Originally published in Verbicide issue #9

Anybody that understands the importance of independent and underground literature as much as I do is both an immediate friend and ally. Enter the cohorts of the Razorcake/Gorsky Press empire.

In the wake of the demise of Flipside, former Flipsiders Todd Taylor and Sean Carswell began a fantastic punk zine based out of L.A. called Razorcake. Not only does it serve as a bimonthly testament to the ever-burgeoning local California scene, it features a slew of well-written columns by a thoroughly literate “who’s-who” of writers, zinesters, and interviewers: Maddy Tightpants, Rich Mackin, Nardwuar, and so on.

Closely tied to Razorcake is Gorsky Press, the book publishing company founded in Cocoa Beach, Florida in 1999 by Carswell and a small collective of writers. The company moved with Carswell to L.A. in 2002 and to date has published eight books by Carswell, Mackin, Patricia Geary, James Jay, Kyle and Torke, as well as the recent Punch and Pie, an affordable and entertaining short story anthology akin to a record label CD sampler.

Are you ready to be deified in the pages of Verbicide?
Yeah, yeah, I’m prepared!

First, give me a rundown of everything you do. If I’ve got this in order, you’re a writer, a publisher of books and zines, and a professor.
Right, that’s most of what I do. Foremost, I’m a writer — I write a lot. I write for a bunch of different magazines, I write for Razorcake, I’ve written two books.

What are some of the magazines you write for other than Razorcake?
I’ve done stuff for Thrasher — I haven’t in a long time, for no other reason than that I’m busy — and then Clamor, I write for Clamor a lot, just because when I’m feeling political and I don’t want to force it on the Razorcake audience…the Clamor audience buys the magazine to actually read political articles. And I’ve had stuff in literary journals and shit like that, I try to stay away from that. The only time I’m published there is if I’ve already written the story and someone asks me for it, which happens occasionally. And then, you know, I’ll write for kid zines, people will read something and ask, “Can I have a story?” and I’ll pass it on to them. I’ve also done stuff for Read magazine…I mostly try to write for zines, I don’t like to write for bigger publications much.

Well, if the Utne Reader or the Paris Review or some magazine like that approached you about publishing a story would you say, “That’s cool…but I’ll pass”?
It’s not gonna happen. The Utne Reader is printed for liberal ladies in their 40s and 50s, that’s their target audience — I don’t mean that as a slam, that’s just who they write for. That’s not really the demographic that I sell to. (laughter) I’m not real popular among ladies in their 40s and 50s as far as being a writer. So, the Utne Reader wouldn’t approach me. I send them review copies of everything, actually; they never review it, but I always send them stuff. But the librarian’s a real nice guy, Chris Dodge; he contacted me about sending Razorcake to him, so I send it to him…I dunno, if they asked for something I would give them something—I wouldn’t write something specifically for them, though. Paris Review, if they asked for something, I would give it to them — I wouldn’t let them edit it, but I would give it to them.

Anyway, I’m a writer, but I also do Razorcake — actually, I don’t do Razorcake, Todd Taylor and I do Razorcake — and we do it mostly out of Todd’s apartment, and some of it out of my apartment. That’s what I try to do fulltime, but it doesn’t pay the bills, so I’m also a teacher at East LA College — but the truth of the matter is that’s going away really soon. The State of California had to dump a bunch of money into homeland security, so they took all the money out of education. From East LA College alone they cut a million and a half dollars out of the budget. Several thousand dollars of that budget cut was my salary, so I’m getting laid off in four weeks.

That sucks. So do you think you’ll be moving on to a different school, or looking into a different line of work?
Well, I got hired on fulltime at East LA College, and I didn’t want to do it, but I did it anyway, teaching freshman English — and it’s a tough gig; it’s a lot of work. I took the fulltime job because I got married recently and my wife moved out to LA, and I just needed some money. I made the money I needed and now I don’t really need it, so I don’t mind losing it. I’ll go back to part-time work. Before, I would teach two classes a semester and they would pay me hourly — and the hourly rate is great, they pay 50-something bucks an hour…so you work eight hours a week and basically everything’s pretty good, you don’t need to work more than that. And then I can dump the rest of my time into Razorcake and Gorsky Press, which is what I did. So, I’m actually happy to get laid off — I think it’s crappy because it’s a societal thing that we’re losing money from education for homeland security — I mean, you want a secure homeland, educate people! It’s frustrating. But, personally, I don’t care about losing the job; I’m actually kind of happy about it.

Are your students aware of what you do outside of teaching? Do you ever get any students who say, “Oh wow, I read your magazine!”?
Occasionally, yeah…they know what I’m all about; right now I’m teaching Howard Zinn’s Terrorism and War in two of my classes, so I’m not shy about my political opinions, and I’ll talk about punk rock in class and things like that. I’m very honest about who I am when I teach, so they know, yeah…but I’m not a power-trip teacher in any way; my students call me Sean and I never lord grades over them or anything like that, I just give everyone about one grade higher than they deserve! There’s no power situation there, you know, what does a grade cost me? So, occasionally during the semester, students will come in with my books or with Razorcake and want to talk to me about them which is pretty cool. But I don’t try and push it on them. If they pick it up, they pick it up, and that’s cool. I taught Rich Mackin’s book [Dear Mr. Mackin] a couple semesters though. That was pretty fun.

