Contemporary Authors

1. My own devices : true stories from the road on music, science, and senseless love https://lccn.loc.gov/2017061527 Dessa (Vocalist), author. My own devices : true stories from the road on music, science, and senseless love / Dessa. New York, New York : Dutton, [2018] 1 online resource. ISBN: 9781524742300 (ebook) 2. My own devices : true stories from the road on music, science, and senseless love https://lccn.loc.gov/2017061172 Dessa (Vocalist), author. My own devices : true stories from the road on music, science, and senseless love / Dessa. New York, New York : Dutton, [2018] pages cm ML420.D479 A3 2018 ISBN: 9781524742294 (hc)

• Dessa Bandcamp - https://dessa.bandcamp.com/

  Combining wit, tenderness, and poetic sensibility to rare effect, Dessa spins delicate and charged stories and animates them with her expressive alto voice, arresting for its honest, clear simplicity. Transcending the restrictions of genre to reveal an astonishing multi-platform voice. Member of the Doomtree collective. Essayist. Rapper. Amaretto enthusiast.

• The Loft - https://www.loft.org/classes/teaching_artists/teaching_artist_detail/?ta=354

  Dessa Wander

  Dessa, a member of the Doomtree hip-hop crew, has made a career out of bucking traditional genre designations—from rapping at Lollapalooza to arranging for full choir. She co-wrote an episode of the chart-topping podcast Welcome to Night Vale, and was tapped by Lin-Manuel Miranda to record the song “Congratulations” for Billboard’s #1 album The Hamilton Mixtape. Her forthcoming album, Chime, debuts on February 23, 2018. As a writer, Dessa has contributed to The New York Times Magazine, MPR, the Star Tribune, and literary journals around the country. She has published two short works of her own: Spiral Bound (Doomtree Press) and A Pound of Steam (Rain Taxi). Her new collection of essays is My Own Devices (Dutton Books /Penguin Random House).

• Penguin Randomhouse - https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/2188092/dessa

  Dessa is a rapper, a singer, an essayist, and a proud member of the Doomtree hip-hop crew. She’s performed around the world at opera houses and rock clubs and while standing on barroom tables. She’s landed on the Billboard Top 200 list as a solo artist (Parts of Speech, Chime), as a Doomtree member (All Hands), and as a contributor to The Hamilton Mixtape. As a writer, she’s contributed to the New York Times Magazine, Minnesota Public Radio, the Star Tribune (Minneapolis), Minnesota Monthly, literary journals across the country, and has published two short collections of poetry and essays. She now splits her time between Manhattan, Minneapolis, and a tour van cruising at six miles per hour above the posted limit.

• Dessa Wander - https://www.dessawander.com/

  Singer, rapper, and writer Dessa has made a career of bucking genres and defying expectations—her résumé as a musician includes performances at Lollapalooza and Glastonbury, performances with the Minnesota Orchestra, and a top-200 entry on the Billboard charts for her album Chime.

  As a writer, she’s been published by the New York Times, broadcast by Minnesota Public Radio, published two literary collections of her own, and is set to release her first hardcover collection with Dutton Books in the fall of 2018.

Dessa: MY OWN DEVICES
Kirkus Reviews.
(July 1, 2018): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Dessa MY OWN DEVICES Dutton (Adult Nonfiction) $26.00 9, 18 ISBN: 978-1-5247-4229-4 A rapper shows that her facility with language and revelation extends beyond music.
Though the memoir proceeds pretty much chronologically, it is more like a series of pieces, each with its own focus, than a cohesive narrative. A Minneapolis transplant to New York, raised by a Puerto Rican mother and a Caucasian father, with a degree in philosophy and a background in medical writing, Dessa (Spiral Bound, 2009, etc.) has consistently transcended conventional stereotyping, and her writing should command interest even from readers who know nothing of her work with the Doomtree collective and her solo releases. By her own admission, she came to music late--"in my midtwenties I was old enough to be a retired rapper--inexperienced and without good odds on making it a sustainable career. She succeeded through what she calls "the Tinker Bell model. She's only real because she is clapped into existence....The Tinker Bell model is the nuclear option. It taps every reserve. It permits no Plan Bs." Beyond artistic drive, the obsessive undercurrent of this memoir is her on-again, off-again romance with a crewmate (and soul mate?) identified only as X; the relationship was incredibly passionate but so combustible it couldn't sustain itself. Dessa's mother and father were equally driven in unorthodox directions, as the former started raising cattle and the latter devoted years to building his own one-man airplane. Some of the narrative is a standard tour diary, what it's like to be on the road, where, she quotes a Doomtree rapper, you're "a traveling T-shirt salesman." She writes of an assignment from the New York Times Magazine in which she was to visit New Orleans like a tourist (so different from visiting as a touring musician), and she writes of her sidelights delivering lectures and performance pieces and of her invitation to contribute to "The Hamilton Mixtape." It has been a singular career, and it is by no means over.
An above-average memoir that itself serves as the musician's next career chapter. Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
1 of 2 9/30/18, 5:01 PM
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"Dessa: MY OWN DEVICES." Kirkus Reviews, 1 July 2018. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A544638024/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=532c02dc. Accessed 30 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A544638024
2 of 2 9/30/18, 5:01 PM

