Hot Seat with Lisa Borst and Milo Walls

Milo and Lisa and many vessels at Ginger’s, by Isabelle Appleton

By Isabelle Appleton

The first time we played hot seat we were on vacation. The house—my grandparents’—is called “By the Way,” christened so even before a major highway came to bisect its front lawn. My grandparents had been dead for many years. Our vacation concluded an odd, roaming summer, otherwise characterized by being markedly in town. In New Hampshire, we (Milo, Lisa, Hannah, and I) recovered lost time, joyfully accomplishing the cluster of tasks comprising the “group vacation”: night swim, sleeping arrangement carousel, matching plastic friendship bracelets fought for and won at the arcade. There was a trip to a regional smoker’s haven some thirty miles away to replenish the dead vape. Walks taken, meals made, nights spent as students of municipal melodrama, as recounted by my Uncle Bill, By the Way’s resident.

Mostly, we talked. At Lake Winnipesaukee and Loon Pond, and late into many August nights. In the mornings, we would read for around ten minutes, eating each other’s eggs, before someone (in all likelihood, me) would finally confess, what I really want to do is keep talking. Admission is contagious; we kept talking. The game we played, hot seat, is a talking game, in which one person fends off a barrage of inquiries from other participants for a quick, predetermined period. I learned a lot about all three, not otherwise revealed in the lilt of the day’s chatter. Perhaps because of the candor hot seat’s invented sense of urgency demands. Or maybe because, more so than what can be answered, we learn a lot about our friends through the shape of their inquiry: what they wonder about each other, and of the world.

Lisa Borst is the web editor of n+1, a print and digital magazine of literature, culture, and politics. She’s written essays and criticism for n+1 about contemporary fiction and film, zine culture, and the television show Emily in Paris. Her writing also appears in Bookforum, The Nation, BOMB, and elsewhere. 

Milo Walls is an associate editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, where he publishes fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. His authors include: Maggie Millner, Michael Magee, Brittany Newell, Emily Hunt Kivel, Jamie Keiles, Patricia Nilsson, Catherine Humble, and Tash Aw. 

Milo and Lisa are dear friends of mine, and each other. When I asked them to play hot seat again—this time, in a more professional capacity, for Washington Square Review—we mused about different ways we could reinvent the interview as form. We didn’t. Instead, in the least innovative sense of the “interview,” I am simply sharing with you the pleasure I have in knowing both of them. Our conversation took place at Ginger’s, a lesbian dive bar that we will always love, despite its couple-centric seating. It was November 29th, and below you will find—alongside all of us dethawing from our post-Thanksgiving lassitude—a limerick, a few reflections, and some very astute editorial advice for young writers.

ISABELLE APPLETON: How are you today?

LISA BORST: I’m alright. I woke up in Fredericksburg, Virginia, where I grew up. I looked at my Spotify wrapped, that was an interesting cultural thing that happened. 

APPLETON: Who was number one?

BORST: It was not John Prine, but it was somebody like that. Oh, it was Yo La Tengo. I’m alright, though. I would say that, as is often the case when I’ve spent a lot of time with my parents, I feel a little, like, existentially sleepy.

APPLETON: I’ll write that down.

MILO WALLS: Why? It’s on the record.

[I am recording the conversation on the Voice Memo app of my iPhone.]

BORST: I think you should only write down non-verbal impressions. Like, “Lisa smiled rakishly.”

APPLETON: When was the first time you realized you were going to become an editor? Did you have some inclination as a child? 

WALLS: I have this indelible memory of the first time I was edited. In seventh grade, we had this extremely sexy Polish temp teacher, who instructed us to write a short personal essay set within the past month. I wrote about my birthday party, where we played laser tag. It was probably quite boring and dutiful. But the last part was about returning home—a description of walking my dog alone, listening from the sidewalk to my neighbor playing the piano, snow falling, etc. When I got the essay back, he had crossed everything out before the final passage. Which, looking back, was kind of sadistic. But I found it extremely moving, that this could be a gift someone could bestow. I really want to find him, Mr. Czarcinski.

APPLETON: Maybe he’ll read this. How can you tell when you connect with something, a submission or otherwise?

WALLS: It is when I feel that something is alive. 

BORST: I have a few genre-specific things I look for. Connecting with a politics piece is really different than wanting to take on fiction. And, in fact, things I loathe in fiction—dead sentences, pompousness—might buoy or at least be acceptable in a politics essay or book review. But I think hanging on until you end up surprised—wanting to hang on until something surprises you.

APPLETON: Are there things that would make you stop reading a submission immediately?

BORST: Any transition so jagged that you have a sense that the writer doesn’t know what they’re doing. I feel, as an editor and as a reader, really attuned to transitions. They’re the cracks where problems make themselves clear. Usually, when I put something down, it’s at an especially raw or unattended to triple-asterisks moment.

WALLS: No. But you don’t have to use one of our answers for each question.

APPLETON: For my interview? Oh, well I’ll be using this. 

WALLS: What do you mean?

APPLETON: Milo editing me. What do you think are pitfalls young writers often fall into?

BORST: There’s a lot. I worry in situations like this, I have an easier time talking about things I dislike than things I like. But actually I think that is something young writers and young editors often come up against: having strong negative opinions and not especially strong positive ones. Frank Guan told me that you should write five or six positive or neutral book reviews before you try a hatchet job. I thought that was pretty good advice. Similarly, I think a lot of young people come into editorial roles with a strong bullshit detector, but less of a sense of what they actually like or want to publish.

APPLETON: What are things you always cut from pieces? Are there certain syntactical devices that people use in writing you almost always cut?

WALLS: Things that are familiarly wooden and stodgy and formal. Like, often you could say “cry” rather than “weep.” But, less to do with specific words, far more often I have a desire for more to be kept implicit. Certain details and descriptions that might need to be made explicit in the writing process can be trimmed away.

BORST: Often young writers overwrite or over explain and don’t have a sense of what’s interesting or can carry a scene. Just like, details that are taken from life, but simply don’t have a place in fictionality.

APPLETON: What in prose bores you?

WALLS: I’m very interested in space as a person, but I feel a lot of writing I encounter in submissions spends far too much time with basic choreography, or how things are arranged. The sink was by the window; the window was by the door, etc. It’s like Chekhov’s gun: if nothing is happening with the window, do I really need to know where it stands? Also meals. The soup was on the stove; the stove was hot. 

BORST: Also busywork. When there’s a scene with a lot of dialogue, often writers will put in-between conversational lines like, then she walked over and washed her hands in the sink that was by the window. But you can mostly lose those things, unless you’re, like, a playwright. 

WALLS: I think for me it has to do with trusting that a reader will follow, that there’s also an emotionally explanatory element to these sorts of gestures. I want more to be embedded or left unnamed. 

BORST: Flaubert will describe a room down to every book on the shelf and speck of dust and it’s the most gripping thing you’ve ever read. So it’s not always bad. But sometimes, I get the sense that writers want you to understand that they have a grasp of beauty. You’ll read a novel with a long description of a vase of flowers on the table and it’s like, I trust that we all enjoy a flower. This is bourgeois. It’s signaling something that doesn’t need to be signaled, because everybody likes it.

WALLS: In terms of space or physical description, I feel like there’s an important distinction between what is approximated and what is carried out and deeply felt. But like Lisa, I feel I’m always encountering exceptions.

APPLETON: Do you prefer editing fiction or nonfiction?

WALLS: Editing nonfiction is far easier for me. But my list is pretty evenly split between both. It took me a lot of time to feel the degree of authority or confidence in editing fiction that I feel in editing nonfiction.  

BORST: If I have any sort of aptitude, it’s for editing nonfiction. But sometimes my colleague Mark Krotov and I will edit a short story together, and that’s the most fun I ever have. It’s a blast; it’s a romp. 

APPLETON: What is the best length a book could be?

BORST: 290 pages.

WALLS: For me, it’s more about feeling. Paul Murray’s new book feels too short, even though it’s over six hundred pages. A lot of these slim, slender novels feel hugely expansive. Tom Drury, Charles Portis, Dorothy Baker. At the same time, I met Hannah’s friend at a party the other day and I asked what he was reading. He shook his sleeve and a novel fell out. So then that really made me think, we shouldn’t be reading anything that couldn’t be literally shaken out of a sleeve.

BORST: Certainly the best printed format for a book is mass market paperback.

WALLS: It’s kind of amazing, as an invention.

APPLETON: What is an adjective people use to describe prose that you’re so over? 

WALLS: Vivid, propulsive. Just like, jacket copy dreck, shorthand. 

BORST: Yeah, unputdownable. But also, I feel like in the past few years I’ve seen a lot of blurbs that default to similes or metaphors that invoke cocktails. Fizzy, foamy—

WALLS: Egg white.

BORST: I don’t like any of that.

APPLETON: Milo, what do you think makes you a good editor?

WALLS: I can’t answer that. I could tell you what I think makes a good editor, generally. Tact, generosity, selflessness, precision, and some narrative capacity, the ability to tell the story of a book with a particular audience in mind.

BORST: I also will only answer in general terms.

APPLETON: You guys are so modest.

BORST: My big, central thing about editing is that you’re almost always doing someone a psychological favor. You’re performing something that’s not too distant from therapy. What you’re really trying to do—especially with more personal writing—is make somebody not sound neurotic or self-centered or too young or unlikeable in some unforgivable way. So, not only having an eye for where those things come up, but also convincing someone when to let them go. I really think that’s the spine of the work. 

APPLETON: What is something you think everyone makes look harder than it is?

BORST: Generally? The suite of tasks commonly known as “adulting.” 

WALLS: Being alone. Reading and enjoying poetry.  

APPLETON: And what are things that you think people make look easier than they actually are?

WALLS: Dancing casually. And therefore, by extension, embodiment more generally, I find very difficult. Budgeting. And what might be called “compartmentalization.” Those are my answers.

BORST: Casual dating, karaoke, and knowing about restaurants. Being a guy about town. Getting a table.

WALLS: For three, at Ginger’s.

BORST: Dressing well and interestingly. 

APPLETON: Lisa, do you feel like you’re waiting for something?