Did you have any superiors you had to clear that with?
I had to clear it with the department. They’re pretty lenient about that — I mean, it’s a city college, it’s not a university; it’s the kind of college where, administratively, they just want to push as many students through as they can. And they’re not so concerned about what you teach as how many students you keep in your class for a certain amount of weeks so they can get a certain amount of funding. The administration does not put education at the forefront in any way. I teach in a portable classroom that’s been there since the ‘60s — a fucking 40-year-old portable! (laughter) I’ve got 45 students per class. So just to put a little perspective on that, the State of California has one guard for every three prisoners — in East LA College they have one teacher for every 45 students. So just think about that, think about that for one second, and think about where the priorities are. So they don’t give a fuck if I’m teaching ‘em. I can teach them anything I want, so I do.

So who are all your partners-in-crime with Gorsky Press and Razorcake?
Mostly Todd. Todd and I do about 90 percent of every issue of Razorcake — we do all the layouts, all the advertising, we deal with all the distributors, we do all the bookkeeping…Todd does almost all the up-keep on the web, I do very little on the web. We do most of Gorsky Press — my wife helps out a lot with Gorsky Press. And, you know, we write a lot of the magazine, we do a lot of the interviews, we go out and take pictures when we need to — we do most of the magazine. We mail it out. If you have a copy of Razorcake, it’s probably been through my or Todd’s hands. We’ve handled it at one point in time.

So, mostly Todd and I do the day-to-day work, but we have a ton of writers, you know, a lot who came from Flipside, a lot who we brought in ourselves because they had cool zines or otherwise showed us good writing. We brought in Maddy after we got the magazine up and running — we didn’t know her, but we liked Tight Pants, so we brought Maddy Tightpants in. Ayn Imperato, I read her book Dirty Money, which is fucking awesome. I called her up — actually, I contacted her publisher and I got in touch with Ayn through her publisher and brought her in. And we’ve met people through friends of friends, and we just have a lot of contributors that way. There’s a ton of contributors — and it’s not like a “scene.” We’re all older than that.

And it seems that you have a lot of people writing for you who are from many different places, geographically — it’s not like a slew of LA people, it’s people writing from all over the country.
Right. The Rhythm Chicken is even in Poland…so we have a columnist in Poland.

I could have sworn he was in Milwaukee.
He was, until January.

What’s in Poland?
I don’t know…(laughing)…I’m not quite sure. I think, ethnically, he’s Polish, so he wanted to spend some time back in the fatherland. Maybe? I know he visited Poland a couple of years ago and had a great time there, so maybe that inspired him. You know, at one point in time, I did know why he moved there. I can’t remember.

How many books have you published to date?
Eight. The most recent is Punch and Pie — it’s a collection of short stories by a bunch of cool underground writers like Jim Munroe and Wred Fright and Ayn and Maddy and my Gorsky co-conspirators Todd and Felizon. I wanted to do the book version of a compilation album, make it real cheap, mix in a good variety of stuff, and try to inspire people to buy more stuff written by underground writers. So far, the rest of the world is far less enthusiastic about the book than I am, but we’ll see. Hopefully, it’ll catch on. And I’m just about to release Rich Mackin’s latest, Thank You for Your Continued Interest.

What are your future plans?
I’m either gonna keep doing what I’m doing — working away at the zine and the books and writing all the time and hope that it ends up working out for me, or else I’m gonna go back to drinking heavily and using a lot of drugs. The jury’s still out on that one.

Has publishing been a moderately successful endeavor to date, or is it the money-sucking bane of your existence?
I keep thinking I’m one step away from being successful. Things keep coming up that make me think that everything’s gonna work out, but I don’t know. Like, a few years ago, I gave a copy of Drinks For The Little Guy to Shawn Stern from Youth Brigade. I was interviewing him for a magazine I used to write for and at the end of the interview I told him that his band and BYO and that movie Another State of Mind — which you know was all about Youth Brigade and Social Distortion’s first national tour — all that stuff somewhat inspired me to start my own publishing company and put out Drinks. So I gave him a copy and he ended up really liking it and, over the course of the next couple of years, he kept contacting me about making a movie out of it, which I never really thought much about, because how does a guy from a punk rock band make a movie, right? But his brother Jamie is a filmmaker and Jamie’s gung ho on the project. So I optioned the movie to Jamie and I met up with him a few times and he’s excited about the project. He’s got a guy writing the screenplay and supposedly it’s almost done and he’s got people who are interested in funding it. So I don’t know. Maybe that’ll happen and if it does, I’d be stoked. I’ve got a lot of respect for Jamie and his brothers and Jamie’s impressed me with other stuff he’s done. So maybe it’ll all work out and I can quit teaching.

