rewilding & reweirding with Brian Gresko
"I am a deeply weird person. And why should I hide that?"
Spring Equinox to New Moon in Aries, 2024
I met Brian Gresko sometime in 2016 (through my friend Taylor!) after I had moved to New York City. It was some time between going to his reading series at Pete's Candy Store and meeting Ocean Vuong at Brooklyn Poets that I decided I wanted to write poetry again. After I left New York to pursue an MFA degree, Brian and I stayed in touch in the way that writers often do: through social media and reading each others’ newsletters. (I also asked him to edit a piece for me!)
So I was delighted to hear from him after last month's newsletter. What he shared with me on why he writes felt inspiring and in line with some things I had been thinking about, so I asked him if he'd like to be interviewed.
Together, we talked about reweirding and what that means to him, being queer and creative, how he got into illustrating, being a part of a writing community, and more. I loved talking to Brian because his approach to writing reminds me of why the art (and art generally) matters: because it's a way to connect—with others, with oneself, with what really matters in life. I hope you enjoy this heart-to-heart mini craft talk.
In response to my last newsletter, you wrote about how "rewilding" reminded you of the word "reweirding" and how you are starting to reclaim your "weirdo identity." What does it mean to "reweird"? What has reclaiming a weirdo identity looked like for you?
Brian Gresko: My relationship to the word weird, and my weirdo identity, has been complicated! Especially after college, finding my way in New York City, I believed that I had to box the weird parts of myself up and put them away, that they were childish, unserious, irresponsible, silly, dumb, useless. This isn’t unusual. Our cultural narratives about maturing encourage us to suppress our strange, playful attitudes in favor of conformity to capitalism and normativity. But what I’ve come to know is: I am a deeply weird person. And why should I hide that? I love my weirdo self.
Reweirding means celebrating my nonconformist, queer impulses. For me specifically reweirding looks like laughing loudly, dancing, arting, moving, making silly faces and singing, growing my hair out and wearing whatever I feel good wearing, trying to be comfortable with myself in my body, opening myself to new things, searching for new ways of being with myself, taking risks, prioritizing pleasure, unboxing what has previously been hidden and repressed. And not just doing these things in private, in the shower or home with my dog, but bringing them forth whenever I feel so moved. I want to let that inner weirdo out!
Does reweirding apply to writing? If so, how has it affected the ways you approach writing and creating?
BG: Yes, I am trying to be more weird in the things I make and create too. I came to writing around the age of thirty, and I thought that being among writers and artists might help me embrace and explore my latent weirdness. Sometimes it does, because a lot of us are very weird indeed. But, you know, especially here in New York City, there are also the types who talk about artmaking as if it's nothing more than a business proposition. Like, you have to know the right people, build a brand, say the popular things on social media, and write marketable stuff that is going to sell to a wide audience and hopefully get you noticed by some anodyne celebrity book club or morning talk show. And then there are the academic types, who take themselves and their work very seriously in a different way. It can be hard for me to keep those stuffy, serious, capitalist voices out of my creative projects, but I have to, because the further I attempt to go down that path the less happy I am, and there’s no success for me there anyway. For instance, a couple years ago a memoir I penned didn’t sell and the biggest note I received was that I’m not “mainstream,” which, duh, I’m not!
In the creative context, reweirding means working on projects that bring me delight and fire my passion, not projects that feel like they would be smart in a “career move” kind of way. Reweirding is digging deep and saying what I’ve never said before. It’s trying to not assess myself according to money or fame. Reweirding means that when I’m on stage hosting an event or giving a reading I feel confident and sexy, having fun in the moment. Reweirding means shattering oppressive patterns that I have established over the years as survival strategies, but which bring me no joy, and that includes in making art. That’s one of the reasons I’ve embraced drawing and illustration, and trying to find new and hybrid forms for expression.
Our cultural narratives about maturing encourage us to suppress our strange, playful attitudes in favor of conformity to capitalism and normativity. But what I’ve come to know is: I am a deeply weird person. And why should I hide that? I love my weirdo self.
I'm thinking about how the process of rewilding myself has been difficult, especially since, as a writer, I then feel a call to share these parts with others. How do you create authentically while also knowing that, potentially, what you create will then be seen by others? How do you nourish your weirdness in this kind of context?
BG: Great question. I imagine that for any artist whose journey is an inward one—driven, say, by their wounds and their demons and their wounded demons—that this question is a powerful if not central one. How can I be both true and performative? How can I shine a light on the dark parts of myself but also ask others to bear witness to what I find? To what extent is my artmaking therapy (for me) and to what extent is it an act of communication with humanity (performative, for others)? For me this boils down to a process versus product question.
The process of creating is, ideally, surprising or transformative in some way—I discover something about myself that I didn’t intend or expect. I know when that happens because I feel it. But the process doesn’t end there. To bring a work to a public audience via publishing or even just sharing it somewhere un-gate-kept, like a newsletter, is another thing, more outwardly focused on the art as a product. In that stage of revision, I prepare the work to walk without me, to go off and encounter readers/viewers on its own. That requires asking a different set of questions than I asked of myself earlier, but I don’t think these questions need to drain the piece of truth, or require I inhibit myself. On the contrary, I think this pushes me to be more solidly proud and out about my weirdness, and to try and better contextualize it for others to hopefully experience with a curious mind and compassionate heart.
This creative labor can be just as surprising as what came before, because I’ll realize that a line or a scene that meant a lot to me isn’t coming through clearly for another person, or that I’ve gotten the order of my essay all wrong, that the middle is the beginning and the beginning is the middle. This helps me get outside of myself, which I always find helpful, because that leads me to better understand myself and articulate my strangeness—not kill or curtail my strangeness but articulate it, live with it, inhabit it, bring it forth.
