Looking back from the start of March

Michael Silverblatt died on February 14th.

It’s been years since his KCRW program Bookworm went off the air. It was a situation that was confusing for many of us. I think we assumed that he was sick, but then he didn’t return, and he hadn’t died. Being myself of course I think that being too ill to work but lingering is a horrible fate. But I also know that’s a toxic way to think. 

Bookworm was a great show. Half an hour every week where he interviewed a writer. The kind of in depth conversation that so many of us who conduct interviews about the arts aspire to do. Silverblatt was erudite and thoughtful, and he sought a tone and approach that didn’t assume listeners had read the book, or the author’s entire oeuvre, as Silverblatt had in many cases, but introducing us to them in a way filled with enthusiasm and awe and joy what they were able to do. Not simply about craft, not so intimidating to those who didn’t know the writer, at his best Silverblatt was great at balancing all of these things.

He was obsessed with and loved so many of the writer whom people might expect, but I also remember the conversations he had with writers I didn’t know, who he introduced me to for the first time like Cees Nooteboom, Laszlo Krasznahorkai, Chris Kraus, James McCourt, Steve Erickson, Geoff Dyer.

I moved to Los Angeles in the 2000s after college and people talk shit about Los Angeles, for reasons that I won’t say are unwarranted, but there is so much art and culture and life happening there. There were so many people who were such important teachers to me in so many ways.

KCRW, which produced Bookworm, was an important place. Still is, I should say. I remember listening to Silverblatt and Elvis Mitchell, who at the time had a half hour interview show The Treatment. Similarly he talked with big names, but also with great young talents like Ava DuVernay. Th station’s music programming is one of the ways that I always think about the city. I might have listened to other stations, and their signature morning show aired when I was usually at work, but the station introduced me to Cafe Tecuba, Kinky, Jesca Hoop, Chicano Batman, and so many other artists. There was a weekly arts review, commentary about different aspects of the city by Kevin Roderick, Sandra Tsing Loh, Rob Long. It was the kind of city I wanted to be a part of. The kind of media organization I loved and believed in.

My point is that maybe some people only heard Silverblatt through podcasts. Saw him as this outlier in the city of Los Angeles standing up for great art and literature in a city in a nation that increasingly devalued it. And he was. But he was also part of something bigger that did that every day. As the National Endowment for the Arts used to say, a great nation deserves great art.

Michael Silverblatt believed in great art. And every week for half an hour he wanted his listeners to believe that there was nothing greater, nothing more important than to read. I don’t share his enthusiasm for every one he interviewed or every book they discussed. But of course that’s not the point. The point was to engage. To read. To think. To be more.

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The funny thing, if I look back and consider such things, is that I don’t think I’ve ever had a good year as a writer. I know that’s a limiting way to think. To never believe that I’m doing enough or successful. There are reasons both toxic and practical for thinking that way. The exhaustion of pitching and rejection and re-pitching. The projects that one has to research just to pitch, and then might never get written. Or that it takes time and many cycles with many editors and many publications so that even if an article gets written, sometimes I’ve spent more time and energy getting to write it than I did actually writing and researching it. 

Of course there’s a lot of writing I do that never comes out publicly or doesn't have my name attached. I did quite a lot of that. When forced to sit down and make a list of all that I’ve done, all that I worked on, I was forced to admit that I wrote a lot last year. Even if it never quite feels like it.

Some of that is also just writing fiction that either didn’t get published or isn’t quite finished, which always has the feeling of being not enough. I can say that I wrote a novel and started another, and wrote multiple short stories and poems. I did a few live events where I interviewed people on stage, which can be fun.

But even from the standpoint of not writing enough and not being successful, 2025 was a good year as these go. I had a short story published in an anthology, which was nice. In part because it never really happens.

Andrew Belonsky, who is practically a neighbor and who I overlapped with at college, launched a newspaper, The Hartford Arts Pagesc. We have coffee and throw ideas around. Most of which he doesn’t like, but I enjoy editors who will look you in the eye and say, no interest whatsoever, what else you got? I am the Associate Editor, in part because I do a story edit of Andrew’s work, and I’ve gotten to write about the local theater scene, musicians like Audio Jane and Someone You Can X-Ray, highlight Joey Batts and Hip Hop for the Homeless, and talk with the artist Peter Waite about his work and exhibition at the Wadsworth Atheneum.

