interview with eic and author benjamin drevlow

by David Estringel

Ernest Hemingway once said, “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” One will be hard-pressed to find a pearl of wisdom that encapsulates the essence of the writing process so succinctly. While the life of a writer comes with its fair share of perks and joys, it can be a harsh reality that comes with its own challenges, anxieties, and rabbit holes.

But nothing worthwhile comes easy, does it?

Benjamin Drevlow, author of prose and verse, as well as the EIC of the very cool lit mag BULL, is an “every man’s” writer, demonstrating a glaring talent to hold one’s attention hostage with his ability to weave narrative and skillfully wield POV (point-of-view), while at the same time staying relatable through his fearless storytelling and exploration of themes that lurk within the dark corners of our minds that would likely never otherwise see the light of day without the aid of shitty day and a bottle of gin. To be a writer is to intimately know disappointment. To know self-doubt that—sometimes—can teeter on the edge of self-loathing. Writing, frankly, often times sucks.

Still, there is joy to be found in being a slave to one’s masochistic pursuit of one’s passion. Not just in acceptances from groovy lit mags that have long been gooned over. Not from “likes” and random gushings from followers on social media platforms (though that can be pretty sweet). The true joy of being a writer comes from capturing life’s good, bad, and ugly—the fruits of one’s suffering—on the metaphorical page that make one sit back and feel a semblance of pride for putting something out into the universe that has meaning, that has gravity, that holds space rather than just taking it up.

THIS is Bejamin Drevlow in a nutshell (no pun intended, Ben).

Here is what he had to say…

B+H: So, before we get into your writing, I’m curious to know about your journey with BULL, where you currently are "the man." Was it always your aspiration to be EIC of a lit mag? If so, how is living the dream going?"

BD: Oh definitely not. I’ve come to really love it and really love the small press lit mag community, but when I first started writing out of college I didn’t read lit mags, and I definitely had no intention of ever working for one. For one, I felt like lit mags were all for snobby, literary hipsters. For two, I was that arrogant asshole who wanted to get published but never wanted to read other people’s work. Back then, I only knew the “big name” lit mags, as well as the ones run by big time grad school programs—the ones that you were supposed to publish in if you were a good writer. And I mostly hated everything I read in them and got rejected by them and hated them more. Like I said: asshole. It wasn’t until years later that I discovered that my favorite authors were getting published in what was then “indie” or “alternative” lit. I had never heard of “transgressive” lit. I just knew that what I wrote was not anything like what they wrote.

BULL happened completely randomly. It was started by Jarrett Haley who then brought on Jared Yates Sexton to run the fiction who then got a job teaching at Georgia Southern University where I taught. Jared and I immediately bonded over fucked up masculinity and how messed up the capital L-literary scene was. Eventually, he asked me if I wanted to read for BULL. Within a couple years, Jarrett got a new job and got busy and turned it over to Jared who then asked me to be the main fiction guy and then a couple years later, Jared got busy writing political stuff and asked if I wanted to take it over. At the time, I still didn’t really want to run a magazine—I had (and have) enough trouble being a functional adult. But I also really believed in BULL and didn’t want to see it go away. So, I ended up taking it over and slowly finding a bunch of other writers I loved who were writing weird fucked-up shit that a lot of other magazines wouldn’t take. It was then that I decided BULL would become the “island of misfit writers.” Before I knew it, I’d been running BULL for ten years, and it’d become one of the best decisions I’d made—that I didn’t really want to make.  

B+H: BULL's aim to explore the evolution of modern masculinity is utterly fascinating to me. One of my first writing/editing gigs was with the Good Men Project back around 2018, and while interesting, it also operated within a social environment that was a bit of a minefield—lots of invisible lines to NOT cross (if that makes any sense). What is it like navigating masculinity in the "cancel culture" of 2025?

BD: I was really stressed when I first took over as the main guy at BULL. On one hand, I kept waiting for a bunch of incel dudes to send me all their misogynistic propaganda and for them to start a campaign to dox me after I rejected them. On the other hand, I kept waiting to publish something that would piss off a bunch of feminist literary people and get “cancelled” for it—or whatever that would mean.

Ten plus years later, I can honestly say that I can count on two hands the number of stories I’ve gotten that are overtly misogynistic (versus stories that are exploring misogyny). At least in my mind.

And I’ve really never had people call out BULL for publishing something they found was offensive.

