Dan Meth

My college chum and adventure cohort Ryan Van Winkle has just gotten his new collection of poems, “Tomorrow We Will Live Here”, published in the UK where he lives in exile. His editor has insisted that he harass all his friends with web-presence into interviewing him for a “virtual book tour”. Ok fine, but he better mail me some Buckfast. Just kidding. Not. (Interspersed are drawings of mine from our numerous backpacking adventures around Mexico, Portugal, Poland, Ukraine and Kelv)

DAN: Do you really like poetry?

RYAN: Yes.

DAN: Really?

RYAN: Really. I also like pizza and comic books. However, for every poetic ‘Daredevil’ there is a ‘Speedball’. (Apologies to Speedball fans who read your blog.)

DAN: So you really like poetry?

RYAN: Look, I know what you’re getting at. Here’s the secret: A lot of poetry (including some of my own) is super bad. Awful. Because more people do it than are good at it. Truth is, if you don’t understand a poem, just move on. It sucks. Read a different poet. When I was young, people said ‘Thirty-Something’ was a great show – Fuck that. I liked ‘Growing Pains’. 

DAN: You and I once co-wrote an animated film about an asthmatic ram and a dog with diarrhea. You also write bittersweet love poems. Do you see these as two different literary worlds or are they connected?

RYAN: Based on the Youtube comments, most people think my ‘bittersweet love poems’ are funnier than ‘the dog that can’t stop shitting.’ The link between poetry and cartoons / comedy is the desire to surprise with language. Don’t think about this too much, it will ruin your cartoons. Further, I think most of my so-called ‘serious’ poems are funny. Especially if you read them in a high, whiney voice. 

DAN: Do you find it liberating to purge the melancholia into your work?

RYAN: Meth, as you know, I am happiest when I am most uncomfortable. This is why we went to a guerilla saloon in Kelv, visited the worst town in Mexico and why we laughed so much while hitchhiking through the desert at night while being followed by rabid wolves. Other people would want to be poolside. Other people would go to a Greek island. But “we pursue the darkness and there we find the light of joy.” – Zemeckis, (1988)

DAN: Where do you get your best writing done? Everyone here seems to think it happens at a coffee shop.

RYAN: Like you, I tend to sketch in coffee shops. The ‘writing’, the real work, happens when I’m in places I know well, can concentrate, and am totally comfortable in. This is usually somewhere I am trapped in for a while. I think I’d write well in jail. Conversely, I’d imagine a jail-house Meth would yield some fantastic comics. Think about it.

DAN: What’s your advice to writers who aren’t comfortable with sharing real feelings and personal experience in their work (or their waking life)

RYAN: Get hip to it. You are going to die. It doesn’t matter. Might as well let it out.

DAN: You can only listen to one for the rest of your life: Bruce Springsteen or Billy Joel?

RYAN: I am confidant that Joel, like Huey Lewis, does have one amazing album left in him, one historic and perfect album – something dark and edgy about trying to commit suicide, about getting old, losing your youthful prowess. Something that is so honest and searing that we’ll all have to re-think our lives…In the meantime, I’d take Springsteen.