And while I believed myself liberated of this perception, after reading Deanne Stillman’s Mustang: The Saga of the Wild Horse in the American West (2009), I realized I’d better take a step down from my academic pedestal. While the book is enlightening in numerous ways—tracing the wild horse from its evolutionary origins on North America to the eradication campaigns it faces today—as I read, one thought bothered me more than most: This horse, the wild and free mustang, is one of those “invasive species”? One of those destroyers of ecosystems? Parasites of local economies? I heard the term often enough, even grew excited at the mention of new ways to combat them, and never did I question the need for such charged rhetoric. Until I did, in an interview I was fortunate enough to conduct with essayist, playwright, professor, and author of numerous works of literary nonfiction Deanne Stillman.

Sam Risak (SR): In Mustang, you take us through the horses’ history in the United States, opening with Cortes’s use of the animals in his conquering of the New World. Time and time again, we see how America used the horse to invade and win wars—ironic considering the horses’ current label as an invasive species. Did this ‘invasive’ parallel drive the structure of your book? And if so, what do you hope readers take away from it?

Deanne Stillman (DS): Actually, I take the history back further than that. In the chapter called “Dawn of the Mustang: Eohippus to Equus,” I talk about the fact that the horse is indigenous to this continent. It evolved in North America, then headed across the Bering land bridge in Alaska, and then fanned out across the world, evolving as it went. Meanwhile, it went extinct on this continent, and then returned with conquistadors. I say “returned” because there has in fact been a DNA match between the horses of the Ice Age on this continent and the horses that arrived in the New World with Cortes and other conquistadors. These horses became the basis for many of the wild horses that range across the West today, though some mixed with cavalry horses and others over time. So what’s ironic is the fact that the wild horse has, in the course of the last couple of hundred years, become demonized in various quarters as an “other” when it is in fact indigenous, as science has shown. I talk about this demonization in other chapters that explore the history of rodeo, for instance; rodeo was when we first started seeing terms such as “outlaw” and “son of a bitch” used in reference to wild horses. Later, when cattle grazing took over public lands, the term “varmint” was rolled out in reference to mustangs. In other words, they had to go.

So it’s not so much that the “invasive” parallel drives my book, but rather it’s the idea that “it’s come to this.” As I ask in Mustang, “why are we, a cowboy nation, destroying the horse we rode in on?” I am talking about a spiritual sickness in this country that needs to be reconciled. Of course we are seeing this now played out in spades, with coronavirus upon us, a plague that comes out of wild animal markets in China. Nature is now responding to the endless assaults all over the planet, and our wars against what’s wild must now come to a halt. For more, there is this, which I wrote awhile ago about a trip I made to the Little Bighorn battlefield for the annual commemorations. https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-battle-of-the-little-bighorn-and-our-war-against-the-wild/

SR: A main argument fueling the often-cruel means of population regulation for mustangs is their lack of purpose when compared to other grazing animals like the cattle our agricultural industry depends on. To what extent do you think capitalism fuels our attacks against the horse? Do you think America has space for both? Or are capitalism and the mustang set in a permanent patriotic clash?

DS: Those are great questions. At the beginning of the 20th century, the time of the horse as our partner had come to an end. The car was here, and before that the railroad. We no longer needed it for transportation and that’s when the mass round-ups began. The mustang came to be viewed as a cash crop, part of the bonanza in the open spaces of the West. Millions were shipped to the slaughterhouse and the railroads offered special “per pound” rates for wild horses. This machine was voracious and yes, capitalism, unchecked capitalism that is, propelled it. Fortunes were made then as the range was cleared and then cleared again, often to make way for cattle. But there were other things afoot as well. Across the West, there are other valuable resources – timber, minerals – and mustang herds were viewed as being in the way. Today, under Trump, grazing fees – meaning the amount that the federal government charges ranchers to graze their cows on public lands – are at their lowest point ever. In the late 1800s, there was a popular book called The Beef Bonanza and it was read widely in England and Scotland, attracting many emigrants to the Great Plains and the West. Today the bonanza continues unchecked.

