The Write Stuff is a series of interview profiles conducted by Litseen, where authors give exclusive readings from their work.
Jeff Von Ward is a San Francisco Bay Area writer, author of
Mormonia: Stories, and director of "The Space Invaders: In Search of Lost Time", a documentary film about arcade game collectors. He works in tech and in his spare time helps curate three reading series:
Writing Without Walls,
The Bernal Yoga Literary Series, and the
MFA Mixer. He is also the managing editor of
Samizdat Literary Journal.
When people ask what do you do, you tell them?
I don’t know that anyone has ever asked me that specifically, until now! I’ve been asked: Spare change? Can I see your ID? Wanna buy some weed? Where do you work? How much money do you make? Where you from originally? How long have you lived in the Bay Area? How old are you? (or When did you graduate from high school?) Where do you live? Where is that? Do you rent or own? When will you be home? Can you pick up some milk? How was your day? What did you do this weekend? What’s for dinner? Do you believe in god? What do you want to do with your life? Are you happy?
Now if someone were to stop me on the street and ask me this question, I would probably have to consider his or her intent. Is it a probing existential query or asked in drunken jest? I suppose a fine line exists between the two, but here I have the luxury of being as prolix as I’d like since I’m typing, which I guess suggests that I enjoy writing, which is true, and, more importantly, the subject of your column. But writing is just the piquant top of an unreachable Andean mountain, and really a microcosm of life, an attempt to embrace the mysterious worlds that exist inside and outside of each of us, am I right? So we try to make the inchoate a little more (in)comprehensible.
That was awfully pretentious wasn’t it?
