emails to psychoanalysts and see how they respond. It’s like siphoning gas from a parked car when you can’t afford to buy gasoline. 

One of them compared psychoanalysis to getting a graduate degree, as a full course of psychoanalysis can take four or five years, and is meant to be an all-consuming commitment, from what I understand. It sounded to me like writing a novel; you commit all this time to a big endeavor that has no guaranteed outcome, and for what? To learn about yourself, of course, but there is more to it than that. I’m not sure what, but there is something there and I can feel it. 

2. Heavens to Betsy consists of a collection of excerpts that jump through different times and locations. How did you go about creating a coherent narrative using this format?  

 This was the painstaking work. It took a lot of rearranging, rereading, reshuffling. I read the chapbook start to finish many times, feeling out with every rereading whether it took too long to come back to the thread where Betsy is an old, dying man, realizing at one point I needed one more entry for that thread, then moving all of the chapbook’s other parts around to compensate. Could I find a place for the story of Lisa saving a dog from drowning? Should I get rid of the part about The Odyssey? Et cetera, et cetera. 

In this effort, I was fortunate to have the help of Cutbank editor Hillary Jo Foreman, who is not related to me. She is an excellent reader and editor, with a great sense of what works comedically and what doesn’t. There were some important omissions and other changes made thanks to her insights. 

It probably took longer to do this rearranging and reshuffling than it did to write the words. The timing of everything had to feel right, and I’m not sure I accomplished that exactly, at every point, but if not I think we came close. 

3. What inclined you to include the “Inspirational Quotations” sections—which I found largely hilarious—that complement the story as the narrative progresses?

I don’t remember it with much clarity. I know I felt there should be quotations throughout it, where people talk about heroism, because that’s the kind of thing that books do when they’re so inspiring. Tuesdays with Morrie probably does that, and if it doesn’t it probably does something worse. 

I think it was as simple as this, that I googled “inspirational heroism quotation” and the one I put in the book that Hillary Clinton said came up. Then I wondered, did George Clinton ever say anything about heroism? I found a quotation that was close enough, then thought, Okay, now, who else is named Clinton? When I found the quotation from NFL running back Clinton Portis, which is unrelated to heroism, but was uttered by someone whose name is Clinton, I knew I had to make the pages of quotations recur throughout the book. It was one of those writing moments where I feel like I’m skydiving in reverse. 

Not all of the quotation pages are as good as that one with the Clintons, and it’s possible that should have been the only one. That would have been funny. But it’s too late for me to do anything about it now.

4. In Heavens to Betsy, you mention that you are a volunteer dog walker at a local shelter. You also say on your blog that you volunteer at a local hospital, where you meet “more people in four hours . . . than [you] typically do in four months.” What role does volunteering play in your life? And do you believe it impacts your creative process?

I started working full-time this year, having been a freelancer and childrearer in the years since I left full-time teaching in 2016. So, I haven’t been volunteering so far in 2026. And it’s not something I’ve even done very long; I only started a couple of years ago, at the dog shelter. 

But it’s very good for creativity. You encounter people you wouldn’t otherwise, you’re challenged in ways that are safe, interesting, and generative. You perform new varieties of labor, and you don’t have to do them for long, like at an actual job. And everyone is glad to see you, because you’re there to do stuff they would have to do if you didn’t show up. 

As a hospital volunteer, I would go on Friday afternoons and help the nurses at the pain management clinic at a nearby hospital. I miss it. The nurses all had such distinct personalities. They were funny, and the work was refreshingly straightforward. Go change those sheets. Get that guy a Sprite. Change these other sheets. Do the next thing. I’m also aware that “they all had such distinct personalities” is something I could say about the dogs I walked at the shelter. But the nurses and the dogs were otherwise different from each other.

Not only can that sort of activity be good for the soul, there’s probably a short story waiting for me to write it, about the experience of going one day a week to help out at pain management. There are patterns there that a narrative can be built on, like certain patients returning at intervals who are at varying degrees of distress or who are mysterious in ways that lend themselves to storytelling. Relationships form; I had a good rapport with a nurses’ assistant. I’ll never see her again. 

One day, two of the nurses weren’t getting along, and watching that play out was interesting. Another day, a nurse told me she’d entered a raffle and won a semiautomatic handgun with a silencer. 

If I had to point to exactly what impact each of these things has on my creative life, I couldn’t do it. It occurs to me that trying to trace that sort of thing is like if you came in from a rainstorm with your clothes all drenched and you wanted to locate one particular raindrop in your shirt. That sounds like something I would do, but it’s all just in there, making you feel cold and miserable and possibly getting you sick.

5. After all his wisdom dried up, Betsy, the old man, said that to live forever, one must invest one’s dollars in the economy, where that money will circulate for the rest of time. In a similar way, do you believe investing your efforts in heroic acts can make you live forever? Perhaps the impact of your selflessness will circulate through society, influencing countless individuals long after you’ve gone, and your story will be told for generations. Or maybe your liver will be eaten like Prometheus, or your shirt will be poisoned like Hercules, or your ankles will be nailed like Jesus, or your daughter will mock you like Foreman.

I think what you’re describing is inevitable. Everything we do affects something or someone, and you can’t fully track the ripple effects of even the most modest of actions. The dump truck driver who watched me run into the street to save the pug Betsy from being killed in traffic may have gone home and told his partner what I did, and maybe that person was inspired to go out of their way to save dogs from traffic, but ended up getting themself and the dog killed in the process. 

