SHALLA CHATS with Tony DuShane

“Editing for Cherry Bleeds”

by Shalla DeGuzman

First of all, who’s Tony?

Tony DuShane writes entertainment articles for the San Francisco Chronicle and other media outlets. His short fiction and poetry has been featured in various anthologies and publications.

Since 2001 he has hosted the radio show Drinks with Tony which features interviews with writers, musicians, directors and actors. Among the guests are Edward Furlong, James Ellroy, Irvine Welsh, Chuck Palahniuk, Amy Sedaris, Kevin Smith, Miranda July and more. The show currently broadcasts every Saturday night on Pirate Cat Radio.

In 2000 he started the literary 'zine Cherry Bleeds that continues to be published monthly.

Shalla: Hello Tony, we’re very happy to meet you. I’ve always wondered about ezine editors, who they are, what else they did, I’m amazed at how accomplished you are. It’s interesting to note that you also do radio and film.

Tony: I don’t feel accomplished, that will hopefully be a description on my epitaph. I just have a drive and tenacity to keep producing and telling my stories. I tried film directing and it is really hard. I’m giving it another shot though. I’ve written a few short films that have good comedic timing and subject matter. I’m going to raise money to get a real crew to shoot it so I can focus on working with the actors.

Also, before I’m 50 years old I plan on directing a women in prison film….I still need to write the script, but raising the money show be easy b/c there’s enough horny dentists out there who would like to get an executive producer credit. Radio is more natural for me. I’ve worked on a bunch of other people’s films doing sound and camera and did some location shoots for the Sundance Channel.

The process I really like is writing, whether it’s a script or novel or short story or article….that’s where I thrive, that’s where I have a nervous breakdown when there’s a blank page and an editor needs it by tomorrow.

I know the first few drafts are going to be complete crap and it’s really hard to be ok with that. I still want to pretend that the first draft will work and I’ll be done in an hour, but it’s never that way. Putting the time in, then seeing it finally take form, that’s bliss.

Shalla: What exactly is Drinks with Tony? Is it talk radio? Do you do interviews or what? (I see you’ve had many interesting guests)

Tony: Drinks with Tony started as a podcast associated with Cherry Bleeds.

I use to direct a film festival called Filmjunkie, which was also a film ‘zine, filmjunkie.com. We reported on film festivals. It was in 1999, and very easy to get press access because the internet was still young enough, publicists didn’t know how to deal with us, so they just gave me what I wanted, interviews with actors and directors.

At the time I was taking a lot of acting classes and had taken film classes and worked on some animation and film projects and wrote a bunch of short screenplays….wait, I’m losing track…my interviews with filmjunkie were video interviews and I interviewed the German actress Bibiana Beglau. The interview went great, but the person who I brought along to work sound didn’t tell me my omni-directional microphone was picking up the dishwasher in the kitchen more than our conversation. I had a huge crush on her and she was a blast.

I think the second interview was Moritz Bleibtreu who was Manni in Run Lola Run. I was so star struck because I was such a huge fan of that film….and other films I had seen Moritz in. I brought a sound man and camera man, both using my equipment, and gave them quick lessons on keeping the boom mic out of frame and to stop the questions I was asking to re-frame for close ups, etc. That interview worked out slightly better, but doing video interviews was becoming cumbersome b/c I needed a crew. Personally, I was writing more than anything else and those two interviews went great, but I kept dealing with asshole publicists from Hollywood who weren’t taking Filmjunkie seriously. I went to AFM (American Film Market) and had no clue what it was, it’s pretty much the sleazy business side of filmmaking….I went two years in a row and the coolest people I met there was everyone who was working with Troma films. They hired models to walk around the convention looking like strippers and both years we went down there we made instant friends with them, got them drunk and just messed with the foreigners who were taking phone calls during screenings….Going to AFM showed me how unartistic most filmmaking is and some of the films were decent and only getting sold for foreign cable rights.

There was one film that has never been released that stars Stellan Skarsgard and Chris Penn….it was one of the most endearing, funniest films I saw in 2000 and it is shelved. Never to be released in the United States. It was released on DVD in France and Italy about a year ago, so I had to buy an Ebay copy to finally get my wife to see it. I called the distributor who owns the USA rights to see about renting the 35mm print, but it was $700 minimum charge per screening.

