Buzzcut

A Conversation with the Up & Coming

In July, head editor Linda Garziera sat down with two of our contributors from Summer Issue II, Jack Lindsay and Evan Sandifer, to discuss their debut books—Sandifer’s poetry collection Body Mechanics, which explores themes of love and identity, and Lindsay’s novel In the Old House, which follows the life and relationship of a young man with his mother in the years before and after she is diagnosed with dementia. Both books were published this past May. 

______________________

excerpt from In the Old House

Noah smoked his first cigarette through the bright red lips of the girl he couldn't remember meeting. He sat on the bench, the girl on his lap. A wind blew and whispered through her dark hair and silent lightning flashed in her eyes. Dusk rain pattered on the awning above. She hung from him loosely, swaying like a willow. It was almost night. The trees creaked and shook in the wind. Her hand slid through his hair and she whispered things into his ear that slid down through his throat and filled his chest to the brim. The end of her cigarette gleamed brightly, reflected in her eyes that looked deep into him, said I dare you. The embers lit up their faces as she drew on the cigarette. She held the smoke in her mouth, wrapping it around her tongue. As she put the cigarette out, she leaned in. The rain came down harder as her lips parted, brushing on his, and he opened his insides, breathed her in. The smoke unraveled from her tongue and passed between them and tasted bad but the hand on his neck was warm as she traced a line under his jaw. And the smoke stung his lungs and he needed to cough but she was kissing him, and she tasted good and her lips were warm and soft and their eyes were closed in the dark as the smoke swirled inside him.

______________________

Linda

What is your writing process? I know you mentioned, Jack, that you once spent the entire ninety minutes of class trying to come up with a first sentence.

Jack

One of two things happens with writing. You know when you get a snap of inspiration and you feel like you want to get stuck? You feel the creativity, you feel an emotion there, and you think, “I’ve got to explode on the page, I’ve got to write stuff?” That will happen, and I’ll want to get that down. And so then I’ll find a page and a pen or get on my notes app and get it down quick. Sometimes that moment spurs me further, but a lot of times it’s just a line, boom, done.

And then the other one is forced. It’s those times when I say to myself, “I have to write right now,” either because of a deadline or because I’ve decided I must. And that’s the instance when I’ll sit down and stare at a page and try to find a sentence for an hour. I’ll just be banging my head against it. But once you get the breakthrough, when you do find that “in”—I always talk about a window of sorts—once I’m in that threshold, it unlocks everything. I’m able to get into the flow state that allows me to keep writing. But it’s a balance. Sometimes I do have to headbang, at least until I get that in-route that allows me to open up, to write.

Linda

Do you write better in a notebook or on a computer? In which medium do you find yourself most inspired?

Jack

Oh, definitely a notebook. I usually start on a notebook and transfer to a computer. I’ll usually use the notebook as the first draft; a lot of times I’ll start editing on the page and I’ll get frustrated because I’m crossing stuff out, doing arrows, stuff like that, and that’s when I’ll give in and transfer it, so I can really write.

Evan

A lot of my writing starts with journaling. It starts with a very personal moment, with me trying to figure out where I am and what I really want to say.

Oftentimes when I start a new piece, I know I have something to say but I don’t know what it is yet, so I like to do something called automatic writing. It’s an exercise in which, once you start writing, you’re not allowed to stop until you’ve gotten to a place you feel happy with. You have to move your hand and see what comes out. Sometimes it’s nonsense. But that nonsense turns into a coherent thought, and that coherent thought turns into something you didn’t even know you were thinking about. I would find that window, and that would allow me to see what had been underlying everything that came before. I try to grasp onto that path and lead into something bigger.

And a lot of it, too, are these hits of inspiration—“I feel really empowered to write something”—and I’ll just bang it out and leave it. I’ll look at it and then I’ll leave it, I won’t touch it for weeks. I don’t think it’s good to sit on the same thing every day, because you’re going to have fresher eyes once you come back to the piece. It’s good to see what it really is in a more objective way.

Linda

Specifically for you, Evan, do you believe the writing process is different for poetry? 

