Interview with Sasha Brown
"Wondrous things are out there but me and my dipshit friends aren’t privy to any of them."
Sasha Brown writes funny, surreal, and shocking tales, and he’s always erupting with a kind of wildness. If you ever check the Submissions Grinder homepage and see something very surprising (examples below), it’s by Sasha. You can find his work truly everywhere, from lit mags like wigleaf to genre mags like Weird Horror and everywhere in between.
He’s here to have a weird conversation with us, and we thank him for it. If he sounds brash at any point, you must forgive him. He’s from Boston.
Speaking of which – Mom, you might want to skip this interview! There is a great deal of profanity starting now that I’m handing over the mic to Sasha. Look away! Now!
Your stories are full of wild characters. Have you known a lot of wild people in your life? Or where do they come from?
First of all I have never sounded brash in my life. I sound classy. I’m sophisticated. I do art. I don’t know about wild people but I’ve known a lot of dipshits. I grew up a dipshit, surrounded by dipshits. Not like epic, tragic dipshits, mostly - just, y’know, people who will pierce your ear with a safety pin in Troy’s shitty apartment after you all get off work at Friendly’s. (True story! Only the name was changed, because I forget that dude’s name! His apartment sucked tho.) The thing with being a dipshit is, stuff is always happening that you don’t get, right? All of a sudden you have to pay a thousand dollars ‘cause you chipped a tooth trying to open a beer bottle and you don’t know why insurance didn’t cover that, you don’t get it, but either way you’re hosed.
I’ve always felt that life is confusing and frightening. Crazy shit happens and we’re all like wait, is that even allowed? Aren’t there rules about this? I write a lot of stories where crazy shit happens and everyone just sort of does their best to deal with it. Look, man, if it starts raining babies from the sky, you don’t have time to be like this seems improper. You got babies to catch.
What are some of your favorite self-inserted congratulations on Submissions Grinder?
The best of Sasha Brown’s Grinder Woots:
“Congratulations Sasha Brown, but it will be your last! - No, David Steffen, have mercy! ARGGHHH”
“Congratulations Sasha Brown, who sends his regrets; accepting for him will be John Cena”
“Congratulations Sasha Brown, you’re finally a real wri - wait, is this the one about eating ass?!” (it was!)
In the many stories you’ve written, which would you say contains a character most like you? Additionally, what are some stories that felt painful to write, ripped from the flesh? (Please link us to these if you can!)
This is gonna sound weird, but I have this one story about butt plugs…
A lot of my stories start as silly jokes in my writing group (in this case, “what if reverse Amigara Fault”) and then I write it as though it were serious and see what happens. Real life is like that for me, too: a lot of it feels silly, but also it’s really happening and everybody really dies. This is a story about death by butt plug, but also it’s about sadness and it’s about how sometimes it turns out you can’t help anybody and maybe not everyone has the same definition of “help” anyway.
That makes a lot of sense! Now, when did you start writing, and what inspired you? And you’re also a gardener! Same question...when gardening, and why?
I used to play in bands. (Of course I did, all dipshits are in bands.) The thing with being in a band is that it’s loud, and band stuff happens at, like, 11:30 on a Tuesday (because your band sucks and Tuesdays are for shitty bands). So at a certain point after I ended up with a family and a whole-ass house I was like, man, I need to find a creative outlet that’s less loud and late. Writing is an art form that fits into a grown-up life. You can do it whenever you want, and you don’t need any equipment or other people. Fuckin amazing! I just started doing this like three years ago. All new to me. It’s been fun.
As for gardening: the thing about that is, it takes fuckin’ forever. You plant something and absolutely fuckall happens for, like, months? Years, if you’re my dickhead oakleaf geranium? I need that slow energy in my life. Things happen pretty fast around here, both inside and outside my head, and anything that slows me down is good for me. The experience of working patiently, over a long period of time, to create beauty: that is good for me.
I’m still not writing a fuckin novel though. Boring.
Do you garden too? What do you like about it? Or did you only ask because you stalked my bsky and it’s like 95% pictures of flowers.
The latter! I’ve always wanted to garden, but it doesn’t work. Dirt is too real for me. A couple years ago, I tried to start a vegetable garden, and not only was very little growing, but eventually I realized that some local feral cats had started using the garden as a litter box, and after that, I was done forever. Unfortunately, I’m easily grossed out. Your flower pictures are very beautiful, though.
Back to my questions! What recurring themes or patterns do you find in your work?
I have this one story in JMWW about someone who finds a severed human hand in her pizza box, and she’s like holy shit, you know, free hand! Right? We’ve all been there. She’s stumbled on a secret. She gets more and more body parts. Eventually she gets a whole-ass body, and all these cool strangers break into her apartment to congratulate her on her achievement. Yay!