A friend dared me to get in touch with Chuck Palahniuk. I went through his publisher, gave them our web stats at Cherry Bleeds, which was about 5,000 readers a month at the time, and the publisher set up a lunch interview with him when he came through town. I got to hang out with him in Berkeley for two hours. When Chuck and I were walking through the Berkeley Library to find his escort after lunch, all I could think of was yelling, hey everyone, this is Chuck Palahniuk. My wife came on the lunch with me to hold the microphone, I didn’t video it and I was still learning how to interview and how to minimize audio problems in field recording….when the waitress asked her who he was when we left the waitress freaked out b/c she was a huge fan of his.
I still was fooling around with video stuff and running the Filmjunkie Film Festival, so my next interview was probably 8 months later, I interviewed Mark Haskell Smith who wrote his first novel, “Moist” at the time. That was kind of a fluke because I was trying to get in touch with Eddie Little, who wrote “Another Day In Paradise” and Mark Haskell Smith was with the same publisher, so they sent me a review copy. I read it and loved it and booked the interview in Oakland. On the way to the interview, I was trying to think of how to separate the podcast from Cherry Bleeds, and that’s when I realized the concept of Drinks with Tony b/c I was interviewing these people at bars and cafes to give the feeling that the listener was at a party with us. I told Mark I had just figured out the name of the show and he thought it was great. I’ve stayed friends with him since and he has helped me tremendously by reading my novel and giving feedback and ultimately referring me to his agent.

My fingers were still in the local film scene and I was getting offers for more interviews with filmmakers and actors and I’d just say yes to any request made….and I went after people I was a fan of, like Hal Hartley, who actually thought I was somebody else, that’s why he agreed to the interview, but after we met and he realized I wasn’t who he thought I was, he was still very gracious and we chatted a while.

The Chuck Palahniuk interview really upped my game, because he was a NY Times bestseller, so I was never denied any writer I asked for. I started treating it like a Q & A of stuff I wanted to know about my heroes’ writing processes and about the publishing business, etc. It turned out to be a way to talk to people I admired and get answers to questions I wanted and all I had to do was post the podcast on Drinks with Tony website.
I did college radio for years at KFJC, and went back for a short time and used some of the interviews I was doing for their news shows. I live in San Francisco and KFJC is about 40 minutes away, so I got sick of that and went back to just podcasting.

I offered the station manager at Pirate Cat Radio in San Francisco access to any of my interviews if he wanted to play them and he asked me to join the station. He used to live in the South Bay and knew who I was through listening to KFJC.

When I started the weekly show on Pirate Cat, I was scared I would have to do repeats since I only had about 10 – 15 interviews finished. It has turned out I haven’t had to repeat a show in almost two years and I don’t have the resources to archive every interview on Drinks with Tony, only the special ones. The pace has been frantic and I spend about 20-30 hours a week producing the Saturday night show. That’s everything from booking guests to going to press screenings or reading the books by the authors I’m interviewing as well as editing the audio for the live broadcast. Then I learned to use the interviews I received from the reputation of Drinks with Tony and sell them to publications, which ultimately got me on regular rotation at the San Francisco Chronicle. I wrote a few spec articles for an editor who accepted them all, then I pitched articles here and there and now I don’t need to pitch, I have automatic space every month.

Having the Chronicle clips has helped a lot getting other freelance jobs. I’ve been determined never to be a critic or reviewer, only make recommendations and do profiles of artists and so far it has worked. Once my novel comes out, I’ll feel ok doing book reviews b/c that will make me vulnerable to others opinions in the same art form. Same with films and music. Until I do a feature film or a full length cd release, I won’t be a critic of those mediums. Too many critics are idiots and if they don’t know the process of what it takes to make a 90 minute film or write for two years to sculpt a novel they have no right being a critic. Now that we have blogs, it’s even worse.

What was your question? Oh yeah, so Drinks with Tony is another project that has taken years to develop a voice and look for. The Drinks with Tony logo is an advertisement from the 1940’s that I photo shopped out all of the writing around it and cleaned it up. It took me about six months to find the right logo…..I knew I wanted something vintage and slightly sinister, something with a façade, a drawing of a man that you’d be a little concerned if he baby sat your children, but so-called distinguished at the same time.
The Saturday night broadcast includes a lot of music, sometimes themed towards the interviews, it’s a books and booze type format with the film and other people of interest. It’s been a lot of fun and I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything.
Drinks with Tony is interviews first. I don’t see the project ever dying. And after 50+ interviews, maybe we’re nearing 100 now, I finally feel like I’m getting the hang of it.

Writers are the best subjects. They have a no bullshit thing about them. Sometimes they’re bitchy and hard to interview, and I like that a lot better than, ‘oh, yes, working with Daniel Day Lewis was great’, b/c actors have too much coaching from publicists and are acting when they’re being interviewed….writers are honest for the most part.