I started conducting interviews for the website CrimeReads, which I’ve been reading for years and love because they cover everything from cozy mysteries to dark noir stories to true crime, books and movies, and everything in between. The team there seems to like me, or likes me well enough to keep okay’ing my ideas. I’ve gotten to talk with an amazing range of writers this year including Anthony Horowitz, Sophie Hannah, Amie McNee, Lou Berney, Gabriel Urza, Artis Henderson, Chris Offutt, Malka Older, Elly Griffiths, Eric Heisserer, and Shaina Steinberg.

Mafalda, the legendary Argentina comic strip, was published in the US this year and I wrote about this in an article for LitHub, which has long been one of my favorite literary publications, and I’m thrilled to be in it.

Not only did I appear in Electric Literature for the first time, but I had two articles appear. One, an interview with Mattie Lubchansky about the graphic novel Simplicity, which is an amazing book. We’ve talked before and I love the new book more than I can say. Then I got to speak with Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore about Terry Dactyl, which is an amazing novel and quite simply one of the best books I read all year. Both just beautiful books that are so timely and so good.

I wrote for Reactor– which I still occasionally have to explain to people used to be Tor but was renamed– but it remains one of the very best websites about science fiction and fantasy. A new collection of the short fiction rof the late Patricia McKillip was released in the fall, and it was a good excuse to write about her brilliance as a writer and prose stylist.

The International Journal of Comic Art published my review of Caitlin McGurk's excellent and important book about the late cartoonist Barbara Shermund, Tell Me a Story Where The Bad Girl Wins.

The Brooklyn Rail has long been one of my favorite publications and places to write for, and I had the opportunity to talk with the Cyborg Jillian Weise about the new book Pills and Jacksonvilles, which has some extraordinary poems.

I continued to write for the Connecticut Voice, which is the local queer magazine and lets me write about amazing local individuals doing great things. I wrote about the Connecticut Sun basketball team and their work, profiled Ashley Flagg, the award-winning chef opening her first restaurant, The Laurel in West Hartford, and Tony Palmieri of Tony’s Flour Shop in Cromwell. I talked to local science fiction and fantasy author Susan Jane Bigelow, and profiled the cartoonists KC Councilor, and Diane DiMassa.

I continued my occasional writing for The Podcast Review by citing 7 books written by podcasters. A list that I like to think is not obvious– except for The Memory Palace by Nate DiMeo, the publication of which prompted the creation of this list.

The Comics Journal has new editors, but they continue to like me. Or at least publish me. I interviewed Melissa Mendes, about her long in the works book The Weight, which I remember her starting when we spoke more than a decade ago, and I was honored that we got to talk at the end of the journey. I interviewed Youssef Daoudi and Mike Curato about their amazing new books, both of which I loved, and Will Franz about his brief but notable career in comics. I wrote two obituaries, including one about Nancy Burton, which I think managed to say a lot about her and our work together and what it meant. 

I also wrote a two-part look back on the series Starman for its thirtieth anniversary (technically the 30th anniversary was last year, but that’s how long it’s taken me to finish this thing). The Starman articles got more attention than is usual for my articles, or at least I saw it being shared a lot. I was hoping for people to respond to some of the arguments I put forward it in, besides just complaining that it’s long and has a lot of footnotes. Maybe in 2026 I’ll see people respond in some ways to arguments about the relationship between comics and opera, European creators and American road trips, attitudes towards the dropping of the atom bomb, American militarism and power in 21st century (and what superhero movies have to say about it). Or maybe not.

Of course when I initially proposed the series I had something longer in mind (pause for laughter) to open with a Tony Harris interview talking about design, creating the look of Opal City, panel borders and physical layout, opening with the very very physical shape of the comic, getting into different issues and short interviews about various topics along the way– like how Ragdoll reads very different today than it did in the 1990s– and ending with an interview with James Robinson. But maybe I’ll write that for the 40th. (Or 46th, more likely, at the rate I seem to work).

Writing it all out, besides thinking, maybe it was an accomplishment, I think about so many of the conversations of those conversations, which I found moving and emotional. They were, at least for me, thoughtful and important. I talked with people I knew or whose work I knew. I met people and their work for the first time. Some people are artists with whom I've interviewed before and will hopefully interview again. Some people I became friends with, or at least acquaintances. I suppose that's all one can hope for, for art and life to be tied together, in ways that feed one's soul.