I don't ever feel inclined to perform, but sometimes I do become aware that I'm bumbling.

TAO LIN: Something we share as writers is that neither of us has an MFA. We’re also both Asian American. How often did that come up, growing up in Ohio?

JORDAN CASTRO: My Filipino grandpa died before I was born, but my grandma would make pancit and other Filipino dishes for the holidays. My grandma’s parents initially disowned her when she married my grandpa because he was Asian aand they thought he was a “Jap.” People didn’t like “Japs” then because of the war. Eventually, though, my grandpa and my great-grandpa became great friends. When I was younger, I wasn’t really aware of my Filipino-ness, but I did think my grandma, my Filipino’s grandpa’s wife, was black, until one day I mentioned it to my parents and they told me she was Italian.

LIN: Diet seems to directly affect my poop. I’ve had inconsistent poop throughout my life. When I eat really healthy, like only raw or boiled meat and fermented vegetables, for many days in a row, my poop peaks in quality. Movement affects my poop, how much I move my body, massaging the food in my intestines. When my poop isn’t good, I also get itchy, including an itchy crotch. I have had a “leaky gut” to varying degrees. For a while you were—or intermittently you’ve been—pooping blood, I know. How is that going?

CASTRO: It’s going alright. It happens less now. I went to a doctor who told me I have hemorrhoids, which is what I suspected, probably from sitting too long on the toilet, and/or doing heavy squats and deadlifts. I’ve been taking psyllium husk, and focusing a little on eating less inflammation-causing foods. I’ve been doing some other things, too. I have this little “sitz bath” thing I fill with warm water and sit in. I also have a “squatty potty.” I originally felt embarrassed, even though one in 20 Americans gets hemorrhoids, and half of adults over 50 have them. Nicolette told me that St. Augustine had them so badly that he couldn’t get out of bed, and some scholars think that this was the impetus for his writing his Confessions, which made me feel better, as I was able to place myself in the lineage of at least one great hemorrhoid-haver. You told me recently in Gchat that you’ve been searching “UFC” on Google and reading the articles and headlines daily. What do you like about the UFC?

LIN: I like mixed martial arts because of fighters’ interests in health and in optimizing their bodies and minds, and, among other reasons, because their interviews with media are funny and interesting, but I told you that — searching “UFC” daily — as an example of a mindless entertainment thing I did, that I want to minimize or not do. We had been talking about how you stopped using Twitter and Instagram, but had been watching YouTube more, and you’d sent me a video of a news clip about physical fitness, which you then told me not to watch. What was that?

CASTRO: It was a clip from Fox News where one of the hosts was talking about an article written by another news organization that said people were using fitness to radicalize people into right wing politics, citing how Hitler promoted physical strength. The premise and beginning was funny, but it ended up being bleak. They did some kind of fake interview with a fake radicalized fitness guy and it was grimly unfunny.

TESS POLLOK: I went to school to study Early Christianity, I was really interested in chiastic structure and in reading the Bible how it was originally being read. And I definitely got involved with the material in a way that wasn’t totally detached, like I got angry with my parents for not raising me with religion, and recently I was upset with someone at a party for considering an interfaith marriage, I was like, “That’s fucked up to do to your kids.” Are you religious at all?

CASTRO: I wasn’t raised with any religion but I’m grateful in some ways that I wasn’t, just because of how rebellious I was as a kid. Being able to come to it without the familial baggage was good for me. It made it feel like my own thing to me, which was important to me at the time. I’m probably not as religious as I should be, but I try.

POLLOK: Are you Catholic?

CASTRO: No, no.

POLLOK: Orthodox? Baptist? Episcopalian?

CASTRO: I would just say Christian.

POLLOK: You haven't gotten that far.

CASTRO: No, no. It’s not that I haven’t gotten that far, I just have reverence for how complicated that stuff is. I feel like it’s easy for recent converts to become like the Pharisees, you know, to just see a glimmer of truth somewhere and start beating people over the head with it and it becomes this trap, intellectual pride. The basics I find easy to commit to but the doctrinal differences, I just don’t – if my family had roots in some tradition maybe it would be different. I would say I’m just a Protestant Christian.

POLLOK: Do you drink?

CASTRO: Not at all. But not because of that. I used to drink a lot. What about you?

