#055: How Books Spark Empathy, Community, And Cultural Change With Will Evans

What if a book isn’t just entertainment but civic infrastructure? We sit down with Will Evans—publisher, bookseller, and founder of Deep Vellum—to explore how reading rewires the brain for empathy, how curation beats overwhelm, and why a single bookstore can change the texture of a neighborhood. From the rise of Dallas’s literary ecosystem to the surprising power of BookTok resurrecting Dostoevsky, we follow the threads that connect curiosity, translation, and community.

Will shares why physical books still matter in a digital age, explaining how spatial memory and the tactile act of reading fire up the parts of our mind that help us feel what others feel. We talk about publishing “outside of time” to protect voices that fall through commercial cracks—formally daring novels, international literature, and titles that return to shape public life decades later, like The Accommodation. Along the way, he traces his own path through Russian literature, the questions that great fiction refuses to stop asking, and the teachers who convert students into lifelong readers.

We also tackle the age-nine reading drop-off, practical ways to invite reluctant readers back in, and the role of bookstores as cultural anchors rather than mere retail. If you care about translation, local history, or how stories can heal fractured streets, you’ll find tactics and inspiration here: meet people where they are, center curiosity over credential, and build a constellation of partners—schools, libraries, indie shops, and readers—who turn a city into a literary home.

Subscribe, share with a friend who needs a new gateway book, and leave a review with the title that first made you feel seen. Your story might be the spark that brings a new reader inside the tent.

Will's Profile
Will's Website

This is Maddox & Dwight! More than anything, we want to connect and communicate with you. We don't want to think of you as listeners. We want to think of you as community. So, scroll to the bottom of the show notes and click the SUBSCRIBE link. Thank you!

Thank you for listening to the For the Love of Creatives Podcast. If you are enjoying the podcast, please scroll to the bottom of the show notes and Rate & Review us. We would SO appreciate it.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:34

And that's when I got a mustache and some tattoos. And I turned down a PhD program in Russian literature to do that. And in that journal, the first entry was pretty much everything I just told you. I wrote it down 20 years ago. And uh I'm just obsessed with this idea of like uh art, literature especially, but all art as like a part of the real world and a part of change, like how we come together, how we can unite, how we can get shared values, you know. Uh, and I think that's really important. It's something, you know, that often feels lacking in our society today. You can feel really fractured, like maybe I don't have the same values as my neighbor. And of course, you know, there's there's all sorts of philosophies that all boil down to we gotta love thy neighbor one way or another. It's not just one book that says that, it's a lot of books that say that. And so how do you how do you find this way in when things feel so divided?

SPEAKER_02 1:29

Hello and welcome to another episode of For the Love of Creatives Podcast. You're uh going to be on this ride with your hosts, Dwight and Maddox, and today we are joined by the wonderful Will Evans. Hello, Will.

SPEAKER_00 1:44

Howdy. Uh it's great to be here.

SPEAKER_02 1:47

Uh so uh I know that I've had the chance to see you grace a couple of stages in town, and uh I'm really intrigued by the way that you provide a platform for uh for people that want to tell great stories, and you've done a lot of impactful work. But uh for uh anyone that that might be listening, they they might not know who you are and what you're about. So could you just uh tell a little bit about who the real Will Evans is?

From Publishing To Advocacy

SPEAKER_00 2:20

Oh, uh the real Will Evans, that's what this is about. Yeah, it's an honor again to be here. Um and it's cool you've gotten to see me speak on a couple stages in town. That's unique for someone in sort of my line of work. And it it means a lot to be able to go out to different audiences and talk about this. It means a lot to be here today. Um, so I'm Will Evans, and I founded a company in Dallas called Deep Vellum when I moved here in 2013. It's a literary arts nonprofit with the mission to bring the world into conversation through literature. And we do that by publishing books. Uh, but it's never just enough to publish books. So we also have a bookstore and we do a lot of events programming around the literary arts of reading, writing, translation, publishing, printing, zine making, print making, bookmaking, um, and hosting author events, creative writing workshops, classes, et cetera, in partnership with uh just about everyone we can imagine in Dallas, trying to go to where people are. And then we do a lot of literary arts advocacy, you know, talking about the value of the literary arts in our lives. There wasn't a uh, there was a very active literary community when I moved to Dallas, but there hadn't been some of the pieces and the key stakeholders that it takes to really build a vibrant, like business and nonprofit kind of community around uh literature in the city. And so we tapped into some of the great resources that the city has, namely its people, and then some of the great resources uh that still remain to be built, and we're going from there.

SPEAKER_02 3:37

And that's great work that you're doing because I I think about how so much is lost in today's world where people want just really quick um consumable content. You know, they they uh TikTok has has really done a lot to rot the brains of the youth. And I think that it's uh something that's infectious and people aren't reading anymore. And you're you're really kind of anchoring us back to something that is essential and human and you know, just a a real part of life that we all need.

Are People Reading Less Or More

Why The Physical Book Matters

Global Literature And Translation

SPEAKER_00 4:18

Absolutely. Uh I I will push back on the negative part of that at the beginning. Like, you know, in this era of TikTok and Instagram reels, and um, there's always every day there's a new article in the paper bemoaning the state of reading, you know, in town and uh or in the world that people aren't reading enough for fun, people aren't reading at all, people aren't literate, and they're all true, right? But at the same time, we live in an era in which people are reading more than ever, right? On their phones, they're reading short form content. Um, and they're also reading books in extraordinary numbers, right? But this is the kind of thing like we we provide an immersive experience. So if you think about it in terms of like entertainment, a book is is a very unique like technological product in that it the form of the book as we know it, right? I'm I'm surrounded by them in every everywhere I go. Um, they the product hasn't really changed in thousands, thousands of years, right? You put words on the page and you bind it, whether it was on papyrus or vellum, the material that like the ancient Greeks wrote on. Uh the reason we can read them today is because it was so durable. That technology is still the same. That's that's pretty amazing. So you're holding a uh a technological product that is uniquely mapped, that every language of the world, this is something I like am so I'm like, you know, a little bit of a nerd if you couldn't tell. And like I am obsessed with certain things. And one of the things I'm obsessed with is that like there are languages I don't know. I grew up in a monolingual household in a monolingual family in a pretty much monolingual country. Uh, and we, you know, neglect the world. America exports culture everywhere, and we don't take as much in. And so that was like part of the reason we did Deep Vellum. We published a lot of international literature. Um, I studied Russian literature, it's what got me obsessed with this. But when you look at another language, obviously you can't read it. And yet every language of the world puts books together the same way, whether it reads left to right, right to left, top to bottom, bottom to top, like whatever way it goes, the book is kind of a beautiful technological product. And when you read it, this is where it gets fascinating. It gets mapped to your brain. Like, this is what's fascinating. It gets mapped to your brain to go to the long-term recall part of your brain, and it activates all these flared sensors in your brain to create the imagery, to feel the feels that the characters are there for. Like so that the way the author is describing the experience, the feelings, the emotion, the power, and that's the same part of the brain that flares empathetic connection, the connection between humans, right? And and so that that pathway is uniquely linked to the written word. It is totally unexplainable. It's it's pure magic, it's pure alchemy, it's pure science, it's pure technology, and yet it's like the magic of all of like all humanity is captured in the book. And so when you get into it, it's different than watching a movie, it's different than reading real. It's different. And and what's crazy is when you read the same stuff on an e-book or you listen to an audiobook, and I read a lot of e-books and audiobooks. This is not to judge, it's just to say it doesn't flare up all the same parts of the brain. There's something about the the holding the object and the way that brains, human brains, map spatial recognition and we do the uh the recall towards certain things. Like, how many times there have been like, I remember it was on the bottom left of that page, it's mapped in your brain in a cool way, and it helps you go there. Um, so it's something really beautiful. And so for us, it's like this taking this conversation that's happening in the world, right? So someone's writing in Russian, or they're writing in Ukrainian, or they're writing in uh Chinese, and we're able to bring that conversation on the page so that you and I can have a conversation with each other about it, and then also with the author, right? And that conversation between the reader and the author is really unique. And what makes Deep Vellum unique in our world is that we don't just publish books. A lot of our people, I mean, they people just publish books. And these are the same people were fine with the fact that when I moved to Dallas, Texas in 2013, there was one independent bookstore in Dallas, Texas, three in all of DFW selling new books. Three in all of DFW serving 8 million people, right? Three independent bookstores selling new books. We did a bookstore crawl, we participated in one that was organized this past year by Katie Lemieux and her crew at Talking Animals Books in Grapevine. They did a bookvine, they did a bookstore crawl, and we had 31 participating stores.

SPEAKER_02 8:15

Oh, how wonderful.

SPEAKER_00 8:17

But someone was okay with the fact that in 2013 there were only three bookstores selling new books and all DFW, right? And none of those stores were really selling deep vellums type of books. And so we had to go out there and like create it. And so for us, it's not just enough to publish a book and sell it to people in New York and say, yeah, end of story and get nominated for prizes in New York and London and be like, yay, the job is done. We're here to say, man, Dwight, Maddox, have you read a Deep Vellum book? Actually, have you read a book? And if you haven't, it's not your fault.

unknown 8:47

Right.

Building A Book Culture In Dallas

SPEAKER_00 8:47

Like we have to provide the invitation for people to come to literature. And this is where it gets really fun and passionate, man, is that like I have a nine-year-old son, he's one of the sick kids as we record this today in the house. But like, he's nine years old right now. So if you're watching this in a hundred years, my son was nine, and nine years old, they've discovered, is the age at which people stop reading for fun. You stop reading for fun at the age of nine, you never come back. It's predominantly boys who leave books forever at nine, but a lot of girls too. And so this is a world in which our publishing peers are totally fine with the fact that the vast majority of Americans are not reading books. They read them for school when they're assigned, and they don't read for fun. And when we talk about what we do, we're trying to bridge these two worlds. Our books are the kind of books that get assigned in like universities, sometimes in high schools, but mostly in universities. These are the kind of books that people are gonna read in 100 years. When someone asks, what was Dallas, Texas like in 2025? Someone is gonna come in one day and discover things we've been publishing. When they say, what was American culture up to in 2025? It's not in 100 years only going to be the president and what the president was up to. They're gonna look and see what were the weird little flares of culture happening all over the country. And they're gonna go, Dallas, Texas was a hotbed of literary activity. Who and why? And it's not just Deep Ellen. They'll be like, Deep Bell and wild detectives and terabank books, Lori Feathers and all the prizes she's a part of, the Hey Festival, the SMU Literary Festival, amazing writers, Latoya Wagon, Sandria Faye. And they're gonna say, what was in the water? And you're gonna go back to 2013 when I got here. And this is like my one, I I love this, but I looked around, I was like, look at all these cool things. Literary Dallas. That's what we're gonna call it. And it was like we gave a little term to it. And it's like we can all feel like we're a part of a thing, and it's true. And other cities in the country have amazing activity too, but you got to connect the dots between people. And we're trying to not just connect the dots between people who've already like opted into literature, but to invite those who have been left out. And so that's when we have a bookstore and we do all these events. We want to go to the places that people are who see themselves missing in literature, right? And who have felt excluded from it. Maybe it was a teacher who told them they didn't read right. Maybe it was uh a parent who said you can't read that. Maybe it was uh someone who called them dumb. Maybe it was the fact that they saw it as elitists and they didn't grow up with enough money to go buy books for fun. They didn't have a parent giving them gifts and didn't take them to the library. And so all these different pathways and say they're all, it's not your fault. But like if we can meet you, if we can meet you, we have the book for you and we will invite you in. And it may be a book we published, and maybe a book someone else published, and maybe a library book, and maybe an e-book, maybe an audio book, but whatever it is, we want to go to where you are and begin the conversation on the journey. And so that's like that's like the deep value mission, mantra, up vision, all kind of in one, you know?

SPEAKER_01 11:28

Well, I I wish you you had passion about what you did.

SPEAKER_00 11:32

I really know, right? I got I got passion and coffee. And those are the two things that you need going there, you know what I mean, every day.

The Age Nine Reading Cliff

SPEAKER_02 11:41

Gotta love it. I I I want to uh talk about an an adjacent technology to books that really help me to get over that hump of not falling into that trap at nine. And that is I I would say that the movies uh you know, at the base, it's it's really it's still a form of story. You know, it's uh the evolution of the medium. And at the risk of getting canceled, I will share with the world something that uh inspired me to stay on a track to really embrace reading and learning and books. I I don't remember the name of this film, but it was, if it wasn't a spaghetti western, it was heavily spaghetti western influenced. And so there were some negative stereotypes abounded and a lot of things that we just don't want to talk about. But one of the things that was uh uh had a profound impact on me was one of these tropes where there was someone that was uh uh playing a Native American that was uh having an interaction with uh one of the the white settlers. And the uh this uh man was trying to explain the power of writing, of uh writing a book because well, my goodness, the the Native American would have no idea, like what why is this important? And so they do a demonstration. The uh the Native American says something to the white man. The white man writes it down and uh then uh gives it to someone else who hadn't had an opportunity to hear, and the the person wrote down exactly what was said. And so for me, the the crudeness of that imagery was like, okay, I get there there is something incredibly valuable about this. And that that planted a scene in my uh I I don't know, ear early, maybe even uh pre um pre-grade school mind where I was like, okay, uh this is there's something here, there's something magic. And I it's it created a passion in it for me that makes it to where uh I have this curiosity, like and and it's only grown as I've gotten older because uh I can see that we live in a a time when there's a lot of information uh and not all of it is not all of it is good. But we have access to things that are far older and uh can look at things that maybe generations ahead of us, they got it right. They knew what was going on. And it's like we're uh in a lot of ways, we're getting wise to it. And a lot of that stuff that's from people long dead is starting to become uh something that we're hungry for again. And I'm kind of loving riding that wave.

Movies, Memory, And The Magic Of Writing

Curiosity As A Superpower

BookTok, Classics, And Democratized Taste

Publishing What Falls Through The Cracks

SPEAKER_00 14:53

Uh I everything you just said is really beautiful. No one's gonna cancel you for finding your curiosity. Do you know what I mean? Like uh it's amazing. Uh you you brought up so many points that are so important to me, my journey, and kind of you know what this is all about, like the why. Like, why would DVLM start publishing books? Right? It doesn't make any sense because in this world there are already plenty of books, right? Why does anyone write a book today when there were great writers yesterday? This is a question we ask and ask, have to ask ourselves all the time. And when as a nonprofit, we have to go out and sort of ask for funding. We have to existentially define our reason to exist all the time. And as we do that, you know, we're often asked really intriguing questions that you just brought up in a fascinating way. And so something really intriguing is that curiosity. I love that word. I started teaching a couple of years ago at UT Dallas, and I now teach at SMU as well. I kind of go a semester on, semester off. And um, it has been so valuable to me personally and to the work we do at Deep Vellum, um, because it's been a really it's a chance to kind of like hone what we do. We're teaching courses on publishing, and I've taught a few literature courses as well. And it's like, how do you talk, how do you train someone to be to how do you teach publishing? It's not like a discipline, it's something you just do. And so you're teaching values and you're also teaching practices, a series of best practices, I guess you could say. And I like after the first semester, like every good teacher, my students taught me way more than I taught them, right? I'm like, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep. And they're like hitting me with like a response that you don't get in the real world, right? They're hitting me with a really nice bit of context. The way they see things is very different than me. And UT Dallas students are very unique in the world, just like from a million different backgrounds that really provide a beautiful context to the how and why we do this. And I was like, curiosity is by far the most important trait in this world. I was like, I am convinced of it after teaching. I was like, curiosity is more important than knowledge, curiosity is more important than wealth, it's more important than like anything, because curiosity can drive and provides a culture of value around the things that you do. And it's it's a great point you brought up too about there were writers of your who wrote great stories. Uh, some may be problematic, some may not be, but like at the end of the day, it reminds me of a quote by the great James Baldwin, right? One of the greatest American writers of all time, 20th century writer, African-American man, Harlem Renaissance, lived around the world. And he has this beautiful quote, and he talks about Dostoevsky, who means a lot to me. And in Baldwin's quote on Dostoevsky, he says, You think your pain and suffering is so unique in this world. And then you read Dostoevsky and you realize that someone has suffered in a way you've suffered before. And like there's someone who can provide meaning and context to it. And something kind of cool that happened this past year. The the Guardian wrote some articles on this too. So it's not, you can go fact check me. But um uh on TikTok, there's now what we call book talk. There are lots of reviewers of books on TikTok, and they're they're often young people who are not your traditional literary elite, right? They're not writing for the New York Times and and and The Guardian Usual, but they they get on there and they're like, I love this book. And they'll talk about a book and the sales of the book will spike. And a book by Dostoyevsky called White Knights. It's a novella. If you've never read Dostoevsky, it's by far the easiest way into Dostoevsky. I have a bunch of young people on TikTok made that a bestseller in the UK this past year. And it is like you have people of all different backgrounds who are like, How can this dead white guy understand love and pain the way that I understand it? And the fact of the matter is, you know, when you essentialize anyone, including the dead white guy, and Dostoevsky was certainly a problematic dead white guy. The thing is, he was a writer like you wouldn't believe. And he wrote a love story that'll make you cry for the rest of your life, and it's worth reading. And to understand that the complexity of who he is in his stories are what allow us to read it and touch on it at different times in our lives and things like that too. And it comes from like Kyrias, right? And so it's it's a beautiful thing because you brought up TikTok before to say that one of the cool things happening right now with TikTok to complement the literary world that like we're a part of this like analog world, right? Like we're all where books are offline, but they're also ebooks and they're audiobooks. They're very digital too. But that you could you, any you in the world, can take a book and get online now and post a review on on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, wherever, and have as much impact on that author's life as these like legacy media of yours, right? You can do more on TikTok than Oprah's book club. You can do more on an Instagram reel than a New York Times review. And there is nothing bad about the democratization of literature, right? They may not always be recommending our books. That's fine. But like at the at the end of the day, if you are a young person and you're reading Dostoevsky for the first time, you will love every book Deep Vellum has ever published. I will tell you that right now. Like it is that is a family tree of literature. But at the same time, you may not be there yet. Well, we're gonna be here for you when you are. And if you're reading White Knights 170 years after it was published, great. There's never a wrong time to just discover a literature, right? And so, like, this is kind of interesting about books too, and about being a nonprofit publisher, means that like we're sort of like not publishing books that are supposed to be bestsellers. We're publishing the books that fall through the cracks of commercial publishing. Why do they fall through the cracks, right? They don't fit the mode or mold of commercial literature, which is often very formulaic, writers of very certain backgrounds, which is usually more class based than things like race these days, but often it has historically. Been people of color are completely left out, LGBTQ writers completely left out, writers of certain styles are left out, right? If you write a novel like Ulysses, it's probably going to come from a press like ours that's like stylistically difficult or innovative. I put those in quotes because we don't believe in difficult literature. But um, all that to say when those books fall through, we believe they have an infinite audience, but they're falling through for a reason. And so we're fighting up, you know, we're trying to reach the mass audience. And so we're coming at it from a culture of value and community where it's like, look, if you're into what we do, and always that's why we're always trying to invite more people in. And so nowadays it's like we realize that this is an evangelical approach to literature, right? It's to say we have a big tent and we are in here preaching about literature because it's gonna change the world, right? And we need you in this tent. We need your voice as a reader, as a writer, as a translator. Like we have to have you. And like, how can we get to you? And so that's like that's different than of our peers, like who just they publish really beautiful books, but like they're not gonna get on a stage and like you know, invite you into a culture of literature. It's like a totally different mode. They're publishing books and they do a really good job at it. But like, I like to talk and I like I like to bring people together. I want to bring a city together, I want to bring a world together, and so we do that through literature. And literature is like, you know, it's creative writing. So it's it's really special.

