ISSUE #10 | An Interview with Ashley Naftule
ASHLEY NAFTULE (they/them) is a writer & performer based in Phoenix, AZ. A playwright and Associate Artistic Director at Space55 theatre, they’ve written and produced four plays: Ear, The First Annual Bookburners Convention, The Canterbury Tarot, and Radio Free Europa. A fifth play, The Hidden Sea, will premiere via YouTube in April 2021.
PS: What was your first favorite book?
AN: I'd love to say that it was The Illuminatus! Trilogy by the Roberts Anton Wilson & Shea, a book that tore off the top of my 14-year skull and poured liquid mescaline straight into the grooves of my gray matter, but my first REAL honest-to-God favorite book was Timothy Zahn's Thrawn trilogy. I read those books front-to-back over & over until the paperbacks disintegrated. Now here I am, age 38, and you'd have to pay me to go watch a new Star Wars show/movie. Sometimes I miss being that kid—crushing on Mara Jade, thinking that raining cloaked meteorites on a planet was the height of interstellar badassery—but there's no shortage of adult stuff to obsess over & dream about.
PS: You’ve been cryogenically frozen. Do you hope the timer is set for ten years, 100 years, 1000 years, or 10,000 years? Why?
AN: The Futurama fan in me wants to say a 1,000, but a 100 would be my go-to number. Far enough in the future that perhaps capitalism either has already collapsed or is on the verge, space travel to other worlds would be possible, immortality and other biological upgrades might be viable options, and humanity would still (hopefully) be vaguely recognizable. I'd hate to wake up 10,000 years into the future and find out that I'm the only human on a planet full of sentient 6-foot-tall roaches.
PS: Do you have any tips for revising a story?
AN: The best piece of editing advice I got recently was from one of my editors at The AV Club, who was editing a music piece I was working on and highlighted a passage as being "lyrical and fake." That's a note that's stuck with me since then, so when I'm revising a piece I find myself questioning what's NEEDED versus what looks and sounds cool. Which--I'm not saying I don't engage in indulgence, doing any kind of art is inherently indulgent. But if you're going to strive for lyricism or poetry in your prose, it's probably best to do it sparingly so it really pops. There's nothing wrong with a little bit of flexing so long as it's being used to strengthen and enhance the work. As soon as it becomes a distraction, then that shit needs to go.
I guess that's just another way of saying "kill your darlings," but it really helps me to think of it in those specific terms.
PS: Tell us about a work of art or media that has directly influenced you.
AN: Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol comics were a Rosetta Stone for me. Those comics gatewayed me into Dada, Borges, gender fluidity, the films of Maya Deren and Jan Svankmajer, and so much more. I love how deftly Morrison balances comedy and horror in those comics, the way he creates these absurdist narratives full of both childish whimsy & invention that are also sharp-edged and deeply disturbing. For my money, it's the greatest run of comics I've ever read--nothing else has come close.
PS: You get the chance to adapt any intellectual property you want, but you can't keep it in the same genre. What do you adapt, and how?
AN: I would love love love to write a Godzilla film as a workplace comedy from the point of a view of an insurance company trying to investigate claims of kaiju damage.