POLLOK: I’m a Catholic now. My mom wanted me to be an Episcopalian because my boyfriend is Jewish, and –

CASTRO: So, you’re in an interfaith relationship, too.

POLLOK: Yeah. I mean, the real reason I was opposed to Episcopalianism is because there’s not really enough rules and I feel like you need the respect for tradition and the self-discipline, to me that’s kind of the whole point. Like, I’m very big on Catholic guilt. But, like you were saying, if you were raised without religion you have total freedom to choose, but do you ever feel fake? Just in the sense that you’re separated from people who were raised in the faith and it’s a more intrinsic part of them.

CASTRO: I feel like it can also have the opposite effect, just in the sense that it’s just a set of dead symbols that are sort of just in the background – and that can be useful, but, I’ve seen it be bad. I think people should be raised with it but I wasn’t and I don’t feel fake.

POLLOK: I once helped a coworker at an old job I had burn a certificate she was forced to sign at her Catholic high school that she wouldn’t lose her virginity before marriage. She was like, “do you wanna do this really feminist thing with me?” I think when it gets to that degree, where it’s so invasive – it’s just crazy – I mean, I also knew someone whose youth group leader used to make him put a quarter in a jar every time he jacked off, and it shocked me so much. I was, like, “your priest is making you tell him every time you jack off?” Completely unrelated, but what brought you to New Haven?

CASTRO: My wife, Nicolette, goes to school there.

POLLOK: Oh, where?

CASTRO: Yale divinity school.

POLLOK: Oh, wow. So, not that unrelated, after all.

CASTRO: Yeah. You can't escape it. The program's just a couple of years so I'm not sure where we'll go afterwards.

POLLOK: And what's your plan?

CASTRO: I'm starting my own press, but that's kind of a secret right now. It hasn't dropped yet.

POLLOK: Oh, okay, well, we don't have to talk about it.

CASTRO: I'm always hesitant to talk about things that aren't real yet. It makes me feel like I’ve already done it, which makes me lazier. But, also, yeah, it just doesn’t exist yet. I’m never wanting to hype or blow smoke like that. What’s your plan?

POLLOK: It's terrible to be on the other end of your own question. I don't really have an answer for you.

CASTRO: It's hard, it's hard.

POLLOK: I used to be a sportswriter covering UFC. I got really jealous of Norman Mailer because I was reading his work and he and James Baldwin were secretly fucking, and the mob used to be really involved so it all seemed really glamorous to me. But I just, like, got Logan Paul a water and that was it.

CASTRO: My next novel is called Muscle Man and it’s about an English professor who hates being an English professor and loves lifting weights, and so I read – I got, like, very nerdy about bodybuilding and read these different memoirs from all these bodybuilders.

POLLOK: Well, who do you like? There’s Phil “The Gift” Heath, I know he’s controversial because of his bubble gut, what’s your take?

CASTRO: I like Chris Bumstead – I know that’s kind of a normie answer. I like the classic physiques, now they just kind of look grotesque and like they’re gonna die, they look really bad. The guy who won the Olympia, Big Ramy, he just looks terrible.

POLLOK: Yeah, they just look like pitbulls. I used to have to write obituaries for these guys in their 40s all the time because they’re on so many steroids – steroids shrink your dick but they make your organs absolutely huge, so they’re just exploding from the inside out.

CASTRO: I got into watching these, like, 40 minute long videos on YouTube, like, analyzing what steroids they think other bodybuilders are using and stuff like that. And I became a big nerd about that stuff.

POLLOK: Nice. Do you work out?

CASTRO: Yeah, I, like, I’m 20 pounds less than my heaviest right now but for awhile I was bigger. If I took my shirt off you could tell. But, yeah, I became sort of obsessed with it. It just actually helped me – not the nerding out about bodybuilding – but in terms of anxiety and depression, working out fully cured it. For most of my childhood I had severe anxiety and depression, I was, like, diagnosed bipolar and all of this stuff, and it’s just totally gone. From a handful of different things, but lifting weights and exercising a lot. Part of it was when we moved to Maryland I didn’t have any friends there for like a year and a half, I was in school online and doing Tyrant Books from home, and there was a gym around the corner. So it wasn’t, like, “I’m going to fix my anxiety and depression with exercise,” I just started doing it and then it helped.

POLLOK: How did you end up working with Tyrant Books?

