A Conversation with K.G. Akbar

David Blaine: I understand that you have dual citizenships.  Where were you born?

K.G. Akbar: I was born in Tehran but came to America almost immediately afterward. My dad’s Iranian and my mum’s Pennsylvanian.

DB: And where is your home now?

KGA: I mostly live in West Lafayette, Indiana.

DB: You are still going to college.  Where do you attend?  What year are you in?

KGA:  Purdue University.  I’m a Junior, I think. I dropped out for a while. I’m honestly not sure what I’m considered.

DB:  What is your major at Purdue?

KGA: I have a Double-major in Creative Writing and English Education.

DB:  Besides your studies, what do you do?  How are you paying the bills?

KGA:  I got a scholarship from Coca-Cola for being good at standardized tests which covers tuition/rent/books and gives me enough money left over to buy poetry, booze and food.

DB: When did you first think you’d want to become a writer?

KGA: Well, I published my first poem when I was six. It was called “A Packer Poem” (I was raised in Wisconsin) and my teacher sent it to the local newspaper, which printed it. I remember the last line was something like “because the fans and the players are brothers.” So, uh, since then.

DB: Do you have any favorite authors or poets, or do you read everything you can get your hands on?

KGA: I spend the vast majority of most days reading whatever I can find to read. Used books are so goddamn cheap and with the proliferation of literature online there is no excuse for anyone who calls themselves a writer to not be well-read. As far as favorites go, I have many. Rimbaud and Artaud would be chief among them – mad French kids whose luciferian pursuit of the perfect poem has very much inspired my own. I love the postwar Polish greats – Milosz, Herbert, Szymborska, and Zagajewski to a slightly lesser extent. Kathy Acker’s Don Quixote was huge. Alexie, Gibran, Snodgrass, Carver. Murakami and Hemingway are huge forces in my prose. Komunyakaa is maybe the best living poet.

DB: What kinds of music do you enjoy?

KGA: All of it. Save poetry, tracing the genealogy of the music that invigorates me is the most spiritually rewarding element of my life. Daniel Johnston, Eric Bemberger of Beep Beep, Jeff Mangum of Neutral Milk Hotel, and Justin Pearson of The Locust have all influenced the person I am more than just about any human I’ve actually met. I love sixties country – George Jones, Merle Haggard, Gram Parsons, etc. Violent Femmes, T. Rex, Conor Oberst, Sunset Rubdown, The Rolling Stones, mewithoutYou, and Elliott Smith are all very important.

DB: Do you have any artistic talents beyond writing?  Do you play an instrument?

KGA: The only instrument I play with any sort of real competence is the computer. I had a music project for a while called Mr. Kaveh that resulted in one hilariously bizarre EP. I took it so seriously at the time, but listening to it now just makes me giggle.

DB: Do you draw or paint?

KGA: Not well. I’ve always felt slighted by my inability to draw anything that looks like a thing.

DB: What’s on your mp3 player right now?

KGA: 113 gigs of music. But I am listening to a Flying Burrito Brothers record right now this second.

DB: What’s the last movie you watched?

KGA: I watched The Devil and Daniel Johnston on my laptop a few nights ago. It is my very very favorite film of all-time. I watch it at least monthly.

DB: You are the publisher of a magazine called The Quirk. Tell me a bit about the pre-history of that.  What were your first publishing efforts?

KGA: Well, The Quirk began as this little local general interest gazette sort’f thing. It had articles, music reviews, art, cartoons, letters, stuff like that. That ran for fourteen issues and had a ton of associated merchandise – t-shirts, hats, buttons, sweatshirts, even an album of songs by local musicians who all recorded songs about The Quirk. Then, as I began getting more and more serious about poetry, I rebranded The Quirk as a literary journal. As far as my own personal publishing efforts go, the first lit-mag I ever submitted to was Remark. They accepted two poems literally within six hours of my sending them. I was ecstatic!

DB: What kind of audience, geographically, are you reaching with The Qurk?

KGA: The Quirk currently ships to every continent except Antarctica. I want everything with a pulse to read it.

DB: I understand that you donate the profits from each issue to a different charity.  Which charity is the present issue helping, and how did you select them?

KGA: This issue’s charity is the Keep A Child Alive AIDS fund. I selected it because I feel it’s the charity that will do the greatest amount of good per dollar the issue is able to raise for it.

DB: How do you attract such well known contributors to what was, at least initially, an obscure publication?

KGA: I knew a lot of the contributors just through being published in the same magazines and striking up correspondences over the years. For others that I really wanted, I literally just looked up where the poets lived, got their local phone books and called them begging for submissions. Then, probably about half of the poems in the issue were unsolicited.

DB: How do you feel about the quality of material you get from the slush pile these days?

KGA: For our last issue I got something like three thousand submissions, of which I accepted around thirty for the magazine. So, that’s two-thousand-nine-hundred-seventyish personal rejection letters I wrote for one issue. That’s not to say that all of those poems were bad – I just have a very particular aesthetic I look for with Quirk contributions.

DB: What has been the biggest surprise so far in your publishing career?

KGA: A few months ago, I woke up and found a book offer from The New York Quarterly in my inbox along with an Assistant Editor position with the magazine. That was a neat surprise!

DB: Congrats on that!  Will you still continue The Quirk?  Any big developments up the road?

KGA: Yeah, I definitely want to continue it. Actually, my roommate is a graphic design major and is going to be working on The Quirk as his senior project, which means I get a team of four graphic designers essentially interning for the magazine all semester. I’m going to do my best to get the next issue out around May 2010.

DB: How can people contact you for more information?

KGA: Well, my e-mail address is kakbar at purdue dot edu.

DB: Anything else you’d care to share?  Website address?  Words of wisdom?

KGA: Uhm. Well, The Quirk’s website is http://www.TheQuirk.org, and it’d be neat if people went to that. Words of wisdom? Love stuff.