Reverse engineering the life that I wanted to have

Earlier this week I had the pleasure of interviewing Niko Stratis about her new book The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman at the Harvard Book Store in Cambridge. You can read an excerpt here.

A little ghost for the offering

The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman by Niko Stratis

Welcome to Hell WorldLuke O’Neil

It was a lovely talk and a great crowd so I thought I'd share it with you nice people here today. Paid subscribers can listen to a longer audio version down below that includes Niko reading and some questions from the audience if I don't fuck up attaching it somehow.

First a couple other things.

Back in February a real piece of shit member of Maine's House of Representatives Laurel Libby was censured by the legislative body after she refused to apologize for or take down a Facebook post she had made targeting a local transgender student track athlete. Since then she's cried and moaned in all the usual ways in the press and is hoping to get the Supreme Court to bail her out for her hateful bullshit.

This week another student athlete named Anelise Feldman, a freshman at Yarmouth High School, wrote a letter published in the Portland Press Herald calling Libby what she is. It's a very thoughtful and gracious rebuttal from such a young person and a refreshing change of pace from the usual whining that we see whenever a cis student athlete loses to a trans one. Feldman wrote:

Rep. Laurel Libby, R-Auburn, recently used my second-place finish in the 1,600-meter run, and that of my teammate in the 800-meter run, to malign Soren Stark-Chessa, the trans-identified athlete who finished first.

One of the reasons I chose to run cross-country and track is the community: Teammates cheering each other on, athletes from different schools coming together, and the fact that personal improvement is valued as much as, if not more than, the place we finish.

Last Friday, I ran the fastest 1,600-meter race I have ever run in middle school or high school track and earned varsity status by my school’s standards. I am extremely proud of the effort I put into the race and the time that I achieved. The fact that someone else finished in front of me didn’t diminish the happiness I felt after finishing that race. I don’t feel like first place was taken from me. Instead, I feel like a happy day was turned ugly by a bully who is using children to make political points.

We are all just kids trying to make our way through high school. Participating in sports is the highlight of high school for some kids. No one was harmed by Soren’s participation in the girls’ track meet, but we are all harmed by the hateful rhetoric of bullies, like Rep. Libby, who want to take sports away from some kids just because of who they are.

"No one was harmed by Soren’s participation in the girls’ track meet, but we are all harmed by the hateful rhetoric of bullies..." That's right. That's exactly right. What a good kid.

Check out this great piece of reporting by Hell World contributor Andrew Quemere for the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism and The Appeal.

“They Took My Life Away For Nothing.”

Explore the case of James Carver, a Massachusetts man exonerated after 36 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit

HorizonMassANDREW QUEMERE

James Carver spent 36 years in prison after he was convicted of setting one of the deadliest fires in Massachusetts history. But after reviewing new scientific evidence, a judge set him free.

It was the early morning of July 4, 1984. A Beverly police officer was driving down Rantoul Street when he heard the owner of the Sunray Bakery screaming to get his attention. The officer turned his cruiser around, then came to a stop. The owner pointed to a rooming house a few blocks away.

It was burning.

The inferno killed 15 people, making it one of the deadliest fires in Massachusetts history. Eventually, a young man would be convicted of setting the blaze and sentenced to spend two consecutive lifetimes in prison for what The Beverly Times described as the “worst mass murder in Massachusetts history.”

But that man, James “Jimmy” Carver, insisted on his innocence. And after Carver’s lawyers presented new scientific evidence at a hearing last spring, a judge agreed that he was entitled to a new trial. In December, the judge ruled that the trial prosecutor relied on junk science to show the fire was arson and unreliable eyewitness testimony to place Carver at the scene. In February, the judge vacated Carver’s sentences and released him without bail—finally freeing him after more than 36 years of incarceration.

I was reminded of this gorgeous piece by Lucy Schiller that I ran in here four years ago this week. It's about how readily we let the elderly die during the height of Covid and it's one of my absolute favorite essays in Hell World ever. Please read it if you missed it.

