Whatever Stokes the Fire: an Interview with DT Robbins

By Sheldon Birnie

Satanic cults. Robert’s rules of order. Wormholes to different dimensions. Ghosts. Ice cold beer. Sadness. Failure. Heartbreak. Werewolves. Heartbreak and love that transcends the ages. The absolute absurdity of life. If any of these themes tickle your fancy, you might want to check out D.T. Robbins’ new collection of short-fiction, Birds Aren’t Real, which is out from Maudlin House on Feb. 28. 

If you’ve been terminally online, or even just lurking around the fringes of the online indie lit scene the past few years, you may be familiar with Robbins. Founding editor of Rejection Letters and Twin Pies online journals, his writing has appeared in HAD, Bear Creek Gazette, X-R-A-Y, Maudlin House, among many others.

Born in Louisiana, raised in a Pentecostal household, Robbins moved to southern California in his teens, about the same time as he got his first guitar, taught himself some chords and started trying to write songs. A communications professional, part-time English professor, and father of three, Robbins still calls southern California home, where I caught up with him earlier this year to talk about life, writing, viral videos and more. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity, btw.

Tell me a little about yourself, DT.

Honestly, I’m really not a very interesting person. I live here in southern California with my wife, my three kids, and our dog Carl. I work in communications for a university in LA and I teach part time at another university in Riverside, which isn’t far from here. I honestly feel like that’s it, man. I love my family, I love the life I’ve been given, and am very fortunate to have what I have and continue to be afforded the luxury of writing. It’s fun.

Tell me a little about your writing journey? When did you get started, when did you start taking it seriously?

I did dabble a little in songwriting when I was younger. My dad bought me my first guitar when I was 13, so I learned how to play that. I was never one of those kids who wanted to learn how to play everyone else’s songs, I was just gonna learn chords and write my own music. That was kind of my introduction to writing. But as far as anything outside of that, I didn’t really discover writing until I was in my early 20s. I was working at Borders bookstore. My manager was this really rad guy named Jeff Myers. I loved that guy to death. Just being in a bookstore, I started finding interest in writers like Bukowski and Chuck Palahniuk. I went back to school at about 23 to get my bachelor’s, because I didn’t want to work at a bookstore at minimum wage anymore. I met my writing mentor and one of my good friends, Greg Chandler, at a community college. He was just the nicest guy. It was an English composition class, and I talked to him after class one day and asked if, like, instead of writing essays about certain topics, could I instead write short-stories? He was like, “Yeah, go for it.” I got to know him and he’s a fantastic writer. It was kind of like, this is what I want to do for the rest of my life. I want to write, teach, whatever. So I kind of just followed Greg’s path. I got my degree in English and then went back years later and got my MFA in creative writing. It’s a pretty simple journey, starting from Bukowski and Palahniuk then working my way through the older stuff, the literary canon whatever that means anymore. Since 2019, I was introduced to the whole alt-lit community, or indie lit, whatever you want to call it. That’s when I started reading like Kevin Maloney and Bud Smith and all those guys. I was just completely blown away by their style and voices. It made me realize, like, now I can be weird. Now I can do the stuff I’d been wanting to do, that I just didn’t know how. I love Kelly Link, Haruki Murakami, magical realism stuff, but a lot of their writing still feels very literary. Aside from that, I was reading a lot of Willy Vlautin, Donald Ray Pollock, Padgett Powell, that literary type stuff. But getting into alt-lit and reading all this weird shit and the things you find online, the more I was exposed to it, the more I began to see it as super freeing. I’m a big David Lynch fan, and being able to do that with writing is really cool. I’m very happy to be able to have this journey.

These stories have largely appeared online. As a writer, and editor of an online journal, what role does the internet and the community, as a platform, influence the structure or content of what you write?

I think in a way there’s less pressure if you’re submitting to something like Rejection Letters – obviously I’m biased there – or HAD, or X-R-A-Y, Daily Drunk, or SmokeLong, Split Lip, Maudlin House, obviously – it doesn’t feel as stressful as trying to submit to The Paris Review or The  New Yorker or whatever it is that for whatever reason has that sense of prestige. The way I see it is  – and I don’t mean it in a negative way – but those bigger places, that’s like going to a workshop, where you put on a suit and tie and try to impress people. Whereas the online lit mags always gave off the air of like a bunch of people sitting at a bar sharing stories. There’s no pressure. It’s just a bunch of people shooting the shit in the most fun and creative way. And that’s what I like most about it. The internet, and I know a lot of people have their issues with it, for a lot of valid reasons – like if you’re on Twitter a lot you see all the bullshit – but for the most part it’s fun. 

Your voice is strong and consistent through the pieces in this collection. How important is a strong voice to you, when writing? Or is this something that has just come out over time?

It has become the most important aspect, to me, of my writing. The stories that stick with me, after reading them, are the ones that had the strongest voice. Mine are almost always a little bat-shit crazy. But that’s not necessarily always the case. There’s a short story in Elle Nash’s book Nudes, “Brittanies”, that has one of the strongest voices. It isn’t something like a story I’d write, but the voice is so strong. That’s what I connect with. It’s not something I sit down and think intentionally about. But I’ve done it so much now over the past few years that it almost becomes intuitive. I can also tell, if I’m working on something, like the story “Clark,” I think I rewrote that story like 12 times, because the voice wasn’t right. I couldn’t figure it out. When it doesn’t click, it doesn’t seem fun. It seems strenuous and a little too calculated. I like the sort of absurdist approach, the chaos in stories. When it becomes too methodical, too calculated, when I try to write like that, I find those stories boring. 