I stammer a lot when I interview people because I’m nervous, and I’m not a fan of polished radio show hosts anyway, and Palahniuk asked me, ‘did you just learn English?’ I love that kind of thing….even if it makes me look goofy I’ll keep it in the interview. An interview scheduled in a few weeks I taped earlier this month. It wasn’t going well and I thought it was my fault and the author related to me a story about how her parents were very religious, but she didn’t buy into religion. I asked her how old she was when she realized religion didn’t work for her and she said ‘eight years old’. My face dropped. She said, ‘I’ve finally impressed you’. After that she stayed longer than she was scheduled for. I love those moments, and those moments happen with writers more than actors.

Established filmmakers are the same way. Wim Wenders and Hal Hartley had a lot of honesty and were easy to connect with. These guys are my heroes and they were excited about art and books and music…..They are the people I want to be when I grow up.

Shalla: Congratulations on the publication of CHEMICAL LUST: A Sex & Drugs Anthology. How did you decide which stories to include in it?

Tony: Everyone in Chemical Lust was invited and had some affiliation with Cherry Bleeds in the past. We had enough work to do with designing and setting everything up I didn’t want to wade through a ton of submissions.

Shalla: Will you be publishing another anthology in the future?

Tony: Yes. That will be announced soon and we’ll be taking submissions for that.
Shalla: Will you tell us about Cherry Bleeds Literary Magazine? How did it all got started? And what is Cherry Bleeds’ mission statement (would that be a good word for it, since it seems a lot more rated R, maybe bordering rated X than most lit mags)? Ie. your story “The DuShane Wipe” talks about… “poop.”

Tony: Cherry Bleeds started as a weekly zine dedicated to publishing the writing of a couple of friends and me. It was to give us a deadline to produce. The famous Woody Allen quote, “85% of success is showing up”, I took that very seriously and published every Wednesday. I wanted the audience, which was about 10 – 20 readers a day at the time, half of them coming from other porno sites hoping cherrybleeds.com was porn, but for the few who came to read the articles, I knew consistency was important and we published every Wednesday. Then I started working on the Filmjunkie Film Festival and couldn’t keep up with the submissions and weekly publication, so I switched it to a monthly.

It’ll be 7 years old in a couple of months. That’s really exciting for me.

When I started it there was a lot more talk in the industry about webzines being amateur and vanity….that seems to have died down as more authors understand the power of the internet. Even a decent selling 40,000 copy book doesn’t get to college students in South Africa or even the UK. There are some months we get even more readers than that. The web is very important and the success of a webzine is consistency and quality. There were issues at the very beginning where there would only be one story b/c everything submitted wasn’t up to par. I’d rather publish one good story, than six mediocre ones. That’s not even an issue now b/c we get so many submissions I can’t even get to them all.

“ The DuShane Wipe” is actually the first story I’ve published with Cherry Bleeds in about 8 months…..I’ve been so hyper focused on finishing the final drafts of my novel I didn’t have time to really work on shorter pieces unless I was getting paid. That’s funny, I didn’t think of it as x-rated, I thought of it as the human condition and how most of us have a very intimate relationship with our anuses, we just don’t show them around in public and it’s taboo to ask another person how he or she wipes. I won’t say which parts of that story are true and what’s made up, but the hospital scene really happened and scared the shit out of me….for a long time I thought if anyone would stick a finger up my butt that I would have to go to the emergency room. There was a lot of tragedy in my early life, family suicides, mental illness, depression, etc.….makes for good entertainment now, and the occasional panic attack.

Shalla: What kind of stories do you like at Cherry Bleeds? What kind of subject matter are you looking for?

Tony: Some people have called us an erotica ‘zine. But I’ve published many G-Rated stories over the years. The main criteria is honesty. Honest human emotions. It’s easy to tell when someone has learned to dig deep in their soul to write the story and when someone has done an excellent job on an assignment in their English class.

Vikram Chandra said in our interview, “sometimes writers go places that most sane people don’t care to go”. I never publish genre fiction, though some can be classified as erotica, the story is usually not erotica for erotica’s sake, I’ll see something deeper and publish it. Even though I’m a fan of science fiction, you’ll never see a science fiction story b/c that’s not the voice of Cherry Bleeds. Oh, I just remembered, it’s been a while since I started this thing, but I called it Cherry Bleeds b/c, and here comes the sex again, I personally wanted to continue to break my cherry and never be stuck on trying to keep up appearances for an audience. Some authors go beyond finding a voice, they find a formula and don’t veer from it. A voice is very important, but, especially successful writers have to be very concerned with selling that next book, well, that’s a natural concern…I just personally want to make sure that I don’t figure out that writing about my ass is my formula and everyone loves it and expects me to write about my ass every month…..I write g-rated stories too and love exploring relationships or delving into surrealism or something else. So the name Cherry Bleeds for me means to keep pushing myself, even if something is working and getting a lot of fan mail, find that next thing and don’t let the formula go to my head.

