INTERVIEW: Matthew Gasda by Claire Hopple

‘Writing is the art of returning’

Creating entries in “not only the pace of thought, but in the geometry of thought,” Matthew Gasda, the prolific playwright, director, and critic, presents a portrait of himself—and all of us. Writer’s Diary, the latest Rose Books release, features an artist choosing beauty over security while grappling with a fractured mind besieged by constant demands. Gasda predicts the future by looking at the past, drafting his identity along the way.

So of course I had to ask him a few questions.

Claire Hopple: You write, “My ambition and ego protrude from my soul like a tumor, and I know people will see it.” How do you manage this psychological tumor? What do you do with both your ambition and your ego?

Matthew Gasda: Well, I guess I manage it by writing first and foremost, which I think is the implication of that passage in the diary. I think circumstances tend to be chastening as well. Life just hits you in the mouth a lot—hits me in the mouth a lot, at least—and tends to shave off and attack that tumor.

I don’t think we live in a very pro-ambition society unless it’s like maybe the ambition of a tech founder. Everything else is passé or embarrassing, and so my artistic ambitions tend to attract negative reactions, I guess.

CH: I sense a lot of pressure in your entries. Pressure to achieve, to produce, to meet demands. Does this pressure stem from your own standards or someone else’s? Or maybe a secret third thing?

MG: Mostly for myself, but I really think that there’s an economic valence to this, which shouldn’t be surprising. Inflation, which has risen in the last four years—the last five years since COVID—really creates an extra level of pressure. AI is putting pressure on jobs, especially word cell jobs.

I mean, I really feel like I am fighting to protect the life that I want to live, like the life of a writer, the life of a director, and an artist. I don’t really know who I am without those things. I think I fundamentally am born to do the things that I do, and yet I have to constantly improve, prove, and reify this, and find economic remuneration for this.

I don’t have enough money. I don’t have a big enough network. I don’t have enough institutional support not to feel pressure. There’s nothing to take the pressure off.

CH: You note that people are becoming more violent and unpredictable in order to give themselves a sense of reality. How have you seen that in action?

MG: Yeah, I’ve seen a little bit of violent behavior in seemingly civilized New York settings. I think in the urbane first-world Manhattan, Brooklyn elite circles that I tend to pass through, you’re not going to really see this on the surface as much, but you feel a lot of psychic violence. You’ve experienced a lot of psychic violence. You sense that people would love to commit acts of violence and that they certainly celebrate it. The tote bagger isn’t going to shoot someone, I don’t think, but they’re happy to get on TikTok or Twitter and celebrate Charlie Kirk getting shot in the neck. Violence is a kind of underclass behavior that PMCs tend to avoid, and I live in a PMC world. But I think people are increasingly impressed and in love with violence as a solution to a feeling of stuckness, and I do find that disturbing because eventually that ideation will give way to something. And yeah, I guess that is happening. Luigi Mangione is another example. School shootings of any kind or teenage gangs beating up strangers for TikTok videos, people employing violence for likes.

CH: Tell us why we need to throw our smartphones away.

MG: It’s killing us. You know it’s killing you. I know it’s killing you. You know it’s killing your friends, etc. There’s an implicit taboo that because everyone is using one, we won’t admit that it’s made everything worse, made us worse, made us dumber, less sensitive, more anxious and depressed.

It’s like being in the mob. It’s hard to get out because getting out in some way implies being judged by and judging those who stayed in, and being threatened by them and you threatening them.

CH: What was your experience like writing this diary compared to a play or a novel? Do you have a favorite format?

MG: I really enjoy writing the diary. It probably is my favorite format because there’s less pressure and because it’s kind of like the byproduct of doing these other things. It occurs naturally as a result of writing plays, novels, screenplays, or reading. It’s like skimming the cream off the top of the milk. It’s hard to say what the experience is like. There’s no singular experience of writing in a diary. It’s such a mood-dependent medium that it’s more like a way of structuring experiences you have in other places.