Evan

It’s definitely different. I guess all of my writing is very personal to me, but poetry even more so. It feels guttural. Poetry, I find, is so intensely me that I end up constantly examining myself. With prose it’s more often an exploration of characters and plotlines, which is fun in a different way, but it is slightly that: different. I like to make lists when I’m working with prose. I like to plan things out, be more thoughtful. But with poetry, I have a lot more room to be abstract and to explore different avenues. 

Jack

Picture this: in normal life, I’m in a room. I’m in this room with doors and windows, and I can kind of look out the windows, crack open the door, stuff like that. But all the exploding emotions and creativity that we’ve been talking about, the substance of writing, all of that stuff isn’t happening in this room. That’s the world outside. So that’s what I mean by finding “a window”—every once in a while, I’ll get a glimpse of the beauty outside, and that’s when I’ll climb out and start running around in the grass.

I think sometimes we forget what’s outside that window—because you do have to hammer down that crazy, exploding mind sometimes, otherwise when you have conversations, people will think you’re nuts—but when I’m writing, I can find that window. I can get out and see everything.

Linda

What do you guys feel most inspired by? Where do you find your inspiration comes from?

Evan

I’m inspired by people. That sounds kind of silly, but it really is people. My life, too—I get a lot of stuff from that—but I’ve met a lot of people who have really transformed me, and it makes me want to be that and do that and transform others in the same way. That drives me. A lot of my writing is just hoping that something reaches somebody.

Jack

My inspiration is my life, but I feel like that’s not the right answer. It misses the mark. It’s more about what I’ve seen; it’s more about observation. What inspires me the most, then, is seeing not my own life but life. Seeing other people’s actions. Little images, like strangers’ expressions or the image of a guy sitting under an awning. Writing a lot of times is just about capturing what is out there. I feel like writers sometimes get caught up in the more monumental things—love, hate, war—that provoke large emotions and are subsequently easier to write about. But I get emotional over the really tiny things, the small little nuances of life. A lot of my writing and inspiration has to do with simply finding those nuances, and talking about the ones that are most impactful to me.

So what is your writing process, Linda?

Linda

Wait, are you interested, or are you being polite?

Jack

No, I wanna know. I feel like right now, we’re just having a conversation.

Linda

When I was writing my book, I got into a routine of sitting down in this tiny space in my kitchen—a little ledge at the corner of my counter—and just opening my computer. I like writing about place; I believe our lives revolve around places. Choosing one space in my house that was my “writing spot,” allowed me to look at all the other places that I wanted my characters to visit in my book. Having an outline helped a lot as well—I could look at it and say “Okay, in this chapter, I have to achieve these ten things.”

It also helped me to write in one document—had I opened another document, I would have never looked at it again. I have an exception to this, though: I believe your best ideas come when you’re writing on a random piece of paper. Maybe a corner of your math homework, the margins of a grocery list. You have your best ideas when your medium is already cluttered, because it allows your brain to say to itself, “This doesn’t matter. I can be creative.”

Jack

There are fewer stakes.

Linda

Exactly. It’s fine if it sucks. Whilst with a blank page, there’s always that question of, “What are you going to do next?” 

Jack

For my book, I split it into five parts. I had it sectioned off so I could bounce around. I always had the five documents open, but it wasn’t until the end that I melded them.

Evan

I’m just a fucking mess. I had, like, forty-five different documents open. And I would start new ones too, because I’d want to write something outside of the context of what was already on the page. Sometimes what was already there would entrap my thoughts, so I would start a new document and would be flipping between all of my documents looking at everything. I like chaos, I guess. 

Linda

When I’ve written poetry, I’ve felt the same way; if I started a poem on the same page, I was trapped in the context of the previous piece. But with fiction, keeping everything together helped me. 

Evan

Well with fiction, you need that context. It’s good to have the lines surrounding it.

Linda

Oh, one thing I was curious to know—what was one character in In the Old House and one speaker in Body Mechanics that you based on a real person? Tell me about something in your book—character, image, action—that you based off of someone you know.

