We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Adam Gnade. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Adam below.

Hi Adam, thanks for joining us today. Have you been able to earn a full-time living from your creative work? If so, can you walk us through your journey and how you made it happen? Was it like that from day one? If not, what were some of the major steps and milestones and do you think you could have sped up the process somehow knowing what you know now?

I earn a full-time living from writing, but it comes in peaks and valleys. Some days are very lean. Others are pretty incredible. I honestly have no idea how it all works or how to predict things. I just hustle constantly. Every day. It can be exhausting and some days (a lot of days) I think of quitting. I haven’t quit (and I won’t) because I love the work regardless and even on the hard days I feel like what I’m doing is a good thing. A couple weeks ago a post someone made on TikTok about my book After Tonight, Everything Will Be Different went ridiculously viral, so I won’t need to worry about money for a while. Still, I know that won’t last forever because it never does. I’m enjoying it while I can and saving up a little for the lean days.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

So, what I do is release a series of novels and audio books on cassette that share the same universe of characters and continue each other’s storylines. It’s about life in the times that we’re living. The releases come out via the San Diego record label Three One G, which is run by Justin Pearson from The Locust, Deaf Club, Dead Cross, and a bunch of other cool bands and Bread & Roses Press, which is Jessie Duke’s new publishing house. They do a sort of co-publication thing with my stuff and I feel really good about working with them. My next book, The Internet Newspaper, comes out on Three One G and Bread & Roses in February of 2023. Hopefully people will like it. I have absolutely no perspective on it, so it might be terrible. I wrote it very fast over the course of four days and then spent six months working around the clock to finish it. Still recovering from that. Really messed me up. My head is kind of a wreck. I feel a little inhuman still.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

My goal is to leave behind a vast body of work that will serve as an alternate history of our times.

Are there any books, videos or other content that you feel have meaningfully impacted your thinking?

I read a lot. Lately I’ve been into Roberto Bolaño’s poetry collection The Romantic Dogs off New Directions, anything by Nathaniel Kennon Perkins, Nicole Morning, and Bart Schaneman, Dmitry Samarov’s new book Paint-by-Numbers, James Baldwin, Nick Bernal’s writing, Dickens, Rin Hart’s poetry and stories, Louise Erdrich, Ana Carreta’s chapbook Girlfriend Cosplay off Burn All Books. Also, Lora Mathis’ new collection from Burn All Books, Here I Am In It, is really excellent. I love Jesmyn Ward. Oh, Nate Marshall’s poetry collection Finna hit me hard this year. I don’t write poetry but I read a lot of it. Poetry can also be one of the worst forms of arts. It gets a bad wrap. When it’s good, though, it’s better than anything. That’s rare. I kind of hate the New Yorker but I also love reading it.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.adamgnade.com
• Instagram: adamgnade

Image Credits
All photos by Elizabeth Thompson