The Accommodation And Local History

SPEAKER_02 21:38

Well, and and speaking of bringing the city together, and I I hope I don't have this attribution wrong, but was the accommodation something that you published?

SPEAKER_00 21:52

It was, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 21:55

And that's uh that's incredible. It's it's definitely it's not a it's one of those things that I I think could be essential reading for Dallasites because it puts history in context and it it uh uncovers a whole lot of things that are swept under the rug and and really uh uh paints things in a perspective that uh allow people to think. It's a a a door into understanding the real history, the the real story about things that have happened in this city.

The Book That Changed His Life

SPEAKER_01 22:30

So Will, I I'm gonna show up with some curiosity. I kind of want to redirect a little bit. I want to know a little bit more about Will. I want to know what drew you into this literary world. How how old were you when you realized that this was a value to you? And what was it that drew you in?

Big Questions In Russian Literature

How To Enter The Russian Canon

SPEAKER_00 22:53

That's a fantastic question. I have no idea, uh, because I don't remember a time when I wasn't reading. Uh so I have to thank my mom, you know. I I she she was at home with me at a young age, and uh I I remember reading with her. I remember when I was starting to read my own stuff. I remember summers on my grandparents' farm in North Georgia, like out in you know, Hart County, Georgia. And it was uh, you know, the county library was a was a trailer downtown, you know, and um didn't have a ton of books. I read every book in my grandparents' house. I read every book in that library and I read Jurassic Park in fourth grade, and you know, like before that, I just I I don't know, I was always a reader. But when I was 14 years old, I I was asked a couple years ago by a great group in Dallas called the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture. They asked me to give a talk on a series they were starting called The Book That Changed My Life. And they asked me to do the first one. They said, What was the book that changed your life? And they expected it to be Dostoevsky or Volgakov, like one of these Russian writers. I told you, we're gonna get back to Russian literature in a minute. And um, and I was like, oh no, those books didn't change my life. I was kind of already, you know, there when I discovered those books. A book that changed my life when I was 14 years old, and I went back and I reread it for this talk, but when I was 14, I had to write a book report on a book translated from another language. So my ninth grade English class. And I was like, when was this? And I went back and I traced it. And so in one month, April 1998, everything about who I was was formed in one month. Like this book that changed my life, my first concert, like uh National Geographic cover story on Russia, like all of this stuff hit at one time. It's just crazy to go back and like discover this. But um there was a book called uh The Life of a Useless Man by Maxim Gorky. Gorky was the first sort of state Soviet writer. He kind of created the creative writing operatus. He was a writer of the revolution, the 1905 revolution, which is what the life of a useless man is about. It was like a failed revolution during the Russian-Japanese War, which was really brutal and caused like some tough times in Russia, the Russian Empire at the time. And then he was living abroad during the Russian Revolution, but he was a favorite writer of Lenin and all these other revolutionaries because he wrote about the people. Gorky was like a middle school dropout who had to go work and he came from the poorest like peasant class in the middle of Russia, like the heartland, Nizhny Novgrid, which was then renamed in his honor during the Soviet Union. That book just like blew my mind. And it blew my mind because it made me feel small and made me feel like I didn't know anything in the world. And it made I I never left the country growing up, and I was just like obsessed and I got obsessed with Russian history and culture. And I was like, when I go to university one day, I'll take Russian literature or I'll take Russian language. And then I got there and I took a Russian literature course my first semester, and it just that course changed my life because it was like, that's my major, that's my life. And so I also got a history degree. Uh, but my Russian literature professor named Elena Glasov-Korrigan. If you think I'm passionate about literature, like Elena is a con she can convert you. Like, she can convert anybody. I was in that class and I'll never forget, she was teaching Gogol, who's a writer I now have tattooed on my arm, right? Gogol was a Ukrainian writer, wrote in Russian, was Pushkin's protege, and arguably he's my favorite Russian writer, right? And my favorite Ukrainian writer. And Gogol is like, he's just so good. And I just remember her describing one story, and she was like crying in class talking about the story. And I was like, this is great. And I got obsessed with what these great Russian authors, like, even if you've never read a Russian novel, like anyone watching this, you guys, I don't know if you've read any of the great novels, you know who they who wrote them. You know the names Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, you may know Turgenov, you may know uh Pushkin, you may know Bolgakov, you may know Pasternak, right? These are like big names in world literature. And uh when you when you sort of like look at their intersection, there was something in there about uh asking big questions. The famous Russian literary questions are what is to be done and who is to blame, right? And so there's literally two things you can read called that, and uh they're all out throughout uh Russian literature. But like there's also the questions like why are we here? What is our relationship to each other? What is our relationship to power, to money, to God, to whatever it may be? And these big questions are sought through literature because literature is a vehicle of social change. And that really, really hit me and resonated with me. And the other day I was cleaning out some stuff um to put back in the attic, and I found a journal that I kept in 2005. I just graduated university and I went to Bosnia for two weeks, and I got back from Bosnia and I started touring with my best friend's band. And that's when I got a mustache and some tattoos, and I turned down a PhD program in Russian literature to do that. And in that journal, the first entry was pretty much everything I just told you. I wrote it down 20 years ago. And uh I'm just obsessed with this idea of like uh art, literature especially, but all art, as like a part of the real world and a part of change, like how we come together, how we can unite, how we can get shared values, you know? Uh, and I think that's really important. It's something, you know, that often feels lacking in our society today. You can feel really fractured, like maybe I don't have the same values as my neighbor. And of course, you know, there's there's all sorts of philosophies that all boil down to we gotta love thy neighbor one way or another. It's not just one book that says