Evan

I would say all of my poems are letters in some way. Whether it’s to me or to various people in my life, they’re all addressed to somebody. It’s good to write with somebody in mind. It makes it more real.

Jack

I’m not thinking of anything specific right now, but what I can say is that while I would take little things from the people I’ve seen and put them into specific characters, each character is more a combination of a bunch of people. Jeanine is full of my mom and my mom’s mom. Art is a combination of my dad, my uncle, my grandfather, and then some guy I saw on the street. Noah: obviously a lot of me, my brother. And of you, Evan. 

So it was never that one character represented one person. Some characters are more heavily one person than another, but it’s more so insertions from all different types of people I’ve seen. The characters in this book are made of multiple people.

Linda

So Jack, when we were discussing your book at Trace Fossils Review, we were talking about your tendency towards simplicity. Your writing gets straight to the point. If you have something to say, you manage to say it beautifully in a single line. We were also discussing how the inverse is true for yours, Evan; you tend to talk beautifully around things rather than straight through them. So tell me: what is easier? What style comes most naturally to you?

Jack

I don’t think it’s a conscious decision. I think a lot of times it’s just how I think. The way my mind works is very direct. I could write around certain details, but it’s more about seeing signs that lead to a point, and that’s where you see the answer. You’re learning as you read through a piece. My writing is kind of a discovery. And I like that directness because—

Evan

It hits.

Jack

It hits, yeah. If I ever found I didn’t know how to say something, I would just say it, and I think that’s a lot of what went on in my book. I admit there were points when it was poorly done—I would say, “I don’t have it in me to write this right now because I don’t have my window, so I’m just gonna say it and come back to it”—but I think that, overall, I like to hit people. Writing, you know, it’s kind of like a punch.

Linda

You sure do know how to punch. I almost cried in the airport while reading your book, which was…not good. What about you, Evan?

Evan

I have a lot of regrets about my book because I was writing with a lot of fear. I was afraid to say exactly what I meant, which is why I walked around the point a lot of the time. Something I’m very inspired by in your work, Jack, is “the bang,” you know? Not only “the bang” itself, but knowing intuitively how to place it where it’s necessary. That’s something I’m really trying to work on: knowing when things just need to be said. That’s something I’ve found I’ve always struggled with. It’s a journey I’m still on. 

Linda

Do you find yourself thinking, “I don’t know how to say this, so I’ll go around it?” or is it just an acknowledgement of, “I don’t want to say this?”

Evan

It’s all of that. I want to make things big and beautiful and meaningful and so, almost to a fault, things get too big. Small things are big—and I know that—but it’s just being able to put that into words and make it mean what I want it to mean that’s difficult for me.

Jack

It’s interesting to see that you’re talking about this like it’s a fault in your book. It’s not a fault.

Evan

I didn’t mean a fault, I meant to a fault.

Jack

I know, but it’s just the way you’re talking about it—“I struggle with this, it’s so bad”— but it’s not bad. I think circling around in writing is good sometimes. I think it does get the point across because it also explores alleys that aren’t explored when you do “just say it.” Things have so many different dimensions, and by walking around a bit more in your work, you’re showing the scenery. You get to know the context as well as the specific thing you’re writing about. Although, when that’s the only technique you do, then it’s not so good. Solid writing—writing that has a punch—is a combination of the two.

Linda

That’s interesting. Both of you commented on how you thought certain aspects of your books weren’t good, but they very much are. Your books hit. They allow the reader to interpret. 

Evan

I like interactive reading. I like when you have to be really engaged with the piece; when you have to inject yourself.

Jack

That’s one of my favorite things to do. I wish I had turned it up more. My book was—I’m happy with it, but I wanted so much more of everything. I want the book I wrote, but times one hundred. My goal was to put little things in there that the attentive reader would pick up on so that, down the line, if there were details that seemed like they were hanging out, the reader could know it’s most likely because they missed something. I love when writing is kind of like a puzzle; when the attentiveness is up to the reader as much as it is the writer. I like doing stuff like that. It’s fun for me.

