A Brief Interview with Claire Carusillo

Ryan Sartor: You do these sort of gifs with text on them to promote your very good newsletter. How did you get that idea? Maybe I'm old, but I've never seen gifs and text quite like that.

Claire Carusillo: I kind of hate GIF culture—you know, like someone on Slack or Twitter says something to you and you can't think of anything sharp to say back so you instead send a 7-year-old Ron Swanson GIF. He does all the heavy lifting for you. I don't like that, and yet, I've carved out a little internet niche using GIFs. I prefer to think of them as little tiny instructional YouTube tutorials, which is where I got the idea. Also, part of the joke (?) of them is that they are poorly written and instead of just a quote or a word below the moving image, it's often a paragraph.

Ryan: I saw you read at the launch for Kill Yr Darlings; Draft Yr Tweets and your poem was really short and amazing. Can people read more of your poems somewhere?

Claire: LOL, no I don't really write poetry. I write a lot of tiny vignettes though, and that was one of them. It was about that thing where you walk past the storefront of a restaurant you always order takeout from and you're like, "Oh, that's where this crab rangoon is coming from..." I'm starting a fiction MFA program in September, so hopefully much, much more to come.

Ryan: What can people expect from your reading?

Claire: I like to write little scenes where people have a lot of self-worth, and yet are incapacitated by the task in front of them, whether that's parallel parking or like, stealing the bride's fella. I like to write romantically about the Midwest landscape of strip malls and salt silos. I try to write women characters who I would maybe not necessarily like or respect, but would become obsessed with, trying to find out more about them online.

Claire Carusillo will be reading at the Difficult to Name Fall Spectacular at Study Hall Gowanus on Sat. Sept. 10.