I’m a big guy, but Chris Frizzelle is bigger. His presence loomed over me the moment I met him. We were in Vito’s on First Hill. I was late to The Stranger’s Silent Reading Series held at the Sorrento Hotel, having got caught up in a conversation at work about music. I raced to the Sorrento, asked someone sitting in a chair if his name was Chris, to which the man said, “No, Tim.” Feeling sort of defeated, I sipped down a gin and tonic in the hotel bar. I left. I walked to The Hideout on Boren, thinking maybe I’d find The Stranger’s head editor there. The place was empty and no one resembled the Google images picture I saw on the Internet (turns out I didn’t even look at the right picture). As a last ditch effort I walked down to Vito’s. Again recognizing no one, I went to the bathroom to piss. I came out around the other end of the bar and was ready to head to my car when Chris came up to me. He wore a faded baseball cap, black shirt, black pants, and asked, “Are you Jake? I think you’ve been following me.” I’d been invited through email by Chris to the reading and felt it was important we meet in person. We’d already scheduled a meeting for the following Wednesday for this feature but it’s always best to know who you’re about to interview (this makes sense in my head).

Chris asked if I’d like to sit and have a drink with him and his friend James, who I found out was moving away in a few weeks to San Francisco for work. Chris was obviously bummed out about James’ departure, ribbing him about it. Saying how San Francisco can’t possibly compare to Seattle. At some point – maybe it was James changing the subject – David Foster Wallace came up in our conversation. Chris asked if I had read him and, sadly, I hadn’t. “I heard he was great though,” I offered.

“Is there any suicide in your family?” Chris asked quickly.

“Sort of,” I said. “Alcoholism, drugs, depression.”

He nodded. I’d read his 9/11 story and felt I knew a little bit about his family, so it seemed only fair I divulge something of mine.

“My half-brother died, vomiting in his sleep,” I told him. “He was 32, or something. I was young.”

“It’s a complicated issue,” James said. “The idea of depression, mental illness.”

We were all silent for a few seconds. A waiter came over then to see if we wanted food. Chris ordered a chicken Caesar. I took the pause to step out for a smoke. I don’t know why, exactly. It seemed appropriate, to gather my thoughts, to re-acclimate in some way. The streets were mostly empty, some parked cars, a few pedestrians. It was a quiet Wednesday night. Inside Vito’s, though, it was crowded, with a three-piece playing in the northeast corner of the club. It felt good to be outside if for just a moment.

When I went back inside, we sat and talked a bit longer. Chris had a vodka soda with a lemon and James drank a beer. I sipped a rum and coke. Only a few minutes went by before we finished our drinks and paid the tab. They had plans to meet some friends at another spot on Broadway. The three of us walked from Vito’s to my car. It almost didn’t start. I’d killed the battery a month or so before, leaving that stupid dome light on (I swear to god, why isn’t there a sensor that shuts the dome light off?). The car did start though and as we drove toward Capitol Hill, Chris asked, “So does The Monarch publish online?”

“Yes, about three times per week,” I said. “And none of what’s in the print edition is online. We try to keep that the cream of the crop.” As soon as I said this, I realized how dumb it sounded, especially since this interview will be prominently published on our site.

“That’s the paradox, isn’t it?” Chris kindly offered. “Sure, everyone wants to be in print. But more people will see it, there’s more access, if it’s online.”

I realized then how much of a pleasure it was to speak with a fellow managing editor. “How does Monarch fund itself?” he asked. I answered: private donations and a fortuitous 4Culture grant. He nodded.

I made a left onto Broadway and maneuvered between the pedestrians and the construction for the new light-rail. I took Chris and James where they needed to go, dropped them off, thanked them for their time and when the car doors shut I immediately drove to the Summit Alehouse for a shot and a beer.

Chris and I met again the following Wednesday at a party for The Stranger at the Erickson Theater, a celebration for the one year anniversary of their A&P Arts Issue. By now I’ve read up on much of his work, his lengthy pieces particularly: the one about Club Z, the one about the woman who committed suicide in his apartment building and the one about sitting down with the famous liars.

Chris had invited me to the night’s event, which began at 5:30pm. I met my girlfriend at the party. We got drinks, chatted about the day. I looked around but didn’t see Chris in the crowd, despite his stature. In fact, I told my girlfriend, maybe I should reschedule. But at 7:30, when the party was over and it was time for us to be kicked out, I saw Chris’s large frame by a staircase. Smiling, he gave a short speech to the crowd, thanking them for coming, playfully telling them to Get the fuck out. I walked over to him and said hello.

“Should we go?” he asked straight away.

“Yeah.”

We grabbed our coats, went outside to the sidewalk. I lit a cigarette, said goodbye to my gal and Chris and I walked to the Honey Hole (which ended up being too loud so we headed for Café Presse).

At the crowded café, we were greeted by the maître-d who looked at Chris and said, “We have one table in the back.” I felt like a member of the mafia or something, allowed into the best corner table at the back of this dimly lit, inviting restaurant.

Chris ordered a vodka soda, I ordered a double rum and coke. When the waitress returned to take our food order, I asked for the warm goat cheese salad with dried fig croutons. I added a bucket of fries with ketchup. Chris ordered the avocado and red quinoa salad topped with marinated prawns and mussels. He also asked for a bowl of parsnip soup, saying, “It’s my favorite!”

I laid a digital recorder on the table and asked, “You ever use one of these things?”

“Very often I won’t record interviews because the quotes don’t end up as good,” he said. “There’s this chilling effect that a recording device has.”

I attempted a spell in my head to make us both forget the recorder.

We started to talk about how it was he became the head editor of The Stranger at 27 years old. He’d come from the University of Washington, where he’d dropped out because he’d found a job at The Seattle Weekly. His path to The Stranger from the Weekly has been written about before, but what’s interesting is the exact reason why then-editor Dan Savage tapped him for the position. “When I was the Arts Editor – a position that no longer exists – I was editing pieces by everybody except the news reporters. I used to edit people’s pieces so when Dan looked at them he wouldn’t have to do anything. Sometimes that meant tiny changes, sometimes big structural changes, or maybe I would write 600 words into the piece in the writer’s voice. I was such a fan of all the writers there. I was so much younger than everyone when I started, I was 22, and everybody had been working there for 15 years, and I was intimidated by their talents. But I realized I could be like a ventriloquist almost. I could do Charles Mudede’s voice, I could do Schmader’s voice, I could do Jen Graves’ voice, Brendan Kiley’s voice. So after a while when Dan didn’t want the job anymore, he said to me, ‘Well you’re already kind of doing it…’”

I found this ventriloquist role intriguing – I’ve felt this way in areas of my life too, acting sort of like a chameleon in order to fit in and push others to work on different endeavors. Chris and I were also both fat kids growing up, we admitted to one another, and in some ways all of it seemed related. I said as much. He nodded. “If you go through a stage of your life when you don’t have friends and people don’t like you or don’t want to have sex with you, you do perceive more deeply other people because you’re not doing your own thing,” he said. “The lengths you go to relieve yourself of your own sadness and solitude – for me, I read the New Yorker, I read Story magazine, Harper’s and the Atlantic. I would just drown myself in all of these magazines. My parents didn’t understand.”

His father was a defense contractor. Mine was a professor. “I threw myself into television,” I told him. “I wanted to rebel too.”

“I’m also an instigator. Just because I want to provoke something, to have something to work with. I have like 100 ideas a day but I have to keep throwing them out to see if they’ll stick. Someone tells me a story and I’m like, ‘You should write it down!’ And they say, ‘You’re a vulture, you’re trying to turn my life into stories. And I say, ‘Yeah, I am. It’s my job.’ Writers do need to be pushed. They do need to be convinced that they need to take the time to do this thing that’s not going to have a big material reward and that the reason they should do it is because it’s interesting! It’s very hard to muster the confidence to do something on your own.”

There was a pause in our conversation. I dipped three fries in ketchup. We were in close quarters in our back table, the café filled with people. Yet, I still felt comfortable. “I think,” Chris said as I chewed, “a kind of ego-less-ness in an editor is really good but I also don’t think that you shouldn’t edit aggressively. Most pieces of writing are bad. Even for good writers. If they’re not bad then they’re not good, they’re just boring. I read all kinds of stuff that’s just, like, fine. It smells like a piece of writing, looks like writing, it has a point, but it’s boring. And that’s not what we want to publish. But there have been times when I haven’t been good at my job, but I think I’m figuring that out too.”

“What does that mean?” I said, going back for more fries.

“Just like you say something indelicately that hurts someone’s feelings. Or you write a headline that’s too provocative. I’m constantly – I’m a self-doubter. Even though I make decisions kind of forcefully and move on, at night I sit at home and I’m trying to sleep but I think about them constantly.”