We have housed them far away from where we can see them

She walked out of a crashing plane into the air and pulled the parachute

Welcome to Hell WorldLuke O’Neil

“Lucy has always liked the plane crash story,” she said to everyone, with tangible annoyance, during the first of our three Zoom calls to the hospital, in which we were tentatively, disbelievingly saying both hello and goodbye at once. Even then I couldn’t stop watching myself on the screen. Zoom makes it impossible to train your eyes for very long elsewhere: there you are, always, reacting, your mouth opening wide, your eyes squinting, your everything on display in ways familiar to anyone else but new to you. I wore a bright red shirt because I had worried she wouldn’t be able to see me otherwise.

It was true, I had been drawn to the story over the years, often asking for more detail that she didn’t want to share. She was annoyed, I could tell. She was annoyed not just about having to talk about the story, but also by my very interest in it.  It was an anecdote she hated, because it was understandably more traumatic for her to retell than anything else, and yes, it was so obviously, so blatantly interesting. It was the story about her that most people would find impressive, for the nerve she had displayed, but also for the situation in which she had found herself.

She walked out of a crashing plane into the air and pulled the parachute. Everything between her drop and her landing in some tall pine tree in the Eastern zone of Germany I still have to imagine for myself. She refused, always, to describe it in any real detail. I’ve imagined it many times, the flipping of her stomach as she tumbled through cold air so forceful it might have felt like thick water. But my uncle had brought it up, not me, during an excruciating, halting, emotional, numbed, disbelieving goodbye over Zoom.

She had been the only passenger to choose to evacuate.

My god this video. Critical support for Ms. Rachel. All my dudes would die for Ms. Rachel.

There are more child amputees in Gaza than anywhere else in the world. What can the future hold for them?

Tens of thousands of children have been wounded in Gaza. Even those evacuated for treatment face an impossible path

The GuardianAhmed Moor

Shout out to Ben of Ben & Jerry too.

Ok here's me and Niko talking. More down below for paid subscribers. Chip in if you like what you read here. Thanks as always.

Thank you so much for being here and welcome to Cambridge. I guess it’s your first time in Massachusetts?

This has all been my first time in America. Growing up in the Yukon, I’ve been to Alaska a lot, but that doesn’t count sometimes. It kind of feels like Canada Jr., or like Russia’s weird cousin. But it never feels fully real. Coming to America for this trip has been like, oh, ok, this is what it’s like. 

And what a great time to come!

I picked such a great time. 

Did you have any trouble at the border? Were you worried about that coming in?

I had a lot of anxiety. My partner Lysha is here. We were talking in the car driving up, like, ok, I know they’re gonna ask us all these questions, and you’re concocting your story. I’m not even doing anything wrong! But then we get there and it’s totally fine. They asked what we were doing and we said going to New York. Then Lysh yelled it’s my birthday! And he was like great. Then I was like, where’s the Trader Joes? And he said, ok, here’s where you go….

You really lucked out. 

I know. I feel like I jinxed it for the way back. This is the last time anybody’s going to see me. 

My wife and I were just walking around Harvard Square talking about how it’s a little cold out tonight. I was thinking if I told you I thought that this was cold you would probably slap me in the face. 

This is a Yukon summer. It’s funny, you really see climate change a lot in the northern parts of North America. In the winter, it’s true, the sun never really comes up. So for 8-10 months a year it’s dark and cold and weird and crappy. Then in the summertime, at least when I was a kid, it was hot and dry, and the sun never goes down. When you’re like me, a teenage alcoholic, you go through a bit of a time warp. Where suddenly you lose days that become weeks that become years, because for three months a year the sun never goes away.  But it is funny, because every now and then somebody would be like, it's cold outside, I'm like, my sweet summer child… 

So you were nice enough to let me run an excerpt of your book on my newsletter and you said that you came up with the title before the idea for the book. I’m wondering, did you feel like, oh shit, now I have to write a book? The title's too good. 