We have plenty of wide open space in this country; certainly there is room for wild horses and grazing at the same time. It’s already happened WITH heavier regulations. There really isn’t a clash, other than the one that is commercially driven. But again, the horse is indigenous, and the cow is not. The horse is protected by a federal law. The cow has a powerful lobby, as do the other industries that ply public lands. By the way, this is not to demonize cows; it’s not their fault! Part of the problem here is that our great icon, the cowboy, is part and parcel of the wild horse/cattle puzzle, and it’s very hard to imagine American without this most basic part of our identity. But, as I write at the end of Mustang, if we can’t reconcile our schizophrenic nature – our love of freedom versus our urge to dam it up, wall it off, round it up – the one of these days, America is going to walk on down the road, on foot, without a horse.

By the way, even Paul Revere’s horse had wild horse bloodlines, as I recount in Mustang. America was born in hoofsparks, as per Longfellow’s famous poem about Revere’s ride (“The British are coming!”). Yet we seem to have forgotten all about that, and remembered only the guy on the horse. Incidentally, her name was Brown Beauty, and when the British captured Revere after the ride, she collapsed and died. So here we have a horse dying in service of giving birth to this country.

SR: In the pandemic that is COVID-19, reminders of how we contaminate our surroundings are everywhere—from freeway signs flashing social-distancing messages to the taped-off playgrounds. Even in America, the land of individual rights, we are instructed to not only worry about our own well-being, but the well-being of those around us. Do you believe this shift in perspective has the potential to expand beyond the virus to incorporate our responsibilities to the planet and the needs of other species on it like the mustang?

DS: I hope so, as I’ve said in my earlier replies here. We are already seeing signs that nature is on the rebound. Funny how it doesn’t take much. Birds are returning everywhere as cars and people disappear from freeways, parks, and beaches. Other animals are starting to make a comeback. Already some mustang round-ups planned by the government for this summer have been postponed (though that can easily change down the line; wild horses have not had a friend in the White House since Richard Nixon).

But clearly, there is a worldwide shift across the board underway. We are in a moment of great danger and great promise. It’s going to take a long time to right the ship, but there is an opening right now and we can do this. The planet can take care of itself if we treat it with respect. Horses have been on this continent since the Ice Age and having re-established themselves in a land where they seem destined to endure, they are not going anywhere. Now, the task for us is to honor them as our partner and great icon of freedom, not just revere muscle cars called “mustang” or have football teams called “broncos” and so on. No horse, no America, as I often say, and if it goes, our spirit is greatly diminished.

Stillman and Bugz at Wild Horse Spirit in Carson City, NV, where the horse lived after being rescued in the Virginia Range outside Reno following the massacre of her band during the Christmas holiday in 1998. Stillman tells her story in Mustang, and also the story of the Virginia Range horses.

For more on Deanne Stillman and Mustang, see Pam Houston’s review in the LA Times: https://www.lapl.org/collections-resources/e-media/podcasts/aloud/mustang-saga-wild-horse-american-west and her conversation with fellow nonfiction author Samantha Dunn at the LAPL for the Aloud series: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-29-bk-stillman29-story.html

Works published in Los Angeles Review of Books and Entropy and upcoming in The Writer’s Chronicle, Terrain.org, and Crab Orchard Review, Sam Risak is a Florida transplant pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing and an MA in English Literature at Chapman University.

Alison Williams: Can we start with a bit of your background? I have the sense that it’s inherent to your work.

Hélène Cardona: My upbringing is somewhat uniquely American because I’m an immigrant and the daughter of immigrants. I was born in Paris to a Greek mother and a Spanish father. My father was translating a lot of international poets and writers, like Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir. There was so much censorship in Spain, everything was political, and there was no freedom of expression. He was about to be arrested for his writing, so, to escape Franco’s dictatorship, he fled to France. There he met my mother, who had left Greece to study law, and that’s how I came to be born in Paris. Soon after, we moved to Geneva, Switzerland, where my brother was born. My father worked for the UN and was involved politically, advocating for immigrants who were living in difficult conditions.

At home, French was the dominant language in the sense that we lived within the French world; but my dad spoke to us in Spanish and my mom spoke to us in Greek, so translation was a way of life. You don’t think of it, you just talk to one parent in one language, the other one in the other language, and that’s how life is. I grew up navigating cultures, steering my boat, and yet feeling very French somehow.

Williams: And of course, your name is Hélène.

Cardona: Yes, it’s a funny story. When I was born, they didn’t have a name for me, because they assumed I was going to be a boy. Finally, my mother gave me her mother’s name. They raised my brother and me with no gender difference. I wore dresses but played all kinds of sports, including soccer. I studied music and ballet at the Music Conservatory. I was also really good at math and physics. I was an equal with the boys everywhere. And it always felt strange when I saw differences in treatment between boys and girls. I felt very frustrated about it.

