Leaving the Door Open

Following a deep dive on Goodreads during a sleepless night a few years back, I stumbled somehow into—and I still can’t pinpoint exactly how it all happened despite hours since of retracing my digital footsteps—the website Neutral Spaces, and after clicking through column after column of many authors’ websites I came across a short story that began with the following line:

This is a meaningful story about the intestinal parasite I picked up while living in Salt Lake City, in Ted Bundy’s house.

Having been born and raised in Utah, I was intrigued and subsequently hooked by the quick-paced and poetic prose. The voice was frenetic, electric, and addicting, and by the end of the story I knew that this was a writer I needed to keep my eye on. This was a writer with an honest and achingly hilarious style that wasn’t afraid to get dirty and bring you along with him. Yet, after you finish reading his work you feel refreshed and energized like you’re floating in the ocean at dusk after a long, emotionally draining day while the sun sets behind the waves. This story was “The Ass is a Hole Where the Light Gets In” by Jon Lindsey, and since then I have followed Jon Lindsey’s writing career online and read everything he has published.

Jon Lindsey is a writer from Southern California. He is the author of many short stories that you can find in places like Hobart, Post Road, NY Tyrant, and Forever Magazine. His debut novel, Body High, was published by House of Vlad Press in 2020 to wide acclaim. He’s an avid surfer and is married to writer Allie Rowbottom, author of Jell-O Girls (2018), and Aesthetica (2022).

The following is my conversation with Jon Lindsey taken from Instagram DMs and other online correspondences over the course of about a month.

You write about people, as you mentioned in an interview with Harris Lahti, who either “[s]tart in a penthouse and move toward the outhouse” or “[s]tart in Gehenna and move toward the throne.” What attracts you to these types of characters and narratives?

I once spent a summer eating muscle relaxers smuggled from Mexico. The day I keestered them across the border makes for a more interesting story than all the days I was inert on the couch. I spent a lot of days stoned on couches, now I’m attracted to movement.

Even though your work deals with people who find themselves in precarious situations and fight their way out and people who stumble their way into self-destruction, your fiction feels hopeful regardless of the situation. I’m looking at the ending of Body High. We know, at least to a degree, what is going to happen to Leland, but we’re left feeling like everything will be okay. Your writing is imbued with a strange sort of optimism and hopefulness that seems to run counter to what is expected of the people and circumstances you write about. Would you consider yourself an optimist? And how did you land on the ending note of Body High?

No, not an optimist, more of pessimist open to possibility. Yes, life is filled with suffering, and I’ve had my share, but I’ve also witnessed beauty, and feel neither experience should be overlooked.

My former therapist called me, “remarkably resilient.”

The ending of Body High just felt right. I don’t know how else to say it. Endings are like that sometimes.

When I exit, I try to leave the door open. Maybe even a light on.

Your writing is incredibly poetic and lyrical, yet you are able to pace things out (i.e., plotting, character development) in such a way that your fiction is quick and easily readable and doesn’t feel bogged down by the beauty of the language. Your work definitely engages in a kind of balancing act between propelling the action of the narrative forward and also allowing your readers to sit in some really gorgeous imagery. How do you manage to balance these two elements in your work?

A story is like a hotdog or New York cocaine: the more you know about how it’s made, the less attractive it is. But, I sometimes try to balance language and pace by omission. Making meaning, tension, and narrative propulsion in the gaps between words. I try to have faith that my readers will discover these too, and accept that some won’t.

For most writers, editing and revising novels can be an incredibly daunting and even anxiety-inducing task. Let’s talk about editing and revising longer works of fiction. What is your relationship with revision and editing and how has it changed since you first started writing?

Editing should cause anxiety. For a novel, it’s life or death. Today’s attention spans are so badly adapted for reading books, that a poorly edited novel isn’t only a waste of time for reader and writer, it’s like shitting in the town reservoir. It poisons the water for everyone else.

Any slob can write a novel, but style is necessary to edit. Developing style takes study, rejection, and valor. A good place to start studying is NY Tyrant Books, Sam Pink, and Amy Hempel.

Some writers view writing itself as a form of therapy. They use writing to work through their trauma. You’ve talked to your wife, Allie Rowbottom, about therapy and the positive effects this has had on your writing. Let’s talk about therapy as a form of writing. How has therapy influenced your writing and vice versa?

