Sean Carswell is a former carpenter, house-painter, dishwasher, pizza delivery guy, bartender, warehouse clerk, junior high school teacher, and construction slap.

Now, when he's not teaching college students English in LA, he edits the punk rock 'zine Razorcake, and writes books. His latest is a collection of short stories titled Barney’s Crew.

Steven Hansen: What are your punk rock bona fides? I mean, besides being the editor/co-founder of a punk rock 'zine, of course. And did you also have a formal education?

SC: I don't really have any punk rock bona fides outside of Razorcake and the time I spent writing for Flipside. I just listen to the music. I mean, I don't look like a punk rocker. I've gone to thousands of shows and own a ridiculous amount of punk rock CDs and records, but I don't have any tattoos or a mohawk.

I do have an education, though. I went to Florida State University and studied writing there. I graduated in '92. After working a couple of years as a carpenter, I went back to grad school and got a Master's at Northern Arizona University.

SH: Sid Harper, the protagonist of two of the stories in Barney’s Crew went to Florida State, too, right? I'm guessing much of your undergrad studies were geared toward philosophy? And, is Flagstaff (Northern Arizona U.) where you met your partner in crime, Todd Taylor?

SC: Yeah. Sid and I have a lot in common. I did study quite a bit of philosophy when I was at FSU. It was my minor, but once I started reading it, I kind of got hooked. I still read a lot of philosophy. More than I want to admit because, let's be honest, when you start talking about philosophy, you start to sound a bit pretentious.

And, yeah, NAU is where I met Todd. We were both graduate assistants there. So it's an unlikely place for a punk rock magazine to be born. But, you know...

SH: In the story “Trying to Outsmart a Fish” Sid is hung up on Spinoza and pissed about some other philosopher named Berkeley. Without coming across as too pretentious, what's Spinoza all about, in a nutshell?

SC: Berkeley is George Berkeley. He was a Scottish philosopher in the eighteenth century. The city of Berkeley in California is named after him. He's not too famous. He did a lot to answer some of the questions raised by Descartes. That's part of the reason why I read him. David Hume, a British philosopher after Berkeley, was heavily influenced by Berkeley, so I read Berkeley to understand Hume a bit more, too.

Spinoza wrote a lot about emotions. He traced every emotion back to love and hate and the varying degrees of love and hate. He talked about how emotions are contagious, how you can be having a great day, but if you're around someone who's angry enough, you can catch that anger like a disease. You can combat the varying degrees of love with the varying degrees of hate. He also had a concept of God where he said, basically, don't think of God as a person or as having human characteristics. Think of God as the universe, essentially, so that the Earth is part of God in the same way that your thumb is the part of you. In essence, God is everything. It's kind of an old concept. I think people call it "pantheism" now, but I haven't read much about pantheism, so I'm not sure.

That's their life's work in a nutshell, though. Very much on the surface.

SH: Yeah. I think that's 'pantheism'. And while we're on the subject of God, one of my favorite lines in the second Sid story “Sid and the Dragon”:

It was easy to be cynical. You could make fun of anything. The real strength came in being able to believe in something.

Do you believe this or was this just one of your character’s thoughts?

SC: That was a tough story. I knew where I wanted to go with the ending, but it was hard getting the reader to go there with me. That line definitely helped me do that. As far as believing it, to tell you the truth, I never asked myself if I believe that. Now you're making me think. It's tough. I guess I do believe it.

So much of writing comes from the subconscious, you know. And I guess that was more of a subconscious thought than a conscious one on my part. When I think about it now, it does take a lot of strength to believe in something. For me, anyway. I'm so predisposed to be cynical, to find fault in everything, to think about everything so critically and logically and, if I have an open mind about it, I have to accept that some of the world is beyond logic. It takes a lot for me to accept that. So I guess, yeah, as of right now, I believe that.

SH: Fate, destiny, God, whatever you see it as, it sure seems to have been working for you during your NAU days. Todd and you have forged a successful partnership in both Razorcake magazine and Gorsky Press.

Neither of you are the typical punk stereotypes either (both having Master's degrees, and now you're a professor!). Do you ever get teased about the dichotomy here? I.e. Punk rockers vs. Advance-degreed lit geeks?