Spoiler alert I guess: but when the cool strangers find out she doesn’t actually know what she’s achieved, she has no plan for the body, she figured it out on accident, they’re disgusted. Everyone leaves. She ends up alone with this heap of parts, feeling like what did I miss? What mystery did I almost solve?
That’s what I return to again and again. Wizards, monsters, spies. Magic and conspiracies. Wondrous things are out there but me and my dipshit friends aren’t privy to any of them. We might catch a glimpse. We will certainly not, at any level, get it.
Is it ever hard to keep going with this business? What keeps you motivated?
Honestly no, not yet. I like submitting stories: it feels like gambling to me, except with zero bad parts. Every story I fire off, like, who knows! Maybe they’re gonna love it! Sometimes they do!
It helps that I don’t, at a core level, give a shit. I’m not tortured by dreams of fame or fortune. I’m 50, man, I just wanna do puzzles and watch Love Island with my wife. The stories are in service of me living a life that’s interesting to me. Creativity has brought me an immense amount of joy. Music and writing both. I think about this a lot with my kid. When we encourage our kids to be creative, I feel like we’re not teaching useful skills. We’re teaching joy.
No but I do have a goal, I do, it’s true. My motivation is this: someday years from now, I want my granddaughter to come across a cardboard box in the attic full of weird old magazines with monsters on the covers. “What’s this?” she goes.
“Oh!” says my son Nathan, misty-eyed and prematurely balding. “That’s your grandfather. He used to write stories.”
Later on the granddaughter sneaks back to the attic and snatches that box and stays up all night. She comes down in the morning all crusty-eyed and messy-haired.
“Daddy!” she goes. “Grampa was into some weird shit!”
That motivates me. I gotta fill that box.
Aww! Speaking of girlhood, I’ve always wanted to ask—when I was a kid, I had a cat named Sasha. Does the spirit of my late cat live on in you?
I mean, how much of a dipshit was your cat? Can I see pics?
No pics!! And zero percent! She is in heaven right now, and I should have given her a content warning, too. Okay, but if you could change something about the writing community, what would it be? What do you appreciate about it?
Oh, my writing friends. What would I do without them? Not write good, I can tell you that.
I love hanging out with writers because everyone’s funny and interesting. One of the things with artists, at least the good ones, is we want to entertain people, right? I deeply believe that the function of stories is to entertain. I think way back in the beginning, all the cave people around the campfire were like fuck yeah, Mike, tell us a cool story, we’re bored and we live in a cave, and that’s how stories were invented and that’s still what they are. “Show me something cool.” Everything else we’ve attached to stories - deeper truth, profundity, the connection of two naked human souls - is just storytellers being pretentious.
Not that it’s not okay to be profound! I do that shit all the time, I’m profound as fuck. I think it feels good if you read a story and you’re like oh shit, that’s the truth, I’ve felt like that, I feel less alone now. So that’s a cool thing. It’s just that you can’t get to the truth if the story is boring.
What’s a question you’d like to be asked? Please answer it!
I don’t know, do you feel like that too? About not being boring? We’ve both been in HAD recently with pieces that are funny but they’re also both about, like, sometimes the world seems like a lot. Your HAD piece is one of my favorites of yours. It’s funny, it’s a blast to read (“old-timey receiver,” lmao); it’s a good time. But the ending sneaks up and it turns out to be the Whole-Ass Truth, and it hits extra hard because I was having fun already. One of the things about you, I feel, is that you’re a super clear communicator. Look at this passage from Three Plagues:
“I kept my tone pleasant all the time. The last thing I wanted was an argument about something that couldn’t be proven or disproven. What a waste of time!”
It’s such a direct line to the reader. It feels effortless and it draws you right in, and that clarity leaves you room to pack a ton of meaning and ambiguity into what you’re actually saying. Does that make sense? Is that what you’re doing? That’s what I’m trying to do. What are you doing, Ivy?
Hmm, good question. I like a lot of boring stuff quite a bit, though. You know what I’m talking about – it’s like you said, puzzles, Love Island. T.S. Eliot.
But like you, I’m mostly trying to entertain myself when I write. Well…actually, now that I think about it, you’re obviously a more gregarious person than I am, and more of a class clown. I’m a weird girl in the corner going “heh heh” to myself while I write stuff in my journal. You’re in the front of the room doing sketch comedy, and no one’s mom is allowed to watch.
What you said about feeling less alone is really meaningful to me! I wouldn’t be sharing my cryptic journal entries online if I didn’t want to be understood, to get at something I feel that’s only really possible to approach in fiction. It can’t be said outright. Which is what I love about your HAD piece, which is playful but also shows a real struggle with the whole notion of what it means to tell the truth and to be yourself…the sad reality that however much we might want true communication and connection, it can never be fully experienced. And people won’t play by our rules! Which is a constant source of disappointment! I felt that. And I look forward to reading many more of your painful realities all mixed up with severed body parts.