that, it's a lot of books that say that. And so, how do you how do you find this way in when things feel so divided? How can you can you how can you find shared language and shared culture? And and it has to be built and rebuilt. It's not something we can, we I hope we can feel this now. You can't take this stuff for granted. It's a work in progress. And so when you when you get into like that journey, you know, it's Russian literature all the way through. And uh I taught a Russian literature course at UTD now a couple of years ago. UT Dallas, I should say. And uh when I taught it, it was a history of Russian literature through the lens of the Ukrainian war. And so I've been working for 20 years on reading not just Russian books and giving myself a whole education in the world. And I was like, there are Russian literature is not the best. It's like everything is the best, it's all just a tier. And then I read those Russian classics again and I was like weeping. I was like, God, they really are the best things in the world. They're really they hit different man, they're so good. So if you've never read War and Peace, it's a big one. It's not the only Tolstoy. Keep going, like you know, and if you've only ever read Crime and Punishment or Brothers Karamazov, keep going. And if you want a slim way in, Tolstoy's short fiction will make you weep. It's so good. Read the kingdom of God is within you, read Dostoevsky's White Knights. It's so slim. You can read it in one sitting, and then when you're ready, move on to the big novels because they're so worth it, they're so immersive, they're so engaging, they're so they will make you think things you've never thought before. You know, it's like it's gonna activate you. And that for me, that thrill of discovery and rediscovery, like, you know, that kind of keeps me going, right? Like it's it's what makes it all worthwhile.

SPEAKER_01 29:36

Are are your kids following in your footsteps? Are they reading as much as you did?

Fixing The Decline At Nine

SPEAKER_00 29:41

Totally. Um, you know, that one of the most important things about uh reading is uh emulation, right? And if you wanna if you want your kid to read, you have to read in front of them. And if you want them to value books, you have to have books around you. So my kids unfortunately are just like they're in. But they're nine and seven right now. So they're at interesting ages. Um my daughter is seven and she's having some like reading differences, right? She's got learning differences, and so it's great because she's super literary. She sat down one day and wrote 25 books, and I mean books. She wrote, she would staple pages together, draw a cover, and it was a series. She numbered each of them, and it was in it was uh my my son's best friend's older sister and her go to the same school. So my daughter's in second grade, and this girl's in sixth grade. So she has an older friend at school, which makes her the coolest kid in her class. And she wrote a series of books about them having adventures together. And on the back cover, there's like a picture of my daughter, right? And it says her name in a little bio. And then inside there's she draws that, she she writes out a whole book and then pictures. And it's amazing to watch because she's creating these stories like just out of thin air. She just can't not be storytelling. And our son is so interesting because he's got like a very analytic mind, and everything kind of has to be perfect. And he's also written books. And when he was her age, he wrote a book based on a story I told him one night at Halloween about a squirrel, a haunted squirrel in the park. He wrote a book about it, like a kind of like a comic book. And I I like scanned it and printed it out and took it to the bookstore and sold a copy to a friend of ours for five bucks. And I gave Andy the five bucks, and now he's like a published author who was like gotten money for five bucks is more than a lot of authors will make on their work in a lifetime. So, like my son is he's very keen on it. And they're both like, you know, dad, when I grew up, I'm gonna be uh whatever. My son sometimes, I'm gonna be a fisherman and a soccer player and an author. And I'm like, yeah, you don't need to just be an author, you know, be you. You could work at a bank and be an author, right? One of the authors who can get me canceled because he meant a lot to me as a young person, but I kept going. Was a guy named Charles Bukowski, right? He's a poet, an American poet, and uh lived in Los Angeles. And he worked for the post office for 40 years while he wrote. And one day his publisher came to him and was like, How much money would I have to pay you so that you don't work anymore? And he said,$100 a month. And the guy was like, That's not enough money to live on. He goes, It's exactly how much I need to live. I budgeted it out. So the publisher started giving him$100 a month, and then they went on to sell millions of books together. But like, he's a kind of gateway, you know, like vehicle. When I read him, I read him in a creative writing class when I was a junior in high school, and there was a senior in my class who came to me one day after class and goes, Hey man, I see something in you. You're raw, but you need to read more. And I was like, Yeah, and he goes, read this book. And he gave me a book. And it was called What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire. And he'll like just come out. And I was like, Okay, okay, Joey. Uh I said, Thanks, Joey. And I took it home and I read it. And it was like, I didn't know you could do that in literature. It was like a way, it was like, I can write like this. I can't write like Tolstator Dostoevsky, but I can write like this. And so it was like one of those gateways. And then you read his poetry, and in his poetry, like a lot of poets, like a lot of writers, they put his influences on the page. And he's like, you know, this is the author who saved my life. I went and read that author. And then literature starts to unfold. You know, it's really important. And so our kids are getting that now via me and everyone else. But in talks, like I don't want to uh who knows who's gonna go anywhere, but in talks with the school, uh, my son's school, about doing a focus group with nine-year-old boys, um, ideally not just boys, but starting with boys, um, about what they're reading and what they would like to see more of so that we could find a way to uh address this decline at nine, this this issue that's in education about like how kids stop reading at nine. How can we work together to address that? Right. And I have some ideas and we're gonna listen to the kids and then like see if we can take it to the district and and address it in in our city, right? In our in our amazing city, where like uh again, it's not race and class that keeps people behind, but they're obviously not alone. There's gotta be some way you can bring this in. And I was the kind of reader, as you can also tell, I read everything that was assigned to me in school, but I didn't believe that that was it, you know. And so that's where we gotta keep going, you know, and so providing that culture of value to get the kids the books and to to feel to see themselves in it and how they play a role. You know, that's important because it's all about empowerment.

Starting A Literary Nonprofit In Dallas

SPEAKER_02 33:53

Yeah. And I I hope that effort catches on because I I think that it could probably be a a useful cure for um a a lot of the a lot of the ills that that a lot of the things that cause division, a lot of the things that make it so that the world is is such a dark place and everyone's uh uh in their corners. I'm really curious about our I I know that it took a lot of guts to come and uh mark. Mark, your your line in the stand to try to build the literary community that you you did in 2013, was it in Dallas? I I can't imagine. I I I remember what it was like living living here. And we we could see the collapse of there being any kind of a hope of there being an an independent bookstore. Again, it was going to go the way of phone booths. Um because there was just so much consolidation. You know, people were there were a couple of big players and they gobbled up everything. And uh everyone thought, well, okay, well um even some of those big players weren't weren't going to have a chance because uh Amazon was going to be the place where everyone got uh got books and everything else. We we would later find out. How is it that you could look at something like those odds? I mean, the handwriting was definitely on the wall and say that you wanted to make a go of that. Because I find that remarkable.

Why Bookstores Still Matter

Constellations Of Community

SPEAKER_00 35:38

You gotta be really foolish sometimes to be an entrepreneur. You know what I mean there? Uh so it's uh it was funny because this is a city. I did a lot of research on Dallas before I moved here. I knew I was gonna move here about a year before I did, right? My wife got a job offer uh before her third year of law school. So she's from North Texas, she's from Weatherford. And so we were looking at North Texas and we knew we'd be in Dallas. Uh, but she grew up not going to Dallas. She grew up going to Fort Worth. Fort Worth was her city of value up here, and Dallas was a big, scary city. And you know, Dallas has a reputation. I hate to say it, it has a reputation out there that we had to address. And look, I think that uh there's something really important. I'm from North Carolina and um North Carolina state motto. I love a good cliche, I love a good state motto. And Texas's motto is friendship, right? Let's go. And then there's also North Carolina state motto is essay quam vidari. And in Latin it means to be rather than to seem. And I love that because when I got it tattooed on me, and my friend, when I got a tattoo, was like, oh, that's like Latin for don't talk about it, be about it. And I was like, Yeah, and there's something to that, right? So then, like when you look at Dallas and you're you're like looking from afar with binoculars, and you're like, it doesn't have anything that I want to do culturally, doesn't have the bookstore I want to go hang out in, doesn't have this, that, the other. This was the thing. I moved here, you meet people who are like, Dallas doesn't have the thing I want. I'm gonna go move to New York. New York has a lot of great things. I don't want to live in New York. And so uh you're like, yeah, but what if we did it together? What if we built it? And so there was this part where it's like when I was drawing up the business plan for Deep Elm, it was like, what could I take to Mark Cuban? What's our shark tank pinch? What our shark tank pitch, you know what I mean? What would be the pitch? It's like, what if you read on the cover of Forbes, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, that books are dead, ebooks are king, Amazon is a send, it's the only thing in the world, right? This is what every headline said. Why have a bookstore in the age of Amazon? Why, why share stories now in the age of AI? Why, why, why, why? All these are scams to distract you from the culture of value that is humanity. I will tell you, but it is a hard business pitch, right? Because billions of dollars are being thrown at AI to scam us out of our future, right? But there is nothing that will ever replace human-level storytelling. Period. Like I, that is it is a scam. This bubble will burst by the time this podcast airs. I guarantee you. Like this is gonna happen. But at the same time, if I had gone to a Mark Cuban-level investor in the city in 2013 and been like, what if I told you books aren't dead? What if I told you bookstores bring value to a community? And in the age of the everything store, you have to offer something. You have to add something super valuable in our society, which is curation. You have to take the everything and turn it into something and bring it to you, because otherwise you're going to get overwhelmed. And the same consolidation you talked about for bookstores that are challenging and you know, borders went away, books and million went away, uh, Barnes and Noble is saved by the skin of their teeth by the brilliant James Dawn. And so, like, this is uh this is all happening, but what if I told you that the real value is in saying that like every neighborhood deserves a bookstore to reflect the values of its community? What if I told you that every city deserves a dozen, 20, 30, 100 bookstores to reflect the diversity of its citizenry of who we are and who we aspire to be, right? And I know that deep valum is only one small part of a much larger mosaic of what a healthy literary city is, and that my voice, as long as I can find a platform to use it, I will talk about the great work being done by others, right? And so when I moved to Dallas, you could look around and you could see pockets of greatness. They're often happening in private places, they're often happening in their own closed circle, but they were all great, right? Um, there were amazing poets here, Rollins Gillian, the poet lawyer of Deep Elm, as we call him, cornered me one time at a party and was like, there was great stuff happening here before you, and there will be great stuff here happening after you. And I was like, Did I not make that clear in the way I yap about this stuff? And he was like, No. And I was like, I will learn from it and do better, Rollins, I will make proud. I was like, I got to, because like if if that's what the world's not saying. So it's in honor of those who came before, right? There were amazing things happening. And and to look around and say, like, look, though, it's like the ancient Greeks would have done a million years ago. If you look up in the sky, all you see are a bunch of yellow dots. But if you draw lines between them, you start to see pictures and a story forms in the sky, right? That was Dallas, and the constellation of greatness is the people and the organizations and the things we do. So, how can you lift those all up into the city that we want to be to we aspire to be? And so um, you know, going against the tide is pretty funny because I feel like at development, we've always kind of gone like this. And then, you know, the world is going like this, though. But it means about twice a year we're exactly right in the middle of where we need to be. The world's like, oh yeah, develop and it moves on as well.