Chatter swayed all around us in the back of Café Presse. The waitress came by, removed Chris’s soup bowl and I ordered a second rum and coke. We began to discuss the idea of a publication’s identity, specifically that of The Stranger, the perception of which might be overly snarky or sarcastic. “Is that ever inhibiting?” I ask.

“Well, first of all, we’ve never been sarcastic.” He looked me in the eyes, not wavering. “Just kidding, I’m being sarcastic.” Phew. “But really there’s hardly anything we write about that we don’t want to write about. For example, we don’t make editorial decisions based on advertising – we don’t write a nice thing about a business because they advertise with us. That would make people not want to read the piece, and you can’t always put a finger on why.” He took a sip of his drink. “Just think of how brilliant our publisher Tim Keck is. The big thing that happened to weekly newspapers is that Craigslist came along so all the classified advertisement went away. Forty-percent of revenue: Gone. He’s reinventing what running a newspaper is like. Instead of what a lot of other publishers have done, which is fire most of the writers to reduce costs, leaving you with a publication you don’t want to read, Tim believes writers are interesting, so he’s figured out other revenue streams so he didn’t have to get rid of his writers. Like Stranger Tickets, for example. And he understands there’s a correlation between difficult personalities and good writers.”

When thinking about writers, I think about the independent writers, people who, now with increased technology and social media, have more outlets for content. I wanted to ask Chris something I’ve been thinking a lot about: the idea of too much.

“A friend came up with the idea that the new hero of this generation is the sifter. It’s inevitable, the production of content, so one has to hone the ability to sift through it. Or, do you disagree? Is it that there really is just too much? Too many podcasts, too many people producing music, too much writing?”

“I’m not sure about stuff like podcasts, but I do know the secret of Slog is that there’s too much. The secret of Slog is that if you look away, you’re going to miss a bunch of great stuff. That was Dan Savage’s idea. As David Schmader says, it’s ‘Good noticing.’ It’s what people want. If people go to a web site and the most recent article was from two days ago, they won’t read it, because it’s not two days ago right now. They want something now. That said, I just had to listen to a two-hour podcast to fact-check a piece of writing, and a two-hour podcast is too much!”

Judging by the food left on our plates, it felt like the meal was arriving at its inevitable end. I wanted to bring up David Foster Wallace before we were finished. Since our last meeting, I’ve had the chance to read a bit of his work. I started to quote Wallace to get Chris’s reaction. “Wallace wrote in his speech at the Kenyon College graduation that ‘It is unimaginably hard …to stay conscious and alive day in and day out—”

Chris interjected quickly, “Yeah, he failed at that. He’s no longer alive.”

I continued, “‘And the only thing that is technically true is that you get to decide how you’re going to see it.’ Is this how it is for you, this idea of continually trying to stay present?”

“You know,” he said, “there’s all kinds of ways to check out. There’s different levels of checking out – like I went through a period of my life when I drank a bunch, smoked pot and really just checked out and was not a good writer or friend or thinker and I regret those times, I just regret not being present. I don’t even know what I said or did. There’s nothing like being a young idiot to teach you not to be a young idiot. I agree with what [Wallace] said there. Writers have the gift that their thing is constantly creating a way of looking at something, that’s what they’re doing. That means that if the writer’s work is not going well then he’ll also not be able to create a way of looking at a thing that’s sustaining, so if it’s going well then he’s doing better than everybody, but if he’s doing poorly, he’s doing worse than everyone. If it’s poor, it can be conducive to continuing to be poor or conducive to hanging yourself on your patio while your wife is away. But you should read his piece about television and irony—”

Mental note: read his piece about television and irony.

“He has a lot of writing about television and the pernicious effect of television advertising on our brains, the ways it makes you feel inadequate as a way of promoting a product. Just the way that feeds on itself. He didn’t write a whole bunch about the Internet and how the Internet is kind of toxic in the same way, but in his way he sort of presented the picture of what was going on.”

The waitress brought the tab. I laid down The Monarch Review’s credit card (that’s so fun to say!). Chris took another sip of his vodka soda. I decided to stick in a thought about snark. “I feel like I hadn’t heard the word ‘snarky’ before maybe two years ago,” I said. “Now I hear it all the time–”

“Did you read that essay in The Believer about snark?”

“No.” Mental note: read The Believer.