I do, however, remember going to the national conference for writers (AWP) for the first handful of years and getting some pretty dirty looks and comments. I think mainly it was messaging back then. Before I took over, the original tagline was “Bull: Men’s Fiction.” Mostly the idea was that we were targeting men who didn’t read fiction and trying to get them to read fiction (which we still aim to do—though more so the trying to get men to read fiction part, less so the “targeting” of men specifically). But of course people (both men and women) would come up and say, “Why do we need more ‘men’s fiction’?”

Of course, we’d always then explain that we were trying to get men to read—not trying to only publish men. But since we just quietly got rid of the “men’s fiction” stuff, people have been pretty cool about a magazine that tries to “rewrite modern masculinity” from a place of bringing everybody who has struggled with toxic masculinity to one place where they can find community.

B+H: What do folks need to know about submitting to BULL? What are you looking for in a sub? More importantly, what DON’T you want to see in a submission?

BD: Honestly, I don’t always know what I’m looking for when I read a submission for BULL. I am very dedicated to our mission of exploring modern masculinity, but I don’t go for things that are overly simplified—anything that feels too on the nose, or too preachy or too patting on the back. I don’t like stuff that’s good v. bad. I want to publish things that challenge our views of masculinity and gender, things that don’t always do that overtly. While I’m definitely not down for stuff that glorifies misogyny, I’m also not down for things that don’t examine the complicated issues with masculinity in life outside of academia and the news—especially down in the trenches of working class and poor people where these issues really get played out. People who don’t always get written about—or to—in the capital L-literary world.

Besides that, I have pretty eclectic tastes. My two biggies are 1) I love grit lit and 2) I love transgressive lit. But by and large, as bullshit as this sounds, I just love sentences and when those sentences lead to a unique voice and style, I’m down for just about any kind of genre you can send me. Bonus points if it’s weird, fucked up, darkly deadpan funny, and wears its heart on the page.

B+H: It goes without saying that being an EIC of a lit mag, especially one that publishes on a rolling-basis, is a pretty time-consuming gig. How do you manage to carve out time to craft those "little darlings" of yours? You seem to be quite busy these days in that respect.

BD: A little over 7 years ago, I basically bottomed out. I was a “binger”—I was Mister All or Nothing. I wouldn’t write for weeks and then I’d obsess about a story for three days straight and stay up all hours of the night. I wouldn’t read for BULL for weeks and then I’d read twenty stories in two days. But then it got to a point where I’d stress and stress about not writing and not reading for BULL, and it got harder and harder to write and read and even when I did; I wouldn’t feel good about anything.

I came very close to shutting down BULL because it was just a constant stress for me and feeling like nobody really cared anyway. I came very close to quitting writing because I felt like the world really didn’t need another whiney, cis-hetero. white guy trauma dumping.

Then, I broke down and started going to therapy. I got diagnosed with PTSD and ADHD, and I got on Lexapro and Adderall, which I know people have plenty of opinions on, but Adderall completely changed my life. It not only helped me concentrate long enough to write, it helped with my constant anxiety that distracted me from writing and reading, which then in turn helped with my depression because I started actually writing and reading regularly.

The other big thing was that I started the fifteen-minute rule. Just like eating, showering, or brushing teeth, I decided that I’d try to read BULL for at least 15 minutes every morning and I’d write for 15 minutes a day. Maybe I’d read one story and write two sentences, but it was better than not reading or writing anything for two weeks.

These days it’s 30 minutes for BULL and 30 minutes of writing. Of course, a lot of times it will be longer than that—especially when I’m not teaching—but my 30 minutes a day basically makes my life a hundred times more tolerable because I’m not constantly feeling like I should be reading or writing and then not reading and writing as a result.

B+H: While we are on the subject, Blood+Honey has published your work recently ("When my Ex-Wife Dies") with a couple more scheduled for release this summer, namely "Ukulele Stu" and "Chicka-Chicka Slim Shady." These were "no brainers" in terms of their acceptance as they pretty much explode off the page. One thing I find particularly compelling about your writing is its use of POV and your ability to create a round character out of your narrator in just very few words. How would you describe your "voice" and how do these ideas emerge and gel in that kaleidoscope mind of yours?

BD: With “When My Ex-Wife Dies,” that’s probably as fictional as I get—mostly just based on watching too many Dateline episodes. But with “Chicka Chicka” and “Ukulele Stu,” those are just essentially heightened versions of real-life experiences, which is most of what I write.

My writing voice largely comes from the anxiety voices in my head. With my ADHD and PTSD, my mind tends alternate between jumping around to a million different conversations to then having one “bad” conversation that just plays over and over on a loop when I get fixated on something. As a result, I’m constantly thinking the wrong thought, the thing you’re not supposed to say out loud, and then thinking I’m a horrible person for having had that thought. Then, I repress and repress it and try to avoid saying anything that would be offensive to anybody, while constantly having my conscience convince me that I’m a horrible person.

