TOD 019 Jennifer Robin: A Good Problem to Have

In this podcast Scott Nicolay interviews Jennifer Robin, performance artist and author of Death Confetti: Pickers, Punks, and Transit Ghosts in Portland, Oregon (Feral House). Also a mini-roundtable report from the HP Lovecraft Film Festival & CthulhuCon (Oct. 6-8, Portland, OR) featuring Michael Griffin, Ross Lockhart (Word Horde Press) and Anya Martin.

Show Notes

Performance artist/author Jennifer Robin joins Scott to talk about Death Confetti: Pickers, Punks, and Transit Ghosts in Portland, Oregon (Feral House), her collection of dark comedy autobiographical blog posts, including a reading of the intensely Weird introduction about her voyeuristic connection to the outside world, micro-identities, traveling West, Portland as character and her love-hate relationship with the city, the assault on the idea of community in the US right now, the shifting nature of artist communities, ‘sucking on the Edge’, Earthquakes in Candyland, her next ‘heavier’ book about America for John Skipp‘s Fungasm Press (summer 2018), her surrealistic science fiction and the fortuitous rise of Bizarro fiction, dream logic and subconscious logic informing her nonfiction, class warfare and desperation, horror and humor as fundamental aspects of human experience, barriers, America as ‘monster’, inspiration from William Gibson and the importance of mentors, the cathartic effect of performance, rawness in human survival, the acceleration of the ‘folly and Weirdness of society’, her teenage journalistic roots, fitting into the new construct of the contemporary artist, the relationship between ego and art, how the Internet is blurring lines between modern artists and their art, freak-outs on the bus, another reading from Death Confetti, poetry and musicality in her writing, as well as her recommended writers/poets including Monica Drake, Autumn Christian, Suzanne Burns, Ben Mirov, Mike G, and Julie Burns.