A soul-baring dialogue of subtle transcendence

Dave Eggers is the author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, a memoir about raising his young brother after their parents died of cancer, which has been acclaimed by most, and the editor of Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, a literary journal of some (but only some) repute. He is only slightly attractive, and has hat hair when his hat is not on, as it was not at a Tues., Apr. 18 Jonathan Edwards Master's Tea. The Herald sat down to speak with Eggers about topics of little concern to the average reader. But you, dear reader, are you average? No, certainly not!

Yale Herald: Last night, when I was looking shit up, I found out a girl who I had a sizable crush on was actually you.

JOHN YI/YH The heartbreaking Dave Eggers.

Dave Eggers: Oh no, Lucy?

YH: Yes.

DE: Oh no, I'm sorry. What's your name?

YH: My name's Matt Fogel. I actually wrote to her asking her to write for this magazine my friends and I started, called lineup.

DE: I think I remember that. I do pseudonomynous stuff for a lot of magazines. There are some other names too that I haven't given up yet.

YH: I want to ask you some questions about McSweeney's. I'm trying to understand your whole mindset—I know you were at Esquire—and then you kind of left.

DE: Not kind of.

YH: You hated it.

DE: I went straight from Might to Esquire, maybe a month in between. Very different environments. I was a little naïve: I thought every magazine was like Might. Because at Might we stayed there 18 hours a day, slept on floors, and cared passionately about what we were doing. We yelled at each other, and I thought all magazines were that way. But that wasn't the case. Esquire was a very sober and a very stale environment. Very nice people there, but there wasn't a whole lot of energy.

YH: Had you been thinking about McSweeney's?

DE: No. I just sort of missed it, publishing my own stuff, stuff I wanted to see in print. It was certainly a reaction. And I always wanted to expand with the quarterly form. I had all these friends who were having all this stuff killed by glossy magazines, and we would just commiserate constantly about how stupid everybody was. It was a reaction. We wanted to scale back and simply bring things back to their purest form. That was the initial influence. It changed pretty quickly after that. After the first issue, it wasn't really a reaction anymore. I could give a shit about Esquire. And then there came in all these people who were just attracted to it, and it took off from there. Each issue is guided by what we just happen to get in the mail.

YH: I wanted to talk to you about Mc-Sweeney's Books a little.

DE: The good thing with McSweeney's Books is that we can do much quirkier stuff, like more scientific writing.

YH: But is it intentionally quirky? Like the radiator book...

DE: Yeah, I'm really psyched about that. The kid doesn't even know yet. It's stuff that I'm interested in. I don't consult anybody else. It got a little bit annoying how collaborative Might was, and now, if I want to do something, I'll just do it. I really wanted to know if there are any effects on children's sleep from radiator noise. It struck me. And I wanted to do a book about electrical engineering on boats. The website is going to veer toward stuff like that. Also, my attention span is a little bit shortened. I just want to do what we want to do. Like this kid from Harvard who sent me this interview. He wanted to know why we were publishing so many big authors, all this about us selling out.

YH: But you ran Wallace and Moody in your first issue.

DE: Right. I don't give a fuck, these are great writers, and I'm going to publish them. If Danielle Steele wrote something that was really great, I'm going to publish it because it's good. And I will do it in part to spite the assholes who think that she's not a cool person.

YH: Tell me about Gerry McSweeney just for a minute. Were you considering the merger?

DE: We did. We tried.

YH: You knew people were going to flip out when all that was on the page was Ben Greenman and Trevor McSweeney's ski parables.

DE: I didn't know they were going to flip out. I thought that they might find it kind of interesting. We were going to slip in more content. We didn't expect people to be so mad. It was an eye-opener. Usually on the letters page, you see the same names again and again. Once we did the merger we heard from a whole new group: the casual reader. That was really enlightening.

YH: Was Gerry McSweeney at all parodying himself? I detected a slight shift in the voice of his letters to the readers.

DE: Early on, it was more collaborative, and later it was more just him. He's a real enthusiastic guy. He'll be back, we'll have a link with them. We overstated the financial burden of the website, but I wanted to do it anyway, just to do it. Because it was fun. We have an offer on the table for another merger, so watch for that. That's the beauty of the web: it's so open and malleable, and we just don't have anyone to answer to.

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