I can’t control whether or not there are a lot of (or any) readers out there interested in hearing what I have to say, but I do enjoy wrestling with how to make myself more legible to myself, and to those who might be sympathetic or open to encountering me through my art. It’s a strange truth to inhabit, but true nonetheless, that performance can bring us a catharsis that is just as authentic as what we do in private.
Reweirding means shattering oppressive patterns that I have established over the years as survival strategies, but which bring me no joy, and that includes in making art.
I loved the "Queer As Family" comic you wrote that was published in The Rumpus. How did you get into illustrating and writing comics?
BG: Thank you! I’m a lifelong drawer and doodler and have occasionally taken on longer art projects that use those skills. For instance, when my son was a baby, I made a solar system mobile to hang above his crib. Years later, when I thought he might be interested in Bible stories but didn’t like any of the kid Bibles on the market because they were all so dogmatic, I wrote a secular-oriented Book of Genesis and illustrated each chapter. (I tried to get some small presses interested but, as usual, was told this wasn’t a marketable project!) My latest project was to take my unsold memoir and turn it into an illustrated memoir, trimming the story and ditching a lot of the words in the process, in the belief that the illustrations more powerfully and simply communicated the emotional beats of the story. The comic came out of that.
This dovetails with the question about private vs public art, actually. Someone suggested to me that making a comic might help my chances of finding an agent for the memoir. At first I thought no, I’ve never made a comic, I wouldn’t know how to do that. Then, not long after, I encountered this news story that fired me up and made me want to write a response. Because of that person’s comment, I decided to try creating a comic instead of an essay, because that felt like a fun creative challenge and also because it did strike me as a potentially helpful thing to do for the memoir. In truth, I doubt that it will have an impact on me professionally, but I loved the process of putting the comic together, and am proud to have it out in the world. I hope to do more, though comic making is still very new to me and I’m not as quick to come up with ideas as I am with writing, where my creative muscles are more defined.
I see a connection between rewilding/reweirding and being queer. For me, a lot of coming into my own queerness has meant honoring who I was before society told me to be a certain way. And I think a lot of what I'm trying to do now with writing is to write again like I did before I was taught how I "should" write. Do you see a connection between reweirding and queerness? How does queerness inform how you create?
BG: Sure, a lot of what I now call queer I used to just call weird. Such as: dressing in what has conventionally been seen as women’s clothes, wearing makeup, kissing people of all genders. In part my resistance to identifying as queer was the inhibition of my upbringing in a conservative, Catholic environment in the 80’s, where queer was used as a slur against me, and in part it was ignorance—me not knowing that queerness is a spectrum like everything is. What changed was witnessing other writers claim these activities as queer and thinking to myself, I’ve done that so I guess that’s me as well, I’m queer too. I tried this out softly at first, but the response was loud—duh, of course you’re queer, welcome to the party! I’ve come to like having this word to lean on to help others understand me, and I’ve come to adore the interactions with other queer writers I know, and feeling like we see one another in ways others don’t see us. But weird and queer are still so tightly bound that when I announced my queerness in my social media profiles (as one does) I wrote “weird & queer,” and there they remain, intertwined. Probably those words will always be connected for me.
In terms of creation, writing about myself as queer has given me more permission to write about things that I kept hidden in the past. It’s provided a springboard to dive deeper, and is a bridge in helping people understand me, because it announces me as not normative, as different, and as writing in opposition to oppressive systems of power that often operate under a cloak of invisibility in our culture.
I can’t control whether or not there are a lot of (or any) readers out there interested in hearing what I have to say, but I do enjoy wrestling with how to make myself more legible to myself, and to those who might be sympathetic or open to encountering me through my art.
I'm struck by the ways you support the literary community—from co-hosting Pete's Reading Series to starting The Antibody reading series during the 2020 quarantine to being a founding member of the Writing Co-Lab. Can you tell me more about how these projects began? And do these projects inform how you create?
BG: I love this question. The specifics of each project aside, the thing that unifies them is that I believe that writers working together are able to build things of lasting value that best serve them and their readers more than any corporate entity can. I also think that the bedrock of literary community is volunteering time and energy. Most moral and ethical philosophies through the ages tell us the same, that doing for others is a lasting pleasure, it’s meaningful. I love giving back, and more specifically I love organizing events, and connecting with people, and collaborating creatively. These things are time-based, but they last in our memories. And so much of literary work is solitary, it’s a joy to be together with other like-minded folks and hear their art, or help them connect with students, or just have some point of connection with them outside of engaging with their words on the page. Gathering to experience art in community is an old, human impulse. I also have a talent for organization (I’m anal) and genuinely like meeting and hearing from artists in person, in real time. So while I sometimes lament that I’m not as focused on my output on the page as I think I should be, in truth I love all of this other literary work that I do, and wouldn’t give it up, which maybe makes me weird too, I don’t know!
What is bringing you joy these days?
BG: Springtime. Mitski. Long walks with my dog and my lover. People Collide by Isle McElroy. The British tv show Naked Attraction. Playing Dr. Mario on Nintendo. Teaching. Cannabis gummies. Whiskey and mezcal cocktails. Sunshine.
Brian Gresko is a writer, illustrator, and educator based in Brooklyn, New York. Gresko co-runs Pete’s Reading Series, Brooklyn's longest running literary venue, and is a founding member of Writing Co-lab, a teaching cooperative.
As always, I end with a short list of what I've been enjoying: blooming magnolia trees, We All Take From the River (a Kickstarter for a river ecology-based board game !), Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, making fun of how many times they say “add value” on Rock the Block, and Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar.