Metropolis Cafe in Milledgeville, GA. Photo: Deepak Kumar
Trop
is a brand new literary website, the collective project of 19 writers scattered
all over the United States. Editor Tom Dibblee, an MFA candidate at CalArts in
Valencia, lives in Los Angeles, and agreed to talk to the Los Angeles Review of Books about the new venture. This interview
was recorded in Tom’s black Chevy pickup truck as Dibblee drove LARB Senior Humanities Editor Evan Kindley from Los Feliz to Claremont, California, where they were meeting some
other people for brunch. They ended up being twenty minutes late, but it all
turned out fine in the end (in case you were worried).
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EVAN KINDLEY: Tom, first of all, thanks for the ride. Second of all, what is Trop and how did it come to be?
TOM DIBBLEE: In 2010 I was living in Milledgeville,
Georgia. My friends Roger Sollenberger and Stephan McCormick and I started putting
on shows at Metropolis Cafe — “the Trop” — which was our hangout.
EK: What kind of shows?
TD: They were variety shows: one was a fake award show designed
to give us opportunities to accept these absurd awards we designed for
ourselves, like Top Chanamasala and Most Haggard Bastard Alive. Another was a
roast of the owner, Deepak. And then we had a musical comedy show, with judges
and lengthy commentary. Our fourth show was supposed to be a musical called Sweatpants Wedding, but Stephan and I
got to writing it and realized it was a bigger project than we had time for,
because I was about to move. But the good news is that it’s still going — Stephan’s
driving across the country to move here right now, so you can expect Sweatpants Wedding to hit a stage in
L.A. some time soon.
Anyway, after I
moved back to L.A. in 2011, we wanted to keep collaborating. So we came up with
the idea for this website.
EK: The main people involved are all living in different
places?
TD: Right; that’s actually one of the main features of the
site. We’ve got people in D.C., New York, Chicago, Minneapolis, L.A., New
Orleans, Nashville, Georgia, South Carolina, and Virginia.
EK: What kind of writing are you going to be publishing?
TD: We’re doing serialized creative writing; we call them
columns, but a wide range of stuff falls into that category. One column, Jill Riddell’s “Acupuncture After the Apocalypse,” is a serial
novel, updated daily; another, Roger’s “The New Kroger,” is a series of stories that always touch
down on the New Kroger, which is the third biggest grocery store in Georgia and
the biggest thing to hit Milledgeville since General Sherman. There’s my
column, “Letters to Jake,” which is a series of letters to my most
morally upstanding friend.
So we’ve got a
range of topics in the columns, but also a range of degrees of fiction: Jill’s
“Acupuncture” is pure fiction; I consider my letters fiction, but the real Jake
has been writing in the comments section below my posts; and Roger’s stories
are mostly nonfiction, though not always. We don’t get hung up drawing boundary
lines; when in doubt, we call it “quasi-fiction.” And this is a term we really
celebrate. Evan Allgood writes our Twitter feed, and even there we've got some
quasi-fiction going on: he tweets about our articles from the perspective of
his alter-ego, a Trop intern much
abused by my own alter ego, the Chief.
EK: I like how you write about the vagueness of the boundaries
in L.A. in one of your “Letters to Jake”: “Nobody ever knows where they are,
even though there are signs everywhere. Within five hundred yards of my
apartment, for example, are four different signs for four different
neighborhoods — Los Feliz, Franklin Village, Little Armenia, and Thai Town. But
all of it’s really East Hollywood.”
TD: In our columns, we try to pay attention to place. We want to
bring together stories from all the different places we live in and tie them
together, into a wider view of the States, and into a group identity. John Teschner
writes about place explicitly in “Concrete Jungle,” a column that focuses on Minneapolis.
And A.C. DeLashmutt writes about a house in Virginia in “Welcome to Our Home.” And then there’s “The Weather,” a group column where we all talk about what’s
going on with the weather wherever we are.
EK: Do you guys edit, or is it blog-style, where people just
post whatever they want?
TD: With the columns, we do peer editing. That’s actually been
one of the great pleasures of the site for me: connecting all these writers. The
two big contingents are a group of MFA graduates from Georgia College and a
group of current MFA students at CalArts.
With the
reviews, there’s a more extensive editing process…
EK: Hold on a second. I just want to point out this picture of
Chucky from Child’s Play on the side
of this truck here. [points out picture
of Chucky; both laugh]
So you’re
primarily doing fiction reviews?
TD: Yeah, primarily fiction, focusing on young writers. The
idea of the reviews is to provide access points to the Trop contributors, so our readers know where we’re coming from, who
we’re reading, and what world our creative writing sits in. We’re going to
write pop culture reviews too, of movies and TV and music, but the function is
the same — to illustrate who we’re watching and listening to, in order to contextualize
our creative writing.
We’re also doing
interviews: so far we have one with Rebecca Makkai, who wrote The Borrower, and one with Jesse Ball. Sam Freilich is working on
one with Ramona Ausubel, and I just finished one with Amelia Gray; those will
come out in the next few weeks.
EK: How often are you going to be updating the site?
TD: We’re doing a full-length article every weekday; that could
be either a column, a review, or an interview. On Saturdays we’ll have podcasts
— we’re calling ‘em “Tropcasts.” Our first one, which went up last weekend, is an interview with Lisa Marie Basile from the Poetry Brothel, a group that organizes private
one-on-one poetry readings — like a lap-dance. We’re also going to be recording
readings of short stories; Natalie Jones, a radio journalist in D.C., is
producing those for us. And the third thing we’re doing is “Life Advice Radio,”
in which Jake of “Letters to Jake” asks me and my friend Peter Nichols to give
advice to… shit, 10 West? I gotta drive for a second…
EK: That’s OK!
[Tom drives for a second.]
TD: …to my friend J.R. Nutt, who’s got a lot of problems.
EK: Are there any particular magazines or websites that you
think of as a model or inspiration for what you’re doing?
TD: There were a few that we referred to a lot while designing
the site. One was Slake, here in L.A. — the
way they’re trying to channel the voice of the city, we’re trying to channel the
voices of all the pockets where we live. The other one was The Tottenville Review, edited by Alex Gilvarry. They focus on
young American writers, and we’re going to be doing that, too, though not
exclusively.
EK: Well, I admire what you’re doing. The L.A. Review of Books is a really big tent, which is a great thing,
but sometimes I envy the more concentrated, collective model you guys are
pursuing. The classic “little magazine” structure.
Are you open to
pitches from writers outside your circle, though? Or are you trying to keep it
limited to the group you already have?
TD: We’re definitely open, and would love to bring in more
people. We just want to make sure we keep a group identity, a Trop identity, so our columns are not
just plucked from the ether, but complement what we have going. I think one of our strengths is that, because
our creative writing happens in recurring columns, it’s all Trop specific; we’re not just mashing
together whatever short stories we have sitting on our hard drives. We’re
playing off each other, and I like to think we’re making each other better. When
I post a new “Letter to Jake,” I want whoever’s above and below me in the queue
to be proud to show their writing alongside mine. And that’s a function of
being a collective. We all know each other, if not in person, then from emails,
and we all care about each other’s work. Speaking for myself now, I think of my
fellow Trop writers as my most
important audience, and having this audience has been really helpful. They’ve pushed
me as a writer, and given me a really fruitful incentive to write well.
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Trop is now live and ready for perusing.