"Dessa: MY OWN DEVICES." Kirkus Reviews, 1 July 2018. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A544638024/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=532c02dc. Accessed 30 Sept. 2018.

• 507 Magazin
  https://www.postbulletin.com/magazines/507/dessa-talks-my-own-devices-release/article_35d122a0-bb59-11e8-b96d-2379dcc069f7.html
  Word count: 1604

  Minnesota rapper, singer, essayist, and self-described science nerd Dessa can now add full-length, hardcover author to her life’s resume.

  In her new collection of short essays, "My Own Devices," published by Penguin Random House, she delves into deeply personal, honest, and thoughtful musings on life through love, music, and touring.

  In a chat before the book published, Dessa touched on her writing process, the emotions within her essays, and what Rochester can expect when she stops by Café Steam on Wednesday, Sept. 26 on the book tour.
  +1
  devices.jpeg

  How does the difficulty of writing "My Own Devices" compare to your other work?

  I think making anything genuinely excellent, for me, has always been hard. I have an aptitude for the language arts, but I've demonstrated nothing akin to prodigy. So, for me, trying to get really good at any craft has taken a lot of work. To write something that's worthy of a hardcover release, isn't done quickly or easily. It ended up being a book I'm really proud of, but I think it took a lot of reiterating. I think this is the twentieth draft… Working with a hot shot New York publishing house isn't easy – it's hard!

  Touching on your process as a writer, do you use a Moleskine notebook, iPhone notes?

  For me usually the beginning of a song, poem, or essay arrives with a little phrase or a sentence or two and I try to just capture that in whatever means is easily available. So whether that's jotting out an iPhone note or writing something on the back of a gas receipt, or in a Moleskine notebook, I'll do that to kind of capture that first idea. And then after that, I'll move pretty quickly, when I'm beginning to assemble a final product, I'll move pretty quickly into Microsoft word.

  How'd you weave through to pick and choose moments in your last years to write about within this collection?

  Well, I think that the genre – which is called creative non-fiction and encapsulates this kind of work – is akin to photography. So like a painter starts with a blank canvas, picks a palette and then dreams something up from nothing or a reference, a photographer is waiting for or posing an image in the real world that is worth sharing.

  Similarly, I think creative non-fiction is like that. You wait until art wanders in front of your pen, you know, and sometimes that can be a single vignette. Sometimes that's a story that takes five or six years to unfold, and I think both kinds of those stories are in the book. I have stories that originated from backstage conversations between Doomtree. We have a habit – like every other road trip group – to play a lot of "Would You Rather." Expanding from a child's game into more of a serious adult's game, and then into more of a philosophical game of who and how we love and what we would give up to do so starts to feel less hypothetical after you've done this thing for ten years. Being on the road makes it difficult to have lasting human relationships at home and just making it possible. All the sudden you're living a game of "Would You Rather" and not just playing it in the back seat.

  And then every once in a while, there will just be a cool science fact that has some artistic potential. So one of the essays is about the mirror test, which is a test that animal researchers use to try to determine which creatures are self aware, and they do that by noting which creatures seem to be able to recognize themselves in a mirror. That was an opportunity to question not only what self-awareness was and which creatures pass that test, but also to explore the idea of vanity and aging. You only think until and include what all is fascinating, and then you cut the rest. It's like cropping a picture, right? I think part of the job of creative non-fiction is knowing when to start and stop writing.

