Hello and welcome writers, scribblers, lyricists, and scribes of all sorts!
This week Write-minded is interviewing an established writer whose star is on the rise. Elwin Cotman’s new story collection blew us away for how he played with form and takes readers on an expected journeys. His stories don’t fit into any box—including length, and we loved it! On this week’s show Grant also announces his departure from NaNoWriMo and what some of his new ventures will be. We’re celebrating creation and recreation and taking on new forms, on the page and in real life.
Poets Elwin Cotman kept coming back to while writing The Age of Ignorance:
Partial transcript from the show
Brooke: I’m Brooke Warner, co-host of Write-minded along with Grant Faulkner, and Grant, I was thinking today about how we each live busy lives in this big writing world, we’re juggling numerous writing projects, both on the page and beyond, and then our day jobs are all about writing as well, and sometimes we’ve got so much going on that we don’t report on it to our Write-minded listeners—and we didn’t report out on something big in your life—that you’ve actually left the day job you held in the writing world for 12 years as Executive Director of NaNoWriMo. I just wanted to congratulate you on all of your achievements and also see if you can tell everyone what’s next for you. Or what’s happening now for you, rather.
Grant: Thanks, Brooke, and, yes, I’d been thinking about moving on from NaNoWriMo for several years—just because I felt it was time, but also because my side ventures are no longer side ventures. They’ve grown into being very central and sizeable and need more attention. But it was hard to transition from an Executive Director position, especially during the pandemic. A couple of years ago, I worked to promote from within NaNoWriMo and bring an employee up to be co-Executive Director, and I thought I’d transition out after a year or so, but then he found a better job, very fortunately for him. So I decided I needed to put a stake in the ground and give myself a deadline to leave, so I worked it out with NaNoWriMo’s board last September that I’d step down after NaNoWriMo 2023 and work to help the org with that transition, which I finished up in early February. So for the last few months, I’ve been focused on all of the next, or all of the now. I have to pause and give thanks for my time at NaNoWriMo, though, and the whole community. I don’t think I’ve ever grown as much or learned as much in a job. And it wasn’t just a job to me. It was really a life, a life that will stay with me, but I’m also excited to move on and serve writers in other ways.
Brooke: You definitely have some exciting stuff going on, and I know our listeners want to hear about it, so I’d love it if you could tell us whatever you can at this point.
Grant: Yeah, I think I’ve mentioned this a few times in passing, but I’ve been involved as an Executive Producer on a TV show, America’s Next Great Author, for a few years now. We raised $100,000 and shot a proof of concept in Newark a little over a year ago, and we’ve been trying to get the show funded, made, and distributed since then. It’s been a journey, similar to publishing a novel, with a lot of “almost” moments that didn’t quite work out, but that we learned from. Right now, we’re working with a production company, and things are looking really positive that the show is going to move forward. Honestly, we could do ten Write-minded shows on this process, or it could be its own podcast. Getting a TV show made is actually just such a different beast than getting a novel published, but it’s been super fun, and I love my team, and I’m learning a lot, so no matter what happens, I’ll be very happy. But beyond the show, I’m working on a couple of other pretty big ventures. I’m working with a couple of partners to build the Flash Fiction Institute, which will be an online hub for classes and resources for all things flash fiction. I’ve actually been writing more tiny stories than I have big novels in the past couple of years, so I’m looking forward to working more with this form of writing. And then I’m teaching a lot, and I have three books in the publishing pipeline, including a novel and a nonfiction book about rejection, and I’m writing a memoir of all things. I plan to do a lot more with memoir in the coming years, in fact.
Brooke: That’s a lot, and one thing that’s interesting to me is that you’re staying in the world of writing. I’ve heard you speak about your early years as a writer, how you were somewhat lost in terms of how to develop a career that allowed you to be a writer, but you’ve done that now for 20 years, in different forms.
Grant: I can’t tell you how confused and lost I was in my 20s and 30s, Brooke, so I consider this one of the most fortunate things in my life—that I could find a professional home in the activity that gives me the most meaning in life. The interesting thing for me is that I started out trying to find jobs that supported me personally as a writer–it was all about my writing–but now I find my joy in working to help other people’s writing. I can’t tell you how much I love teaching writing. I feel a sense of gratification that goes beyond anything that I personally write, and then working with you on Write-minded, because even though we don’t get paid to do this, we get to talk with all of these amazing authors and have this ongoing dialogue about the writing life with each other.