The French system is selection through math. So if you’re good at it, you’re encouraged to go into the scientific section in high school. I specialized in math, physics, and chemistry and also studied languages (English, Spanish, and Latin). But once you’re in the system, you’re—

Williams: You make your track.

Cardona: And they expect you to keep going. So at seventeen I was in medical school, and at nineteen I had a breakdown because it wasn’t for me. I thought I could do it all, but once you’re in medical school, you can’t. It’s all people do. Other interests are unheard of. After two years, I was burned out. I crashed. I had a deep depression, and I got out of med school. And my dad was so upset with me, like I was letting him down. When I hit the specialization the French system required, it was the beginning of the end, a slow death. I didn’t want to give up my artistic side (I played the piano and belonged to a dance company), but I couldn’t say no to getting into med school. It sounded good. I thought, I’ll be the kind of doctor who is a linguist, who does all these artistic things—but no, the regimen wouldn’t allow it.

Williams: It sounds like your work as an actress, writer, and translator was built out of this initial fragmentation or realization, where you had to explore and build this new part of yourself as an adult.

Cardona: I had to learn who I was the hard way. It was a dark time. And yet this challenging process of individuation was a great gift because it forced me to make choices. It propelled me out of Europe to the United States. I realized that this was my life and I had to live it. But it was painful. I had to start my life completely over. My mom was my only support.

Williams: In reading Life in Suspension / La Vie Suspendue, what first attracted me was the mysticism, the connection with nature, and the duality of the language. But as I looked more deeply I saw these connections with your family and your history. In the beginning is your dedication to your mother, and then as I read through, I saw her as this continual thread in your poems. Did you write these poems specifically with these themes in mind, or did they come up organically?

Cardona: A bit of both. My mother died twenty years ago. There was such grief because she was the only person who believed in me. When I was younger, my dad thought I was throwing my life away, leaving medical school for acting, but he meant well. And in recent years we’ve reconnected. But my mother always believed in me. Her death was a huge loss. As a result, I wrote a lot. I had notebooks filled with notes and poems that I didn’t know what to do with for a long time, until I put them in book form.

Williams: Did you consider yourself a poet as you were writing these notebooks throughout that period? Or was being a “poet” something that happened as you wrote the poetry as a mode of self-expression?  

Cardona: I think I’ve always been a poet. I started writing poetry when I was ten. Surprisingly enough, even though my father was a poet, he never had a connection to anything I wrote for a long time. That changed after the publication of my first book. 

Williams: How interesting.

Cardona: Really interesting. My mom, on the other hand, read everything I wrote. With my dad, when I was younger, it was always as if I was a strange animal he didn’t understand. But since the publication of my books, he has told me how much he loves my poetry, which really means a lot to me. We reconnected, and we’re close now. So close that I’m translating him, which has been deeply moving (see WLT, Nov. 2013, 15). He’s gone through a lot, too, and now we’re both in a different mind-set, which makes reconciliation possible.

My connection to nature always existed. I spent my whole childhood and early teenage years in Geneva and its surroundings, living in nature, in the mountains with my dog. In those days you could, as a child, get lost. It was safe. I’m not sure that people do that anymore, but I would disappear with my dog for hours, and it was total communion. I always had that connection to nature and to music. I would play the piano. I didn’t have the words for it at the time, but it was really meditation. When I was writing the notes, I didn’t know what I was going to do with them. It was a healing process, transcending grief and pain. The poetry comes from creating something that encapsulates that.

I didn’t know what I was going to do with them. It was a healing process, transcending grief and pain.

Williams: So these poems, then, were written over the course of these long years after your mother passed away?

Cardona: Yes, yes.

Williams: Because in my mind I was thinking, “So she sat down, she wrote a poem, and then she translated it.” And, of course, it’s not like that at all, because you’re a human being and you write out of your experience. So you had these poems that you wrote over a long period of time, and then you sifted through, composing and curating this collection. And then did you move into the translation?

Cardona: That’s right.

Williams: Were they in English or in French, or both?

Cardona: They were all in English because I write in English. It was my first publisher’s idea to present the book in a bilingual collection because they didn’t have any work in French and English. It was an unusual proposition, and it made me rework the texts, which was also a great gift. I did it for The Astonished Universe, Dreaming My Animal Selves, and Life in Suspension. I think it improved the poems.