  Obviously, these are all true accounts and thoughts in your life, but has your relationship with any of them changed?

  I think that even if the tone changes, the thematic concepts to which I'm most attracted, very often holds firm. So, for me trying to figure out what it means to be human and where we're supposed to look for meaning, how and when we find our most valuable connections with other people and how to handle loss – I think those are the themes I circle around a lot. And then because I'm a science geek, I like trying to examine those very often emotionally-laden topics through a technical lens. So, incorporating genetics or neuroscience or aviation principles to a very personal story – I like doing that, kind of varying the technical and the intimate details.

  Now that the pen's down and the book is out, will discussing these topics and stories on the book tour dates bring you back the emotions of these memories?

  Will it hurt? Yeah, I think it probably will hurt sometimes. I don't know exactly how it's going to feel. It's a more candid account than my albums have been for sure, so there is a degree of weirdness that can arise from talking to strangers about your most intimate feelings, but at the same time I sort of feel I've been in cross-training for that with the records.

  I think if you just say it plainly, if you decide it's not a secret, that helps. Like, 'Hey, I've been totally busted on occasion,' Well most people have, too. There's this pageantry that we run around looking professional for most of our lives. We all fundamentally understand that that is untrue. That the way people are on Instagram is not a full picture of them; that the way people look on Monday mornings when they're reporting to work is not copying a look on Sunday afternoon. So I think there's a shared fiction that we can dispose of when we're talking about real shit, if someone invites us to.

  With all of these personal accounts that people will be reading, I'm not sure if there's an end goal for you, but if there is, what are you hoping people walk away with?

  Yeah, I mean I hope they are moved, and I hope that there are turns of phrase that have kind of burrowed into their memories. But to be honest, neither in music nor in writing do I identify an objective goal that I hope my readers or listeners will experience. I figure that's on them. In the same way that a solidly constructed song may resonate for slightly different reasons, which isn't to say that it's completely subjective and could be about anything... That's not what I mean at all; I know exactly what the book is about – I wrote it that way. But I figure which parts resonate and why they resonate are probably going vary from reader to reader because they've all had different experiences. So, for me, it's just trusting the book to do its own work, in the same way I try to trust songs to do their own work. You make them really well, if you can, and then there's a new relationship that sparks between the readers and listeners at that point.

  You'll be having these stops in Seattle, New York, Boston, etc. Why did Rochester get on that list as well?

  Minnesota is my home state, and now I split my time between Minneapolis and New York. But Rochester's been a place that has always been really welcoming to me and my band. Especially in the past five to ten years, there's been a real commitment and enthusiasm to cultural events, and it's been a really good. I'm hoping there will still be some interest in the new project.

  Have you thought about what a book tour means for you? Do you still get hyped up before a book stop?

  I think in both cases it's trying to figure out what the realest experience I can provide is. So, if you don't feel like jumping up and down and creating a party, then don't do that, you know? For me, maybe that'll mean picking slightly different passages to read from or having different conversations. But I think reading the room, trying to figure out, is it a late night where people are trying to flirt and play and have a glass of champagne or does this feel like a crowd in a well-lit room that's eager to really engage in philosophical ideas? I try and engage in the vibe of the room and time as opposed to opposing my plan upon the people gathered – it's always been trying to use the energy in the room as raw material to build something.

  Is there anything else you think people should know before diving into the book?

  I think if I've done it well, I think the book will speak for itself. For me, I'd be excited if people are game to come through and come say hello at the Rochester appearance – I'll be looking forward to it. They'll either dig it or they won't when they get it!

• Hello Giggles
  https://hellogiggles.com/reviews-coverage/my-own-devices-dessa-interview/
  Word count: 3229

  My Own Devices is a beautiful collection of essays about heartache, complicated love, and using science to get over your ex
  Sam Gehrke
  Elizabeth Entenman
  September 18, 2018 11:49 am

  Every once in a while, a book comes along that helps me see and understand myself in a way I never quite have before. That’s exactly what happened when I read Dessa’s new collection of essays, My Own Devices: True Stories from the Road on Music, Science, and Senseless Love.

