Steven Dunn
“You ain’t shit and ya daddy a hoe” is what one of my Etch A Sketches says in the most elegant cursive you’ve seen since you forged your mama’s signature on that field trip permission slip. But you’re not supposed to write shit like that on a kids’ toy, let alone in beautiful handwriting. That’s the game for me, though, to make an Etch A Sketch do what it ain’t supposed to do. A mischievous game that stretches the form. It’s also why I draw a lot of organic shapes and objects with that one contour line cutting through aluminum dust: bonsai trees, bowls of rice, cabbage heads, broccoli, Japanese gardens, seaweed omelets. A bunch of curves inside a rectangular thing that seems like it can only draw rectangles.
I write in similar ways—looking for the curves of things, how ideas and images can follow a singular line while branching and twisting. My novels do what novels aren’t supposed to do, and people often ask me why I call them novels. Still a mischievous game. Because the novels I’ve loved stretched my imaginations, because they took on shapes that I didn’t know was possible in that rectangular thing. Etch A Sketching was my first love as a kid. Writing was a later love in my late twenties. I write and etch the same. There’s confines everywhere that we can’t always change, so what can I do within these confines that can fuck it up a bit, stretch it out a bit?
Steven Dunn (a.k.a Pothole, cuz he’s deep in these streets) is a Whiting Award winner who was shortlisted for Granta Magazine’s Best of Young American Novelists. He’s the author of three novels: Potted Meat (Tarpaulin Sky, 2016), water & power (Tarpaulin Sky, 2018), and Tannery Bay (FC2/University of Alabama Press, 2024), which is co-authored with his homie Katie Jean Shinkle.