Linda

I would like to get better at that. It’s so hard to pull it off in a novel. The problem that I came across was that I would reach a later chapter and would think “I should’ve added this beforehand” but then I wouldn’t want to change the stories that were already written that I had already changed multiple times. 

Evan

It’s difficult. But I think when you pull it off, it is really rewarding.

Linda

Another one I was wondering: Do you find religion plays a role in your writing?

Jack

I think my book might have come off as religious—and I definitely had that in there—but it was more about faith, not religion. Faith and religion go hand-in-hand a lot—people mix them up—but they’re not the same. I think faith is a sign of religion or of being religious, but faith is also far beyond religion, and often exists without religion. Though I’m not sure religion exists without faith. 

I think faith is a predecessor, and so that’s kind of what I did in my book. I started off talking more about religion, and then I wanted to get some distance. Jeanine has this question about how she can’t be religious. She doesn’t feel it. And it’s about, like, being able to have faith without having to have this sort of harsh ideology with it, you know, being able to have faith without that. It’s more spiritual—this is something that was left unexplored in my book and what I wanted more from—but the ending, basically, is about that: You have to trust in everything, because living is just being able to trust. No matter what you think, you are having faith that you’re gonna get home and you’re believing in the next day, you’re believing, because—what’s planning for? What’s having hope for? 

One of the recurring symbols in my book was having your eyes closed. If you’re looking at a timeline, future and past, you’re moonwalking. We’re all walking backwards; all you can see is what’s been behind you. Your eyes are closed, but you believe anyway—if anything, that’s the kind of religion my book is about. You’re walking backwards and your eyes are closed but you trust. You have to believe it’s going to be okay. 

Evan

Here’s my deal: I talked about God way more than I thought I would. And I care about God way more than I thought I did. I used to be somewhat Baptist—and I moved away from that at almost a complete 180, very suddenly moved away from that—so since then, I’ve thought I just didn’t care about it. But some part of me really does. And I feel like I should write more about God and my relationship with religion, because I—I think I’m still learning. I think, in my book, I explored a God made of blood, a God made of human, and in a way, that’s a lot more comforting to me than someone that’s in power. That was an interesting idea to me, that I could create an image through which I leveled with God. So I wouldn’t call myself religious or anything, but there’s definitely a lot having to do with that in the collection that surprised me. I want to see more of where that goes.

Linda

Do you guys have any forms or types of writing you want to do in the future? I mean, I know you did poetry, Evan—

Evan

Yes. And yes.

Jack

I’ve been writing some poetry, actually. 

Evan

Really? Send me some. I want to get back into prose too. I haven’t written prose since junior year. Maybe some more journalism as well.

There are also tons of different poetic forms I haven’t explored. I always forget there are forms that I can try instead of the free-flowing shit that I always do. Inserting structure into my work would be interesting to see.

Linda

When do you feel the strongest need to write?

Jack

A lot of the time I’ll have a calm moment, or a moment when I’m alone in my head and I don’t have a lot of stimulus; a lot of inspiration comes to me then. I feel I need to write when I can’t say anything.

Evan

When I don’t know what it is that I’m feeling. That’s when I need to write. It sits like an odd weight in my chest; it’ll permeate through a long period of time and then when I finally sit down and write, it’s lifted. And in that moment—it hits me every time, this revelation—I think to myself, “I can’t believe that was there the whole time.”

Linda

How are you tied to place? Where is the place that your writing lives for you?

Jack

My book is placed on Edisto Island. I think where I grew up is very specific and unique to me, so that has a big deal to do with it, but I feel as though my writing isn’t that tied to place, even though my book was. I feel like I need to write about place a lot more, but I didn’t feel as though place was what the book was really about. But I don’t know if I want my writing to live anywhere. It lives where it lives. If I think it’s anywhere in an aesthetic or an ethereal way, it would be maybe a farm,  or some fields.

Evan

I don’t feel tied to any one place—maybe Charleston as a whole. I feel like I’m always trying to find where I came from and where I belong, so that’s not really a concrete place yet.