SPEAKER_01 40:14

I'm having a little bit of an aha moment right now because what just hit me was the similarity between books. physical books and vintage clothing. You know, retail we know retail is going to eventually go away. Brick and mortar retail. It's it's it's it's shrinking by the minute. And it it's all going to places like Amazon where you can order. But you can't order old vintage out-of-print books. You can't access all the things on your wall right there. It's like when retail when when all the Neiman Markets and these high-end places are gone, we're still going to have a Dolly Python. We're still going to have vintage places because you can't come by that stuff. There's such a huge emphasis. I am shocked at what the prices that they can charge for a worn, well-worn piece of clothing. We vintage shop fairly frequently and there is a percentage of both of our wardrobes that are vintage and it's shocking to me what you can find and sometimes how much they can those items will bring.

SPEAKER_00 41:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 41:40

You know it's uh and it's the same for books, I'm assuming you're absolutely right.

Vintage Culture, Used Books, Longevity

Publishing Outside Of Time

SPEAKER_00 41:44

That's a much better business model to be in for used books than new books. I'll tell you that right now. And I think something important about what you just said is like there's a longevity thing here, right? And like when we publish a book, it's very expensive to publish a book. It's very expensive to keep a book in print. This is why books often go out of print, right? You ever heard that term? They sort of disappear from the market and then often they're rediscovered later, right? A publisher will republish them like we did for the accommodation, right? The accommodation was not available, then we republished it and it has now had a completely different life in its second life 35 years later. And um that same thing happens to books all the time. But uh it's also super important for the way that you discover things outside of time. As a nonprofit publisher again I mentioned like we have to publish outside of time and what that means is like if you go to a great bookstore like in a store that sells new bestsellers, right? You go to Interabang, whose books, Barnes Noble here in town, you'll see the front table changes weekly because there's five publishing houses now in America that publish 80 to 90% of the books in the country. Right? That's a lot. That's like they have almost a monopoly on the marketplace of ideas and styles and things that books can be. And so we're fighting in that mode that our books like can't exist in this mode of time. So we have to find some way of going outside of it. And I'll never forget when Deep Vellum had published just enough books then I went to the half price books flagship over here on Northwest Highway, you know, and half price books have been around a long time and they have a great business model. And they take you know remaindered books like the extra books that a publisher is getting rid of right and then they sell them for half off. So you're getting a brand new book for half off about a year or your year or two later um it's an amazing model. And then they also have the used books in there. So you get this like really nice culture of value outside of time. Like half price books is a beautiful business model. And it meant a lot to me when I went in there and they started having our books in the used section because it meant our books were starting to have a second life. Right? That's cool. And uh there's something really to that now in terms of the vintage clothing market it is a bit ridiculous that t-shirts I bought like when I was in high school going to concerts are now going for like$2,000 and I am somehow not cashing in on that. But I am like kind of a foolish democratic guy when it comes to this is like I am not in the rare book world. I'm not particularly interested in it personally. Deep Ellen is doing discovery and new authors often hyper contemporary like these are our peers in around the world that's not a great business to be in it is a foolish business to be in quite honest with you because you have to invest a lot up front for almost no hope of like in our lifetime most of the books will not gain but they might outside of our lifetime and that's what it's about. But then it's the same sort of thing you can go to these rare bookstores obviously High Price books is in town Dallas used to be an epicenter of rare book collectors. This was one of the great spots in the country for it. Larry McMurtry the great Texas writer who had the bookstore in Archer City got to start doing that here. He learned how to do it in Deep Ellen at a bookstore and then went on and had a bookstore in Dallas and went had one in DC Houston Houston then DC and then ended up in Archer City with a big collection and our friend these days we got a friend named Seth is a great chance to give Seth a shout out down in Austin he's got a bookstore now called Livra Books L-I-V-R-A. And man he's got like this model I just I love it like aesthetically it's perfect because he mixes rare books with used books with new with a very few new books and the new books he stocks are ours. Like so it's like our literary it's like our types of books and our actual books. But then the other books are just add so much of a culture of value around it. And so my pushback on you is that I don't think retail will go away. Retail as we know it today might go away but retail will always exist right oh yes no is a community tool it's just like if Neiman Marcus goes away someone's going to go reinvent Neiman Marcus. Do you know what I mean? It's if if uh a local mom and pop shop in town like goes away it has a chance to be reborn too because it adds there's something to it that's uh it's always changing and you know like the good thing about capitalism is that change is good right here we go you know uh it competition is good and our competition now is is way more existential than it used to be and I think that's the point that you're you're really hitting on nicely is like it used to be like oh if a store closes another one opens now it's like a store closes. Will a store ever open again? Does it deserve to open again? That's a different question and one that I hope you know we as a community uh continue to uh aspire to but I think it is like this this aspect of curation and experience are two things that are gonna drive the future of retail because like Neiman Marcus has always offered an experience in retail above the purchase of the goods. So um I actually have three books if I could show you I went to a used bookstore in Denton the other day I didn't plan to do show and tell but the books happen to be in front of me. And I bought the three books that are maybe you asked a question about like Will Evans, who is he? I bought the three books that are like from a publishing side my my like professional life I've never bought three books that are more me like in one sitting and one of them is Stanley Marcus's A Life with Books the guy who ran Neiman Marcus the legendary Mr Stanley the guy I I have a pantheon of people I consider my patron saints uh that I like venerate for the value they brought to the world and Stanley Marcus is one and I never got to meet him. He passed away before I could ever get to know him but I've met a lot of people who know knew him personally and I like soak in every story. And he was a great book collector and a great great person. Another person I really love and value was Sylvia Beach who founded a bookstore in Paris called Shakespeare and Company and she also had a publishing house of the same name. She published Ulysses by James Joyce. She was the first publisher and her bookstore was so legendary all the great authors of the era um were were hanging out in there this this Paris of our dreams but like anyone who had a bookstore in a publishing house she lost her hat on it. I mean she lost her fortune on that bookstore and and publishing and like publishing Ulysses was a bad business proposition but like legendary right and so I consider Sylvia Beach one of my patron saints and I got to to go to her grave in Princeton New Jersey last year after I gave a keynote and I got to lay flowers on her grave and say thank you. And if you go to Paris today there's a legendary English language store called Shakespeare Co. named after her bookstore in honor of her. So it's like her legacy is all around us even if you never heard her name and then the third one I'll just go real fast is called The Art of the Publisher by a guy named Roberto Colasso, who is a legendary legendary Italian publisher who just passed away a couple years ago. But like he meant a lot to me uh his publishing house is all about this value it's not just the culture of value it's the value of culture right and in in what we this aspirational thing that humans have there's something really to it and the art of a publisher are two words that don't usually go together art and publisher because it's usually like it's just a transaction for most. And if you can think about it this art boy you can have a lot of fun in this business. And I was like I got these at Recycled Books in Denton and so shout out Recycled Books another used bookstore that I just love beyond belief.