I think anybody that ever agrees to write a book eventually has that oh shit, I have to write a book now moment. I definitely did. I had the title and I had written it on a notepad…. I had pitched a different book initially to this series that I wrote for at the University of Texas, and it wasn't really working out, and they were like what else do you have? I had this note on my desk that said “the dad rock and made me a woman.” And I thought it was funny.  I was like what about this? They're like yeah tell me more. And I was like shit I don't have more. Then I developed more pretty quickly after, but yeah, it was just kind of a funny joke that sort of took on a life of its own. 

How long ago was that? What was the process from conception to where we are today?

I think it was like a couple of years ago now because I had the idea and I workshopped it pretty quickly, and luckily for a small press it's an easy pitching process for the book. They all wanted me to do one. I just had to prove I knew what I was gonna do, which took a little bit. Then I started writing a book, having never done anything like this before. I thought this would be easy. Which, if anybody in the crowd has ever written a book, no it's not. 

No it’s not. 

But at the time I was like yeah this will be easy. This will take me like six weeks. Then two years later here I am.

You think of it as like, ok, I've written articles before, they don't take that long. I'll just string 25 articles together. 

It's like a bunch of articles. 

Yeah but for some reason the math doesn't add up that way. It's not as streamlined. 

No the math doesn't… When I was 30 I ran a marathon. Which I would never do now. But imagine being like, yeah, I could do a marathon, I walk down to the corner store every day.  Which is almost kind of true but not really.

So you touched on this a little, but Dad Rock… We've both been music writers for a long time. We know most of this stuff is made up, genres and things. 

Yeah everything is fake. 

Right, it's definitely fake. But it's kind of like an amorphous thing. What did it mean going into the book, and how did your sort of understanding of what the genre represents change over the course of writing the book? 

Well, it kind of really did start from this idea of, like, I wasn't taking it very seriously, right? The title was a thing that I thought was funny. And I was working from that angle. And then when I was kind of putting it together, I was thinking a lot about when Wilco was called a dad rock band when Sky Blue Sky came out in 2007. So, I was thinking about that and I was like, well, why were they saying that all of a sudden Jeff Tweedy is a dad rock writer? I started thinking a lot about that. And Dad Rock was this term that kept being funny to me, but I was like, but I'm not taking this seriously. And I actually want to see how can I deconstruct this and take it seriously and try to figure out where was Jeff Tweedy and Wilco in his life and in their career that he was writing the songs that he was writing for Sky from Sky. 

I sort of started to develop this big framework. If you found my notes, it was like you had stumbled upon the Zodiac Killer's lair, because I'm just, like, scribbling notes and things on pads and leaving them around and I was developing this idea more and more. And I was like, so what if Dad Rock is fake? What if I make it real in my head? And that's sort of what I did. This is how anything works. What if a fake thing becomes real? 

Right. That's how any genre works. 

And now we’re at Harvard talking about it. 

So a band isn't necessarily born as Dad Rock. They might graduate into it somewhere at some point in their career. And I think, you know, that certainly happened for a lot of the bands you write about. They were young and hip and vibrant and then at a certain point…. And it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with being a dad because many of the bands and artists you include are certainly not dads. So is there a switch that flips? You can sense a sort of wisdom or like a weariness or something like that that happens to a band? 

I think it's exactly that. I think it's the weary wisdom of failure over time. And I think a lot of that is… You know, I was a journeyman glassworker. I'm a Red Seal journeyman glazier by trade. And it's a trade I learned from my father who learned it from his. So I'm a third generation glassworker. And a lot of how I learned to do the trade was I failed. I made mistakes and I learned to not be afraid to make mistakes. A big lesson that my dad taught me was that mistakes will happen, so how will you recover and learn from them? And I think a lot of what Dad Rock became for me is like people that are writing music or writing songs that are saying here's how I have failed and learned. I am imparting my wisdom to you through that. I am not trying to tell you how to live. I am just showing you how I have gotten here, and if you try, maybe you can avoid some of the pitfalls I found. But I'm just sort of laying a roadmap out that is largely born of failure. Because I think that failure is not necessarily always a bad thing. I think that it is a thing that sort of will mark us in its own way, but I do think it sort of gives you this way through life. So I was thinking about it a lot through that. 

