Interview with Jon Doughboy

a brief and cautious look inside the dough

Who is Jon Doughboy? This mystery has intrigued me since I discovered JD on Twitter. I have accused several other writers I know of using Jon Doughboy as their alter ego. All have denied it. He writes bright, odd, disturbing, and darkly funny short stories for a variety of lit mags such as ergot., Maudlin House, Heavy Feather Review, Bruiser, Apocalypse Confidential, The Dodge, and so on. What he tells us about himself online is undoubtedly a pack of lies, but he talks a lot about living in a yurt and being a hobbyist scribbler, so we all find him relatable. Another of his hobbies is talking trash when he participates in lit battles. We need to know more! I’m here to sniff out the truth.

Why do you hide under this blanket of a pseudonym? Can you give us any little nuggets of truth about your life? I’ll note that you classify the lovely “Jacko is Wacko is Us” as an essay.

I think of Doughboy as more of a heteronym than a pseudonym. It’s less about hiding than self-escape. We share some facts of our biography. My life, the man behind Doughboy, crops up here and there in stories and essays. But I don’t think that’s something to praise. It feels like laziness to me. Self-obsession. Narcissism. Indications of a feeble imagination and a timidity about trying to write outside my lived experience, to open things up to other voices, registers, places, possibilities…

I created Doughboy on a whim, a whim of disgust and frustration after writing for years and realizing I’d never have success. Not the kind of success I wanted which was to be paid $80k a year to write weird little novels and to only write weird little novels. No marketing. No brand creation. No networking, readings, conferences, contests. No querying or synopsis writing. I’d just be paid to do what I love and then buy a little Salinger bunker and leave the hustle to an editor and agent who I’d meet once a year for a fancy steak dinner where I’d hand them a thick printout of my latest work. Magazines, little rags like the New Yorker or the Paris Review, would email me or send me letters soliciting work. I had no idea that this sort of career didn’t exist, never existed.

I was also disgusted with all the identity stuff of the moment. A good example of this is a story that I had accepted somewhere and then the editor got cold feet and passed it to a sensitivity reader who rejected it, questioning my “right” to tell this story. I also got a sense from some of the editor’s emails that if I’d be willing to confirm my race and ethnicity, to prove that I had the right to tell the sort of story I’d written, they might consider publishing it. The idea of a writer’s identity being more important than the work they produce is alien to me. Ap Con eventually picked it up.

You often perfectly capture contemporary frustrations with the act of writing. With writers who love the identity of “writer” more than writing itself. With the push-pull of wanting praise/accolades v. wanting to be free and isolated. With being a reader of fancy stuff when nothing else about you is fancy. For example: “The I Recommends,” “Drinking Margaritas at the Mall,” “The Deer.” How have your thoughts on this evolved? How do you feel about being a writer right now?

I don’t think of myself as a Writer. I like to write. I love to write. It’s fun. I’m actually a bit disappointed that it’s so fun. I wish I found other, less sedentary, isolated, and self-involved things more fun. But I read a lot as a kid and here we are. Honestly, I don’t care about accolades. The dream is still to get paid. If I could get paid to write, and write what I want, I’d be paid to do what I love. I don’t know many people who can say that. But all the baggage people have about being a writer or artist, I don’t really get that. Maybe it’s because I’ve written so much but the visual and performing arts seem a lot more interesting to me. I’d rather be working in something tactile like woodcarving or sculpting or something. Or be a musician. The image of some scribbler hunched over a laptop and tinkering with words isn’t romantic to me.

What’s the deal with autofiction?

I use it as a pejorative. There are a whole host of learned experts on X who will tell you it started with Plato or that Cervantes actually left behind an earlier draft of Quixote that was a work of autofiction about jerking off in a cell. At best, autofiction can be a playful investigation of the self. But when I read an artless half-baked story that feels like a diary entry written by a person with a dull life, that’s the worst of it. Even the catchwords associated with it bore me. It’s vulnerable, raw, authentic, etc. That’s not the stuff I crave when I read. I want a story well told. An interesting style. If I want rawness, I’d rather talk to a friend about some weird shit they’re going through than read some stranger’s prose selfie online.

