RS: You're the friendliest, most welcoming writer in New York. Is that something that comes naturally to you or do you make an effort to be especially kind?
DM: Being friendly and welcoming is the best way to make people feel comfortable enough to stand next to you, let their guard down, and not notice you've lifted their wallet. I've always been a thief, so it comes naturally, but I also take it very seriously, as one should with anything they pursue, and I spend a lot of time practicing. Robbing people is a kind of forgotten intimacy, a form of affectionate flattery that has gone out of vogue, but it remains a timeless compliment in my mind. Since I must both like someone and be liked by them in order to steal, which is a scenario that only comes about through actual sincerity, it turns out that I exclusively rob people I genuinely admire.
You've been able to balance your work as a brilliant fiction writer while co-editing one of the best lit mags out there, The Atlas Review. How do you balance those separate endeavors?
Ha! It's all a ruse. First, for Atlas, all of our amazing writers and artists do most of the work. They spend their time making poems, stories and essays, paintings, photographs, and collages. That's the hard part. And writing fiction is pretty much the same. I let commercials, SPAM, junk mail, infomercials and pyramid schemes do most of the writing for me. My ambition is to be a kind of psychic medium, not with a connection to the spirits, but to other people trying to sell things they don't care about to people that may or may not exist. Writing fiction might seem like a roundabout way to go about this, but with anything that matters, it's best to take the long road, or -- if possible -- the road that never even gets there.
What can people expect from your reading on Saturday?
Traditional cocktail of sex and sadness.
