Are there any differences between your teen readers' responses and the adults'?
What's been really rewarding is that kids who are, you know, twenty years younger than me say that it's really authentic or they feel like it's exactly like their life. To me, that's a real compliment because I'm not a 16-year-old kid and I wasn't when I wrote it. My goal was to make it feel like a documentary, to have a really authentic sensibility about it, so that means a lot that these kids feel that it's like their life. Adult readers—people my age—are reading it with a more nostalgic sense. Those kids reading it now, there reading it as it's happening; they're having erections in class and they're reading about it. I think when I read Catcher in the Rye in high school, I felt, "This guy is writing about my life right now!" I think that's a really incredible feeling to have... that's what kind of opens you up to books—that someone has been through this before. There's such comfort in that.

Do you have a particular moral sense in your writing? Like, in Tender as Hellfire, there's so much devil imagery and that sense of redemption you get with Hula Girl... How does morality, in general, fit into your books?
I grew up Catholic: I went to Catholic school until I was 18. That has really informed the kind of person I am and a lot of what I believe... I'm not a practicing Catholic—by any means... but even the mythology of that particular religion and, like you said, the imagery of devils or the saint imagery in How the Hula Girl Sings... I feel like the best that I can offer a reader is a question and not an answer. The books that I read that are very "moral" seem very closed and kind of didactic: You feel like you're being preached at. When I start a book, it's always with a question, and hopefully through my writing I come to an answer myself. If I start knowing that answer, I feel like I'm on a soapbox. With Tender as Hellfire, that question was about responsibility. At the time I was writing it, there was this wave of victimization; like, TV talk shows and things about people complaining about their childhoods, like: "This is why I'm a jerk now." With people that were really close to me, too. So, it was like, at what point do you become responsible for your own mistakes? Or do you?
And with [Hula Girl], I wrote during the trial of Timothy McVeigh. I was working at this juvenile detention center with these kids and this idea of punishment and, definitely, capital punishment... does that work? Or is forgiveness maybe a better goal than revenge? When I started that book, I didn't know how I really felt about that... Was the answer sometimes? Was it maybe? I wrote to try to come to some answer for myself. Each of those books has been started with a different question and, hopefully, the reader, as they're making it through the text, doesn't feel, "This guy already knows. He's playing a game." Some of my favorite writers—people like Hubert Selby, Jr. or Nelson Algren or Toni Morrison—the way that they're moral is that they write about characters nobody else wants to write about or about people who might be really difficult to see as human. Like in The Bluest Eye, there's Charlie Breedlove, this guy who abuses his own daughter, but [Morrison] makes him a really complex, a really human character instead of just a stereotypical abusive father. And Hubert Selby, he has this amazing depiction of this drag queen. In the time when that book came out, this was a completely taboo and misunderstood subject.
I feel that, as a writer, if you have any moral duty, it's to portray characters as complex: define humanity in characters you'd maybe rather not. With Hula Girl, that was really the goal: can you make people feel sorry for these two guys? One who killed a child by accident and the other who committed murder... By the end, you're rooting for these two convicts. There's things in Hairstyles, too... I mean, he's going to try and steal this record from his only friend at the time. The characters in my books aren't very moral and I think that's probably what makes them interesting. Like, it's really hard to write a story about a happy marriage or about a character who always does the right thing. A story is about a problem, about when things go wrong, so it's always a little more dramatic when you have characters who are questioning or who do things that are morally questionable or illegal.

Changing gears a bit, Punk Planet magazine recently folded: Is the Punk Planet imprint at Akashic going to continue?
To start off, yes, unfortunately at Punk Planet, we published our last issue, issue number 80. I'm still a little upset and heartsick about it. Punk Planet was around for 13 years and it was really the lifeblood of independent culture. A lot of kids found out about bands, artists, filmmakers because of it, I know I did, and it was important. I wrote for that magazine about bands that won't be covered anywhere else, you know? You're not going to stumble across them on MySpace; they might have a page, but you'll never know that they do…However, the imprint will continue. The next book coming out is a Chicago writer named Elizabeth Crane, who writes short stories. Her stuff is pretty interesting and surreal—edgy. Her book is coming out in February. And I think they have an updated version of their interviews coming out. Then, there's a collection of essays from the magazine, so it will still continue in that way.

