Metropolis Cafe in Milledgeville, GA. ?Photo: Deepak Kumar
Trop is a brand new literary website, the collective project of 19 writers scattered all over the United States. Editor Tom Dibblee, an MFA candidate at CalArts in Valencia, lives in Los Angeles, and agreed to talk to the Los Angeles Review of Books about the new venture. This interview was recorded in Tom?s black Chevy pickup truck as Dibblee drove LARB Senior Humanities Editor Evan Kindley from Los Feliz to Claremont, California, where they were meeting some other people for brunch. They ended up being twenty minutes late, but it all turned out fine in the end (in case you were worried).?
EVAN KINDLEY:?Tom, first of all, thanks for the ride. Second of all, what is?Trop?and how did it come to be? TOM DIBBLEE: In 2010 I was living in Milledgeville, Georgia. My friends Roger Sollenberger and Stephan McCormick and I started putting on shows at Metropolis Cafe ? ?the Trop? ??which was our hangout. TD: They were variety shows: one was a fake award show designed to give us opportunities to accept these absurd awards we designed for ourselves, like Top Chanamasala and Most Haggard Bastard Alive. Another was a roast of the owner, Deepak. And then we had a musical comedy show, with judges and lengthy commentary. Our fourth show was supposed to be a musical called Sweatpants Wedding, but Stephan and I got to writing it and realized it was a bigger project than we had time for, because I was about to move. But the good news is that it?s still going ? Stephan?s driving across the country to move here right now, so you can expect Sweatpants Wedding to hit a stage in L.A. some time soon. Anyway, after I moved back to L.A. in 2011, we wanted to keep collaborating. So we came up with the idea for this website. EK: The main people involved are all living in different places? TD: Right; that?s actually one of the main features of the site. We?ve got people in D.C., New York, Chicago, Minneapolis, L.A., New Orleans, Nashville, Georgia, South Carolina, and Virginia. EK: What kind of writing are you going to be publishing? TD: We?re doing serialized creative writing; we call them columns, but a wide range of stuff falls into that category. One column, Jill Riddell?s ?Acupuncture After the Apocalypse,? is a serial novel, updated daily; another, Roger?s ?The New Kroger,? is a series of stories that always touch down on the New Kroger, which is the third biggest grocery store in Georgia and the biggest thing to hit Milledgeville since General Sherman. There?s my column, ?Letters to Jake,? which is a series of letters to my most morally upstanding friend. So we?ve got a range of topics in the columns, but also a range of degrees of fiction: Jill?s ?Acupuncture? is pure fiction; I consider my letters fiction, but the real Jake has been writing in the comments section below my posts; and Roger?s stories are mostly nonfiction, though not always. We don?t get hung up drawing boundary lines; when in doubt, we call it ?quasi-fiction.? And this is a term we really celebrate. Evan Allgood writes our Twitter feed, and even there we've got some quasi-fiction going on: he tweets about our articles from the perspective of his alter-ego, a Trop intern much abused by my own alter ego, the Chief. EK: I like how you write about the vagueness of the boundaries in L.A. in one of your ?Letters to Jake?: ?Nobody ever knows where they are, even though there are signs everywhere. Within five hundred yards of my apartment, for example, are four different signs for four different neighborhoods ? Los Feliz, Franklin Village, Little Armenia, and Thai Town. But all of it?s really East Hollywood.? TD: In our columns, we try to pay attention to place. We want to bring together stories from all the different places we live in and tie them together, into a wider view of the States, and into a group identity. John Teschner writes about place explicitly in ?Concrete Jungle,? a column that focuses on Minneapolis. And A.C. DeLashmutt writes about a house in Virginia in ?Welcome to Our Home.? And then there?s ?The Weather,? a group column where we all talk about what?s going on with the weather wherever we are. EK: Do you guys edit, or is it blog-style, where people just post whatever they want? TD: With the columns, we do peer editing. That?s actually been one of the great pleasures of the site for me: connecting all these writers. The two big contingents are a group of MFA graduates from Georgia College and a group of current MFA students at CalArts. With the reviews, there?s a more extensive editing process? EK: Hold on a second. I just want to point out this picture of Chucky from Child?s Play on the side of this truck here. [points out picture of Chucky; both laugh] So you?re primarily doing fiction reviews? TD: Yeah, primarily fiction, focusing on young writers. The idea of the reviews is to provide access points to the Trop contributors, so our readers know where we?re coming from, who we?re reading, and what world our creative writing sits in. We?re going to write pop culture reviews too, of movies and TV and music, but the function is the same ? to illustrate who we?re watching and listening to, in order to contextualize our creative writing. ? We?re also doing interviews: so far we have one with Rebecca Makkai, who wrote The Borrower, and one with Jesse Ball. Sam Freilich is working on one with Ramona Ausubel, and I just finished one with Amelia Gray; those will come out in the next few weeks. EK: How often are you going to be updating the site? TD: We?re doing a full-length article every weekday; that could be either a column, a review, or an interview. On Saturdays we?ll have podcasts ? we?re calling ?em ?Tropcasts.? Our first one, which went up last weekend, is an interview with Lisa Marie Basile from the Poetry Brothel, a group that organizes private one-on-one poetry readings ? like a lap-dance. We?re also going to be recording readings of short stories; Natalie Jones, a radio journalist in D.C., is producing those for us. And the third thing we?re doing is ?Life Advice Radio,? in which Jake of ?Letters to Jake? asks me and my friend Peter Nichols to give advice to? shit, 10 West? I gotta drive for a second? [Tom drives for a second.] TD: ?to my friend J.R. Nutt, who?s got a lot of problems. EK: Are there any particular magazines or websites that you think of as a model or inspiration for what you?re doing? TD: There were a few that we referred to a lot while designing the site. One was Slake, here in L.A. ? the way they?re trying to channel the voice of the city, we?re trying to channel the voices of all the pockets where we live. The other one was The Tottenville Review, edited by Alex Gilvarry. They focus on young American writers, and we?re going to be doing that, too, though not exclusively. EK: Well, I admire what you?re doing. The L.A. Review of Books is a really big tent, which is a great thing, but sometimes I envy the more concentrated, collective model you guys are pursuing. The classic ?little magazine? structure. Are you open to pitches from writers outside your circle, though? Or are you trying to keep it limited to the group you already have?TD: We?re definitely open, and would love to bring in more people. We just want to make sure we keep a group identity, a Trop identity, so our columns are not just plucked from the ether, but complement what we have going. I think one of the Trop strengths is that, because our creative writing happens in recurring columns, it?s all Trop specific; we?re not just mashing together whatever short stories we have sitting on our hard drives. We?re playing off each other, and I like to think we?re making each other better. When I post a new ?Letter to Jake,? I want whoever?s above and below me in the queue to be proud to show their writing alongside mine. And that?s a function of being a collective. We all know each other, if not in person, then from emails, and we all care about each other?s work. Speaking for myself now, I think of my fellow Trop writers as my most important audience, and having this audience has been really helpful. They?ve pushed me as a writer, and given me a really fruitful incentive to write well. ?
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Trop?is now live and ready for perusing.madonna half time show fiat 500 abarth madonna halftime m i a clint eastwood mia super bowl tom coughlin
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