  If you don’t already know Dessa from the Minneapolis-based indie hip-hop collective Doomtree, her solo career as a rapper, or her track on The Hamilton Mixtape, you’ll instantly fall in love with her beautiful, scientific brain. My Own Devices offers a fascinating look inside her mind. Dessa questions how love works, explores what makes her human, and ponders ways to maximize agency and free will. She opens up so fully and honestly about heartache—not heartbreak, but heartache—that you’ll wonder if you accidentally picked up a copy of her private journal instead of her book.

  But what hit me the hardest were her remarks on sadness and blueness. Dessa describes herself as “naturally melancholic” and assures you that sometimes it’s okay to want to feel other feelings more than you want to feel happiness. She understands the importance of processing sadness and is quick to remind us that experiencing it doesn’t mean you’re doing anything wrong—a powerful notion I wish we heard more often.

  I spoke with Dessa about her path from writing lyrics to writing prose, the vulnerability that comes with opening up so deeply, and how she enlisted a team of neuroscientists to help her fall out of love with her ex-boyfriend. (Yes, really. She also once wrote a letter to Geico in hopes of insuring her heartache as a professional asset.) Prepare to feel feelings.

  Dutton
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  HelloGiggles: What was the road to writing My Own Devices?
  Dessa: The cart was well before the horse in that I had wanted to be a writer, and I loved creating nonfiction, since I took my first course in it at the University of Minnesota as a late teenager, 19 or 20. My aspiration had been to become a writer, and having graduated, I wasn’t exactly sure how to materialize that objective. I sent a lot of unsolicited submissions to literary magazines and realized that probably wasn’t going to pay rent. [Laughs.] I entered music rather circuitously through the world of slam [poetry]. After I wasn’t really finding a path into the publishing world, a friend of mine recommended that I compete at a poetry slam, which is essentially competitive spoken word. It was there that I connected with members of the hip-hop community in Minneapolis, who said, “You should try doing that, but over music.” That was my entrance into hip-hop performance. I had wanted the book before I’d wanted the rap career. For the most part, I’ve been writing, not always with an impressive output of material necessarily, but I’ve always been writing on the side throughout my musical career. Writing was always happening on a parallel track.

  HG: Your songs are filled with dramatic metaphor, but the book gives you more real estate for prose than a three-minute song does. How was writing My Own Devices different from writing lyrics or poems?
  D: You used the term “real estate.” Part of it does have to do with the quantity of ink—how many ounces you’re allotted, essentially, in the course of a three-and-a-half-minute song vs. a couple hundred pages of prose. But I think also, you’re reporting to different masters; your objectives are different on the stage and on the page. In writing lyrics, you want to make sure that you’re penning performable phrases. You care about the sonic quality of the words, and even more than that, the percussive quality of the words. And you want to make sure that you avoid homonyms that can be confusing, because you know if you deliver them—you’re working in primarily auditory form—that those can be an impediment to understanding for listeners. Whereas you’re never reading your own book in a timed speed trial. For rap, being able to deliver a given line is an important concern.

  I think the book and a lot of my songs investigate the same questions. There’s a layer of figurative language that provides a veil of privacy in songs, whereas that would get tiresome, I think, for a full-length book. In three and a half minutes, your task is to create a feeling and present phrases that are both emotionally impactful and clever enough to gain purchase in a new listener’s mind. A book is a really different endeavor. Part of it is just temporal. To listen to an entire album, while it may take a year to make, takes about 40 minutes. But to read a book takes hours. You’re asking a different thing of a reader, so you provide something that’s commensurate to the ask that you’re making.

  HG: Was it nerve wracking to put your emotions on full display?
  D: Yes. Yes. The answer to that is yes. A lot of my songs run on what I hope are very well crafted metaphors, but they’re still metaphors. So you don’t have to divulge the affidavit of an experience; you’re creating an impression of a feeling. In a book, there’s room and good reason to include the details of an emotional experience, which means a greater degree of vulnerability. It’s sort of like having sex under fluorescent lights. [Laughs.] There’s just not a lot you’re gonna get away with and still have an honest experience.

  HG: My Own Devices dives into some of your personal relationships, including family members and your ex-boyfriend, who you call “X.” Have any of them read it yet?
  D: Before I published it, I sent essays that I thought might be tender to anybody who I talked about. My dad was one of the dudes who was like, “I’m not gonna read it. I think you should write the truth even if it makes you look uncomfortable. It’s your book to write.” And my brother was like, “I would rather have you write a true story than one where I look cool.” I sent the ones that mention my ex to him, and I was like, “Hey, if anything is factually incorrect, or if you remember anything differently, or if there’s anything that’s going to be horrible to have in print, will you holler at me?”