It’s important to note that you can be a very young woman and also be imparting those lessons, like Julien Baker, or some of the other younger women artists that you write about in here. 

I think people can kind of fail and learn lessons and learn how to impart them at any age. There is this idea that... I used to work with this guy who told me he would never listen to music made by people younger than him, because what do they have to teach him? You can imagine he was not a great person. You're not drawing a picture of the greatest man alive in your head when I tell you about this person I worked with. 

If you haven't read the book yet, there are plenty of not so great people in here. 

Oh yeah, there's a bunch of not great dudes that did a lot of not great things. This guy was like medium. He was chaotic neutral. 

That sounds like a win for you. 

For a time. Yeah. Like when the other guys were beating me up. I think chaotic neutral is a little bit easier. But I just thought that was so funny because younger people can live lives that are totally different from yours. Julien Baker has such a fascinating story. She came up in an evangelical Christian environment, and she was an addict from a young age, and she had all these things. She was queer and she was living in areas where none of these things were safe necessarily. Then sort of finding herself in punk rock and all this stuff. You gain a lot of knowledge in a short amount of time depending on how you grow up. And I think it was really interesting to be like, ok, somebody like this is still making Dad Rock in its own way. It's sad and beautiful. A lot of it is about failure and struggling and trying to be better, which I think is what a lot of dads are always kind of doing in their own way. 

I'm probably going to be the only one interested in this one, but it's notoriously hard to clear lyrics for books. Did you have a huge pain in the ass doing that or was it pretty easy? All the lyrics throughout the book. 

I was worried about this the whole way through because I didn't ask anybody if I was allowed to. I just wrote the whole book and I wrote lyrics in, and you'll see if you read the book, I will cut in through chapters or through paragraphs and essays and I'll put chunks of lyrics in there. And every chapter is named after a song and I put a lyric up top. It never once became a problem. But every day I was like, today's the day I get that email where they're like, ok, shut it down. We fucked up. And I just never got the shut it down we fucked up email. I'm waiting for it. it could still happen.

Well hopefully they had the lawyers look at it!

I also know that at least one artist that I wrote about in the book now has a copy of the book, and so, I'm like, what if he reads the book and he's super pissed off, and he's like, wait, that's not real?

Let me guess... John Darnielle?

It was Jeff Tweedy! His manager wrote the press and asked if he could get a copy. 

That's great. 

I’m not at all worried we'll get a really angry letter from Jeff Tweedy in the mail at some point in my life.

I don't think you have to worry about that. So how about narrowing down the songs? Was there a much longer master list, and were there a few songs that you were upset that you didn't end up being able to work in?

Yeah I made a really long playlist of songs once I sort of developed that framework that I was talking about. Because I worked in construction for so long, I'm an early riser, which my dog loves, and I think my partner is neutral about at best. I wake up at 4:30 in the morning, and I take the dog for a walk. But I approach the morning like all good addicts do, where I have a very specific system that. I start the coffee, I take the dog out, and I would listen to the songs that I put on this playlist. And if they weren't working, like if they weren't… You know when you're trying to write about a song or music or whatever, if it was not triggering something emotionally in me, I would just cut it out, even though I loved the thing. I made a mixtape out of that, more or less. I tried to keep it within a manageable amount of time, song-wise. Like when I would make tapes when I was a kid, you know? 

So I did that, and then there was one essay… I wrote about Granddaddy, who were one of my most favorite bands. 

Yeah I love them. 

And the essay that I included, once we were done, the press and I, you know, we're all looking at the book, and they were like, I don't think that Granddaddy essay will work. I was really bummed, because I love that band. I had written about a near-death experience I had when I was driving a work van in the highway of the Yukon, in the middle of the winter, and I rolled my van, and I nearly died. I didn't. Spoiler. I’m not a ghost…. So I took that out, and I was really bummed about it, because I really loved that song, and I just really wanted it to be in, and I was getting really precious about it, and then I had to sort of kill my darlings a little bit, and take it out, and save it for something else. And then, of course, they were like, what if we take that out, and we put one more small essay, and I'm like, three new essays, perfect, I'll do that! 