But even if it doesn’t, publishing isn’t dragging me down. It doesn’t suck all my money. I generally pays for itself and I do make a little bit of money off of it — mostly off of my own books, the ones I wrote — and most of my writers have made a couple of bucks off of it — not a whole lot. Not much at all, who am I kidding? But they get their books in print and they can set up readings and sell the books themselves and make five bucks or so off of each book they sell. After a while, it adds up. So no, I like publishing. I like it because I can write whatever the hell I want and not have to worry about who’s gonna publish it. I like it because mainstream publishing sucks and I like to read and I feel like I have to do something to combat all the crappy books that mainstream publishers put out.

How long have you been a writing?s
Since I was a little kid. Since before that, even. My mom tells stories about me being a little kid and fucking something up around the house and she’d be like, “Sean, who did this?” and I’d have this big elaborate story about how Spider Man or Dopey from the Seven Dwarves had been by and it was actually them who took a shit back behind the television or whatever. I have a scar on my forehead from when I was three years old and telling my grandmother a story about Superman which apparently ended in me thinking I could fly, which I couldn’t, of course, so I busted open my head on the coffee table and ended up with a dozen stitches. So I guess I’ve always been making shit up, stories and whatnot.

How long did it take to complete your first two books?
Fucking years and years. I started working on Drinks in the spring of ’94. I was living in Atlanta and really broke and I had nothing better to do, so I started typing up a bunch of stories about my days of being a carpenter, and I finally decided that I had to stop writing on it or it would torment me forever sometime in ’99. And the first story I wrote for Glue and Ink Rebellion I wrote because I was giving a reading at a basement space in Flagstaff and I wanted to read something new, so I wrote the story “Bulldog Front” — the one about the roommates who are snowed in and start settling all their problems by boxing each other — in the fall of ’94, after I’d finished the rough draft of Drinks. The last two stories I included in Glue and Ink I wrote in the spring of 2002, so that book covers I guess eight years of my writing, but you have to understand that most of what I wrote in the early and mid-’90s has been securely packed away and hidden from the eyes of readers for their own good.

It takes a lot of shitty writing before you get on to something good. Most of those stories in Glue and Ink were written for zines and such between ’99 and 2002. And I’ve also been working for about three years on a novel called Crazy Broads and Dead People. Lately I’ve been feeling like I’m almost done with that one, but I don’t know.

Who are some of your favorite writers?
Man, that’s such a hard question to answer. I read so much and have so many favorites that it’s hard to say without just giving a list of names. The first one who comes to mind is Thomas Pynchon, but I almost hate answering that because, number one, my writing is really nothing like Pynchon’s. I wish it were but it’s not. And number two, Pynchon is one of those obscure, super-difficult-to read writers and if you say he’s one of your favorite authors, you sound immediately pretentious. But I used to smoke a lot of pot and I was seriously paranoid and this fucked up world only adds to that paranoia and the only author who adequately reflected that was Pynchon. I’ve read all of his books except for his latest one, and when I was in graduate school, I read Gravity’s Rainbow, which is this book that they had to level forests to print, it’s like 400,000 words long — the size of eight normal novels — and you have to read a half dozen books while you read Gravity’s Rainbow just to understand where Pynchon’s coming from. But it was that book that taught me how to think globally and understand how, say, imperialism in Africa from a hundred years ago directly fucks up our lives now, or how rockets and rocket bombs and the world’s governments’ hard-ons to stick them into every hole they can find is leading so much of the rest of the world to be either the victim or too stupid to know that they’re supporting the aggressor. Beyond that, though, Gravity’s Rainbow is a hilarious book full of dick and fart jokes and scenes where, like, the hero fights off the US special forces with custard pies while making the world’s slowest getaway in a hot air balloon. So there’s that one.

But I read all the time. I’m always reading books and magazines and zines and comics and anything I can get my hands on. I read for hours everyday. I love it. So it’s hard to narrow down my favorite authors. If anyone wants a list, they can email me and I’ll recommend the 10 best books to read on a rainy day or the best books to buy with your last dollar or my recommendations if you’re reading your boyfriend’s copy of Verbicide and you want to read underground literature that’s less male-dominated or whatever.

Any current writers that you’re a fan of, or that you think will define the canon of our time?
Well, the obvious answer is that I’m a fan of all the writers in Punch and Pie and the Razorcake writers and the ones whose books I publish. I mean, that’s why I publish them. But probably none of us will define the canon of our time. We’ll probably all be forgotten. Shit, let’s face it, we’re forgotten already. It’s just like Nelson Algren. That fucker wrote some of the best books of his time, and he’s been forgotten and now the canon is defined by a bunch of Nelson Algren rip-offs like Philip Roth and Saul Bellow, though I like Saul Bellow, but he’s no Algren. So our canon will probably be a bunch of literary fiction hacks like, I don’t know, Barbara Ehrenreich or Dave Eggers. And they fucking suck, but that’s the way it always goes.

What advice do you have for aspiring publishers?
None. I need someone to give me some advice.