You were hating on Judith Regan before it was really popular to do so.
[laughs] Yeah.

Could you talk a bit about your take on the current state of publishing?
In that preface to Hairstyles of the Damned, I wrote this thing to her. It was pretty direct...

Well, you've since been vindicated, right?
[laughs] Well, yes and no... I feel that anybody with two eyes who was following the books she'd been putting out since the day she was hired... I mean, this was a lady who got her start in publishing working for The National Enquirer. And that's exactly what she brought to publishing. The really strange thing is that she shifted publishing; she changed publishing. She really, I feel, lowered the expectations of what a book could and should be, and because she was able to sell hundreds and hundreds of thousands of books, these other publishers were trying to compete and came out with similar books. Before her tenure at HarperCollins, you didn't see nearly as many memoirs by B-list celebrities or rock bands or...

Porn stars?
Porn stars. They put out a book by Timothy McVeigh, as a matter of fact. Just really tasteless books that epitomize what sensationalism is all about—books that have the kind of tone of The National Enquirer. She also really built in this idea that instead of attracting a book audience, they should attract a magazine audience: larger fonts, smaller books. Instead of letting a book be a book, trying to shape it in the form of a magazine: self-help, very sexualized. Because the market responded, all these other publishers jumped on board. She was kind of a pioneer in her own way, I don't believe for the better...
But there's a lot of great publishers who are corporate publishers or part of larger monopolies. The majority of the books on my shelves are from Vintage or Knopf or Norton or Grove... and those are all corporate publishers. I think a mistake that a lot of people in independent publishing and independent culture make is that they want to draw a line and be really dogmatic. They want to say that there's something intrinsically valuable about a piece of art that's independently produced versus something that comes out on a commercial label or from a commercial studio... and that's just not true. I mean, I was the books editor at Punk Planet and we got tons and tons of independent books that were just not good, just like we got tons and tons of independent CDs that weren't good. So, I really think it's a mistake to say, "Because this is indie, it's good. Because this is corporate, it's bad."
The real secret—and I talked about this in an interview I did with T Cooper for Punk Planet—the real secret of independent publishing is that it can't exist without chain bookstores; it can't exist without big companies—like Consortium, which, I mean, that is a huge corporation, and they [indie publishers] can't exist without that distribution. There are a couple of really great independent publishers that I value and respect, like Akashic and Soft Skull... Milkweeds out of Minneapolis... but there's a lot more going on there that people should really know about. I mean, part of the success of Hairstyles is that Barnes & Noble selected it for its program and they've continued to really support it. It wasn't from independent bookstores, it wasn't through the magazine that Hairstyles sold.
When you're younger, in your twenties, you love to be able to draw lines like that. The music that you listen to: It's all black and white. The politics that you believe are clearly defined. The older I've gotten, the more I've realized that it's way more complex than that; It's less about drawing a line and dogma and more about trying to find complex answers to complex questions... Like this very convoluted answer to your question. But I feel it has to be, you know. I have a book coming out with Akashic next August—another collection of short stories—and I'll continue to work with them because they give me the freedom to do what I want to do on the page. They're really supportive of me. But I don't want people to think that I believe one thing is better than the other intrinsically. Unfortunately, a lot of press and interviews... in some ways, it's great to be labeled as the "indie poster boy," you know, but it's also just not true. I think people should just be aware of how the system works.