And that's the quintessential mixtape thing, when you know that you've only got like a minute and a half, like at the end of the tape, so you have to include a short song. 

We used to be a proper country. 

We did!

And we used to do things right. Do you have this in your brain still, where… This guy made my sister a mixtape in high school, and I think about it all the time, because on the end of side-A, he had tried to squeeze Professor Booty by the Beastie Boys in, but the tape wasn't long enough for the song, and it cuts out like a quarter of the way into the song. All I knew was it was the Beastie Boys and I didn't know what song it was for a long time, because I couldn't Google anything because it was like 1993. To this day when I hear that song, when it’s streaming on my phone, I think it's gonna cut out. And it doesn't, and it kind of bums me out that it doesn't. I wish stuff failed more. Stuff used to fail a lot more when I was in analog.

I was gonna say if a guy or a girl had made me a mixtape and a song just cut out at the end of a side they wouldn't have a chance with me. I don't respect that. 

You gotta leave that stuff out.  I would have this notebook and I would write them down… My partner who's here, she has a binder that is a collection of every mixtape she ever made, which is an incredible artifact, and it is this very thoughtful process of, like, ok here's how long everything is, here's how long each of the songs are, here's how long a tape is, and it's like… that is science. We’re at Harvard right? There should be a building that is just mixtape sciences. I'm available to teach it. I didn't graduate from high school, I don't know if that's a prerequisite. I'm Canadian, I don't know if that's going to get in the way. I know that famously there's not a money problem in America at institutions of higher learning right now. 

No, everything's great here right now.… You do write about so many great bands in here, one thing that really made me go hell yeah is that there's a lot of disdain for the band KISS. 

Yes. 

We hate KISS in this household. 

Do you like KISS? 

No! 

I was like, are we going to get into it? 

No, no. I'm saying I hate KISS. 

KISS sucks. 

KISS sucks. 

KISS is bad. I had to say this the last time somebody asked me this question, but if Gene Simmons is here I'm sorry. But also your band sucks. I just had so many bad experiences with guys who… It's fine if you're like, ok, yeah, KISS, Detroit Rock City, that's a good song. 

Couple good songs. 

Fine. But if you're like, my whole thing is I like KISS? Huge red flag. 

Huge red flag. As you find out if you read the book. 

Yeah. Apologies if your whole thing is KISS. And you were going to do the face painting. And now you're very glad you didn't do yourself up like the Cat or the Star Man or whatever. 

Seems like you know an awful lot about KISS. 

I know too much, yeah. Like I've gone too deep. 

You write a bunch of times throughout the book about how you don't have a good memory, and that's strange, because I don't either, and that's basically our whole job. It's remembering things that happened and writing them down. Were there any things that you did to try to like, aside from the songs themselves, to sort of nudge your memory along and try to trigger some memories?

Occasionally I would ask my sister, who's like my life stenographer, and I would be like, hey, do you remember this thing? And sometimes she would say yes or no. And some stuff I didn't run by her. And then when she read the book, she was like, I did not really want that Wallflowers CD. Like, you fucking did! I  remember because I bought it for you because I wanted to be cool like you. But I would sort of go to other people, because sometimes you do have to go, ok, you were there, right? Corroborate this story. And they'll sort of say yay or nay. But sometimes it was just like this is the memory that my brain has told me is real all of this time. And sometimes I would look up facts or try to sort of put myself in a place. So if it was really locked in a time that I could remember, I would maybe listen to other music or watch a show or just try to do… I absorbed so much culture because I lived in the Yukon and I had nothing else to do. So it was just like, what do I have that could maybe jog my memory? Because, you know, I drank from the time I was like 13 until I quit drinking in my mid 30s. That is a lot of time to be a blackout alcoholic. Notoriously, people that blackout drink don't have the greatest memories, because part of the job is that you lose a lot of days. So I just sort of had to be like, well, what things do I remember? And the parts that I don't, how can I get them back? 