CH: “Digital production took away all limits but it also took away all interest.” How do you see that idea playing out for us, the “us” being humanity?

MG: Well, people are going to the movies less. We all, I think, almost anyone who has any kind of social media feels just exhausted by too much content, like we’re drinking content from a fire hose. Music is playlist slop. We’re losing relationships to albums and to the intentions of musical artists, the sequencing of the songs. Everything digital is shot through with ads. I feel like, I mean, really, we’ve switched from art being finite to art being generative and infinite, and that, like, is a cancer by definition—a self-replicating entity that takes over gradually and crushes real biological life.

CH: “There is no storytelling anymore, only information telling—data sharing.” Where does your book fall in this paradigm?

MG: I’m not really sure. It’s definitely a kind of novel. My next novel involves sub-use of fictional diaries, which are very similar to the writer’s diary, although there’s a lot more than that in the book.

There’s not too much to say about this. I’m not the first person to note that we don’t want invention and storytelling anymore. We want representations of life because maybe no one feels like they’re living a real life anymore. We want autofiction, which is like this real-unreal thing, this simulated simulacra.

So in a way, Writer’s Diary is a kind of autofiction, but what is autofiction other than a diary? I don’t know. It’s a very confusing hall of mirrors to enter into conceptually.

CH: What does “meaningful progress” look like to you?

MG: Great question. I think it would probably mean that we find a way to make technology serve us in the background. Maybe it tells us to put on a coat on our way out the door, tells us to sell a stock, or that someone left a voice message that we should listen to. It filters out rather than feeds us ads and junk mail. It encourages us to interact with each other in the real world. That would be a form of progress. I could say lots of things about what would make the world a better place, but in fact, I’m working on a book that will be announced shortly called Futurepast, which basically sketches a positive vision of the future, one that involves incorporating old and new technologies without being beholden to technology for the sake of a more democratic society.

CH: “A spiritual life only has two phases: dying and being born.” What does that look like for you, if you don’t mind sharing?

MG: I think it has something to do with suffering. It’s a hard aphorism to unpack, but it seems like every spiritual tradition––and I find this is true in my own experience––entails that you pass through some kind of destruction process where the ego is destroyed or the hard residual crust of the self gets cleared away so that new thoughts, experiences, emotions, and relationships to God can emerge. You have to be willing to let a part of yourself die in order to let a new part of yourself be born.

CH: How did you develop such a wide social network?

MG: Do I have a wide social network? I guess so. I just follow up with people. I try to make meetings in person. Sometimes I write letters. I do phone calls. I just try.

CH: Do you view the role of an artist as a miner of what is good, true, and beautiful? Is loneliness a requirement of the trade?

MG: Yes and yes.

CH: You write a lot about both individualism and community, recognizing the importance of both. How do you see them working together? Is it like a respiratory system, where you breathe in the outside world, filter it, and breathe out the inner life onto the page or stage?

MG: I think that’s a great metaphor. And this is what Futurepast is partly going to talk about. A merger of aristocratic and democratic traditions. I do think you need a strong code of individuality and personal responsibility for a healthy society, but it can’t be expressed in a get-off-my-lawn way.

CH: What does it look like to be worthy of your own existence?

MG: I have no fucking clue, Claire. But I think it might have something to do, if you really are forcing me to answer this, with waking up and asking yourself that question every day and being guided by whatever voice answers from within.

CH: Who do you consider to be a genius?

MG: Terrence Malick.

CH: Thanks for talking with me, Matt. I’m gonna repeat your own words back to you and say: Whatever you do, “Do not get over your astonishment at being here.” Here on Earth, life itself. I’m constantly astonished by it, too.

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Matthew Gasda is a writer, director, and critic. He is the founder of the Brooklyn Center for Theater Research and the author of the novel The Sleepers, and two collections of plays, among other works.