  I’m lucky, because the two men I’ve dated as a grownup—one of them I mention briefly in the book, but we’ve been together for four years—are also musicians. They’ve written songs about me, and I’ve written songs about them. It’s not quid pro quo, but in some way, I think all of us are interested in good art, even if it was someone else’s, and even if it meant forfeiting some of our own privacy.

  HG: Let’s talk about X. You enlisted the help of professionals for a very elaborate brain experiment and brain training to help you fall out of love with him.
  D: I was drawn to this idea about mapping and essentially trying to eradicate the romantic love in my own brain by a lot of forces. I was in the throes of a really protractive breakup, and I couldn’t seem to recover at the rate at which the people around me were recuperating from heartbreak. I didn’t know why it was taking so long and why I couldn’t get over it, and I found that painful and embarrassing and a tax on my other relationships. I’m singing this one song, both literally and figuratively, to all my friends all the time about being blue. And that sucks. So I was drawn to the idea that one might be able to change the way that their brain is functioning in an effort to speed a healthy, emotional recovery. That was fascinating to me, because I very much wanted a healthy, emotional recovery.

  Also, I’m a science geek, and I was blown away by the idea that there might be a physical locus for romantic love in the brain that was differentiated from platonic love or a mother’s love. I was surprised by that and my curiosity was aroused. And also, I’m making my living as a musician and a writer, so I’m naturally attracted to unusual experiences and the effort of investigating them artistically, too. All three things—art, science, and a broken heart—coalesced in this one potential endeavor.

  HG: Now that more time has passed, do you think it worked? Did it make a difference?
  D: It did make a difference. I don’t want to overstate it; it’s not like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. When I see this dude, I’m not like, “I’m sorry, who are you?” But it did help. I did feel like I was in the throes of a relentless fixation. I wasn’t totally feeling like I was at the helm of my own thoughts. Although I can still be sad and have a pang of pain or loss, or contemplate past failed relationships, I don’t feel like I’ve got my fingers in the socket and like I’m being electrocuted by sadness. It’s not all-consuming, and it did feel all-consuming for a while.

  HG: You talk about sadness so beautifully that it almost makes it not sad. Something that really resonated with me was that feeling blue doesn’t necessarily mean you’re doing something wrong.
  D: I was really slow to consider that. It took right up until writing that; it just hadn’t occurred to me. I thought it was an indictment of me somehow—I was fucking up if I was sad. Like a lot of people, I’ve read, at least in passing, some of the current thinking on mood and sadness. I was actually just emailing with my childhood best friend today, and she was talking about the fact that some recent research does imply that disposition is considerably genetically determined, like your height or your blood type. The best way to be reliably happy is to be born with a genetic predisposition to happiness. [Laughs.]

  I don’t want to force the metaphor, but you know how there’s this one look that a woman’s supposed to have in any given American era? We all sort of bend ourselves out of shape trying to meet that model. I wonder if, in some ways, it’s corollary to mood. I’m supposed to be buoyant and Instagrammable, and if I’m not, then I’m gonna take another hot yoga class or whatever the fuck it is that people do to try and feel happy and centered instead of saying, “Oh, this is just how I’m built. If it’s totally impeding my life, then I ought to figure it out. But if it’s just how I’m built, then maybe I should just try to build where I am.”

  HG: I like that you embrace sadness. It would be inauthentic to recall memories of past relationships and pretend like they were amazing all the time.
  D: I don’t know if that’s universal or not, but I think it’s almost universal that a lot of us, at some point if we’re really pushed to the wall, would prioritize a couple of things over happiness. Ours or other people’s. It’s like that matrix thought experiment: Would you want to be happy at the expense of understanding your own lie? Would you want to be happy if you were living a lie? Would you want to be happy if you were really just a brain in a vat? No. I think you’d want to unplug and run around with Neo.

  HG: “Congratulations,” your track on The Hamilton Mixtape, hits even more deeply now that I’ve learned more about your relationship history. Did Lin-Manual Miranda know any of this when he asked you to do it?
  D: No. [Laughs.] I sent him the book, so if he’s had a chance to read it, he probably does now.