And this is a thing that's actually been a delightful part of being sober for as long as I've been.. I’ve been sober for over six years. And part of it is like, sometimes my memories come back, which is good and bad. Like sometimes you're like, oh, I didn't want that. 

That's why I was drinking.

Yeah, this is why I did that in the first place. I thought I’d put you away. But It is kind of nice to start getting your life back a little bit too in some way. 

For sure. I found the structure of the chapters very interesting, because often one might start about the song itself, or it might start with a memory of your life, but it's just sort of back and forth, and there's not really too much delineation between the two in terms of the paragraph structure. Was that something that came right away, or is that something you had to work your way towards? And it is very seamless, it's a bouncing back and forth, but it really works. When did that come to you in the process? 

It started to come fairly early on. Once I had the loose structure built I started sort of giving the skeleton a little bit more bones. Once I did, I started to realize this was the way that it felt like it was flowing naturally in my head. The thing is that I don't really know what I'm doing. I don't have any formal training as a writer, so I don't know any of the rules, which is maybe a good thing. Once somebody emailed me, and I think they were trying to be mean, but I took it as a compliment, where they said you said that you write essays, but you write essays like a poet. And I was like, well, thank you. And I don't think she was saying that to be nice about it. She was like my high school English teacher being like you're bad at this. But I just sort of approached it in a way that felt right for me, and luckily every time I showed it to somebody to read or edit, they never were like that's bad. So I just sort of trusted like, ok, if nobody's pushing back on me… When you're faking that you know how to do a thing, you just go until someone says that's not how you do it. And you're like, ok, I'm sorry. And no one ever said, that's not how you do it, so I never had to apologize. 

Well, it worked, I'm glad it worked out. I'm gonna read a few quick, little couple sentences here that you wrote:

“My dad taught me to fix. To mend, tape, and glue to hold all our old and broken things together. Never throw anything away. I could fix anything. Even if I had no idea what it was or what its goals or intentions were in this life, I could trace wires and gears back to their source and find the problem. This is what made me good at repairing automatic doors; this built the construction company that I started and ran on my own, doing my best to work myself to death in its name. I wanted every broken thing to be something that could be rendered useful again.”

It occurred to me that that almost describes the whole book itself. That process. Am I telling you something you don't know here or is that something you thought about? Is there a connective tissue between that ability to repair something and what you're writing about in the book itself? 

Kind of, but I don't know if I ever really put as fine a point on it until you pointed it out. 

I’m very good at what I do. 

Thank you. I appreciate this. You finally figured out what the book is about. No, it is like that. It’s interesting. I'm glad you pointed that out because I think I was kind of unconsciously thinking about it, but I wasn't… I'm sure I was making it a harder point than I really realized. I didn't realize the book was gonna be so much about my dad, even though it was in the title. And I think a big thing that my dad taught me was how to fix things. Because when I started working for my dad I wasn't mechanically inclined. No one looked at me and thought they’re gonna make a hell of a construction worker. But I figured it out, and a lot of it is because my dad taught me these things: How to be patient. How to learn how things work and reverse engineer them, and how to fix things, like I wrote about. A lot of it is reverse engineering the life that I wanted to have, and trying to fix it along the way, or even retroactively to make it work in the present. And I don't know if I fully realized that until just now. So I'm gonna have a real emotional moment in like an hour when I’m back at my hotel, eating Taco Bell, lying in the bed crying.

Please don't eat Taco Bell. There are so many good taco places in Cambridge. 

I know I shouldn't have said that out loud. 

I think you said your father never pressured you, but did you feel pressured to follow into his trade? I don't really have a sense of the place you grew up. I do have a little bit, but it strikes me as this mix of beauty and desolate wilderness, but also just  kind of like any small town in North America. And is it the traditional pressures that lots of people feel from their parents? Or is it heightened in a way, as far as you can tell, by the landscape and perhaps the isolation and that sort of thing? 

