Writer Spotlight: Brandon Taylor

“I write about love and intimacy because love and intimacy are things that do not come easily to me.”

This is the first installment of Catapult’s latest feature: Writer Spotlight. 

The Catapult team created the Community side of our website to allow writers to showcase their own work, and to break down barriers between writers and editors. As web editorial assistant, I peruse our open platform every day, reading, recommending, and sharing notable works. Writer Spotlight allows us to get to know our Community even more closely.

I found Brandon Taylor quite early on on Community and was immediately pulled into the language and intimacy of his stories. Taylor has since become the Assistant Editor of Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading and was recently accepted into the Tin House Novel Writing Workshop. Besides his artistic pursuits, Brandon is a PhD candidate in Biochemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I was thankful that he could take some time to answer a couple of questions. 

—Morgan Jerkins

1. You’re getting a PhD in biochemistry. How do you have time for writing and how do you balance two wildly different passions?

I write on Sundays and on lunch breaks. I used to have this fantasy about getting up early or staying up late to write, but that always leaves me feeling exhausted the next day, which is typically not a good idea when you’re working in a research lab. So I’ve stuck to writing in these small pockets of time throughout the day and on Sunday, which is a day I don’t tend to go into work. It’s an arrangement that works for me because I tend to write very quickly, so I get a lot of work squeezed into these small moments.

As for balancing them, it’s really no trouble at all. I love writing, and I love research. To get to do both is really a great privilege. I do get frustrated about being on the outside of the writing world. At times, I feel like I don’t really have a writing community to help me grow. But social media and platforms like Catapult have really helped me find a sense of community and belonging.

2. Your writing depicts love and intimacy as a kind of jagged edge. The familial relationships are often very tense too. Can you say why these themes persistently recur in your work?

I write about love and intimacy so much because love and intimacy are things that do not come easily to me. I was raised in a family and in an environment that had essentially no vocabulary for feelings or love or intimacy. I don’t even think I saw my parents hold hands or embrace, let alone kiss. So I’m interested in trying to understand how love and intimacy function and how people come together or fall apart.

Another recurrent theme in my work is queer desire and queer love, especially among men of color. My closest friends are also queer black men, and we were always so hungry in college for stories about us. And as the writer of the group, it fell to me to create them. I write these stories for my friends, I think, and for boys who grew up in shitty places like I did.

3. Why did you choose Catapult to publish your work?

I guess it’s no secret that I love Catapult. Before Catapult, there weren’t that many options for those of us who didn’t really know how or had no desire to navigate traditional publishing. You could either throw a story up on your Tumblr or put it on site like FictionPress, but it always felt so insular.

Catapult has really elevated the game. Not only is the site gorgeous and polished, it brings this enormous potential audience to the stories on both sides of the site. It’s this space where I feel free to be inventive and to try out kinds of stories and voices. I also get to read so many different kinds of stories. There is a beautiful conversation flowing between the Community and the curated sides of Catapult. It’s been a pleasure to be a part of that conversation.

4. You recently became Assistant Editor of Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading. What are some of the things you hope to accomplish while there?

This sounds like a cliché, but I just want to find great stories. Recommended Reading has such a fantastic record of putting forth a diverse slate of narratives and forms, and I’d like to continue that streak. The team is amazing. They read bravely and sharply, and I’m just so impressed by them.

5. Are you working on anything else? And if so, can you give us a hint of what it is?

I am working on mostly two projects right now, one fiction and one nonfiction.

I do have a not-so-secret project. I’ve challenged myself to write a series of linked stories on Catapult. Two of them are up already (Diagnosis and Terminal), and I have another in-progress.

Be sure to follow Brandon Taylor on Twitter @brandonrambles.