Brooke: One of the things I feel grateful for in my life is to have found work having to do with books. Growing up I didn’t even know that there was such a career as book publishing. The behind the scenes jobs don’t get the kind of attention being an author does, of course. And the Internet created all of these additional spaces for writers and, Grant, you and I have both been a part of and benefitted from that. Whether it’s NaNoWriMo, or teaching online. We’ve been smack dab in the middle of this explosive growth, too, around who gets to even be an author in the first place, and self-publishing and hybrid publishing and author platform building. It’s this constant place of invention and reinvention, and I feel grateful too that we get to do all this writer- and book-adjacent work, and also be writers and authors. And Grant, we’re talking about all this in part because we wanted to share with the community about your next things, and to acknowledge that you and therefore we are not affiliated with NaNoWriMo anymore, but also because today’s show is about creating new forms, which can be said of writing but also about the forms we take, the forms our lives take. And I know you especially liked today’s guest, Elwin Cotman—so tell us how he fits into this theme of creating new forms.
Grant: I’m blown away by Elwin Cotman’s stories. You know, I discovered him on one of those lists of “most anticipated books,” which I often think are more about marketing than truly curated, but his collection of short stories, Weird Black Girls, is just so many things all at once. He’s an amazing writer, a true poet, and his writing defies form. I never knew exactly where I stood in his stories as I read them, and his work has this interesting blend of fantasy and reality. I was just riveted in a way that I often don’t find myself riveted, and I found myself inspired by his writing, inspired in that way that gave me fresh eyes on how to tell a story. That’s interesting for me because I’m getting to be an old guy, and I remember how when I was a young writer, it seemed like I was being swept away by a new writer I discovered every other month, but it’s been a while for me now, and Elwin is making me re-think my own storytelling proclivities.
Brooke: That is what Write-minded is all about, really—making us think and re-think the ways we tell our stories—and to think and re-think our lives as writers, really, because we all are trying to make writing fit into our lives, and to make our lives and careers nourish our writing, if possible. In preparation for this interview, I read about Elwin, and in one interview about the influences of poetry on his prose, he said:
Through reading poetry, a writer can become more open to breaking form. You can write an entire novel in a poetic style. You can find new ways to structure sentences. Or you can go an entirely experimental direction that explores the boundaries of prose.
I love his sense of experimentation and the way he so naturally questions form to find the expression that works for him. It’s a lifelong quest, of course, a lifelong challenge, but that expression defines what it means to be human.
Grant: Elwin is one of those writers who honors his truth in a deep way on the page. I don’t know how to exactly describe it, but he’s unflinching, and when I read him, I felt like every word on the page was in service to the story. I got the feeling that it didn’t matter where or how the story might be published or any of the business side of writing, but that he was serving the story with a deep honesty, integrity, and vulnerability, and that’s what I look for more than anything else from a writer, so I’m looking forward to talking with him more after this short break.
“Poetry is essential because language is ultimately the most important thing to me.”
—Elwin Cotman
This Week’s Book Trend:
The Times recently released an investigation indicating that various tech giants knowingly bent and broke the law as they work to create new innovative artificial intelligence systems. There are various lawsuits in process, but I imagine the courts will give the AI companies some kind of exemption or rule that the content they’re effectively stealing will just be ruled fair usage for training purposes. It's a real moment of reckoning because AI is not something that’s going to get put back into the bottle. How do you think it will play out?
ABOUT ELWIN COTMAN
Elwin Cotman is a storyteller from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He is the author of three collections of speculative short stories, The Jack Daniels Sessions EP, Hard Times Blues, and Dance on Saturday. His book, Weird Black Girls, just came out from Scribner, and his debut novel The Age of Ignorance will be published by Scribner in 2025. Elwin’s work has also appeared in Grist, Electric Lit, Buzzfeed, The Southwestern Review, and The Offing, among others. He holds a BA from the University of Pittsburgh and a MFA from Mills College. You can find out more about him on his Substack.