We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Jason McGathey a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Jason, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Did you always know you wanted to pursue a creative or artistic career? When did you first know?

I suppose it was always buidling toward this, but the first concrete moment that always sticks with me is rushing home from the last day of 11th grade, and feeling this furious need to jot down everything that had happened recently.

Before that, in retrospect, the signposts were occasionally sprouting up here and there – I just didn’t realize it. I think one mistake you make as a kid – not that you know any better – is that if the approach to something they are teaching in school isn’t working for you, then you just sort of assume this subject isn’t for you. I mean I can honestly say that absolutely nothing they taught me in English class past about the 7th grade was even remotely interesting to me. But I still read books constantly in my free time. Making the connection that I might like to write some never occurred to me for the longest time, mostly because either my English teachers were duds or what they were being told to teach was just not for me or whatever the case may be. And I know others who would later say the same thing, years down the road. Some never read books at all, until much later, because they hated English class so much.

Even so, I typically did well in tests, and could write my assignments competently enough. And I always enjoyed speaking in front of people, for some reason. For half a semester in I think 10th grade, we were required to take this class called Speech, which I enjoyed much more than English. There you were constantly having to write and perform little demonstrations or essays and so on. And even though I was never the least bit popular, I would run for student office every year mostly just for a chance to act out my little goofy script in public. Bombing out was never a problem for me, heh heh. Going clear back to 4th grade we had a great teacher, Mrs. Hoffman, who would encourage anyone who wanted to that they could write something about whatever and then read it in front of class. I enjoyed doing so even if my off the wall pieces, more often than not, didn’t exactly land with the masses.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I am a somewhat obsessed, mostly self-taught writer (jumped into the fire right after high school) whose condition seems to be worsening! By that I mean, my ability to sit and hammer out these words and tinker with this stuff for hours on end. Now I could easily sit there all day messing with this stuff, every day. And if not that, then reading a book, often while listening to a podcast about honing my craft. To date I have published 10 books, with my most recent, “Well-Behaved Monsters,” so hot off the press that the pages might still radiate a little warmth. Apart from the considerable amount my writing gives off, that is.

In addition to the books, I also have a trio of websites I tinker around with when so inspired. “Love Letter To Columbus” is my sprawling historical document concerning Ohio’s greatest city, featuring tons of personal anecdotes and photos you couldn’t possibly get anywhere else – I like to think of it as a world-building exercise that unfolds for the reader in “choose your own adventure” form. Then there’s “A Known History,” where I discuss and examine my family at great length. For that, I was picturing this place where all the relatives could gather and warmly reminisce about our shared experienes; however, much to my surprise, almost no family members have shown much interest in it, while the response from total strangers has been much greater than expected. Finally, my regular old Jason McGathey website where I post random pieces that don’t fit into one of those two projects.

The books I’m most proud of are probably my memoir “Riots Of Passage,” the dark and detailed office comedy “Tales of a Scorched Coffee Pot,” my southern folk tale type horror yarn “The Doom Statues,” and possibly most of all this latest project, “Well-Behaved Monsters,” which examines the dating scene and nightlife rituals for this collection of modern (mostly) twentysomething singles.

If you are easily offended, or want a tidy little book series, or an author who stays in the same lane all the time, then I am probably not your guy. However if you’re into something a bit more offbeat, and someone who is constantly experimenting with new things – yet attempts to maintain the same high bar quality-wise, and keep them accessible, every time out – then you might want to give my works a test drive. At the bare minimum you are bound to be constantly surprised, which is after all one major form of entertainment for most of us.

I was told by one reader that he enjoys what I’m writing, is somewhat transfixed by it…even when he has absolutely no idea what I am talking about. And though I wouldn’t necessarily say this is what I’m shooting for, I nonetheless consider that just about the highest praise possible. If able to accomplish this at a bare minimum, with every sentence written, then that alone I would say is a job well done.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

I had some difficulty getting my second book, “One Hundred Virgins,” off the ground in exactly the manner I wanted. This was the early days of self publishing and you basically had to have a go-between back then to input and format your books for you. And had to pay them a few hundred bucks to assemble your files.

I was using a service called iUniverse, who’d done a pretty good job with my first book. At the time, don’t ask me why, but I had it in my head that I wanted this extremely simple and understated cover – plain white, a single photo kind of offset to the side, a straightforward and clean black text. And we emailed back and forth extensively about exactly what I wanted, as I sent the cover artist the material, et cetera. Then became horrified and borderline livid when the books came out, and the photo was tilted at this “jaunty” angle, the text this spiky, goofy font I hated. The cover designer guy took it upon himself to do this because he apparently considered my concept too dull.

But, this turned into what you might call lesson #2, in how to pivot, or maybe even lessons #2, 3, and 4 in various aspects of life in the creative arts. If not life in general. That whether sounding cliched or not, nothing is REALLY a failure, you just have to figure out how to regroup and make the most of the situation at hand. Because as it turns out, a short while down the road, someone lodges a complaint about the content of my book, and iUniverse decides to yank my title. Yet this is no problem because by this time an operation called CreateSpace has sprung up, which requires no intermediaries, I’m able to do everything myself. And CreateSpace was eventually bought up by Amazon, which made the situation even better.

So I’m able to slide over to CreateSpace without any break in availability at all. And before completing this switch, I make a few corrections to the text – some factual errors people had pointed out to me, a few typos I’d noticed since publication, at least one or two words I thought meant something else and had to change. Which I am highly grateful for, because had the original version remained up, I probably would have never taken it down just to apply these corrections. Beyond that, I upload the exact cover I want, enjoy doing the whole process more myself anyway. And as an added bonus, I can’t imagine there are too many of those original iUniverse copies floating around – if I should ever for some outlandish reason make it famous, those would probably fetch a decent penny.

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

Wow, this has been a bumpy road, for sure, and that’s without even getting into issues like Facebook deciding on a whim they’re just going to delete your page, for reasons that still remain murky. But one decision I made early on, and now seems completely insane to me, might make a decent cautionary tale for those who are just starting out.

I’m one of these guys with a million different interests, and for whatever dumb reason, I thought it made more sense to compartmentalize these with different profiles on all the different sites. My thinking was that fans of my writing probably couldn’t care less about this little record label I’m running on the side, et cetera. Except not only that, but then often splitting hairs and spinning off different profiles based on the SUBJECT of my various writings, like one for local history, one for family related stuff, et cetera. All done with a similar mindset. Or separate ones for each of my kooky musical projects.

Yet…this not only proved to be an insane amount of work, I realize now was incredibly dumb. Because you’re really just splintering your audience that way, and reaching far, far less people. If I had just stacked my profiles into one or at most two different categories, I would be so much farther along in my career. At one point I might have had five different profiles with let’s say on average 5000 followers apiece on Instagram. Even allowing for some overlap, one profile with maybe 20,000 followers instead would mean my posts were reaching way more people. I probably set myself back a good decade with this nonsense. So nowadays my philosophy is, well, here’s all the crazy stuff I’m into, under one banner, deal with it.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://jasonmcgathey.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/xt_force/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jasonmcgatheywriter
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jason-mcgathey-1aa78614/
• Twitter: https://x.com/JasonMcGathey
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9ixnRKtMK-W7a0svyQMEKQ
• Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/xtforce
• Other: https://lovelettertocolumbus.com
  https://aknownhistory.com
  https://jasonmcgathey.wordpress.com

Image Credits

all photos and artwork by Jason McGathey