CASTRO: I met Gian once when I was 18 – we did drugs together at his apartment, actually. And years later I just tweeted, “I wanna try editing somewhere for a month,” and he saw the tweet and emailed me and I did it for a month. I think he had a couple people doing that, doing it for a month or so. But he asked me if I wanted to do it indefinitely and I ended up doing it for, like, five years.

True nerds are just the worst of the worst. They’re the most resentful, violent, seething people – and they’re impotent so that makes it worse. A lot of great writers were cool and jacked.

POLLOK: What specifically were you getting into at Tyrant?

CASTRO: I edited the website myself, right before Gian died I had started working on books, I worked on Brad Phillips’ book, but Tyrant sort of fell apart before I could do more stuff like that. I was just thinking the other day how stuff like that really helped me see myself as a writer, you know, I would just do things like email Lydia Davis and she would send me stories. Like, I was able to see myself as someone who could actually do this. And that helped a lot in terms of building confidence. Like, I didn’t go to school for it, I just wrote some terrible poetry books when I was younger. And it definitely helped a lot. And Gian didn’t teach me anything, really. I would reach out to him about editing and he would be, like, “Just work on it, you know what to do.” I was working at this art store at the time and very few customers would come in – some of those stories are, like, 800 word stories, and I would be working on them for, like, a week. Some people sent me, like, edited manuscripts and they would show me so I could see a little of what was going on. It helped me learn how to write, in some ways.

POLLOK: How come you never moved to New York, then?

CASTRO: I don’t like it here. It’s overwhelming and busy. I’ve got dogs that like to run around and stuff. I like coming here for brief periods and doing what I have to do but I like having space. The other thing is I love hanging out and I feel like if I lived in New York I would just be hanging out too much. I really like just reading and writing at my house, being on the porch, being able to take the dog out.

POLLOK: Does that feel satisfying and enough for you? It’s because of all the working out, isn’t it?

CASTRO: Yeah. I’ve got friends here but I’ve always liked having friends who weren’t involved or interested in literature.

POLLOK: Yeah, I mean, my whole thing with Animal Blood was I wanted to make a literary magazine for someone who’d never pick up a literary magazine. And it’s been weird. It’s been a wild ride. But I think it’s cool because it’s emerging, like, writing is so cool. I feel deeply in my heart that there’s nothing nerdy about writing, it’s just really cool. And it’s been awesome to see that come into the world more.

CASTRO: I have this theory that I’ve been trying to explain to people, and they don’t necessarily agree, you know the archetype of the bully and the nerd, or whatever? I feel like true nerds are just the worst of the worst. They’re the most resentful, the most violent, seething people – and they’re impotent so it’s even worse. A bully will just punch you, but a nerd will try to destroy your soul. A lot of great writers were cool and jacked.

POLLOK: A lot of great writers were cool and jacked!

CASTRO: And I feel like there’s a lot of value in not getting caught up. It’s easy living here getting too sucked into what’s going on. I can see a little bit of it online but not too much. Online, I can learn about things in meaningful ways, but it doesn’t constitute the bulk of my real life, my spiritual life.

POLLOK: Hypothetically, what if you wanted to know what was going on? What if you wanted to be a part of it?

CASTRO: Then I would be wary of that desire. I think it’s important not to get swept up in the memetic contagion of the crowd. And I think I’m susceptible to that. It’s much easier for me not to care what people think when I’m not there.

POLLOK: This is all making a little too much sense to me.

CASTRO: Yeah, we might move upstate.

POLLOK: Oh, I love it upstate. You should move to Ossining. It’s sometimes hard to tell with people – there’s some people I know who are, like, “I don’t want to get caught up in the city, I need to move to Missouri,” and I look at them and I’m, like, “You would fucking hate Missouri.” You never know who’s larping. People who are larping always die.

CASTRO: Maybe I’m saying something obvious but there was a guy outside my brother’s apartment in Williamsburg who was just screaming, and he was surrounded by garbage, and it just made me sad to think about hardening my heart to that.

POLLOK: I have a hard time going home to LA for that reason, because of how bad homelessness is. I’ve gotten mad at my mom before for wanting to move but I do get it, the amount of human suffering you see is out of control. We recently elected this awful careerist AOC woman, Nithya Raman, to the city council, and she just does nothing and it’s so sad. The last time I was at my house I had to call 311 because a naked woman was wandering down my street completely strung out, picking blood out of her toenails. And like a week later Nithya came to do a photoshoot with the encampment talking about how much she loves our unhoused neighbors.

