#modelcitizen

oh and I drew myself too I guess

Joshua Mohr is the author of the memoir (2017), as well as five novels including Damascus, which the New York Times called "Beat-poet cool." He's also written Fight Song and Some Things That Meant the World to Me, one of O Magazine's Top 10 reads of 2009 and a San Francisco Chronicle best-seller, as well as Termite Parade, an Editors' Choice in the New York Times. His novel All This Life won the Northern California Book Award. He is the founder of Decant Editorial.

Joshua Mohr is in conversation with Lidia Yuknavitch celebrating the launch of his brand new book Model Citizen: A Memoir (published by MCD/FSG) in our City Lights LIVE! discussion series on Tuesday, March 9th

****

Where are you writing to us from? 

I'm in Seattle, which is farther away from City Lights than I'm used to being. I miss the days when I could walk to the store from my apartment in the Mission District. I love you guys but walking from Seattle is just too much. No offense.

What’s kept you sane during the pandemic? 

I've found the pandemic a fertile time creatively. I've been making art like my ass is on fire! I know artists feeling paralyzed with all the existential unease, but in my sick brain, all this chaos gets my imagination and work ethic firing on all cylinders. The old axiom is "Write what you know," and I'd add this: write what you know, but not what you understand. Write into your confusion. Write into the moral mud of being alive. That was my mantra while scribbling Model Citizen.

What are 3 books you always recommend to people? 

Well, I'm doing this City Lights event with Aunty Lidia, and I put The Chronology of Water: A Memoir into people's hands all the time. I've probably bought fifty copies of that book to pass around! Others I recommend frequently: We the Animals by Justin Torres and Another Country by James Baldwin.

Which writers, artists, and others influence your work in general, and this book, specifically? 

For this one, I did my best to channel Sam Shepard. He's a huge influence on me and, in this context, I'm specifically thinking of his elegiac last little book, Spy of the First Person. Sam was dying and there's this thrilling and awful and beautiful alchemy of him knowing about his imminent death and imbuing the book with, for lack of a better phrase, a parade of pre-ghosts. It's haunting, in the best way. It feels like he's whispering the work right in your ear, and the best memoirs read that intimately.

If you opened a bookstore, where would it be located, what would it be called, and what would your bestseller be?