Patron Saints Of Bookselling

SPEAKER_01 48:12

So well this is we're we're starting to run a little short on time and I have one more thing I'd like to cover before we wrap you've talked a little bit about not not directly but you know all of the people that you pull together in the Dallas area there's community there and that's a big part of our conversation and to do what you've done is demonstrates complete creativity. So we've covered those bases.

The Next Level: Resources And Collaboration

SPEAKER_00 48:37

I would like to know you know that literary dream that you have moving forward in a nutshell because we're really running close on time who is it that you need to become in order to achieve that next level of that literary dream who do you need to become uh I need to become what the what the world needs right I need to keep listening and learning uh from those who know more than I do right and those who know more than I do are like every your person everyday person off the street regardless of background regardless of class like an educational background any of that and to listen and say like uh what could we do together right you have a value to me I hope I have a value to you and helping you come together um and I hope that like for for deep vellum's sake that I can become someone who is can continue to grow in uh in effectiveness and leadership to provide uh the invitation to others to join this journey with us at Deep Vellum through Deep Vellum with their own organizations with their own companies their own initiatives their own donations whatever it may be um I mean it takes a lot of work we've done quite a lot of work with very little funding and if you don't believe me our 990s are all public record and um it is uh it just goes to show you that like what we can do with very little resources imagine what we could all do together with even greater resources. What resources um and something I've I've often started challenging funders because we don't get any money from many traditional funders like in the city around the world and um you know when when they say no to us if they ever say no or even if we're just in a meeting begging them for their time uh we can be a little honest with them now and say like have you ever gone to an organization and said what will it take for you to never come back and ask for money again? How much money would it take? And then how much money would it take for you to solve the problem? What would it take for you to solve the problem? What can we do together? If it's not just money, what would it take? And if you're not answering that question then why why are you funding a nonprofit? Like the problem should be solvable. And uh I think that that's an approach like and if you can't solve it alone can you solve it together with another organization? Could we be doing better with others? The answer is yeah. And so continued collaboration uh I hope that uh I can be a leader who can be a part of those collaborations. I hope this organization where my colleagues inspire me every day, right? And I learn so much from that we can all be getting this culture of value that we all share and share it with the world. Right. And uh invite more people in wherever they may be everywhere in the world right because someone watching this right now may be watching it in a country super far away from Dallas. I was just in India last month and I came back so inspired like you wouldn't even like believe so I wouldn't be surprised if someone I met last month in India watches this and like you can do it too in India and we can do it together from Dallas to India and everywhere in between and so that's what I that's who I hope to become I hope to become an even better father, husband, son, brother, uh leader and reader I always hope to be a better reader too.

SPEAKER_02 51:39

So what more could anyone hope for?

SPEAKER_01 51:43

Yep well this has been amazing we thank you so much.

SPEAKER_00 51:47

We've um it's been enlightening I mean I've read books all my life but most of my reading was um nonfiction reading to look for you Maddox come on you can't now you gotta come on and visit I got a book for you right fiction is what builds the empathy the nonfiction does something else in your brain but that's okay come on come hang out with us right allow this conversion I was talking about to work in real time I got a Christmas present coming for you all right thank you Will thank you guys we really are honored and appreciate your appearance today I appreciate it too thank you I appreciate your time thank you