Williams: In what way? What has been the change? Are you kind of translating yourself?

Cardona: I’m translating myself, yes. Obviously when I translate, I try to be very faithful. For what’s untranslatable, I work to find an equivalent. But I try to be faithful. It’s not about being literal. I try to be as literal as possible, but what has to be changed has to be changed. I’m not re-creating a different text. Sometimes one can do that with translations, and they become their own animal. I’m rendering the work into English, so it does transform, it does become a new text. But I’m not choosing to change things to fit my own personal view.

However, with my own work, I felt freer. And so in a couple of poems or lines here and there, I decided to say something else in French or in English. It was fine because it was my choice to do that. I was only accountable to myself.

Williams: I did notice these differences in the texts. As a person who is just beginning in translation myself, I was very curious as to how those choices were made. They mean different things in each language, which seems not the way of the work of translating in general.

Cardona: And this is because I preferred it one way in one language and the other way in the other. I felt that I could get away with it because it was my own. But I wouldn’t necessarily do it with someone else’s work.

Williams: You’ve done a lot of work as a translator. Would you say you think of yourself more as a translator or as a poet? Or as a poet who translates? Or does it really matter?

Cardona: It doesn’t matter. I’m a poet who translates. And an actress as well. They are different hats I wear. If I’m writing poetry, I’m writing poetry; if I’m translating, I’m translating. If I’m performing in a movie or recording voices for a movie, I’m just doing that. They are different aspects of me that get to be expressed at different times, or maybe sometimes at the same time.

Williams: As an artist . . .

Cardona: Yes, as an artist. When you have more than one interest and don’t specialize in only one from the outset, your path is a bit slower until everything comes together. I’ve spent my life doing all these different things and feel I’m in the best place I’ve ever been. Everything takes time. There are no shortcuts. I’m more at peace with that now.

There was also so much financial struggle, having to provide for myself. I’ve spent all these hours that add up to days and years working just to support myself, not necessarily in artistic fields. But those experiences have enriched me, because that’s what life required. All the different jobs where I met all kinds of people.

Williams: Which makes the work, at the end of the day, more tangible and present. You’re in it and living it, and not just theorizing or philosophizing but speaking from your own true experience. This must also inform your translation, understanding other people, having empathy and passion for them.

Cardona: Exactly. Empathy for other cultures, and people.

Williams: This brings me to the epigraphs in your book. There are a number of them. I was thinking about the idea of translation as conversation with other poets, with other cultures. Is that what’s happening with those writers that you refer to?

Cardona: Yes, all these poets and writers, whom I love and connect with so deeply, express exactly how I feel. We are kindred spirits. So I incorporate them via epigraphs. I am both paying homage to them and enriching my poem thanks to this ongoing conversation.

When you understand and know other cultures, you don’t fear the other. There is no other. We should be shepherds of the Earth.

Williams: You also did the translation work with Walt Whitman’s war writings. I felt a lot of symmetry with Whitman in your poetry. Do these opportunities with the translation work you do come from you pursuing the work you’re interested in, or do they come more spontaneously?

Cardona: For Whitman, I was approached by Christopher Merrill at Iowa’s International Writing Program. Whitman’s war writings had never been translated before into French or Arabic. This was a great opportunity because these texts (poems, letters, and prose) resonate so much with the current climate. Whitman worked as a nurse during the Civil War, tending to wounded soldiers from both sides, Confederate and Union. It was so touching and moving to translate his work. At times it made me cry.

It’s a timely reminder that we humans have a very short-term memory. If a war hasn’t occurred fairly recently, a country is ready to send its people to battle again. I could visualize the horrors as Whitman described the amputations, the damage inflicted on these young men. When one is young, one feels fearless and invincible, and this pattern repeats with every generation. It made me wonder what it’s going to take for humanity to transcend that and for us to be able to live together without having to steal another country’s resources.

It’s a question of evolution. Everyone should have the right to a decent life. Those extremes in terms of wealth—between the 1 percent who control everything and the rest of us—don’t serve humanity.

Translation is necessary to know oneself—to know where one comes from. Every language is a key into the psyche of its people.

Williams: I want to get to this idea, then, of translation as a political act.

Cardona: It is a political act.

Williams: Its nature is in being able to take the words from one culture and move them into the language that can be understood in another.