Linda

Now tell me if I’m wrong, but I feel as though your writing is a lot more tied to people.

Evan

Yes. That’s exactly what I wanted to say. 

Place is people. That’s what makes me feel at home. I think anywhere is my place as long as the people are there.

Linda

Ideally, would you write better in a small, tight cubby—maybe it’s a little messy, maybe it’s a little cramped—or when you have an infinite amount of space around you?

Jack

I’m gravitating toward the cubby. I feel like it’s a very streamlined space, and I like the idea of the pages around me because that would be the only thing I could see, but that small of a space would only be good if I didn’t live in there. But if I could go into the cubby to focus after seeing everything, that would be good. 

I’m also wondering about the open space, though, because the cubby is described in the question you asked, but the open space is a blank page. Are we in nature? Are we in a city?

Linda

Let’s edit the question. Let’s say the options are either the cubby or a grassy field in front of empty mountains.

Evan

I think the beauty of nature would be a little too distracting to me. I would want to write about it after the fact instead of while I’m there.

Jack

I agree. If I’m there, I want to really be there. I think the wide open space is good for looking and the cubby is good for writing. 

Linda

Jack, you told me a long time ago—maybe when we were in tenth grade—that you spent a lot of time in downtown Charleston walking around and talking to people. And Evan, in your poems, the characters we see repeated most often are strangers. So I’m wondering: what is it about strangers that draws you to write about them? What is it about not knowing someone that sticks with you? 

Jack

Well, the thing about strangers is they’re not people to you yet. You know they have their own lives, but the way they exist in your mind is like set pieces; you don’t know anything about them. You make stuff up. And when you talk to one, you get these bursts of detail—you have this short interaction, and in your head, their entire person is reduced to this interaction. And so strangers are interesting because you get a little snippet of somebody and they suddenly become very simple. And, obviously, in many ways that’s not wholly true, and you can think about it as intricately as you want, but what you know about them for fact is very simple. 

In the end, I think it’s good to talk to strangers because it helps you become more of a person. You have to expose yourself. Everybody’s life has a very specific tone and rhythm, and people get stuck. And by interacting with other people, you kind of hop out and you get to see the perspective of someone standing across from you who’s doing something totally different than you. 

Evan

I got this very intense feeling last night when Jack and I were at a concert: we were sitting in this massive room full of people who were strangers to us, but at one point, I found I wasn’t focused on the music anymore; I was focused on the people. I started seeing how people were impacted by the music, seeing how all the people were people, and it just hit me that that was our commonality.

I also find very interesting the collectiveness of strangers, how they tend to all meld together until you have that close-eye view on just one of them. You forget sometimes. Especially the three of us—well, we’ve been in high school with the same two hundred people for seven years now. I’ve gotten to know them all by their own ways and their own aesthetics and their own personhood, and then you get exposed to the wide world of so many things and it comes at you that you’ll never get to know everything and it’s awesome. It’s good to be a stranger.

Linda

Do you remember that one day in class when we were talking about the wind and how something can be present even if we can’t see it? I’ve been wondering: what is something that’s present in your books that you know is there but that either the audience doesn’t see or that you didn’t get to fully write about?

Evan

There are lots and lots of references that I make in my work that I know others have no way of recognizing. A lot of details regarding specific memories and specific people are very personal to me and the life that I alone have lived; there’s no way even you two would fully understand quite a bit of them. But that’s the cool thing about my work, I find: as a reader, you don’t have to know everything. You get to project a lot of your own life when you read my pieces.

Jack

I’m thinking about all the details that I didn’t flesh out that I wanted to. I mean, I did Ren so dirty. I was just terrible. I feel so bad for Ren’s character because I just cut that whole plot off. I wanted a whole thing with that—I wanted so much more to happen between her and Noah—but I just cut the nuts off of it. For the baby too, there was so much that was there in my mind that wasn’t there on the page. (pause) And you know what? I’d say I didn’t write enough about grief, either. I feel like grief was there, potent, but it also was not there. The book kind of winds around it. Jeanine never confronts it. She has grief but she’s missing it by the end; she doesn’t have the cause behind normal grief. And Noah—I feel like he doesn’t confront that anymore that I can remember. That’s another thing that got left out. The ending, too, is definitely there but is also left for you to feel.

