A Lifetime Ago.
(Originally published on Medium on June 14th 2018, before their distribution settings went weird and the story became invisible) On June 6th 2018 my friend, and previously commissioning editor, mentioned an interview I’d done for her back in 2005 and wondered if I still had a transcript. I sent it to her and took the opportunity to read it again for the first time in probably a decade. It struck me how much of the subject’s opinions I’d since internalised as my own and how many of my opinions he’d help cement with his authority. I thought about how ill-prepared I was, how on the crest of success he was, yet how treated me as though I were Clark Kent on assignment for the Daily Planet instead of a lucky fan writing for Fiend, a tiny “dark culture magazine” in Australia. I thought about how generous he was and not just with his time — at the end of the interview I mention we shared a cigarette and we did, but it was a cigarette he gave me. My friend and I discussed putting the...