SC: Not really. When we were in grad school, we'd get shit from the higher ups about being punk rockers. Todd especially. I remember one writing professor was scared of Todd. I don't remember exactly why. I think he read a story in her class and his story was pretty intense and when Todd read it, I think he paced around the room and maybe even jumped up on her desk. It was a long time ago.

But no one in the punk rock community has given us shit. Well-educated punk rockers aren't really that rare. The lead singer for Bad Religion has a doctorate. The drummer for Dillinger Four is a clinical psychologist. I think the old guitarist for Kid Dynamite has a doctorate in clinical psychology, too. It kind of makes sense. When I was going to school, a lot of my teachers were old hippies. And I rebelled by being a punker. Now it's the punkers' turn to take over the teaching field and the kids' turn to start a new rebellion.

SH: I just read an old essay of yours (I think it was in an e-zine called 19ink or Ink 19) wherein you proposed a revolution could be started by the people, en masse, either quitting or seriously scaling back the hours they worked for their respective paychecks. I know you and Todd and your wife Felizon spend way more than 40 hours a week putting out Razorcake. If and when your proposal in 19Ink ever got rolling, would you be willing to take your own advice?

SC: That right there is the problem with writing for Web journals: your more embarrassing essays stay in print forever and are easy to access. I wrote that back when Ink 19 was still a free monthly, about five years ago. But, okay, I said it. Now I have to think about whether or not I still stand by it. You're asking me some tough questions.

From what I remember of that essay, my theory was that if we all quit our jobs or just scaled back how much we made, we'd all make less money and spend less money on the worthless stuff that we buy to try to salve our souls from the wounds we get from working sixty hour weeks. Or something like that. A pretty weak premise, I'll admit. I do think that we should all work less. In France, they have a 35-hour workweek. That sounds pretty good to me. And I think we should all buy less worthless crap like, well, just about everything they sell at Wal-Mart. So would I take my own advice?

First off, you have to understand that I don't make any money off of Razorcake. Razorcake makes enough money to stay afloat so long as I don't take a salary. So you can't really say it's a job, in that sense. And I'm not working to make anyone rich. I'm not supporting the top-heavy economy that I proposed we fight against. I'm just working on the magazine because I enjoy it. And because I think it's important for some sort of independent voices to exist in the media. But technically, it's probably more of a hobby than a job. A very consuming hobby, but a hobby. Or, actually, more accurately, I guess I'm spending all that time volunteering for a not-for-profit agency, because Razorcake is a not-for-profit corporation. So in that sense, I'm still taking my own advice.

SH: Razorcake is a corporation?! I thought corporations were the enemy? ha ha. Hey. I suppose that 'not-for-profit' prefix is the thing that stipulates whether a corporation is evil or not. Anyhow. What the hell is a Razorcake? And, as the name of your independent press, did you snatch that from Apollo astronaut and 1st moonwalker Neil Armstrong's apocryphal quote "Good luck, Mr. Gorsky."? If not, where'd you get it from?

SC: I know. I'm my own enemy. But you're right about the name Gorsky. Gorsky Press was started in Cocoa Beach, Florida, right by where Kennedy Space Center is. So the whole "Good luck, Mr. Gorsky" was a joke and a regional reference. Razorcake, on the other hand, means nothing, really. Todd started Razorcake as a web 'zine. He wanted to call it "Born to Rock," but borntorock.com was already taken. So he and two of the other founders of Razorcake were sitting around, trying to come up with a name that they could use for a magazine and a domain name. Someone owned the domain name for everything they came up with. Then, towards the end of the night, Katy, who's one of the founders of Razorcake, was brushing her teeth, and she somehow thought up the name. She came back out of the bathroom and said something like, "How about Razorcake?"

And Todd and Danny -- Danny's another co-founder -- said, "What's a Razorcake?"

"I don't know," Katy said. "But it sounds cool."

Todd and Danny agreed, and that's where the name came from.

At least that's the story that Todd, Danny, and Katy tell. I wasn't there. I didn't get involved with Razorcake until about a month later. Todd came to visit me in Florida and was telling me about his ideas of starting a web 'zine. I tried to convince him to make it a print ‘zine and he said he would do it if I moved out to California and helped him. So I did. And four years later, we're an evil corporation.

