Spencer Bailey

You also worked for the college magazine.

Is it true that you wrote a thesis on Philip Larkin and jazz?

True story.

What drew you to that particular intersection?

Very niche intersection.

I had a professor, Carol Ann Johnston, who introduced me to the work of Philip Larkin.

And then when I went to study in London for a summer, I had a professor there as well who was...

teaching Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes and Paul Muldoon and some other British and Irish poets.

And I was just like, this Larkin guy's a great poet.

Again, I don't think Jhumpa Lahiri and Philip Larkin have very much in common, but there is a melancholy, I guess.

A certain loneliness, perhaps, as well.

But I felt...

connected somehow to Larkin and to his poetry and then I discovered that he had been a jazz critic and I thought huh that's interesting like

I also love jazz poetry, and I'd never thought about Larkin as a jazz poet.

So I was just basically merging these two things that I found fascinating and combusted them into this thesis.

You said that Dickinson was where you realized you were not the writer you wanted to become.

Yes.

I know that Sherry Kimmel at the magazine taught you a bit about the mechanics of editing and storytelling.

How did she influence the writer that you wanted to be?

More or less by making me understand pretty early on that every word counts, every word matters, how to...