I studied the theory of Keith Johnstone for improv acting….I even recommend his book, “Impro” as a way to break the self censor as a writer…..one of his philosophies, and I saw this over and over again and it happened to me as well, when actors really get into the moment and completely uncensor themselves in an improv scene, the brain and topic goes either sexual or anal. I haven’t read it in years, so this is from memory, but it was amazing to see shy girls in a scene that ends up in the bathroom. My respect for the theories of Freud catapulted after studying improv.

Shalla: What if someone submits a story that is pretty good, you like the plot, characters jump out at you but, it still needs that certain umph!, do you a.) edit it b.) reject it or c.) ask for revision?
Tony: I’ll send a very detailed letter of rejection and let them know they can revise it if they like. This doesn’t happen too often (once every six months), but I’m very careful not to assume that my suggestions for a revision would make the story better…I’m only one opinion and I make sure to let them know that. There are many successful published authors who I think are crap and they have a huge following. So, my idea of a good story may not be another person’s. My wife is a huge fan of Jane Austen and I’m not. It doesn’t mean Austen isn’t a great writer.

But that case is very rare and most rejections get a standard rejection letter b/c I don’t have time to engage with every author who submits. It’s a dictatorship here since I’m the only person who reads for the short story section.

My personal editor’s mission statement is that I try to keep a consistent voice to Cherry Bleeds and that I stand behind every story published 100%. If someone had a gun to my head and tried to make me say one of the stories on Cherry Bleeds sucked, I would have to say, pull the trigger. No, I’d give them Cherry Bleeds and my wallet and the smell of my piss stained pants…I guess I’m trying to say I’m very proud of every writer and every story that is published.

Shalla: Why do you usually reject a submission?

Tony: No soul. Shocking for the sake of being shocking. Anything preachy. It doesn’t fit with our voice. Actually, here’s a secret for getting published on Cherry Bleeds…every submission gets a standard reply that says we get many submissions and if you don’t hear back from us in a few months, feel free to follow up. For every issue, I pick one story from the general submission file and three to four stories from the writers who have sent follow up notes. This kind of gives me an ‘out’ not to send rejections to everyone, only those who follow up….and I seriously can’t physically read all the submissions…there are times when I’m getting five to ten submissions a day….and I believe a good chunk of those writers forget they even submitted their work, sometimes they even have their stories addressed to a bunch of magazines at once. I don’t care if it has been published elsewhere or they’re submitting to other ‘zines…..we’re not The New Yorker, any webzine that doesn’t pay (though I hope to change that by fall 2007) and doesn’t accept simultaneous submissions, those editors need a good ass kicking.

Shalla: Any big no-no’s you’d like to tell writers, before they submit to Cherry Bleeds?

Tony: There’s only a couple of rules on the submissions page…the main one is to include a short bio. Also, it’s amateur hour if there’s a copyright symbol at the top of the page, that’ll get an eye roll before a read. If a bio isn’t included I automatically delete the email. If they send poetry to me and not the brilliant poetry editor, Paul Corman-Roberts, I automatically delete that as well.

Oh, another funny thing I get every once in a while is some author thinks he’s Bukowski and will send a cover letter that I better publish his genius story or I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing, or they’re going to come and kick my ass….or something to that effect. Those are automatically deleted as well……and they should read some of the letters and diaries that have been published by Buk after his death….he was a kiss ass when it came to editors.

Shalla: Finally, any writing tips and/or editing tips for writers? Books and reading materials you’d recommend? Conferences? Workshops?

Tony: Keep writing and reading…even our favorite writers are tossing 90% of what they write into the waste basket. I asked one of my favorite writers if he is difficult with his publisher when they ask for edits. He said he is not and in the end what’s more important is the story and not his ego.

I’ve never been to a conference, but I plan to apply for some if I don’t get an agent soon. Workshops are individual decisions….some writers get MFA’s and it makes them better writers, some lose their creativity and become great teachers…..some writers need to workshop their books and others shouldn’t. I had to workshop my first novel because it deals with a religion and a world that isn’t known to most people, so I had to make sure I was keeping the balance of moving the story forward while subtly educating the reader along the way. There was no way around not workshopping that material extensively. The book I’m working on now I probably won’t workshop.

Shalla: Thanks Tony, very helpful answers! For more on Tony DuShane and Cherry Bleeds Literary Magazine, please go to: http://www.cherrybleeds.com/

Read Tony Dushane's short story, "Girl Opportunities"

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