CASTRO: It’s like that classic picture of AOC crying at the border fence, but there’s also that shot of the photographer taking the picture of her. Her pretending to cry at a fence. That image is infinitely more powerful than the original, where it just looks like she’s crying, or whatever. I’m not trying to duck human suffering, it was just something that I thought about when I was in New York – all those people walking past that guy – it’s not why I didn’t move here it’s just something I thought about.

POLLOK: How did you start writing the book?

CASTRO: I think it started – it’s hard to say. I think it started when I was ranting about my friend. And I was working on another novel which just sucked, so I was trying to pay attention to what was happening when I got distracted writing the novel. I didn’t ever have the idea, “Oh, I’m setting out to write this metafictional novel.” It just emerged. Reading books like Thomas Bernhard and Nicholson Baker, books that only take place over a few hours, it made me realize, like, “Oh, I can actually do something like this.”

POLLOK: Yeah, on our show that we did today I talked about how reading this reminded me so much of Concrete.

CASTRO: Yeah, what’s crazy is that when I started this I had only read Woodcutters, and I had no idea that Bernhard has tons of books about trying to write. And when I read Concrete, I was, like, “Whoa, damn.” And then when I read Nicholson Baker – who I also modeled it after – I’d only read The Mezzanine, and someone suggested I read U and I and it was also about trying to write something. Concrete is amazing.

POLLOK: I’m reading Michael Kohlhaas by Heinrich von Kleist right now and it’s amazing. It’s just a great book about sensitivity and how if you’re sensitive you get fucked over all the time and eroded and used up until you’re just junked.

CASTRO: That reminds me of Kierkegaard’s Works of Love, where Kierkegaard says one way you can tell if you’re loving well – he would say Christianly, basically, if you’re loving properly and self-sacrificially – the world will hate you. And treat you like shit. In some ways it’s sort of the story of the gospel.

POLLOK: There’s another great book about that – this is sideways related – Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy is exactly about that. It’s a great book about how it’s okay to be sensitive and a man.

CASTRO: That's true.

POLLOK: Okay, and I’m done now – I promise to stop – the third most amazing book about being sensitive and a man is Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson.

CASTRO: You love those.

POLLOK: I do, I do. I actually have something coming out in Heavy Traffic that’s about a woman and I’m just so, so proud of myself.

CASTRO: Is she a cruel bitch?

POLLOK: No, she’s more like a table. Object. I didn’t even get to the interiority yet, I would have to write even more.

CASTRO: You're kind of in the true masculine tradition.

POLLOK: Yup. Who are some of your favorite writers that really inspire you?

CASTRO: I feel like every time someone asks me this I immediately forget every writer I’ve ever read. Dostoyevsky for sure, Thomas Bernhard, obviously. I read a lot of philosophy: Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, to some extent – René Girard. And I’ve been reading a lot of theology.

POLLOK: What theology have you been reading?

CASTRO: I’ve been reading a lot of the Orthodox guys, like, David Bentley Hart, Fr. Seraphim Rose. Paul Tillich is someone that I just absolutely love. Michael Henry, too. Novels? I really like Knut Hamsun, he wrote these books called Hunger and Shallow Soil. I still can’t believe you like The Good Place. What else do you think is funny, besides Seinfeld?

POLLOK: I think 30 Rock is pretty funny.

CASTRO: Yeah, I thought 30 Rock was amazing.

POLLOK: An amazingly funny Netflix show that they cancelled that I really liked was Santa Clarita Diet.

CASTRO: Well, I’m just glad you brought up 30 Rock because I was starting to feel like a psychopath that I couldn’t remember a single funny TV show.

POLLOK: What's the worst show?

CASTRO: Quite possibly The Good Place – it's too fresh in my mind.

POLLOK: Oh, I like it, but I don't even understand why I don't like it. Like, I couldn't even tell you why I like it.

CASTRO: I think I’ve been reading too much theology, I think it’s a problem – I don’t know if you can tell from my novel, but I’m an analytical thinker. I’ll have to watch more and get back to you.

POLLOK: What do you think is the best TV show?

CASTRO: Probably The Wire.

POLLOK: It's always The Wire with you people.