“Well, The Believer’s whole thing is that they think you don’t have to be snarky to write well about something. It’s a beautiful mission and I love them for it, but meanwhile, I kind of disagree. I actually think that snarky writing, while most of it is annoying – if a writer is really smart, it’s fine. If the writer did his homework and he’s being snarky, it’s fine. It’s only when the writer hasn’t does his homework and he’s just being snarky because he has nothing else, like he’s running on fumes. But writers like Lindy West are brilliant, she’s thought it through. There’s great examples of art criticism, theater criticism, literature criticism going back at least a century that’s really mean, really fucking mean – read some of Virginia Wolfe’s book reviews, she’s a fucking bitch. It’s unbelievable! She just rips people apart. It’s personal, and it’s sassy, and it’s sarcastic, and it’s mean, and it’s good, that’s the thing. Or how about Dorothy Parker’s reviews. She would write about going to a play and shooting herself in the middle of it. And then about waking up, having grazed her forehead, and she’s bleeding everywhere and she keeps writing the review of the play – fucking brilliant, right?”

“Right!”

“She wrote in the 20’s for The New Yorker and Vanity Fair. The meanness is not the point, weirdly. Getting obsessed with whether the writer is right to like the thing misses the point. The point is the work of art, itself. If the writing is strong enough, it makes you alive to whatever is being written about. It makes you alive to this movie, it makes you alive to this book. And at The Stranger we don’t believe in presenting a so-called ‘objective’ presentation of something. You’re going to go find the facts and write about what you find. I just want to know, you as the reporter, what did you find, what did you make of this? I’d rather have that than an ‘objective’ or ostensibly balanced portrait, because pretending to be objective is a false position. ”

“What’s the biggest problem with this sort of mission?”

“That those people who want to disagree with us can easily claim that we’re not serious, that we’re not journalists. But we never said we were serious. We never once said we’re a serious paper. We do serious things sometimes, but we never said, ‘We’re Serious!’”

Chris got up from his chair at this point. He said, “I’m going to go tinkle, I’ll be right back.” He turned back to me with a smile, “Sorry I said ‘tinkle’.” I sat there and said things into the recorder: what I ate, what he ate, what we were drinking, a few keywords like: Café Presse, French fries, parsnip soup, vodka soda. The waitress came to take the credit card. A minute passed and Chris came back from around the corner. He sat down, his presence shaking the silverware. “What else?”

“How did you meet Dan?”

“I was at The Seattle Weekly and I became friends with the News Editor of The Stranger through the Editor the Weekly – that’s how I met Dan. Then two of the editors that worked at the Weekly got fired and I told my friend at The Stranger about it and I was like, ‘I don’t want to work here anymore, the only two editors here that I thought were any good just got fired.’ So Dan was trying to convince me to write a piece from the inside what it was like working at the Weekly and being miserable. But I decided not to do that, I thought it would be a shitty thing to do, but we talked about it for a while. But there’s this weird mythology that I sent articles to Dan or covers to him, and that’s totally not true.”

“Last question: Why have you stayed at The Stranger—”

“Because I have the best job on the west coast, at least. The amount of freedom I get is amazing – when Dan was the editor The Stranger didn’t publish fiction and poetry, because Dan doesn’t read fiction and poetry. But I do. And when I took over I said, ‘I want to publish fiction and poetry,’ and they said, ‘Okay.’ Even though, you know, poetry’s not a moneymaker. Not many people are clamoring for more poetry in their newspapers. So the fact that I can waltz in and say, ‘I want to do this.’ And they say, ‘Sure’, is amazing. And what other publication is as funny as us? I just feel so lucky that to blow it, to walk away for some corporate job, or some job in New York, is so stupid when I can be here and help create this awesome beacon of literary culture. Now that it’s free to send information anywhere because of the Internet, cultural centers are changing, at least a little. The fact that we can publish all this original Sherman Alexie stuff, Dan Savage stuff, can be the place where Lindy West got her name, can be where Eli Sanders got his Pulitzer Prize, the fact that we can turn out these amazing writing careers, and we’re still in business and we’re doing fine, I would rather be in on that scene, which is so much more interesting and not a cliché and actually breaking into new territory than go grovel in New York City somewhere and maybe be the editor of some magazine I wouldn’t even want to read.”

The waitress approached our table, back with the credit card. She cleared the rest of the plates. I thought it a fine time to turn the recorder off. Chris proceeded to say some of the most brilliant stuff anyone has ever uttered. But that’s only because the recorder was shut off. I thanked him again. We walked through the front door of Café Presse. We got to the street corner, shook hands. Then he went his way and I went mine.