  HG: At 5 a.m. you’ll be tagged in a long tweet about seizing the day.
  D: [Laughs.] Oh, yeah totally!…Oh, god.

  HG: You had a lot of big questions going into the book: How free is free will? How does love work? Is it always good? Do you feel like you have some answers now?
  D: I think that I’ve got better lenses. I know that some writers really derive a therapeutic value from the articulation of their struggles, worries, and conflicts. I don’t know that I do. But I do derive, I think, an intellectual clarity. When I have to sit down and write something out—a philosophical question that’s been nagging at me, or a moral question that I’m struggling with in my own life—I think being tasked with the job of writing it in plain, clear language helps me better understand my own questions, even if I don’t arrive at perfect answers. I understand the field before me. But some of those questions to which I feel I’m attracted, you don’t answer definitively for your whole life. Love is not always, as I’ve experienced it, and as I’ve talked to a lot of people—I don’t think it is always good.

  HG: I agree with that.
  D: It’s funny how many people don’t. Most everybody thinks love is always good, but I don’t think so. I just finished reading Trevor Noah’s book. In other cultures—we’re a minority in almost every way, the way we live our lives in the U.S.—love looks really different the way that it’s behaved around the world. And love is often coupled inextricably with a lot of less praise-worthy feelings and practices.

  HG: How do you deal on days when it’s hard to make art or bring your vision to life?
  D: I think the hurdles are different on different days. Sometimes, it’s just that I can’t seem to figure out what the puzzle picture is supposed to be. I’ve got all these pieces and they seem meritorious considered individually, but I’m not sure how the fuck to put them together. So that’s a hurdle internally—a lack of vision.

  On the days when I feel like I’ve done something wonderful and I don’t know how to get it out there, I admit that sometimes I vacillate. I know some people don’t read any comments, and they don’t care what the marketplace thinks, and I admit that I’m not that. I do care about reaching people. My opinion matters more than those of my friends, and way more than those of people I’ve never met, because I don’t know what their tastes are, and I have no idea how to calibrate their tastes to my vision. But it does matter to me if it’s not resonating with an audience. Sometimes, if my work isn’t resonating, I get frustrated and wish that I had the budget to do an extraordinary marketing campaign. Sometimes, if my work isn’t resonating, I’ll second-guess the work.

  HG: What is the most useful career advice you’ve ever gotten?
  D: I think it’s changed a lot over the years. When I was starting, my dad said, “Keep your overhead low.” I think that was one of the pieces of advice that best shaped my early career. I didn’t have to spend as many hours working to finance my life, because my life was really inexpensive. That means that there’s a lot of time to hang out with artists and try to get better at what you do. I was hanging out with the editor of Rain Taxi once, drinking after a show, and he said, “The hardest thing to be is yourself.” And at that point in my career, I thought, “Shit, yeah.”

  I have a sign in my apartment right now that asks, “Is that what you really think?” We fall into habits of mind that, unless we really take inventory, we might not realize are outmoded. I realized two years ago that I was buying more clothes that were green. And I was like, “Wait a minute, I’ve never liked green. Maybe I should check what my favorite color is. Maybe it’s fucking changed and I just said red all the time, because that’s always been true. Do I like green more now?” That’s a fundamental truth of yourself. Unless you check, you might have incrementally changed in a way that would surprise you—how far you’ve drifted or evolved since the last time you actually took an appraisal of yourself.

  More than that, how many assumptions do I take on face? Even things I know I believe, like climate change. I realized I should fucking know what studies I’m sourcing instead of just saying, “There’s a scientific consensus.” If someone said, “What the fuck are you talking about?” I do not have a good answer. Make sure I have a good answer. On what grounds are your beliefs founded? I think it’s surprising how many of our fundamental beliefs are not grounded on anything. I remember reading some book about how the biggest things you know about yourself—your name, your birthday—are total heresy. Check. I like that.

  HG: What’s your favorite book that you’ve read recently?
  D: I like Gulp by Mary Roach. I’m still sort of deciding what my final review of it is, but I really liked reading the short novel Grief is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter, because it’s such a different way of using language than I know how to use language, and it made me want to figure out how to work in that lane a little bit. Oh, and one more: Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain. Aw, man.

  My Own Devices is now available wherever books are sold.
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  https://hellogiggles.com/reviews-coverage/my-own-devices-dessa-interview/

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