Environmental pressures definitely play a factor right? It is a very masculine environment. And I was sort of told that a lot. And yeah, my dad never explicitly said when you come of age you will work for me. But everybody else I knew whose father was a tradesperson went into the trades, right? When I was in school in the 90s, they sort of would tell you that you had two options. You could graduate, and you could go to college and you could get a college job. And if you didn't, you'd go work with your hands. And it was like a punishment for being bad. I failed out of high school. And so I accepted the punishment for being bad. And that was sort of how it was presented to me. But my dad, I think, almost kind of resisted it, because I think he could see what had happened to him. But because my dad is such a non-emotive person, especially with me when I was younger, he never said to me, you don't have to do this. He just presented it to me as an option, and I didn't know what else to do, so I said yes. And for most of my life, not until I was older, until my dad could see that the job was really breaking me, did he approach me and say, you don't have to do this. You should find something else, because I can see that this is just wrong. 

I gotta say working with glass sounds like it really sucks. 

It was bad. It was hard, and I mean... 

And how many cuts? You talk about bleeding on basically every page. 

There's a lot of blood in the book. I cut myself a lot. You get really used to it really quickly. The first time it happened, it was terrifying, and it got to the point where glass no longer cut my skin, because my skin got so tough and so used to it, that I could pick up a sheet of glass with my bare hands without gloves, and if it broke, it would not cut me. 

I had a new apprentice once who I didn't know was very squeamish, and my kneecap accidentally got cut wide open, and at that point I discovered that he did not like the sight of blood, which was a great moment for that to happen. I said can you go to the truck and get me some tape and some paper towel and we'll fix this? And he just sort of looked at me and couldn't move, and I was like, well, I can't move right now. One of the two of us needs to go and solve this problem for me. 

But my dad, part of the reason why my parents were worried about me getting into the trade is my dad has a big scar on his arm. When he was working in a glass shop in British Columbia when he was younger, he was working by himself late at night, and he was carrying a sheet of glass that broke in his arms, and it cut his arm right down to the tendon. He was alone, and he had to bundle his arm up, hold it like this, and drive a manual transmission truck to the hospital. 

Oh, goodness. Well, that relates to something… This happens everywhere, but it seems particularly that this performance of masculinity in the place that you grew up was hung over everything. Again it's not unique to there, but was it that much more intense, like it was coming through in the book, than you think it is in other places? Perhaps a place like Cambridge I imagine.

It is really hammered home that there is a specific kind of masculinity that is valued above other things. When you think of the Yukon, if you've never been, or you've never even seen photos, it sort of conjures this idea of the cold, and this desolate landscape, and rugged men with big beards. Some of that is very true. In the wintertime they have this festival there called the Rendezvous Festival, which is a marketing scheme they cooked up in the 70s where they pretend it's a gold rush. They have two competitions that run throughout this festival. One is the Rendezvous Queen, and it's women that dress up in period clothing, and they're not allowed to drink the entire time, and they sell raffle tickets in order to raise money for the organization that puts on this festival. The men run for what is called Sourdough Sam. It is literally a week-long drinking competition where you try to drink yourself basically to death, and the winner gets a truck that costs, let's say, $350 to be charitable. But the point is to be drunk and debaucherous and masculine and all of these ideas, but the women have to uphold these virtues. And they're always looked down on, and it is this weird dichotomy that sort of exists in all places up there. I saw it from a very young age, and it imprints on you, and it teaches you these things that take a lifetime to sort of dismantle. Until you move away, you're like, oh, that's weird. It's super fucking weird that they do that. They still do it now, in 2025, even though some people are like, maybe we should stop doing this, and they're like, this is the way we've always done it. Well not really. This is the way we've done it since the 70s. We've stopped doing a lot of stuff we used to do in the 70s, famously. 

We sure have. I think we’re roughly similar in age, and I remember, for me, when I was young, perhaps the thing that pulled me out of the potential of becoming like a suburban, masculine shithead, was Kurt Cobain and Michael Stipe, two artists that you write about a lot throughout. How important is it to have people like that, and I suppose there's artists like that now, but for people of roughly our age, I feel like they really saved a lot of people, being like, you don't have to be this type of shithead dude. Talk a little bit about what those two in particular, meant to you.