Not to make it trauma-dumping time or anything, but I can vividly remember the time after my brother killed himself at 18 years old, getting angry that he had to die and have his funeral on same day as the championship game for my sixth-grade basketball team. And I can remember complaining to my father—who was also the coach—that we had to miss the game because of the funeral.

Thirty-five years later, I can both empathize with being a 12-year-old and having douchey 12-year-old thoughts. But I also know that I’ve spent most of my adult life feeling like a terrible person because I felt that way when I was 12.

My writing voice is pretty much just my anxiety voices with the volume turned up and my years of repressing those thoughts and not saying them out loud turned down.

Throw in that plus growing up on a farm in Northern Wisconsin and that’s my voice.

B+H: How much of ‘Benjamim’ (and his life) gets woven into the tapestry that is your creative work? I mean, for writers, most everything is fodder for the page. With those who gravitate toward more experimental styles, however, it’s harder to glean fact from fiction. Sometimes experimenting on the page makes it easier to be transparent, while other times it creates a cleverly veiled distance. Where might you fall within that spectrum?

BD: Like I said, my writing is mostly just me confronting my real-life anxieties.

What if I said that instead of thinking that? What if I did that instead of just saying that?

When I bottomed out about 5 years ago, I was convinced that my wife was going to leave me. I was convinced that I deserved to be left. So what did I do? I wrote a collection of connected short stories about “my wife” leaving me.

It was called Ina-Baby: A Love Story in Reverse.

Of course, it’s always based on “what-ifs” instead of at actual facts—but it’s also always based on “real” what-ifs, not completely made-up “what-ifs.”

I always say that I’m no good at making it all up but I’m also terrible at telling the truth.

My wife, who is also a writer, who’s name happens to be Christina (with her alter-ego being “Ina”), probably should’ve kicked me to the curb long ago for being the type of guy who writes an auto-biographical book about her divorcing him. Not only did she not, she also gave her blessing to me publishing it. Mostly because she understands that if I don’t write this stuff and don’t put it out there for people to read it, it all festers inside me and things get dark.

That book came out before Covid, and I’m now putting the final touches on a manuscript of autobiographical poems about being divorced and alone. And bless her heart, my wife just went through and gave me her last round of edits.

Some day I hope to grow up and stop writing fucked up stories about the people who’ve been unlucky enough to try to love me.

That day, sadly, is not today.

B+H: So, perusing your website and your pubs, I see that my personal library is missing some Drevlow. So, if I only had a fistfull of cash to drop on one of your books, which one should I buy and why? Follow up: I shake down some third-graders for their lunch money to buy a second book of yours (all hypothetical, of course); which one should I get in order to get a proper vibe of who you are as a writer/creative?

BD: While I’m all about shaking down 3rd-graders, I’m also all about giving away my shit for free. Anything to get somebody to read what I’ve written and make it all the way through and not completely hate all of it is mostly why I write these days. Of course, I buy all the books from my presses so they get money out of it, and I try to do anything I can to get people to support my presses, but for me it’s all about making connections with people who might find something in my writing they can connect to—or at least to feel better about their own lives.

Sorry, ADHD tangent.

I’m probably the worst person to answer this question because the things that I tend to find the funniest are the things that other people find to be a depressing slog to read through.

The book I’m most proud of is my novel The Book of Rusty, which nearly killed me. It was that cliché of the writer who’s always talking about the novel he’s working on but never actually finishes. Just finishing it and getting it published was a huge accomplishment for me—not matter how people liked it (or not) or even read it.

The Book of Rusty’s, again heavily auto-biographical, about a fuck-up janitor who keeps trying to kill himself but keeps fucking that up and can’t really bring himself to get it right, so instead he decides to write a “mem-wah” about his brother killing himself and how he can’t fill his brother’s suicidal shoes. Rusty’s whole thing is that he wants to write a funny book about suicide that will make people stop looking at him with such pity.

Hilarious, right? It took me 18 years to write this book. At one point, it was 1200 pages. The finished product ended up a little under 300 pages, but even so, it’s definitely not a beach read (unless you are like me, in which beach reads are funny books about childhood trauma and suicide).

I set out to write a book that nobody else would write—a book that would stand out (for better or worse) from most other novels about trauma and suicide, and I feel like I did that… for better or worse.

On the complete other side of the spectrum, last year I published a chapbook of poems about Patrick Swayze. Obviously, it’s called In Praise of the Swayze (which should’ve been In Prayze of the Swayze, but I didn’t think about that until too late).