BORST: Huh. Yeah, I would say I’m waiting for something. I think many Americans feel that way. 

APPLETON: Do you feel like you know what it is?

WALLS: Student debt relief.

BORST: I’ve given up on waiting for that. No, I think it’s a suite of things from the personal to the world historical. 

WALLS: I think if you had asked me in my early professional career, I had a feeling of waiting for my life to begin. Now, I feel that it’s begun. I got what I wanted, or something, and I don’t always know what to do with it. There’s this ambiguous hole. It might be arrival or God or history? I’m not sure in what arrangement.

APPLETON: What do you really think of MFA programs? 

WALLS: Lisa can answer that better. I see that they are variably necessary and completely extraneous. They make a great deal of sense for certain writers, but it’s hard for me to extricate what they produce from the many other stages a book has to go through before I encounter it anyway. I don’t have strong opinions.

BORST: It can be three years of free space to write a book. That’s, like, the most beautiful thing America can offer you. It’s closer to socialism than anything else we have. At the same time, it’s an environment of forced competition. I’ve been going to AWP for the past few years, where I always get really freaked out by people elbowing each other out of the way to shove their manuscript at every booth. This year I read Mark McGurl’s book about how MFAs have shaped postwar fiction. This huge institution that produced the literature of research systems, class mobility, and campus novels. But, basically all those things I’ve enjoyed in fiction. So I think MFAs have produced work I like, and that feels very American. Enjoyable and interesting. What if we all had one more drink?

[We get another drink.]

APPLETON: Now that we have another drink, I’m going to ask the questions I want to. Like, do you think it’s interesting, being gay? 

WALLS: I don’t think it’s notable, but I think it’s interesting, because I find everything interesting. And it has everything to do with the relationship to the thing, and not the thing itself. Does this make sense? It’s like the doubloon in Moby Dick. It’s compelling not because it’s a coin nailed to a mast, but because the characters each have a different interpretation of and approach to it. They reveal themselves through their ways of looking. 

APPLETON: That’s pull quotable. 

WALLS: Take it!

BORST: I’m not especially interested in my own queerness, really at all. I’m a little suspicious of anyone who is.

APPLETON: What irritating quality do you find yourself more able to tolerate than others? 

WALLS: Ambivalence, repetition, and idiosyncrasy. 

APPLETON: You are good at tolerating those things, as a friend of yours who you tolerate.

BORST: I don’t think I’m a very tolerant person, as far as bad personalities go. Maybe pompousness, when it’s earned. 

APPLETON: Is there a line that stays with you guys from anything?

BORST: From literary history? A lot. Though I think I tend to read and remember at a paragraph or clause level, more than a sentence level. I don’t have Milo’s ear for memorizing poetry.

WALLS: Do you remember our limerick? 

BORST: Oh, no. About Lime Rock [Connecticut]?

WALLS: There once was a boy from Lime Rock/He always wore only one sock/But when it came to his shoes, he had to wear two. And we couldn’t ever quite figure out the last line.

APPLETON: I’ll think about it. What advice would you give to a twenty-six-year-old brunette writer, first year at NYU?

WALLS: What advice would we give to Isabelle?

APPLETON: No, to a twenty-six-year-old brunette writer in her first year at the NYU Fiction MFA.

WALLS: There’s only one person I know who fits that description.

APPLETON: There’s actually unfortunately a lot of girls. 

BORST: I was thinking about this interview I read a long time ago with a font designer who was like, I’m good at designing fonts because every night my friends were at the bar, I stayed home and worked on the middle stroke of my F. It’s so unglamorous! But I think one must be a tiny bit selfish. A tiny bit of discipline about when to hang out.

APPLETON: Relatedly, what should my novel be about?

WALLS: Isabelle, I think that it’s of utmost importance that you answer that question yourself.

APPLETON: Nooooo.

WALLS: I actually think that you already know the answer, and that’s a beautiful and rare quality.

APPLETON: Lisa, do you want to answer?

BORST: What I want to read a novel about—not necessarily by you, but maybe by you—is this big, operative tension in the lives of people I see around me: how to navigate the space between being a young person living a liberated life versus the more normative comforts and stability that some people achieve in, like, their thirties. Obviously this is a perennial question, and a question that's explored in a lot of my favorite, for example, women's fiction from the 70s—stuff by Alison Lurie or Laurie Colwin or whoever else. I think that every generation, especially the queer front guard of every generation, remakes its approach to normativity in some way, and I would like some advice about this tension. Ideally in the form of very contemporary fiction. 

APPLETON: Do you write, and is it hard to write as an editor?

BORST: Yes, sometimes. I mostly write criticism, and I think evaluating what works about a novel feels adjacent to editing. Sometimes, in fact, it feels repetitive. I wonder if that’s even an interesting way to do criticism, like if there should be some mystical separation between an editorial memo and a book review. If there is, I haven’t found it yet. Conceiving of writing more ambitiously feels harder. It seems difficult to try and write a novel while working at n+1, although some people have  managed to do both very successfully. Even though sometimes secretly—off the record—[redacted].

WALLS: I wish you would. I don’t write and I’m grateful.