Cardona: When you understand and know other cultures, you don’t fear the other. There is no other. We are all humans inhabiting this planet, with our differences. We have more in common than not. We should be shepherds of the Earth. Translation is necessary to know oneself—to know where one comes from. Every language is a key into the psyche of its people. There’s no need to be antagonistic toward people just because we’re unfamiliar with their culture or the language they speak. This dehumanization of the other is a very scary thing. Pitting people against one another is counterproductive. Through translation, we bring cultures together, we create bridges. Becoming familiar with another culture transcends otherness. We are many and diverse.

February 2017

This interview by Anastamos Editor-in-Chief Alison Williams originally appeared in the May 2017 edition of World Literature Today.

Check out Hélène Cardona’s translation of Maram Al-Masri’s poetry in our inaugural issue, here.

We took away four major lessons on writing from the master class with Max Brooks:

1. Passion is important for writing, especially when you’re dealing with people in the industry.

“For me, it was all the question of passion, all the question of what am I writing that I want to read and that’s always been my favorite authors. They tend to be people who come to writing later in life and have other jobs and do it as a side thing and then it takes off. For me it’s about passion and it’s the only way I know how to survive criticism.

Now if he [referring to the general students in the room] goes into a regular job, then he can stay inside that little millennial bubble and not get hurt. But if he’s an artist, holy shit are you in for it. And that’s if you’re successful. If you get your shit out there, they will come for you and your parents can’t protect you. And this little school that just wants your parent’s money and is right now protecting you; they can’t protect you. No one can protect you. He’s going to get out there and he’s going to be subject to the most vicious, horrible criticism, what some people would call cyber-bullying, he’s going to call Wednesday. And the only way he’s going to be able to survive that is by loving what he does. Every minute of every day. Even when he hates it, he has to love it. Because that’s the only way to survive. Because otherwise don’t do it.

Don’t think you’re gonna become a screenwriter because people are going to love you, people are going to take giant dumps all over you every day and that’s just life. And that’s not just the people that are in your very business, because if you’re going to be a screenwriter, you’re going to have to deal with every day with a group of people who are part of a jobs program for the mentally deficient (they’re called creative executives) and their job is to turn good scripts into bad scripts and those are your bosses and after you go through them and then get your movie out there, some shithead on some website is going to basically pee all over you, so you have to love it. Any one of you whose considering doing anything artistic, you have to love it, you have to keep going, because that’s all you can do when you try to be artistic.”

2. Playing Minecraft on Survival Mode is a great lesson on life and writing.

“When my son got into Minecraft, I got into it with him and I realized this is more than just a game. If seen through the right lens, Minecraft can teach you how to survive real life. If you play it on the survival level, it teaches you about patience and planning and dealing with failure, everything you need to know for out there. And you never stop learning no matter what age you are.

I think the creative level should be played sparingly. It’s really good for creating awesome structures, but it doesn’t teach you the awesome lessons that Minecraft really has to offer, because you just get stuff handed to you. And that’s not a great lesson for surviving life. Nobody’s going to hand anything to you. I don’t know any rules for writing, but I do know some rules for surviving writing. And in my survival guide, you need discipline. You need to keep doing it, like Matt [a screenwriting student in the session] is going to write the first draft of his script and it’s going to be awesome and creative and it’s going to flow. That’s great. He’s going to need to do 17 more drafts and that’s not going to be awesome and beautiful but the shit’s gotta get done. That’s called writing. That’s discipline. That’s a job.

And you learn that when you play Minecraft on survival. You have to stockpile food or else you will starve. And it’s not always fun to plant that wheat. But you gotta do it. You gotta clear the ground. And then it teaches you patience. That wheat’s gonna grow. And yelling at it’s not going to help. And you better find something else to occupy your time while this is happening. Minecraft teaches you time management. I have x amount of daylight hours before the mobs come out. I have to use my time well because then when I’m forced underground, there’s stuff I can’t do outdoors. What can I do indoors, what can I do outdoors? It teaches you how to plan. In order to plant that wheat, I gotta punch that tree, make tools and get seeds. What do I need to do first? So all these lessons are amazing. These are lessons that as a middle aged dude, I’m still struggling with. This is an amazing game and it teaches you how to recover from failure.