Linda

And—oh my gosh, I think we’ve hit the last question—buzzcut or no buzzcut?

Jack

Can you elaborate?

Linda

Nope! That’s the question.

Jack

Oh god, I have to interpret? What is my answer supposed to hinge on? Am I talking about a specific person? For what occasion?

Evan

What are you talking about, Jack? You have a buzzcut right now.

Jack

Oh god, I guess the decision has been made for me.

Look—I’m a very practical guy, so I think overall: buzzcut.

Evan

Fuck yeah. Buzzcut.

But I will say, I wouldn’t have one again. It was great, but it also sucked. 

Jack

Why did it suck?

Evan

My hair was something I hid behind and something that defined me, and then I purposefully took it away to see who I was underneath it, and it was terrifying. I felt terrible a lot of the time, and I felt lost, and I didn’t know who I was anymore. It really did impact me in a very strong way. In growing it out, I learned a lot about myself but I also—I feel like I took a lot from myself too.

Linda

It makes me think of how, in some religions, you can’t cut your hair because it’s considered a part of you.

Evan

Yeah. Hair is a big deal. It’s not just a cut.

______________________

“The First Humans,” excerpt from Body Mechanics

Say we were to begin

& the first step falls so 

slow into the raunchy carpet, 

sipping away at the dirt still

dripping from your faded

shoes. I take a breath as if

to say let’s take this outside,

we are too big for this

room, I have finally

perfected the follow

me look, & so you do, &

so the grass invites us into

its cradle. We jump at

the warm creatures so

deep beneath us, soon

I cannot tell who is 

falling & who is catching.

It all feels like falling. The

legs, the thigh’s inner

thigh, the lead me breath. How

sharp the things are

we try to forget. How can 

the room have come too?

How can I fill an arching

space? There is 

a moment I was facing

you, you were gone, & I

wondered if it was too much to

ask— to be looked at

through blanket walls, found

in our cradle. I do not ask

you to stay. Of course,

we cannot live there. All to say,

I am a trace fossil. It is my right

to disappear. It is our right

to be remembered as

a step in a room.

________________________________________________________________________

Lindsay and Sandifer’s contributions can be found here: To Summer 2024 Issue. Sandifer’s collection Body Mechanics can be purchased here, and Lindsey’s novel In the Old House can be purchased here.

Linda Garziera is a writer and explorer of cultures. Inspired by her own travels, her debut novel The Bejeweled Chameleon is set in Thailand, where a thrilling tale of family, adventure and loss unfolds in the hands of two young boys. Her writing has been recognized in the Atlantic Institute, National Scholastic Writing Awards and Kelly Writers House 2023 summer program at the University of Pennsylvania. At her new home, Duke University, she is a student of Economics, a writer for the school’s MUSE magazine, editor of Borderless Magazine, and avid member of the Duke Club Rowing Team—in case of an emergency, you’ll find her there.

Jack Lindsay is a student and writer from South Carolina. His fiction is a place where his experiences can rest, fit in the files of the story and make it real: a tie hanging from a street sign, the look of a conch shell after it cuts your foot, a blue heron taking flight. He is the author of the novel In the Old House. At any given time, he can be found writing in about eight different notebooks, talking to strangers, and perusing his grandfather’s old books on his remote barrier island home near the ocean.

Evan Sandifer is a creative that can be found cutting new looks into their wardrobe and frantically rearranging the art on their walls. They have found a particular home in poetry, where their joy for words, their emotion, and their curious spirit can play in unbound territory. They have received several silver and gold keys from the Scholastic Writing Awards competitions, and their work has been featured in The Kenyon Review Literary Magazine. They recently published their debut anthology Body Mechanics (2024), and they are excited to continue pushing the boundaries of what they can achieve in their writing. Evan is a lover of good company and will take any chance they can to dive into a range of topics, from the ethics of Dark Souls to the intricacies of rap.