It doesn’t involve any jokes about suicide at all. No references to my wife or my family (check that, I think there’s one brief one about my parents making me take piano lessons).

But anyway, even if you don’t care about Patrick Swayze, it will make you care about Patrick Swayze because, frankly, everybody can learn from Patrick Swayze and Patrick Swayze’s movies.

And plus, wouldn’t it be a great story if you stole money from a 3rd-grader to buy a chapbook of poems about Patrick Swayze? (Again, you could just email me and I’ll send you a copy for free and long as you promise to actually read it.)

B+H: In terms of your writing, when you first started putting proverbial pen to paper, how has your craft evolved over the years? Where do you think it's headed?

BD: I never meant to be a writer. I wanted to be a college basketball player. Then I wanted to be a college basketball coach.

Until after grad school, I only wrote when my teachers told me to write. I took one creative writing class in undergrad and wrote one complete story. That was the story I used to apply for grad school.

In grad school, every story I wrote ended up in my thesis. My thesis won a contest and got accepted to be published the year after I graduated in 2007. It got published in 2008. (It was called Bend with the Knees and Other Love Advice from My Father and you can currently purchase it on Amazon for $496.01).

That’s not meant as a humble brag. It’s meant to set up that I didn’t know what the fuck it was to be a writer.

Between 2008 and 2018, I published 2 stories.

I was “working” on Ina-Baby and my novel Rusty all those years. By which I mean, I’d go six months, seven months, eight months without writing and then spend five days and nights writing and vomit 30,000 words. And then go another six, seven, eight months and delete 25,000 words and start again.

As I said, this cycle just about broke me.

These days I’m still on the 30-minute kick, which keeps me sane.

The only thing, now, is that for the last five years I’ve been writing mostly flash or micro fiction and poetry—which helps with me mentally because they help with achievable goals and deadlines.

On the other hand, I have about 300 pages of a sequel for Rusty that I’ve been telling myself that I would go back and revise and put it out there before everybody forgets about Rusty completely. I’ve been telling myself that for the last five years.

I was gonna do that this summer. I’ve edited exactly zero pages. On the other hand, I’ve written about 30 pomes/micros—about 25 of which are garbage, but still.

B+H: So, time for some shameless self-promotion. What are you and/or BULL working now? Anything about your glamorous life as an EIC and author that our readers must know?

BD: So there’s all the poems I’ve been writing along with a bunch of flash pieces that were basically failed poems (which are what the pieces were that you were kind enough to accept for your beautiful magazine).

I have about 600 pages of poems and failed pomes from the past 5 years. Last year, the Swayze chapbook came out plus a collection of short stories (that were failed poems) came out in a book of connected stories called Honky about a white redneck kid from Northern Wisconsin who grows up idolizing Michael Jordan and Tupac.

I just sent out a collection of pomes called trash pomes 4 trash people that I hope to find a home for somewhere.

And a couple weeks back, I sent a finished novel manuscript called The Captain’s Been Drinking to my editor at Cowboy Jamboree, so I’m hoping that that might come out in the next couple years.

I can’t promise that any of this will be any good or that anybody will want to read it, but here I am who I am. I keep throwing the trash at the wall and seeing what sticks.

B+H: What three pieces of advice would you give up-and-coming writers out there as they navigate their ways through their craft and the dog-eat-dog world of publishing?

BD: Ooh, I’m the last person anybody wants advice on this from. Every year I write and send out, I think I understand less about writing and publishing than I did before. Even including the stuff I’ve published.

I guess my first piece of trash advice is publishing is nice and can help get you more readers, but publishing is not going to make you happy if you weren’t happy before diving headlong into that process. And a lot of times it can fuck with your head because you’ll post it to social media and a handful will “like” it and a small handful will actually read it, and then two days later no one will “like” or “read” it.

Publishing a book often goes that way, too. Like I said, I got a book published within 6 months of graduating school, and I was like: fuck, man, this is the life. Everything I put into this is all leading up to this. Then it came out and nobody read it. And then nobody was banging down my door to publish more of my work.

I was convinced that—to be a writer—you had to constantly be making bad life decisions to make for good writing material. Then 10 years went by and somehow I didn’t succeed in killing myself and somehow my wife didn’t leave me and somehow I got a job, and I still don’t know anything about anything and most days I’m not a functional adult human being… but I’ve written some stuff I’m kind of proud of. I’ve had some people read these things and say nice things to me about them.

If you focus on publishing as a way for you to get other readers that you wouldn’t otherwise know and getting published with the stuff that you’d want people to respond to, you’ve at least got a head start to having a much more healthy relationship to it all than I have had for most of my writing life.