Recently, I quit therapy. I’m cured. Or, more so, I realize I’ll never be cured. That there is no cure. No overcoming, only understanding. A guy in my suicide support group said it best, “I don’t trust anyone who isn’t a little bit depressed.”

Historically, I’m not someone who has easy access to my emotions, so writing about them can be like learning. Therapy and writing have made me more fluent in myself. Some writers will deny the therapeutic aspects of writing, but they’re lying.

Surfing and hanging around the beach are huge parts of who you are. What drew you to surfing and the ocean initially, and what role has surfing played in your creative life?

Both my parents were beach people. My mother liked to layout and get sun-kissed. My father was a surfer, and on our weekends together he would take me to the beach and leave me on the sand with a box of cookies, a coloring book, and a red t-shirt to wave if anyone tried to molest me. At around eight years-old, I understood that if I wanted to spend time with him then I would need to learn to surf. I remember my feeling of pride, as well as my father’s look of surprise, the first time I was able to paddle past the whitewater and join him in the lineup.

Surfing can have a strangely conservative mentality (black wetsuits and white surfboards), especially then in Southern California, and I was desperate to differentiate myself (I rode a cheetah print surfboard). Probably, I eventually rejected surfing due to its link to my father, replacing it with books, playing in garage rock bands, and a series of moves from East Hollywood to Texas.

Shortly after moving back to California, my mother killed herself. In the aftermath, I searched for something to help me relearn how to live in the present. I tried jiu-jitsu and was dry humped into unconsciousness. I decided to go surfing. Immediately upon paddling into the lineup I wondered why I had been away so long. Now, I surf too much and it’s ruining my writing, but my life is better.

Some of the spots I surf have formed over hundreds of millions of years by rivers carrying rocks from the mountains to the ocean. Thousands of miles away wind will blow on water and create swells that travel to topple over those river rocks and make waves for me to ride. Feeling my own smallness in the face of this process helps me put my life in perspective.

Some people find faith in a book, but I seem to find it in the sea.

A couple years ago, you said that you had a hunch that “we are entering a new period of Romanticism. A returning to spirituality in order to escape—a childlike yearning for a heavenly father—the fantasy of being at the center of the universe”. Your work feels very romantic in the classical sense. Characters yearning for beauty, wholeness, the sublime. What was it in the air that led you to feel this way? Do you still feel this way?

At that time, unemployed people were crawling out of lockdown and into parties for the publication of Body High, and the world seemed filled with wonder. In the two years since, do I feel the same way? I don’t know. Was I speaking cynically about spirituality? I don’t remember.

Back then, the air felt thin, as if we were all very very high up and no one would catch us if we fell. The government seemed to be failing so naturally there was a lot of searching for stability in religion and astrology. Some of the searching was sincere yearning and some only fashionable scavenging. Culture moves so fast that maybe we’ve already entered a new era, an Enlightenment of Chat GPT, psyops, and extraterrestrials. But what do I know.

Lately, I try to pay less attention to culture and more attention to nature, seeing similar cycles. Some days I go hiking in the Santa Monica Mountains and witness indescribable flowers, and then the next week I’ll go back to the same canyon and all those flowers will be dead, replaced by a whole new delicate flower.

Who or what are you reading right now?

Thirst for Salt by Madeline Lucas, The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease by Daniel E. Lieberman, Birth of the Endless Summer: a Surf Odyssey by Jamie Brisick.

Which writers and artists do you think are being slept on?

A Zoom reading series called, Misery Loves Company, that hosts the most outré writers anywhere.

Are you working on anything new at the moment?

I’m starting a press with Nathan Dragon, Harris Lahti, and Jon Perry called C4G Books. In 2024 we’re releasing three books: Peter Vack’s novel, a collection of stories from Nathan, and an anthology of writing about suicide.

I’m also writing a new novel. The other day, I read from it at a literary reading and after the event ended, I was standing around talking to another writer on the bill when a woman from the audience came up to tell the other writer how much she loved their piece. I smiled and waited for the woman to compliment my writing. Instead, she simply walked away and rejoined the party.

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Body High is available from House of Vlad Press.