I talked to Bryan Washington about books, bars, and spas

Working Title No. 01.

I’ve long admired Bryan Washington. He’s the author of two novels, Memorial and Family Meal, and a short story collection, Lot. He writes brilliantly about love, grief, and food, tracing the contours of life with a sharpness that tells me he pays close attention to the rhythms of our existence. I could go on all day! But I’m very grateful that he chatted with me so early on in this newsletter and didn’t mind that I texted him six months later, like, this is ready to go. FSG has since bought the novel-in-progress we talk about here (!), and there’s a fifth one on the way. Obviously, I can’t wait to read both. Bryan is also my agent sibling (Hi Danielle!), which I like to think makes us connected. This interview also marks a new series on Extracurricular: Working Title, where I talk to writers I admire and ask them about their reading taste, their works-in-progress, and what they do when they’re not penning the next Great American Novel. Let’s get into it.

photo: Cydney Cosette

When did you realize you were a writer? 

We're in 2024 now. It was really only in 2021 that I started self-identifying and speaking as a writer. At that point I was two books in.

I understand that though, I absolutely get it. 

Sometimes I say that and people are like, bitch, what the fuck are you talking about? You've been writing books for however long but I don't come from a background in which that’s a model for me. A life in the arts was not a model for me. A certain kind of financial stability was not a prevalent model for me. It wasn't something that was super visible, so it felt really slippery. It felt really amorphous to say, oh, this is not only who I am, but also how I make a living. I am able to live not just by being fulfilled, but meeting my needs tangibly. So yeah, I think that was around the window. It took some time, and even now sometimes I find myself hedging. A lot less now.

What books have shaped you as a writer? 

Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto

I’ve talked about this book incessantly. It’s a perfect book. It’s about a woman who loses one family and finds another. There’s a significant cooking component but really it’s just about her becoming a person.  I had not read anything like it when I read it for the first time. That book quite literally changed my life.

Another Brooklyn by Jacqueline Woodson

It left a deep impact on me. It’s elliptical and gives its protagonist space and grace to not be in progress. She flies around studying death and when she returns home she’s thinking about life and the journey she’s taken, that her friends in her community have taken. It’s both linear and not. They thought their lives would be one way and then things change. When I read that book for the first time, I had not seen that on the page and it really made an impression on me.

Black Deutschland by Darryl Pickney

It’s about a queer guy from Chicago who moves to Berlin. He's navigating his queerness, living in Germany and his upbringing in the States. It’s also about the communities that he comes across and being a little bit of an outsider. It was a really challenging book the first time I read it. The second and third time I saw the ways the book really evaded legibility.

Stone Fruit by Lee Lai

This is another book that evades clear legibility. It’s about two queer folks who are in a relationship— the dissolution of that relationship and the ways it had to dissolve. The relationship had to be the way that it was in order for them to find themselves and figure each other out. Even that isn’t entirely leaning into what the book is. It's so many different things.

My Brother's Husband by Gengoroh Tagame

Tagame is probably more well known for his erotic works, but this graphic novel is one of the most moving narratives that I've spent time with. It parses through questions of what family is, and can be, and how the most subtle contours of our relationships inform every single one of our actions. And the art's truly gorgeous? I think about it all the time. 

Do you read while you’re writing? Do you have any rules around what you can and cannot read, or do you read normally?

When I’m in the first half of the generative process I don’t read things that are recently published. I didn't touch any of that. I was trying to figure out the world that I wanted to put on the page, what the relationships were, who the people are. Once I'm in the later stages of a first draft or the beginning of a second draft, my reading habits resettle and I read whatever I want to. When I'm first starting something, I'll have maybe a handful of books that, if they're not similar content-wise, are similar tonally and perhaps structurally. Just seeing that someone has done something like this, something that felt similar to this or looked similar to this, that's useful for me. I'll read old things, stuff in translation from the early two thousands and earlier.

How long have you been in this generative period?

On and off since 2020 for one of the novels I've just sold, and intermittently for another book that I'm working on. For the last six months it's been my main writing gig. I work on a bunch of stuff simultaneously. I work on a bunch of stuff simultaneously. The pattern so far is that usually around the 75 to 80 percent mark of the first draft of a project, the most value is me focusing on that. I was touring while writing it, and after tour I got to sort of resettle my nervous system and work on it a bit more. 

What’s your writing routine like right now? 

I've been between Houston, LA, and Osaka for the last few years, and lately I'm spending half of my time in Tokyo, so those are places I'm really drawn to city-wise. As far as routine, it depends on where I am in a project. If I’m in a generative point like right now, I write in the morning from 6-11 depending on what I have for the rest of the day. I’ve had to be very thoughtful about setting up that boundary and telling myself that this is the time that I’m going to work on this particular project. If I only get 6 to 9 or 6 to 8 at the outset of a project or the first 75 percent of a project that’s cool because it’s two or three hours but as I get closer to finishing a draft and having a sense of what the world is, who these people are and how they interact I become more hard line about really sitting through the entirety of that time. There’s a window near the end of a project when the world is as clear as it's been and I really want to capitalize on that and hold onto it. I can write generatively just about anywhere if I have headphones. Lately it has been at home, whether that’s Osaka or Houston. With editing, ideally I’m in a place where there’s motion but I’m not being bothered. So airport lounges, airport waiting areas, and train stations. When I’m in Houston, I have a car. I hate driving but I edit really well in the auto maintenance place. No one's really bothering you, but people are doing stuff. 

That makes sense to me though. Sometimes I get my best work done on Amtrak or on the plane. 

Yeah it’s strange. I don’t know if it’s being in motion or being in an interior world for a set period of time but I’m really productive. 

You mentioned headphones. Which ones are your favorite?

I use the Sony XM5s. 

