“It seemed right that I try to transform myself by writing it.” Katherine Hill in Conversation with Ross Simonini

I first met Ross Simonini, the writer, artist, and musician, in January 2006, at the Bennington Writing Seminars, a low-residency MFA program in Vermont. He was about my age, under 25, in a program with a median closer to 40. He always looked alert, an obvious thinker, and he had such a fluid, confident walk that it took me several days to realize that he wasn’t very tall. He also wore an adorable knitted hat and the same Sherpa-lined corduroy coat that I had recently cast off, and which he himself had bought second-hand. (The coat trick might have occurred later in our friendship, and there’s almost no way it was the exact same garment I had worn, but it’s the best fact I can offer to illustrate my instinctive connection to Ross.) Most importantly, he was extraordinarily easy to talk to. 

We’ve been friends now for more than a decade, and we never seem to run out of things to say to one another—about books, art, places, other people, and various strategies for staying alive. Conversation is one of his many talents, one he’s cultivated professionally as interviews editor of The Believer, co-creator of The Organist podcast, and a freelance journalist and teacher. It is also one of the great artistic and intellectual projects of his life, crystallized in The Book of Formation (Melville House Books 2017), his genre-bending, genuinely haunting first novel, which takes the form of a series of interviews between the principal characters.   

On November 14, 2017, I spoke to Ross at Powerhouse Books in Brooklyn, to celebrate the release of The Book of Formation. What follows is a recreated and edited transcript of that conversation.

—Katherine Hill

KATHERINE HILL: As a journalist, you’re used to being the interviewer—the person asking the questions, unlike now. Can you tell us how that practice influenced the shape of this novel?

ROSS SIMONINI: As far as I can remember, I’ve always thought in dialogue. I continuously ask myself questions and, occasionally, I attempt to answer them. So the back-and-forth rhythm is natural for me. Same goes for conversation: I’m usually interrogator, shaping and steering the flow of the talk with little challenges to other person. That’s what keeps me engaged. If I talk too much, I start to feel a little unsettled. I suppose, in general, I’d like to be a better listener than a talker. I love that (spurious?) Hendrix quote: “Knowledge speaks. Wisdom listens.”

So for me, interviewing is just my basic way of being in the world. I started asking people questions for a job when I got out of school. It supplemented whatever other money I was making at the...