Interview with Miles Meth
Tell us about your relationship to writing.
I did not always want to be a writer. As a young person I only really encountered writing through school, so I understood it as a scholastic/academic activity. AKA, boring. I have always read, however. To this day I feel that books are the closest thing we have to telepathy, to entering the mind of those different than us, so I was drawn to them from a young age.
I went to college in upstate NY and became politicized, joining one of the last remaining chapters of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). I was swept up in the social movements of the time, including the initial formation of the Movement for Black Lives in response to the murder of Mike Brown and The Fight for $15, which had a very active campaign upstate.
My senior year I wrote an op-ed for the school paper in support of the adjunct faculty’s efforts to form a union. The article was shared widely around campus, and I felt powerful: seeing that my words could spark conversation and that, at times, I was uniquely situated to tell a story that ought to be told.
Still, for many years writing was a small side hobby that I saw as enriching, but secondary to union/community organizing. About three years ago, after facing cycles of burnout as a union organizer, I began writing fiction more seriously. I realized that, while I love essays and articles, fiction has always been the writing that has touched and moved me in a total way.
Do you have any non-literary hobbies?
I play the saxophone. Not so well, but well enough to understand my limitations. I think it’s great for my writing practice when I explore other creative modalities. Cooking too. You start to recognize the patterns across acts of creation, how much craft comes down to practice, practice, practice and then, when the time calls for it, letting everything else fall away.
What’s been inspiring you lately?
The strikes across industries in Massachusetts. Namely the thousands of courageous healthcare workers and casino workers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston Medical Center, and Encore Casino who are walking off the job. Strikes are profoundly consuming, and I don’t think we always recognize the ripple effects that they have— a successful strike can spook corporations across the state or even the country, and can therefore raise standards for workers well outside the narrow purview of a single bargaining unit. At the same time, an unsuccessful strike can have the opposite effect. It’s a gamble that demands massive sacrifice from the workers walking off the job; I view it as part of our collective responsibility to donate to hardship funds, walk the line, and organize our communities to support striking workers.
What are you reading right now? Any recommendations to pair with “Defend”?
I just finished Collapse by Edouard Louise. I gobble up everything he writes. I am transfixed by the brutal, unsentimental depictions of the miseries of the working class in rural Northern France. He pulls no punches in describing the homophobia and violence he has faced from his family, but because (not in spite) of this, his explorations into the sociological conditions that create this violence feel like beautiful, tender gestures of compassion, not detached, academic theorizing. I think his books are required reading for organizers. We have a responsibility to listen to and attempt to understand people who we may vigorously disagree with but know we must find common cause with to fight the ruling class.
A good companion to “Defend” could be Joyful Militancy, an anthology of essays and interviews edited by carla bergman and Nick Montgomery. They offer alternatives for how organizers can combat purity and rigidity and build instead, as the title suggests, joyful militancy. One of my favorite parts of the book is where they examine 17th century Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza’s concept of freedom. Spinoza argued that freedom is not the ability to do whatever you want, but that freedom is the ability to do things with other people that you couldn’t do alone. My hope was to explore this version of freedom in “Defend.”
Finally, as someone who primarily writes prose, I’m always trying to read poetry, which teaches us how to strip language down to. I’ve been moving between Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic, Jericho Brown’s The Tradition, and The Grace Paley Reader.
Do you have any unpopular literary opinions or advice?
Never, ever trust Goodreads ratings.
Tell us about your writing process and your approach to craft.
I treat writing fiction, or anything creative, as a fairly spiritual process. I rarely have a whole story mapped out beforehand and don’t necessarily intend to “accomplish” anything through a story. Instead, I have an image, a scene (less often, a character), that I find compelling, and I try to surrender to that, to write it as fully and honestly as I can. I was introduced to the concept of “draft zero” by a friend—that is, don’t even think of your first draft as a draft, lest you become frozen by examining how bad it is. Instead, treat the first draft (or zero draft) as just the process of mixing words together, like mud and water. Only once they’re on the page can the shape of the clay come into view.
From there, I revise incessantly. I’m so lucky to have a number of friends I really trust with my work, so I try to get multiple eyes on everything. A story probably goes through 10-15 drafts before I feel it’s ready, and even then, there is always something to tinker with. But then, part of the artist’s surrender is knowing that once a piece is published, it’s no longer yours and now belongs to the head and heart of the reader.
What inspired you to write “Defend”? Why did you choose fiction over an essay?
I was interested in writing something that pulled back the curtain on direct action. So often the general public only sees the finished product: a photograph, an Instagram reel, a news article, which makes direct action seem utterly, magically spontaneous. I get why organizers do this, why political messaging needs to be simple and clear. Us vs them. But I’m interested (and I think others are too) in the real lives of organizers.
For me, fiction, at its best, has a spellbinding quality, an ability to transcend, or perhaps skirt around, ideology. In other words, I’m interested in fiction’s ability to reach people who otherwise think they are uninterested or opposed to something, because they are simply drawn into the story.
I think many still write off direct action as too extreme, unrealistic, unhelpful, pushing in the wrong places. Despite years of training and engaging in direct action myself, I still hear that reactionary voice within my own head, so part of what I was hoping to do through “Defend” was disabuse the reader of the notion that these activists are just a bunch of crazy ideologues. To make clear that they have hopes and dreams that fall outside of the work, and that, though they may disagree on tactics, they are bonded through the intensity of what they experience together.
Moreover, the odds can feel (and many times are) so stacked against us. A common dismissal of direct action is that it doesn’t accomplish anything and is ultimately symbolic. This is actually an important critique, I think, one that organizers must reckon with and take seriously in their strategy of how to most effectively use our energy. However, like the spiritual surrender I described with writing, there is something similar in direct action as well. No one knows for sure which protest, what video, what photo will seize the imagination of the country and make space for change. We have to believe that it is worth trying again and again, bringing in the Leos of the world, until we win.
MILES METH (they/them) is a queer, Jewish union organizer and writer living in Boston MA. They hold an MFA from the University of Southern Maine and their work has appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, The Boston Globe, Cleaver Magazine, The Healing Muse, The Stonecoast Review, The Forward, The Bias and more. They were a finalist for the Saints and Sinners LGBTQ Literary Award.
