Interview with Author Otto N. Tynham

Ottos N. Tynham's form-questioning story "Truffle Season" is a piece that pulls a lot of concepts into one place, rifling through the inner dialogue of existential longing and contemporary circumstance. We knew the author would have plenty more insight to share in our interview (below). Enjoy!

What makes you keep writing, even when it's hard?

There is a dark-haired, carmine-scented woman who is constantly standing over my shoulder with an earwax balloon pointed at the back of my neck, and it’s filled with histamines. Whenever I stop writing for any period of time I get incredibly itchy and turn the color of a lusty Elizabethan.

Advice on creating that you’ve learned by trial and error:

Ideas will always come, even if they take a long time. Art is necessary; not like food or water, but like gravity. It just is, and it just happens.

What's your favorite underappreciated novel or short story (a work you never hear anyone else talking about)?

Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet. 

One sentence soapbox:

We are always dreaming a dream we don't wake up from, and most of what we consider real is just noise or interference. 

What is your writing strategy? Do you write every day with a rigid schedule, or are you more flexible with your practice?

It’s more like urinating.

When did you realize you were weird?

I’m not weird, everyone else is.

Do you think about your reader?

To paraphrase eighteenth century Irish bishop George Berkeley, you can’t think about anything you haven’t seen before.

What was the best money you spent on something writing-related?

A pristine 1960s Olympia SM9 De Luxe typewriter that I bought for $75 through a friend with a “typewriter guy.”

What is your favorite museum or gallery?

 Future Lab[s] in North Adams, MA

What is weird?

The refrigerator that swallows in the dark, a crow falling from a sky full of crows, taking in the city from above, the crowd of mannequins at any given bar, transparent desperation of counterfeit-luxury, skin in a hot bath …

What was the inspiration for your story?

“Truffles contain twice as much androstenol, a male pig pheromone, as would normally appear in a male pig … Here this beautiful, healthy, sow smells the sexiest boar she’s ever encountered in her life, only for some reason he seems to be underground. This drives her wild and she digs frantically, only to turn up a strange, lumpy, splotchy mushroom.”

– Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses

What do you hope readers experience from your work?

Altered states of consciousness?

How do you combat loneliness?

..………………………………………………

Thoughts about artichokes?

Not a berry.

What’s the point of all this, really?

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Otto N. Tynham is a writer and armchair anarcho-pessimist. He splits his time between the Midwest and the East Coast Tri-State area. When he's not writing, he is likely fixating on the disappearance of Pyongyang's Giant String Cheese Factory. This short story is his first official published work.