By Nita Noveno
In this issue of SalonZine, I’m thrilled to speak with Brian Gresko, author of the newly self-published book You Must Go On. I’ve had the pleasure of knowing Brian as a fellow alum of The New School MFA Creative Writing Program, a fellow NYC reading series curator, and an active member of the broader writing community. His book is a generous offering, born of love and perseverance, and it overflows with support, truth, and hard-earned wisdom. I found myself nodding and savoring each page. The advice is practical and clear-eyed, and the repeated refrain of encouragement that closes each section resonated deeply with me. What stands out most is Brian’s emphasis on community, on play and humor, and on confronting the myths and self-doubt that keep so many writers silent. This is a book not just about writing, but about what it means to persist as a creative person in a messy world.
NITA NOVENO: This book is far more than a how-to guide. It feels like a true companion for the long haul with practical tools, emotional nourishment, and that beautiful, grounding refrain like a warm hug or high five at the end of each section: “Keep at it. I’m rooting for you!” I’m so thankful for it all. Can you share what inspired you to write this kind of deeply supportive book and what that refrain means to you?
BRIAN GRESKO: This makes me so happy! I love that description – like “a warm hug or high five.” That’s exactly how I hoped those refrains would read.
I don’t usually read books about writing, and never thought I had a book like this in me. It happened by way of serendipity. Last year, Writing Co-Lab led its first Summer Camp, a three-week program to help new and emerging writers generate material and build creative steam. As part of it we sent out a daily email of encouragement. Every email I wrote felt like a little essay, and, as is the case when I’m writing an essay, each became a journey in which I discovered new things about myself and my life – that despite feeling like I’m floundering around, full of doubt and idiocy, an author who has “failed to launch,” I actually had accomplished and learned a lot as a writer.
I was excited and fascinated by this. I wanted to push farther, and I also loved the explicit relationship between reader and writer in the epistle format. Letters and parables have a long history in cultures around the world; the newsletters of today are just a digital occurrence of this. So I designed a month-long class called You Must Go On, composed of weekday emails and weekend zoom sessions, with the intention of fanning my students’ creative fires and building community. Those emailed essays became opportunities for caregiving, a way of providing guidance and support to fledgling writers of the kind I wished I myself had, a gentle mentorship not of craft but of attitude and fortitude. Of course, in the process, I was caring for myself too, speaking to those younger, confused parts of myself that are still within me, and my current self, a bit bruised by the publishing machine but determined to keep at it and remember what drew me to this path. “I’m rooting for you” became my sign off – rooting like cheering, but also rooting in the botanic sense like digging deep to provide support and sustenance.
At the end of that month I had twenty essays, each longer than the last, a surprising amount of material. The book had birthed itself.
NITA: The theme of this issue is uncertainty, and you speak directly to a writer’s discomfort with it—how society doesn’t encourage us to stay in that space, though it’s essential to creativity. How do you see our current political and social climate affecting our ability—or willingness—to sit with uncertainty as artists?
BRIAN: It’s become harder than ever to value or sit with uncertainty or even identify as an artist in today’s America. As part of the retrenchment of white, patriarchal, colonial ideals, that ridiculous old myth of the American cowboy has ridden back into style in a big and, frankly, frightening way. These babymen broligarch wanna-be cowboys see uncertainty as weakness. Don’t overthink it, just do. Don’t listen, speak. Take up space.
Capitalism does not reward uncertainty either. The digital marketplace values straightforward simplicity – elevator pitches over complex stories, tik tok earworms over concept albums, franchises and intellectual property over originality. Speed is an asset. Product over process. This is one of the reasons AI has caught fire. By and large, people don’t value the labor and time involved in creativity and so have no compunction outsourcing it to machines.
I still encounter students who believe they will find an agent and then editor who’ll invest in their career and nurture their talent over the course of books until they achieve critical and commercial success. That’s a myth. While writing is an art, publishing is a business. Industrywide, people are working far too hard for shrinking profits to have the patience and altruism to mentor an artist over the long, uncertain rollercoaster of a creative career. Authors are given small advances and little support and asked to produce a hit and produce it quick. Though books take years to write, the cycle for launching one might only be a few weeks long before publicists are reassigned. By necessity, agents have gotten cutthroat about who they choose to work with. If they don’t smell a sure thing? Good luck, babe.
So, what do we as artists do? We get resourceful and look to other sources for inspiration and guidance. Because at heart, art is about being with uncertainty, using your imagination, trekking off the well-worn path. I have done literary journalism for years now, and in the book I point to authors who shared wisdom with me on this very subject – Garth Greenwell, for instance, saying that art is a “radically unproductive” space, because to both engage with art and to make it is something that happens outside the demands of commerce, it’s nonlinear and slow, it doesn’t give us something that we can easily hold and say “I got this from that art.” Creativity is older and more mysterious than the ways of capitalism. Though our creative selves engage with and are inspired by culture, these days they must also be counter-cultural, resisting the political and economic forces that demand we account for our time via accumulating wealth and authority. Art comes from a place of not knowing, a place of listening as much as speaking, a place devoid of hierarchy, a place of optimism, a place of softness, and, ultimately, a place of love.
