Post from the Loft: On the Art of Listening
From wild sons to vampires and virtuous stepmothers, to the caretaker with dreams as vast as galaxies, and what four years of Heavy Crown Press conversations taught me about the art of listening.
I. The Beginning
My first interview published under the Heavy Crown Press label—and the first to go out over the podcast waves—was in April 2022. The subject was John Mese, fresh off the Wild Son ride. I had seen him perform the prior summer in a one-man show called Wild Son: The Testimony of Christian Brando, written by
, an author of noir detective fiction and sometime writer for People magazine. The show toured venues up and down California, in Louisiana, and finally at Festival Fringe 2021.I saw it performed on Father’s Day (a good date for a play about a son lamenting the misfired signals between himself and Marlon Brando) at Bistro Byronz in Baton Rouge. That first interview with
was easy; he’s one of the chattiest, friendliest, most easygoing people I’ve had the pleasure of knowing. My neurodivergence is scarcely an issue when talking to someone like Mese. You ask him a question and he’s off to the races—telling stories, feeding analogies, giving vivid descriptions of what it’s like to step on stage and become Christian Brando. With a guest like that, you don’t have to do much heavy lifting.(Footnote for the record: Mese has since written and performed his own one-man show, Wild Son & Then Some, about his late father. After portraying Christian Brando talking about Marlon, he’s now both pen and performer in his own reckoning. The show debuted at the Unurban Coffee House in Santa Monica on October 18, and he also contributed a short story to the debut issue of
.)That first interview felt like running through the starting gate at full speed.
II. Learning the Hard Parts
I don’t remember exactly what my motives were when I started doing these interviews. Maybe part of it was simply to see if I could do it. I’m not an outgoing person, so it was a real battle of wills—a test of stamina—to push through the outreach emails: Hey, would you like to talk about XYZ on my show?
Composing questions, asking them—that’s the easy part. The hard part, the part I still haven’t mastered, is listening—truly listening—and giving that my entire focus without letting the critic inside my head take over.
The technology, too, keeps me humble. For the John Mese interview, everything rolled without a hitch. For Derek Sitter, there was a portion Zoom somehow decided to record off-meeting—don’t ask; I still don’t know how it happened. Luckily, Derek had a vault of film footage (Bugtussle, Tutu Grande) that he generously let me borrow. The interview itself became an exercise in discipline, attention, and focus; post-production was a hellscape of endurance, impatience, and editing. Some moments were simply lessons in lighting. Those were cases where an AI copilot could have set me straight.
And then there’s Amanda, whose story reminds me that creative life isn’t limited to books or stages. Hers is the art of caretaking—of a tortoise, of a marriage built on imagination, of costumes stitched for Comic Con and small daily kindnesses. She finds her signals in the final frontier, where wisdom travels in starships and in gentle hands offering watermelon. Listening to her, I understood that the work of listening isn’t only for writers; it belongs to anyone who tends something with love. I saw that the tortoise in her backyard is embodiment of the patience, endurance, loyalty and love that is required to be fully present for any interview.
III. The 2025 Conversations
The first of the 2025 conversations was with
, a writer whose steadiness you can almost feel through the screen. She works at the Library of Congress—a setting perfectly matched to her patience and precision, the quiet authority of someone who lives among stories.Georgina grew up with her father and stepmother, a woman she credits with helping her overcome learning obstacles—and who must have been at least partly the inspiration behind the book Tales of Virtuous Stepmothers. The tales are her own inventions, original fairy stories that push at the boundaries of the genre to honor different kinds of motherhood, especially the “stepmother” who’s been so often maligned in traditional lore.
Talking with Georgina reminded me that quiet realism and imagination aren’t opposites. She writes from empathy rather than spectacle, and listening to her describe how compassion becomes myth made me realize how powerful gentleness can be when wielded with intent.
A few months later came a very different kind of dialogue: J.M. Celi, returning to talk about The Unlife of Lisa Cooper: Vengeance, the second half of his vampire duo-logy. Where Georgina’s stories illuminate virtue, Celi’s sink their teeth into consequence. Yet both writers are chasing redemption in their own languages—hers through mercy, his through fury.
Celi spoke about endurance, about characters who wrestle with conscience long after mortality has left them. The conversation was a reminder that genre isn’t a cage but a mirror; whether you’re writing fairy tales or vampires, you’re still writing about what it means to be human.
IV. The Art of Listening
Looking back across these four years of conversations—from John Mese’s kinetic energy to Georgina Warren’s calm precision and
’s haunted lyricism—I’m beginning to see a pattern. Every interview, no matter the subject or setting, is ultimately a study in how to listen.Listening is harder than it sounds. It isn’t waiting for your turn to talk, and it isn’t nodding at the right intervals. It’s surrender—the choice to stop rehearsing what you’ll say next and to step fully into someone else’s tempo. You have to tune your own signal low enough to catch theirs.
When I started these interviews, I thought I was chasing stories. Now I think I was chasing connection—the invisible thread between people who create and people who try to understand why. The guests change, the microphones change, but the question underneath stays the same: what does it mean to stay human?
Whether it’s Lisa Cooper fighting to keep her individuality through unlife, or a woman exploring maternal virtue without being defined by it, or a father and daughter in a novel trying to decode silence—or a “wild son” breaking the silence and exploring the heartache of his father—each story begins where listening begins. It’s the one act that always survives translation.
—AR | Notes from the Loft, 28 October 2025