Ammon Gillins' piece "Asteroid Day Comes Six Months from Thursday" shares a familiar setting with a fresh outlook, giving readers a weird display of the neutrality, kindness, and mild absolution possible in a wake of unavoidable worldwide destruction. It's unexpected and thought-provoking. Read our interview with Ammon to hear a little bit about his creative process plus his best writing advice.
What inspires you to create?
There’s something special about making something that wasn’t there before. Accomplishment maybe, and some pride probably, but most of all the hope that what I’ve made can have an impact on someone else, even if that impact is small.
Where do you go or what do you do to recharge your creative battery?
There’s a trail near where I live that winds high up into the mountains. I find that the outdoors are one of the best places to go to clear my head. Then I try to notice things. It’s hard to not want to be creative when you’re noticing things.
How do you get through a creative block?
I don’t think there’s really a secret for this. You just have to put one word after the other and never stop.
Advice on creating that you’ve learned by trial and error?
A piece of advice I heard some years ago: There is a river of trash you must cross before you start making anything worthwhile. There’s no way around it. You’ll write trash, but you keep going and eventually you’ll find that you’ve crossed that river and that what you’ve written isn’t so bad anymore.
There’s “good” weird…and there’s also "not-so-good" weird. What’s “good” weird to you?
I think the biggest difference between good and not so good is how you present it to others. Weirdness without control is just odd. Weirdness with control is fascinating. And it doesn’t have to be abstract. Authors like Jeff Vandermeer take completely normal stuff and word it in such a way that it sounds weirder than it actually is. Brilliant.
Read the full issue here!
Ammon Gillins is an MFA student at Brigham Young University. His works appear in Inscape Journal and Short Edition.
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