A Short Interview w/ John Thurgood

"Bonus material" for Thurgood's short story, "The Filmmaker," published on Tuesday, 9/10.

Short Story, Long features long short stories, each paired with original art, published every other week. In between stories, we feature some kind of “bonus material” for each — an interview with the author, outtakes or trivia about the story, etc. The stories are always going to be available for all, for free, with the “bonus material” saved for subscribers only. Paid subscriptions help pay writers and artists.

Read “The Filmmaker” now if you haven’t already!

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Aaron Burch: I'm kinda always curious where stories came from and what the seeds of idea were. Can you tell me a little about the genesis for this story?

I used to never write about skateboarding. I thought I really needed to separate those two parts of my life. You know, like, this is my writing/art life and this is my skateboard life. I even had distinctly separate friend groups for both. I never talked about skating with my writer friends and never talked about writing or books with my skater friends. This was pretty much all through my twenties and most of my thirties. I'm forty now. 

Eventually, I don't know, something switched. I just felt like, why not? Why not write about the thing I've been doing since I was ten. I know about it better than most. I should have something important to say about it. This was after I'd started publishing a few stories and I thought I knew a thing or two about what a short story was. So after my MFA I started working on a collection of stories that looked at skateboarders from a few different points of view. I got into a PhD program with one of those stories, so I was thinking, at the time, maybe I am on the right track here.

This story is a part of that project. It specifically touches on skateboarding and its relation to film and recording, but of course as stories do, it kind of takes another direction. I don't know if you've seen the documentary Minding the Gap. It's great—just a top shelf example of a skateboarder making something no one else could have made. Bing Liu is a great filmmaker. You should definitely watch it if you haven't. What I mean to say here, though, is that in the documentary there is this one kid who's just the perfect archetype for a lot of skaters I've known over the years. His name is Zack, and he's just one of those kids that seem almost possessed, completely unable to control their own impulses. I remember watching that film for the first time and thinking, Damn, I know that kid. I grew up with several Zacks. Well, I guess, Wayne is my version of Zack—an amalgam of all the Zacks I've known. ​It's all wrapped up in the memories I have of growing up skating in a third-rate city in Indiana. Eventually, filming and recording became the glue that held it all together. 

I love Minding the Gap! Such a great doc!! I love, too, what you say here,

Eventually, I don't know, something switched. I just felt like, why not? Why not write about the thing I've been doing since I was ten.

One of my... theories? ideas? One thing I've noticed, as I've gotten older, about myself but also with a lot of my writer friends, is that when we first started writing, we did so while avoiding so much of what made us who we were — sometimes because we were embarrassed by it, sometimes we just thought it was boring, sometimes we just feared it wasn't "Literary." (Says the guy who grew up almost embarrassed by being such a rule-following youth group kid... who just finished a novel set at a youth group lock-in.) But then we lean in and embrace those things, and often the writing levels up?

You touch on it a little in your first answer, but I wonder if that "leveling up" rings true to you? If you can talk at all about what it has meant to you and your writing to finally embrace and start writing about skating? Not just the fun of writing about skating (though that too!) but if you've noticed it changing the writing itself too? Either in process or result?