I just thought of this right now: I believe the impact you describe is real, but I also think trying to trace that impact would be like figuring out where raindrops are in your clothes when you go inside the house and have been soaked by rain or water from a hose that someone sprayed at you. 

It’s probably best to go through life with the understanding that every single thing we do has a profound effect on many other people, and act accordingly, even if it doesn’t, as stressful as that sounds. Living in the suburbs like I do, it’s easy to not feel that way at all. Being in a car can make you feel like you’re in a different world from everyone outside it.

6. On page 14 of Heavens to Betsy, in the section titled “Compost,” you mention that you started writing this story simply to “have a good time writing it,” that “writing is fun when you don’t care if you’re doing a good job.” You also mention the dangers of writing a book with no purpose—that the story can become dull and tedious. From your perspective, at what point does an author need to consider his audience?

I think I do my best work when I have a specific person in mind the entire time I’m writing. If I imagine one of my friends who are smarter than me reading what I’m working on, I am on my toes, because I don’t want them to find out how dumb I am from the way I’m writing, even though they know about that from talking to me already. 

But I also feel like I have to shut that off sometimes, or most of the time, while writing a first draft. You can let those people in later, when you’re editing.

With HtB, I had a reader in mind at every point in the process, because I wanted to make members of my local community mad at me and wish I hadn’t written the book. But the result of that was that I wrote something funny. 

I guess if there is one thing I have learned about writing, it’s that you can intend all the specific effects you want, but often people will be affected by the work you create in ways you don’t see coming. Sometimes it’s exactly the opposite of what you’re going for. It sucks but maybe it’s beautiful also.

7. As humans, most of the time it’s easier to examine the faults of other people more than our own. In Heavens to Betsy, pages 23-24, the conversation between old man Betsy and Bobby Bear really illustrates this, showing that, in the end, we have no one to criticize but ourselves. Does judgment (toward others or yourself) inspire your writing?

You are referring, of course, to the scene in which Betsy the pug, who has transformed into an old man with tuberculosis, informs Bobby Bear that he knows he only pretends to like him, and vexes him with the news that he will have to go on living with his own hateful self after Betsy the old man is gone.  

I was worried about that page of the book, a little bit, because Bobby Bear is sort of a fictional representation of me—and that’s a big sort of—but I don’t feel about anyone I have met personally the way he feels about Betsy as a tubercular man. His hatred is completely unreasonable, which of course is meant to be funny, but I wouldn’t want that to be traced back to me. I feel that way only about certain people who hold and have held public office—actually, right now, I hate a lot of those people.

Harsh judgment of myself inspires me maybe more than anything else does. Or, if it doesn’t inspire me, it motivates me to write. I wake up every morning feeling like I’m at the bottom of a hole thirty feet deep and I have to climb out of it, even though I know I’ll never make it out of the hole. There are only a few ways I can try, and one of them is writing. Another is Pilates.

8. A couple weeks ago my buddy’s car was in the shop. He needed a ride home from work, forty-five minutes out of my way. Just as you saved Betsy because “it was the right thing to do,” I gave my friend a ride home, and somewhere along the way, a nail impaled my tire. I left his apartment with a flat. In Heavens to Betsy, you discuss heroes being punished for doing good things. But perhaps we sometimes expect a reward for our “selfless acts,” when a true selfless act is committed with no strings attached. Do you think we are occasionally punished for doing good things as a reminder that these things should be done without expecting something in return?

I think it’s cool as hell if you believe that, but to be honest I don’t think there’s meaning to be found in things that happen to us, unless they’re done by other people on purpose. Like, in your example, the nail didn’t puncture your tire for a reason, unless someone put the nail where they knew your tire would be, so as to flatten it. If that’s the case, you should think hard about your relationships with others, and reconsider the sort of people you have brought into your life that they would do a thing like that. 

But I do think it’s significant and worth thinking seriously about how we live in a country that makes it so hard to get around if you don’t have a car, and which leaves it up to you to: acquire a car, which costs outrageous sums of money; maintain the car; find a way to get around when there’s something wrong with the car; prevent damage to the car; have the car repaired when it is damaged, which it will be; replace the car when it breaks down, which it will; and fill it with gasoline with alarming frequency and at great expense, not to mention environmental detriment. It was nice of you to give your friend a lift. But imagine what it would be like if both of you could walk to the places you need to go, or take a train. 

I know this is not a novel insight, but I think about it all of the time. I guess what I’m really saying is, this so-called friend of yours is a parasite and the sooner you cut him loose the better.

9. Pugs. They can’t breathe. They get eye diseases. They have bad backs. Their mothers too often need cesareans. What are your thoughts about pugs? Should we stop breeding them? Should we switch to “retro pugs,” which have longer snouts and less wrinkles. Is the cuteness worth the pain?

You forgot to mention the liquids that are constantly leaking and spraying from their anuses.

I have never liked pugs. I don’t want anything bad to happen to them, as a breed or individually. I don’t hate them. But I don’t want them to come near me with their gross penises and anus spray. 

I think people should get their pets from shelters, rather than breeders, and if they did that maybe the pug could evolve into something more noble, with better backs and air passageways, and more elegant eye diseases than the ones they get now. 

Cuteness is not worth any pain. People should enjoy their pugs if they have them, but I should never have to have one because I don’t want them to come to my house and soak my fresh laundry and innocent children with their runny excretions.