I listened to a recent Entitled Opinions episode that touches on this. The narcissistic feedback loops of social media. Autofiction in that sense feels like the natural mode of the day. Social media has intensified this. It almost feels like the parasocial connection to a writer posting their autofiction online is a more important than the work itself, overshadows it, defines it, to the point that your little story only has value insofar as it sheds light on the person or personality behind it. You become the story. Your work is a footnote to your self.

Please share a few pieces that readers can access online that make you feel especially happy or proud. What do you love about each one?

“Seagram’s” was the first story of Project Doughboy and got picked up by Don’t Submit, whoever they are. I wrote this one morning, the first thing “I” had written in years, and stumbled across Don’t Submit and sent it in. I created the name “Jon Doughboy” on the spot while submitting it. Thought about it for two seconds. On some level, there probably would be no Doughboy without Don’t Submit. I’d had a version of writer’s block. Not writer’s block, really. More like writer’s disgust. I still have that disgust. But I channel it into my writing and have fun in the process.

I just found out my story “the North American Blizzard of 1996” in the Dodge was nominated for an O. Henry Award. I don’t know anything about the award or how the process works but I’m pleased with the story. It’s a step towards a more multivocal direction that I’d like to go.

I also like the visuals of “Nesting Bowls.” I often think about the form of the story and how it shapes and grows out of the content and I think the two work well here.

Are there any pieces you’ve written that feel alien now? Maybe you hate them, or they don’t feel true anymore, or you’ve moved on in some way?

I’m not too precious about my stories. I write them and move on to the next. I’ve written plenty of goofy, horny poems and unserious stories like a prose poem about watching Aaron Rodgers tear his Achilles tendon. But I don’t hate anything I’ve written. I’m more interested in the process than the product. Probably because I genuinely love the act of writing.

One of my favorite things about publishing a story is that it stops nagging at me to edit or tinker with it. At least for the time being. I can move on to something else. A different voice or style. A different perspective or time period. I’ve written a couple of terrible novels that remain unpublished but I don’t hate them. They’re what I was capable of when I wrote them and that’s fine with me. I don’t feel the need to throw my past self under the bus for valuing different things or having different feelings or ideas or skills than I do now or will in the future.

You write about a variety of different kinds of people and places. Do you gain the requisite knowledge from reading, watching TV, dreaming, just boldly making stuff up?

All of the above and then some.

Which dead writers do you feel the deepest kinship with? You can mention a few living ones too, if you want.

I’m not sure anymore. When I was younger and still romanticized writers, there were plenty. Robert Walser as the patron saint of failures. Bernhard for his rants and bile. Pessoa for his different selves. I go through phases where I read a bunch by one writer but this is impossible to predict. I was on an Ali Smith kick not too long ago. She’s a bit didactic but I like the playfulness of her prose. Sometimes I read to immerse myself in something, get outside myself. Sometimes I read to see what I can learn and rip-off and experiment with in my own writing. Sometimes both. That said, I’ve always been more interested in the work than the writer behind it. I don’t read a lot of writer biographies and often can’t even remember the name of who wrote a book I liked but I’ll remember a great line or character or scene.

Is there any hope?

In general? Yes. I hope this chicken I’m roasting tonight will be delicious. I hope my mom won’t get duped by anymore internet scams. For literature? I don’t think so. I don’t think it’ll ever have the place it once had in the culture. People read less. There are new media eating up the share of attention and time people have. It is what it is. I don’t think writing is inherently better or more important than other forms of art and entertainment, television, video games, sports etc. We’re here for a bit. We spend our time. Reading and writing are some of the ways I’ve chosen to spend mine.

What would you like to be asked? Please answer!

“Doughboy, darling. We love your stuff. Your prose is making us weak in the knees. Are you interested in a big fat book deal?”