You talked about working with plays and the puppet show... Boy Detective started out as a play, right?
Actually, it started out as a screenplay. I started it... you know, I think I was writing Hairstyles at that time and I decided to try and write this screenplay and see if I could make something happen with it. As I wrote it, it got more and more complicated, and all these little characters started popping up and I figured there was no way that this was going to work... There's this great theater company in Chicago called the House Theatre, and they do really elaborate, big productions and they have kind of a similar aesthetic in terms of stories that might borrow from myths and pop culture. So, I had this script, not really a screenplay; [it was] kind of all over the place, and I thought, "Well, I'll try writing it for these guys." I handed it off to them and after that, I felt really invested in it... then Hairstyles came out, and I decided that I was going to go back and try it [Boy Detective] as a novel, and I had all these different ideas that I wanted to do. So, I finished writing the book, sent it off to the publisher, and we decided that we were going to do the play. The play opened in May, about three months before The Boy Detective novel actually came out. It was great. We were able to sell copies there, before it officially came out. The production was so beautiful, with live harpsichord and violin. They had this little seven or eight minute prologue, which was a video, a film, that they shot and they got Karl Cassel, from NPR, to do the voiceover. It was just so lush and beautiful and it was a great experience. That was the first time that I adapted something for the stage instead of just writing an original stage play. It was just a great experience.

So, do you consider yourself a playwright also, or are you more of an accidental playwright?
I've actually written six or seven plays... I have a play that's opening tomorrow night, actually... this is the first time I'm missing an opening. Chicago is just this amazing town for storefront theater and really edgy, interesting, experimental theater and there are a lot of companies that are kind of hungry for new voices. I've been really fortunate to work with a bunch of them over the last couple of years. My stories are all about characters interacting with each other, and my favorite part is what they do through dialogue. It's really easy for me to make that switch. I started writing with the intention of making films, and then I found that if I wrote fiction, I wouldn't have to bother with actually filming it. Everything that I've written, I feel, could be staged or made into a film. I don't write a lot of stories that have a lot of internal monologue or conflict; they're very physical and happen in a very specific place. Hopefully, you flip through any book and there are these long stretches of characters just talking to each other. It's also just something new to explore. When you write a book, it might not come out for a year and a half, if you're lucky-sometimes, even longer than that. In the meantime, I find it too frustrating to try to start a new novel without this other novel having come out. That's when I started writing stage plays: as something to kind of practice or to keep writing in the meantime. Sometimes they lead to other novels or sometimes they're kind of their own thing.

Are your plays ever going to be published?
Well... we'll see. Like I said, a lot of times, they get integrated into novels or integrated into short stories, so I don't really feel like it's its own thing. I have a couple now that are definitely just stage plays and I feel like I'm happy with them as they are and I have no intention of making them novels or anything like that. So, we'll see. Arthur Nersesian, he's this other Akashic guy who wrote The Fuck Up and a couple other great books... he has a collection of his plays on Akashic and I think that's the only [drama] that Akashic has put out. So, we'll see. It'd be interesting... definitely a possibility.

I noticed your tattoo, which is the image from the cover of Tender as Hellfire... the tattoo came first, I assume?
Yeah, yeah.

You have a lot of work actually. Is it all from the same artist?
It's all different artists, actually. What I did was, every time I had a new book or every time I sold a new book, I would go get a new tattoo. So, they're all for the different books. This one was for Tender as Hellfire. It's the soul in Purgatory. It's a recurring Catholic image and there's a lot about Purgatory in Tender as Hellfire. This one is St. Lucy, and I got her after How the Hula Girl Sings. She's the patron saint of writers, so I felt that she had been very kind to me and that I needed to pay her back. I got the last one just a few days before my thirtieth birthday, and I think I might be done. We'll see... I have a daughter coming in January. This our first kid and I'm really excited. I've been flirting with the idea of getting something after she's born... a small tattoo with her name on it. We'll see. I haven't decided yet. It's interesting, though... each one is kind of a photograph... it's a photo album that's about a very specific point in my life and the people who went with me when I got tattooed and all that. Whether you think about the history of tattooing as spiritual protection or about marking different periods in my life... there have definitely been times when I think that they've saved me in different ways. It's hard to procrastinate when you have St. Lucy staring up at you.

(November, 2007)