And the fascists hate it for that. The Trump regime is directly and violently attempting to break our creative spirits by dismantling and defunding government institutions like the National Endowment of the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services. They want to fracture intellectual communities on college campuses. Close the doors on the National Museum of Black History and Culture, and who knows what cultural organizations will be in their crosshairs by the time you read this. I believe it’s absolutely necessary for us as artists personally, and for our culture as a whole, and even, in a harder to define and yet intrinsic way, for democracy, equality, and justice, to continue to sit with ourselves and our communities in uncertainty and to dream and recall big and bold and beautiful ideas, alternatives to the way we’ve been conditioned to live with ourselves and others and this planet, even if some of those ideas don’t pan out the way we think or hope they might. It’s okay to not know exactly what the hell you’re doing. Who does? Uncertainty is where creativity and ingenuity comes from.
NITA: You’ve shared so much about the internal struggles like pushing past those working-class beliefs, battling self-censorship, and navigating the wild world of publishing. But if you had a magic wand to instantly undo one of these hurdles for every writer, which one would you zap away first, and why?
BRIAN: Alright, if I have a magic wand then I’m going to think big, really big, and systemically, and zap money. Imagine if we as a society guaranteed every human being a living wage? Like, not a wage for work done, just a wage because we’re alive, a person in this world, and so we shouldn’t have to worry about meeting our basic needs – having shelter, food, water, clothing, healthcare. If we provided for every person on this planet instead of hoarding resources and seeing one another as enemies, then perhaps we might return to some of the ways that artists existed in communities in other cultures, in other times. The artist as philosopher. The artist as truthsayer. The artist as storyteller. As history holder. As doula to the future. As spiritual guide. As mystic. As mother, in the most basic of senses, giving life, providing guidance and emotional care.
Creativity is an essential part of being human. Capitalism is dehumanizing and so we’ve lost connection with that. If we could take the quest for money and profit out of the equation, what might that open up for us? I can’t even begin to imagine.
NITA: You encourage writers to find silver linings in their journeys and emphasize the role of community. As someone who has built spaces for connection through your reading series, Pete’s Reading Series, and Writing Co-Lab, how have these community experiences shaped your own writing process? What do you see as the most powerful aspects of writers coming together?
BRIAN: Writing by its nature is a solitary pursuit, but there’s an element to my experiencing art, even art like literary narratives that are encountered in silence and solitude, that is intrinsically social. Reading is communication, author to reader, heart to heart. There’s a great description of how this process works in Alexander Chee’s essay “On Becoming An American Writer,” where he says he has the feeling sometimes that he could pop a word off the page and find the writer’s eye behind it, staring back at him. I love that. The books on my shelves are friends and comrades, and in their pages I see parts of myself both familiar and strange, new and old, and I feel less alone, and even, as weird as it sounds, seen. Perhaps it’s that through someone else seeing themselves I have come to see and know myself better.
Gathering with other artists, in embodied spaces, in real time, or virtually, online, makes this aspect of reading even more palpable and powerful. To hear with my ear a work being performed aloud, or to discuss writing in a class with colleagues and students, has a physical effect on me. The hairs on the back of my neck stand to attention. My stomach churns with excitement. It’s a rush, you know? That’s a beautiful, powerful thing. It’s motivation. It’s inspiration. If only we could bottle it! But of course, that’s part of the magic of community. You can’t fake it, or replicate it, you’ve got to experience it in the moment.
There’s also a fortification of will and spirit that happens in creative community, because this thing we do, writing the stories of our lives, or make believing stories, or penning poems, requires such magical thinking and self-confidence – bringing something out from within ourselves that we hope a stranger will bear witness to and find within our art what we’ve found within the art that has saved and changed our lives. Art making is not a linear process. There’s no step-by-step process. No guarantees. It’s a leap of faith. Being with and around other people who know what that feels like is… well, it gets me right in the chest, I don’t know how else to put it. That shit is real. And it is honestly one of the most important things I do to keep myself going.
Want to know a secret though? It took me a long while, like, years, to be okay with that, to be proud of it even. Because there are many writers who disdain this kind of stuff as a distraction to their “real” work, which happens on the page, or as something which, because it’s not monetized or awarded within the literary ecosystem, is therefore not worth their oh-so-important time. For me, art is generosity. Community building isn’t just feeding my artistic self, it’s a part of how I express myself. Maybe I also balked at embracing this because the cynical teenage boy in me finds it cheesy to say, but I’m one optimistic motherfucker and I love people, and really do think that if we get together to share and talk story and listen to one another that we can change ourselves and our society and this planet; we can find a better way. That doesn’t happen alone. It happens in community.