Your writing can be both irreverent and endearing, absurd and heartbreaking. Is that duality important for you, or is that just how your stories end up taking shape? 

The whole collection, or a lot of the stories, were written throughout 2020. The one that kind of hit the most for me was “Oi”, it’s maybe the most personal, because I wrote that story after my cousin had passed away and I was dealing with his death, grieving through that. For me, the balance is more that heartache and grief and all the emotions that people deal with in the midst of these absurdist situation is a lot like how we try to deal with the shit that happens in our own lives, whether it’s death or other things we’re grieving: divorce, bankruptcy, fill in the blank. We try to make sense of nonsensical situations. Death is one of those situations where there may be a cause of death, and we understand that, but we’ll never truly understand what death is. A lot of those stories are really about people just grappling with those serious situations masked as absurd situations. Sometimes there’s nothing to figure out and you just have to let things be as they are. My cousin, when he passed away, it was a construction accident. We still don’t get it. You can wrestle with that and try to make sense of it or you can accept it for what it is and let your emotions be what they need to be to get through that. 

Death, life after death, failure or overcoming (in a way) failure, the devil / Kevan, all make appearances throughout. But with these heavy themes you have humor, but it’s never like you’re trying to land a joke or stretching for a laugh. How important, as a reader or writer, is getting that laugh or smile in where you can when dealing with these heavy themes or to see that stuff in a piece?

I don’t want to lie and say there’s not a part of me that’s trying to be funny, but it’s more so what I think is funny. If the reader thinks it’s funny it’s more like, OK, if you do you do and if you don’t you don’t. Whatever, that’s fine. But it’s more important to be honest, and sometimes honesty is funny. It’s sort of the same problem where, like, I’ve always wanted to write a horror novel. That would be super cool. But the struggle I’ve always had is that when you’re trying to be scary, you’re not scary. And when you’re trying to be funny, a lot of times it doesn’t work, because people can tell you’re reaching for a joke. That’s the job of a standup comedian, not me. To me, the humor is more selfish, in a way, because it’s what I think is funny, for whatever reason. I always thought it would be funny, say, to see the meeting minutes of a Satanic cult (“mtg minutes”), having something so chaotic, having so much boring corporate order to it. To me, that’s funny. Whether or not anyone else does, that doesn’t matter. It’s funny to me. I’m only going to write what I think is funny rather than what I think might make people laugh. Or maybe something I write that I think is funny, someone else will think is quite sad. If I find it funny, I want to write it because what’s the point if I don’t do it? What’s the point in doing something you don’t want to do in the first place?

You  mentioned writing a horror novel. You’ve written a poetry collection (This is What Happens When You Leave Me Alone), you’ve got this collection coming out. Do you have anything else in the works right now?

I definitely want to try my hand at a full-blown novel. It’s just that short stories are easier. They’re less methodical in the sense that they’re like dreams. They come and they go and then they’re over. A novel is like a daunting task, it’s like a mountain you have to climb, you have to map your way up there and sometimes you have to trek back down and go a different route. Short stories, you don’t have to do that. You just get them out and then you’re done. But I do want to try a novel, I have a couple different ideas, we’ll see. I’m kind of hoping I can take the approach I did with most of the stories in this collection, where I’m just going to sit down and start writing and whatever comes out comes out. It was very stream of consciousness. It’s hard to do that, though, in 80,000 words, unless you’re Stephen King and you can just get fucked up on cocaine and blackout for a night and you write Cujo or whatever it is. But I don’t think that’s really an option for me. I’ve also thought about doing a collection of essays about family trauma. I grew up in a very religious family, with a lot of pentecostalism in our house, which I thought would be funny to write about. So we’ll see whichever grabs my attention and stokes the fire long enough to see it through to the end.

The trailers you’ve done for Birds Aren’t Real are great. They come across as more of an extension of the text, rather than an ad. How important, today, is marketing and getting the book or your writing out there, be that through Twitter or Instagram or multimedia things like trailers? 

It can be pretty stressful. Marketing thing is something I’m still trying to wrap my head around and understand how it really works, while also trying to get to a point where I don’t give myself a hard time about shit that doesn’t really matter, like how many views a video got or anything like that. We all carry a little bit of narcissism in us, and that’s something I try to put out. With the videos, I’m a huge Tim & Eric fan. I love those guys, I think they’re geniuses. So I just thought, after Kyle Seibel came out with his trailer (for Hey You Assholes!), I thought that was a really cool idea. I’d never thought about a book trailer. I talked to Zac Smith about a little video he did about his last book and his book Barn Poems. I thought I’d just go for it. The videos were my opportunity to try my hand at something I’d never done before. I didn’t know how to do anything, so I talked to Tex Gresham and he gave me all the pointers on how to put it together. He helped me out a lot. Tex is a fucking angel. That first one, with all the random cuts, that’s what I think of as the real trailer, per se, because it does have all the little hints of things that are in the book, while keeping up the vibe of how you might feel reading the book. The other videos were all just for fun. That’s why I’m doing all of it. I don’t – in any way, shape, or form – have this big dream of being an esteemed writer or anything like that. If it happened, that would be wonderful, but it’s certainly not my goal. So if I can do anything that’s fun that pertains to writing, that’s what I’m going to do. 

D.T. Robbins’ collection of short-fiction, Birds Aren’t Real, which is out from Maudlin House on Feb. 28. Check it out here.