SH: You capitalist pig. How can you live with yourself? You're a philosophy buff, and I've been puzzling over this for months, who said, and I'm paraphrasing "We all eventually become that which we despise."? And, though I know you're a pacifist, the question needs to be answered, who'd win a no-holds barred cage match between you and Todd? and Why?

SC: I don't know what philosopher said that. I know Ben Weasel had that lyric in one of his songs. I think it was on the Screeching Weasel album "Anthem for a New Tomorrow." Actually, he said, "We become what we hate."

Still, I'm not gonna fight Todd. There's an old story about the Sioux and the Pawnee, and they'd only fight each other if one group outnumbered the other. Supposedly, they never fought even fights. So, according to this story, a Sioux warrior and a Pawnee warrior were both walking through the woods when they came across each other. Seeing that neither one of them had an advantage, they both sat down and waited for reinforcements. They sat there staring at each other until the sun set. No other warriors came along. Eventually, one of them got hungry and went home.

The reasons would be different, but that's about how a fight would be between me and Todd: just sitting there until one of us got hungry and left.

SH: It's a great anecdote, so I won't call you on your skillful sidestepping of the question. So... You broke your wrist a few years ago at Upland Skate Park (in the Los Angeles area I assume? Performing some vertical hanging ledge aerial maneuver no doubt), was it your writing hand, or do you compose directly from a keyboard ... so you could at least hunt and peck?

SC: That's funny that you know that. I will say this, though. It was no aerial maneuver. It's like the old saying goes: the only time I catch air is when I'm falling. But I was at that skate park with Art Fuentes, the guy who illustrated Barney’s Crew, and there was a guy about ten years older than me who was dropping in at one part of the bowl and getting a ridiculous amount of speed. And I thought if that old guy could do it, so can I. And right before I tried, I said to Art, "I don't know why I'm doing this. It doesn't matter if I can pull it off. It does matter if I break my arm." I tried it anyway, and I actually did pull it off, but I was so busy congratulating myself that I didn't pay attention to the fact that I was still on my board, still moving, and about ten feet up a concrete wall. A split second later, one of my bones was broken in half. I'm not that bright.

But, no, it was my left hand and I'm right handed. Still, the broken wrist made it tougher to write because I write on a keyboard, and all the good letters are on the left side.

SH: It's an unwritten rule that I can't have any of my stories published at the e-zines I volunteer for. Has anyone criticized you for publishing your own material? The literary community is pretty snippy that way, I'm sure you know.

SC: Yeah, I get a bit of criticism for that. I get a lot of silent dismissal, like my stuff isn't worth consideration because I'm part of Gorsky Press and they publish my books. I think a lot of that comes down to an inherent pettiness. In general, people don't want you to succeed. As a species, we certainly revel in the failures of others. Isn't that what reality TV is all about?

Still, I don't worry about it. It's petty. I mean, it's not like other people won't publish my writing. I actually turn down writing assignments for other editors and other publications so that I can do stuff for Razorcake. It happens more often than I should admit. I also understand that a lot of self-published writers have to publish themselves because no one else will, and a lot of literary journals and e-'zines are very nepotistic. So this also creates snippiness. But, to be honest, I don't really care too much about all that stuff.

SH: Some famous Chinese philosopher once said something like: Happiness is getting your haircut every two weeks and watching your neighbor fall off the roof. What's on the front burner now? You're taking a book tour up the West Coast this summer. What are those like?

SC: That's a great quote. I think the front burner just got taken over by my desire to break out my clippers and, when I'm done, go next door and rip off some shingles from the neighbor's roof. Such an easy formula.

The book tours are a lot of fun, especially because now I've been to most of the places where I'm reading. I know people in the towns I'm going to, and I'm excited to see them. It's also a nice way to reach readers. People love stories. They have an appetite for story hour. I mean, you remember how much you loved story hour as a kid, right? Why give that up? So I'm doing the West Coast tour with Todd and James Jay, a poet whom Gorsky published. Then, in June I'm doing two weeks in the Midwest and on the East Coast with Joe Meno, who wrote Hairstyles of the Damned, and Mickey Hess, who wrote Big Wheel in the Cracker Factory. And, in August, I'll do a week in the South with Todd and Mike Faloon, who publishes Go Metric! Magazine. It'll be great because I'm actually a fan of all the writers I tour with, so I get to be entertained by them every night.

Small Spiral Notebook reviews Barney's Crew