NITA: I love your observations about writers as both political warriors and jesters, jokers, fools. You make a strong case for humor and play as sharp tools. What are some moments in your life or work where stepping into that role helped you get to the truth in a way seriousness couldn’t?
BRIAN: I have a work-in-progress, a hybrid graphic and prose memoir called bastard, about how I grew up knowing that my dad isn’t my biological dad, but I didn’t know who my biological dad was, or why he wasn’t in the picture, and the truth of my paternity was something me and my parents never discussed. I was the family secret! That’s just one of a few important things we didn’t address in my family, another being my allergy to conformity, specifically around gender. There was a point in composing the book where, as many memoirists experience, I felt totally stripped bare, naked. An uncomfortable feeling! But I thought, what if I lean into it? What if I draw a full-body nude self-portrait, by way of announcing to the reader “here I am, wrinkles and pimples, weird hair tufts, flaccid toadstool penis and all?”
On the nose? Sure. But also funny in a kind-hearted way, and brash, and honest, and proud too, all of which felt right for the memoir’s tone, and for my approach in writing it, which was to not be completely self-serious but instead celebrate and find a little levity in the ways in which I found to survive growing up in a stilted, conservative, normative environment as a creative, genderqueer bastard. Play is essential, I think, to surprising myself, and that’s something I ask of art – that it surprise me, that it illuminate something in me I didn’t know was there.
NITA: The book is out in the world now, and it’s such a generous offering. What kinds of responses have you been hearing from readers? Has anything surprised you or landed differently than you expected?
BRIAN: I wish this weren’t the case, but honestly? I’ve been surprised by responses like yours, which give the book the same attention and consideration a book published in the more conventional way, by a corporate publisher or indie press, might receive. I’ve been around long enough to know that within the literary community “self publishing” carries a stigma, like the author couldn’t get any traditional publisher interested and so therefore the book mustn’t be very good, as if publishers are the arbiter of value and aesthetics. I didn’t realize I had internalized some of that bias myself until it came time to promote the book, when suddenly I found myself wrestling with whether it was a “real book” or not, and so should I do things like give readings or place excerpts? There can be an ick factor too, like self publishing is a move of desperation, and some authors don’t want to be associated with that because it seems uncool. Like, god forbid we actually believe in ourselves and our work! No, we’d rather have it seem like some outside figure (standing in for our parents) has come down from on high to anoint us special and chosen.
What helped me minimize and ultimately move beyond my unconscious bias about self publishing was reconnecting to the book’s origins. This book emerged from me like a surprise gift, and because I’d been on the rocky road of querying for so long, I didn’t even consider sending it to agents or editors. I wanted to get it out into the world and keep moving. I love the idea of a book as cult classic, the way, as a teen, I used to drive to Plastic Fantastic or Repo Records in Philly and dig in the crates for vinyl and CD bootlegs. There’s joy in an artistic artifact, in holding something that was handmade and hand reproduced and passed from fan to fan. I go hard for DIY art! This book is a limited edition experience, there are only 250 copies in existence and I don’t have plans to make more. Radix Media is a printing and publishing cooperative owned and operated by artists, and I’m grateful they didn’t just print the book but worked with me, a newbie designer, in getting it done right. They didn’t have to care as much as they did, but I think they saw what I was doing and felt excited about the project.
That was lovely and surprising, and it’s been wonderfully surprising to hear from people like yourself that the book made an impact on them, that it’s gone from my heart to yours. One person recently wrote me that she has a quote from it displayed over her writing desk. That’s incredible. I’m floored.
NITA: You’ve mentioned how, as a teacher, you once had your students run and play outside, tapping into joy and movement as part of learning and living. If you were to design a one-day “writing camp for grownups,” anything goes, what would be on the schedule? (And where do I sign up for this…?! Haha)
BRIAN: I’m actually doing that! I’m working with my friend and colleague Trish Fancher to develop a writing retreat in Crete called Peitho’s Gift – named after a minor Greek deity whose gift was pleasure for words and the body. Our first outing is at the end of the summer, at a hotel on the seaside where on a clear day you can see across the Mediterranean to Africa. The day will begin with walks on the beach and stretching, followed by breakfast, and then quiet time for us all to write, read, and nap. We’ll reconvene as a group at happy hour for snacks and wine, to read aloud works-in-progress, and to learn from one another. We’ve asked each of the eight participants to share a little something of themselves, maybe a lesson or exercise on writing, or some other creative form – drawing, singing, cooking, movement, storytelling, whatever. The idea is that we’re all equals, students as well as teachers in this weird and wonderful life. We’ll end the day with dinner and, maybe, nighttime dips in the sea! Our bodies as well as our minds and spirits will be nurtured and invigorated, in solitude, in nature, and in community. As much as privacy is essential for creating, we need other artists for support, care, and inspiration, especially these days. We can’t do it alone! This retreat will actualize those beliefs.
NITA: What a dream come true!