It's that same idea, right? You don't have to live like this. When Cobain was on the scene, and I was just young enough, I was 13 years old when he died. I was obsessed with Kurt Cobain when I was younger, and I was really into Michael Stipe because Cobain would talk about R.E.M. so I got into R.E.M. I wrote in the book that when they found Kurt Cobain’s body he'd been listening to Automatic for the People and my publisher was like we can't corroborate that that's true, and I was like, I know it's true and I don't even have to look it up…. 

But it was like, suddenly, in rock music especially, we didn't have a lot of radio and what not in the north, but I could get Rolling Stone and Spin magazine so I would go to the bookstore, and because I was poor, I would steal copies of Spin magazine…. They got their retribution later when I wrote for Spin magazine and they pay very little

And it took you nine months to get paid…

Yeah, it takes nine months to get paid a hundred dollars. So it's like they got their comeuppance in the end. But it was really good to be able to read, especially about Cobain in particular, because here's this man making this loud, aggressive, angular music, and is also sort of displaying a kind of softness, and is doing this you don't have to live like this thing. It still felt very fresh and new and it was very formative for me. There is another way, or there is something else, or there are these other options. And Michael Stipe, before he even came out was very, you know, there were a lot of allusions to his queerness, and he stood up for people that were living with and dying of HIV and AIDS at the time of the height of the AIDS crisis. The only family member that I know of that was queer was my uncle, who killed himself when I was quite young. He killed himself sort of at the beginning of the AIDS crisis, and I thought of that a lot too, like we needed more people like that, that showed there is another way you can do this. You don't have to live like this. And you can still make aggressive art that is confrontational. But you don't have to be this sort of macho shithead person in order to do that. In fact, there are much more interesting ways to be confrontational and to confront your environment and be in contrast to it 

Very much so. The Neko Chase chapter really was a favorite of mine. It definitely gave me the chills. You talk about coming out to your family. Coming out stories are very popular. Sometimes they can be very cliche…You said you didn't really necessarily want to write a coming out type of memoir. Were there things you wanted to avoid? Or were there other ones that you took some solace from, some inspiration? 

Yeah, it was hard. Because it's obviously part of the story right? I came out in my 30s. And one of the notes I got in the book was that they were surprised that the transition came so late in the book. I was like, yeah, I was surprised we came so late in my life. I think sometimes that stuff runs the risk of being like inspiration porn, where the point of it is to sell this idea that here's this thing you're gonna do and it's gonna fix everything. And I don't really think that's true. I will liken transitioning, and getting sober, in a way, where they were both actions I took where I thought here's the thing that's gonna fix me. And it never did. And it continues to not be the thing that fixed me. What it did was force me to confront my life and be, like, ok, what are the actual problems? What am I gonna do to rectify those things? And I wanted to do that, but in order to do that, I did need to spend a lot of time being, like, well, how did I get here? Unfortunately, because…I tried to come out a bunch of times. A friend of mine refers to problems like that as tipping a Coke machine over, it never happens in one push. The first time I tried was in 2001 or something and eventually it was mid 2010s before I finally did. I just really wanted to sort of write through those moments, and as I did, and I was writing a lot about labor and death and addiction and all these things, I thought, these are the stories that are actually more interesting to me, because the act of transitioning was really, you know… It was a day. And it was telling people. And it was all the stuff that it was, you know? Having to leave my hometown because it caused a lot of problems and all these things. But it was a snippet in the grand scheme of things, and I thought the bigger stories are the things that built me to the point where I was safe and able to do this, come out in what was kind of an act of desperation in and of itself. 

But I don't know if I could have done that if I hadn't had all those experiences. I sort of wanted it to be this multifaceted thing that wasn't just one thing, it was a lot of things that led to a moment that opens the door for whatever comes next. 

Paid subscribers can keep reading for some new music and a couple of great photos. Goodbye to everyone else!