Second:

I’ve already discussed this ad nauseum and I also remember people telling me this back when I was young and thinking those people were horribly lame, but still I can only tell you what I’ve done, which is to say, what I’ve stolen from others:

“Write a little every day without hope and without despair.” – Isak Dimeson.  

It’s boring and a lot of days you’re gonna write stupid shit that might just be a diary entry or a tweet that you won’t actually tweet. But the more you avoid writing and only write when your inspired and when you have something “good” to write, the more that blank computer screen is going to bully you, the more you are going to start to question if you are a “real writer.”

To be a writer, you have to write. That doesn’t mean you stop being a “real writer” if you’ve gone six months, a year, two years without writing anything worth publishing. It’s not about posting shit on social media about how much you’ve written this morning (along with how many miles you’ve run). It’s about whenever you can, just throwing whatever’s in your mind on the page and seeing where it goes and a lot of it will go in your diary of shitty writing, but for me, I’d rather have a 2-year diary of shitty writing than one great story that you’ll never be able to recreate because it’s too damn hard to write nothing and nothing and nothing and then churn out one great story once every 2 years. Plus, it fucks with your head because you forget that you have to be shitty for 2 years before you get a good story. All we remember is that we sat down one time and a good story came out, so if it doesn’t come out nice and neat like that, then whatever you’re writing must be garbage, but again, this is just me.

Third:

Publishing is a numbers game. If you want to get published, you need to set aside time every couple weeks or months to send out some stuff to get rejected. I feel like it’s the same as writing for me: send out a few pieces regularly “without hope and without despair.”

I don’t mean send out a piece to 50 different places at the same time. I mean send out one piece to 3 to 5 places and every time it gets rejected send it out to a couple more places. The more you can approach it like it’s your job—just sending out and sending out, the more you’re going to be able to develop a thick enough skin to sustain this over the long haul.

I think most authors out there probably live this story, but I’ve had stories get rejected 50, 60 times over 4 years before getting accepted. And often the ones that I think fit great at a mag will get rejected, and the pieces I think have little to no shot will get accepted.

Like I said, the longer I write and publish, the less I understand about it.

BONUS QUESTION:

B+H: In terms of literary magazines’ relevance and sustainability, where do you see them headed? Where do they need to go?

BD: Ah, so the “bonus question” is about the existential crisis of literature in the age of TikTok. That’s an easy one.

Jk.

The short answer is I think it’s all about just plugging away and doing what you believe is important enough to plug away at.

I love BULL and believe in what we do, but honestly, whenever people talk about BULL, I think half of it is simply that we’ve survived since 2008. That’s a long time for a niche lit mag that doesn’t make any money, which is to say, it loses money.

I think you definitely have to be able to flex with the times, but I also feel like in the age of distraction, the pendulum will eventually swing back and some people will seek out reading stories and poems as an antidote for the noise of contemporary life.

As for what magazines should do, I clearly don’t have a fucking idea. I am lucky enough to be able to afford to be a shitty salesperson and lose money on the magazine.

It’s interesting with people doing substacks these days as a way bypass the devil of social media. I’ll be interested to see where that goes. For me, my email stresses me the fuck out, so I have a hard time keeping up with the substacks I subscribe to. It’s much easier for me to see something posted on twitter, be reminded of that author or that magazine and then follow the rabbit hole to reading a bunch of stuff from that author or in that magazine.

But again, that means making a deal with that musky devil. And also it means that you can go the other way and just start doom scrolling about all the other authors and magazines that are publishing stuff that’s much more popular than yours.

I wish I could say something good about print, and I love print and would always choose print if I could and still do a print issue for BULL every year, but for small magazines, unless you’re a great marketer and sales person, it’s just hard to make it sustainable unless you do Amazon print on demand (which we do) but then you are now making a deal with the Bezos devil.

This all sounds kind of depressing (as I often sound), but I do feel good that there will always be a community of writers and readers who want to find a way to support each other and support great writing.

Now it’s just a matter of finding where and how to do that. 

B+H: Thanks, Ben, for taking the time to chat and for inviting us into your world for a while. Prepare for some more love once your micro-fiction piece, “Chicka-Chicka Slim Shady,” drops later this month on the 25th. Such a cool piece! Unitl then, folks can whet their appetites with your pieces, “When My Ex-Wife Dies” and “Ukulele Stu,” here on Blood+Honey. Hope to see your stuff lurking around our submissions inbox soon.

*Stay tuned for the September installment of “Beneath and Beyond…” for an interview with author and EIC of The Gorko Gazette Colin Gee!