I use the XM4s, you have the fancy ones! 

I was using AirPods until recently and then I was on a work trip, in the Netherlands airport, and my AirPods stopped working. I don't love buying things in airports because it's always going to be more expensive than it would be otherwise, but I was like, fuck it. I can't not have headphones, so I bought 'em there. I thought I was an AirPod girlie but I really like them. Sometimes I don’t want to listen to music but I want silence, and it's really good for that too. Just the noise canceling of it all.

Do you use any other writing accessories? 

I’m really big on what notebook I’m using. I have a generative brainstorming notebook, a drafting, and a note-taking notebook. I like the Muji notebooks. You can get them for three USD at many of the convenience stores in Japan. It’s a high-quality notebook for not much money at all. I also really like the Torinco. I like those because the binding is really solid. It lays flat when you open it. I like Midori notebooks as well. I’m also really big on sticky notes. I use the Fusen ones. There’s gratification I get from putting down a sticky note, like okay I did this today. They visually add up in a notebook and track progress. 

Where do you write your manuscript? 

I use Google Docs. I can’t write the entirety of a book longhand. I’ll write exchanges or certain paragraphs to see how it feels or moves. But generally, I have many parts. And then I make PDFs of them as a backup in case Google turns itself off and all my shit is gone. 

Do you edit in the doc or by hand?

The first three rounds of edits I do in doc and then the last two rounds of edits, which I do before I send it to my agent or an editor, I print out and do by hand. When I hold it I catch a lot of different things on a language level. If a progression or a scene feels too rushed that won’t track for me on the screen the same way it does if I’m reading it on a page. 

How do you start a new book? Do you research when writing? What’s that process like? 

For better or worse, I have a tendency to write about the same handful of places and many of the same communities. It's really important to me to spend time in those. It'd be really hard for me to write about a place that I've never been or about a community, whether that’s community in the sense of people or community in the sense of something less tangible. 

A lot of the research that I do at a data or information level takes place before I start drafting. Questions of structure and progression will pop up the further I get into the generative process, but those become more present for me after a draft or two. Once I know what the story is and how it could move, there’s the question of honing it and what models and progressions would best make visible what I'm trying to do. The research question exists throughout but it changes as the draft progresses.

Have you ever read any books on writing? This is a selfish question. 

There's a book by Walter Mosley called Elements of Fiction. It’s really important to me. It takes this question of what is a novel, flips it on its head, and walks through a way of approaching it while always underlining that this is a way not the way. Then About Writing by Samuel Delany. It’s a collection of different speeches, letters, and things that he's published–all circling around the question of writing: structure, living as a writer, the ways he lived as a writer. Form and process. That was useful. The Paris Review interviews were extremely important to me when I was first starting out, particularly around the time I was writing my first book. Specifically Toni Morrison's and Hodgens. I printed them out at one point and I would have them on my desk and would refer to them from time to time. Just seeing different ways to be. Alan Hollinghurst’s interview was really important to me too.

Can you share the books that you've been reading during the drafting process?

A lot of fiction in translation. 

The Membranes by Tai-We Chi (translated by Ari Larissa Heinrich) 

Ways of Going Home by Alejandro Zambra

Cross-Stitch by Jazmina Barrera (translated by Christina Macsweeney)

Twinkle Twinkle by Kaori Ekuni (translated by Emi Shimokawa)

Indeterminate Inflorescence by Lee Seong-bok (translated by Anton Hur)

None of these books explicitly align with what I've been writing, but tonally and, in some cases, structurally, they're in a similar zone, so I've been lugging them around as I go from place to place.

Are there any writers working right now whose work you really admire? 

There are many. He’s a translator but Anton Hur. All the books he works on, as different as they are, there’s a frequency they share that is really inspiring, a word I don’t use lightly. K. Ming Chang. Her work is phenomenal and she’s prolific. She’s so good at her job. It’s beyond to me. Any time that she has new work coming out in any capacity I’m super excited. Transcendent Kingdom came out a while ago but Yaa Gyasi is brilliant. The work she does is very specific. Transcendent Kingdom left a deep impression on me the first time I read it. There's a certain way that it could have been accomplished that would be really legible to a certain type of reader or reviewer or marketer, but the book resists that and I appreciated it very much. There’s a book called Bellies by Nicola Dinan. It's phenomenal and does a lot of really cool things. Then Love in the Big City by Sang Young Park and Happy Stories, Mostly by Norman Erikson Pasaribu, translated by Tiffany Tsao. I read Happy Stories, Mostly last year and I loved it a lot. Really great work. 

So when you're not writing, what do you do?

It took me a while to accept this, but unfortunately I am a party girl. I like to go out and have a nice time. 

Period. Where should I be going out in Houston and Osaka? 

If you’re in Osaka then Doyama or the Umeda area. That’s where a lot of the party girls go. It's changed in the way that a lot of gayborhoods have globally, but it's where a lot of the queer things are and everyone just hangs out. It’s one of the more open gayborhoods I’ve been to. In Houston I spend a lot of time in Montrose. That’s where the queer epicenter is as far as the greater Houston area. I spend a little less time in the Heights. I used to live up there and they have cool stuff too. Also East Downtown around the Dynamo stadium. I’m at Ripcord a lot. It’s Texas’s oldest queer leather bar. The demographic is expansive, you see a lot of people. Eagle Houston is cool. JRs is fine for karaoke. Crocker’s is cool. It’s a Black queer bar and pretty active from midnight to close. There’s a really nice energy and everyone's just hanging out, both on the patio and inside. They probably have the strongest drinks you can get at that price point. I like to swim so I do that three or four times a week and I like going to sauna. If I’m in LA I like Century Spa and in Houston I like Gangnam Spa. 

Amazing, thank you. This is great. 

Yeah, thank you for your questions.