In Minecraft, as I have done, you can build a beautiful house that takes you forever and accidentally burn it down. So what are you going to do? Cry over it and quit and not play Minecraft again or are you going to clean up the windows that are still hanging in mid-air and build another house? So that’s the thing that Minecraft teaches me. I thought, if you write a Minecraft novel, take time to note those lessons so that they’re clear. And that’s what I’ve done.”

3. Juggle your time wisely.

“I wrote the novel in my spare time and I became a screenwriter because I didn’t care as much. I didn’t get sports and academics. I sucked at. So I had nothing except my writing. I wrote my first short story when I was 13 and it was like a world I could hide in. Every day for two hours a night, for my life, I would hide in my room every day from 9-11 and write. And I thought that I can’t show this to anyone. All I had was this thing. If I bring my writing out into this world and it gets judged, it gets judged poorly, well then it’s time for the heroin needle. So I kept it away.

When I wrote Zombie Survival Guide, I thought I cared too much about this to see the light of day. Maybe I’ll hit something I don’t care much about like screenwriting or SNL. And it was actually when I was on SNL that I took the book back out and dusted it off. It was time to put up or shut up. It was time to be brave and take something that I care about it, which is novel writing and let it into the world. And be done. Because I can’t hide from it anymore. That’s how I did that.

Now, I’ve had to adapt it because I used to be a night writer before I had a child. The problem is that I’m the kind of writer where the best stuff comes at the end of the day. And it’s hard because at the end of the day I’ve gotta go pick up my kid from school or I gotta go home. And the hardest part for me is switching the brain off because I’ve gotta go home and all the cylinders are firing and god forbid there’s a problem I need to solve and I can’t let go of that. I’m like a dog with a chew toy. I gotta take off the writer jacket and be a father and a husband.

And my wife’s going to have problems and my kid’s going to have problems. And at that moment, their problems come first. I can’t say to them all, you all go to hell, I am a writer. Some guys did that. I think the toughest part is the juggling. I need a space. My wife’s a writer too—she’s a playwright. So for us, the juggling comes down to deadlines. Whoever has a deadline gets priority. If she’s got a deadline and I don’t, then I’m Mr. Mom. I’ll pick him up from school; I’ll take him to tap dance. I’ll do what I gotta do. I’ll deal with the plumber. That’s on me. If I’ve got a deadline, she’s gotta do it. So that’s how we’ve managed to organize our schedule.”

4. Always follow your passion because you never know where it will lead you.

“I kind of wrote Zombie Survival Guide, the way Tom Clancy wrote Hunt for Red October. He was not a writer, he was an insurance salesman. At the end of the day, he’d write a little bit of Hunt for Red October. While I was writing scripts during the day and then at night, I was writing a secret project that only I thought I would want to read. I didn’t think anybody else cared. And it was called Zombie Survival Guide. Nobody was into zombies in the 90’s. We had an awesome life, but there was this looming fear called Y2K and people were starting to panic about it and I had always been scared of zombies. Always.

So Y2K is happening and I’m thinking, what if there’s a zombie outbreak and not the kind you see in the movies; what if there was a real zombie plague? The more I thought of it, the more I realized that 90% of people would not die from zombies. They die from malnutrition or dehydration or some sort of disease or they prick themselves on a rusty nail and get Tetnus or they fall and break their leg and not be able to hunt. That’s what happens when this incredible web of first world safety and security breaks down. People die from secondary and tertiary problems, not the primary problems.

Growing up in Southern California with the threat of earthquakes, we had earthquake kits and we always planned like how are we going to survive. In an earthquake most of us aren’t going to die by something falling on us; most of us are literally going to die of dehydration. So I took all that knowledge and I took some personal experience that I had. When I was in college for the first year, I was in ROTC so that’s where the beginnings of my weapons knowledge came from. So when I’m talking about the M16 being a crappy gun, I can tell you from personal experience, it really, really is.

So I sat down and wrote a book. For me. And I shoved it in a drawer. I didn’t think anyone wanted it. And then when it got published, they tried to market it in the humor section. Because once again, zombies were not popular. And people thought, well he’s just written for Saturday Night Live; he’s won an Emmy and he’s Mel Brooks’ son, so clearly he wrote this making fun of zombie nerds. He can’t be that much of a loser. This guy clearly didn’t really think about it. He’s lampooning and I said, “No, I am as much of a loser as you think I am. I’m really into this.” So I had to start doing zombie lectures to self-market it. And that’s when it sort of took off because I knew other people are into this just like me.”

Photo credit: Dennis Arp