6 Important Writerly Questions with Matthew David Brozik

Here’s a little sit-down we did with Matthew David Brozik, seasoned humor writer and author and the guy behind the just-released Humorist Books title, The Vowels of the Earth. A hybrid of literary sci-fi, really silly word humor, and old-school academic farce, it’s the 1940s-set story of the nefarious and alien-influenced origin of…the letter H. It’s a trip.

1. Who are you? What are you doing here?

Funny, those are the same first two questions I asked a small boy I found in my home recently! Turns out, he was my son, and he lived there. But me? I’m Matthew David Brozik, lawyer-turned-copywriter, author, husband—and, yes, father, it would seem. I’ve written a handful of humorous novels, although “handful” is misleading because any one of them would be enough to fill your hand and then some. So let’s say “several” humorous novels. And I’m here answering questions to the “best” of my “ability.”

2. Since “Where do you get your ideas?” is a terrible question, what made you want to write this book?

Thank you for not asking me terrible questions. I genuinely appreciate that. As it happens, I didn’t want to write this book. As I recount in the afterword, the germ of this novel was a short humor piece in the form of an interview with the protagonist decades after the events that changed his life. Some time after I finished that piece, I jotted in my writing notebook—and I’m not kidding about this—“Really bad idea: THE GREAT VOWEL GRIFT as a novel.” (“The Great Vowel Grift” was the name of that original short piece. I jotted the aforementioned note on October 28, 2015. This fact will be important in a minute.)

 

3.How did you keepwriting this book?

Are you suggesting that I shouldn’t have kept writing it? That’s just mean. In October 2015, I was one year into a seven-year stint at a terrible job. I was bored beyond my capacity to convey in mere words. To say that I was not intellectually stimulated would be an understatement. So once I had decided to write a novel about a disgraced one-eyed academic who takes on the unlikely challenge of helping to invent a new letter of the Roman alphabet, how could I not keep going? Looking over the pages upon pages of notes I took as I wrote the first draft between late October and late March of 2015, I’m reminded of just how much fun I had writing Vowels.

 

4. Who is this book for, anyway?

These questions are getting borderline accusatory. I might have to invoke my rights against self-incrimination. A while back, I came to terms with the fact that I write for myself more than for anyone else. And then I realized that there’s nothing wrong with that. Plenty of authors write for other people—the masses, even; I write stories that I want to read. And I write them in the way I like stories to be told. And then, I hope that there will be readers who will also want to read my work. Handfuls of them, even.

Another answer might be: you. If you’re reading this interview, then chances are very good that you’ll enjoy this book, and that means that you’re the person I wrote it for. You and me.

 

5. Any darlings you had to kill?

Of course. There was a big one. Fortunately, it did no violence to the story to remove it.

One kind of humor I really enjoy might be described as “bait and switch,” and might also be described as “pointless.” At the same time, I hate writing backstory. So when I realized that the reader might want to know how Jeremiah, the protagonist of Vowels, and his fiancée first met and all that sappy jazz, and I really didn’t want to write any of it, I came up with what I thought was a very amusing bit: I described a very outlandish, dramatic, Hollywood plot… in such a way that the reader would (I hoped) think that I was describing the start of Jeremiah and Leah’s romance…only to reveal that it was the plot of the movie they saw on their first date. It didn’t quite work. It was shaggy dog story that was a little too shaggy. Or not shaggy enough. So I took it out back, tied it to a tree, and… uh, I sent it to a farm upstate.

 

6. What are you working on now?

A couple of months ago, I left another job that was making me dumber every day. While I was still there, though, I started another novel that I’d like to finish writing. It’s called AFTERWIFE—but I don’t want to give away the plot lest anyone steal it and write a better novel than I can.

Other than that, I’m looking for a job I won’t hate and a new literary agent. Also, I have a milestone birthday coming up (or just past, depending on when this goes live), so I need to shop for a very expensive car and reading glasses.

 

The Vowels of the Earth is available now.

 

 

Read an Exclusive Excerpt from ‘How to Succeed in Academia’ by Ross Bullen

New this week from Humorist Books: How to Succeed in Academia (While Failing at Everything Else), by funny person, career-track professor, and podcaster Ross Bullen. It’s a book about the surprisingly terrifying quagmire that is being an academic for a living. Here’s a taste to get you to sign up to take the whole course.

***

YOU GOT THIS: Student Loan Debt, High Blood Pressure, and a 1995 Toyota Tercel

Are you passionate about learning, teaching, and making less than $15,000 a year? Do you enjoy tweed blazers, crisp autumn afternoons, and stealing lunch from unattended cafeteria trays? Have you ever longed to drive, sleep, and hold your office hours in a 30-year-old car? If so, then a career in academia might be right for you!

“But wait,” you ask, “how can someone like me break into a field as prestigious and rarefied as academia?”

First of all, you need to understand that academics never ask each other questions this directly. If you want to fit in, you should try something like:

“I have a question that is more of a comment.”

Or “I have a two-part question. And one of those parts has two parts, so it’s really three questions.” You should then ask no fewer than seven questions, none of which have anything to do with what the other person was talking about.

Or “I know I was on my phone the whole time you were talking, but I’d still like to deliver a 12-minute, uninterrupted monologue about how everything you said was wrong.”

Second, you should know that this is not how books work. I’m writing these words long before you are reading them, so it’s not like this is a conversation. If you’re just learning this fact about how books work now, you’re probably not cut out for a career in academia. Sorry.

Likewise, if you’re the kind of person who genuinely enjoys a good conversation, you’re probably not going to enjoy working in academia either, unless you think asking “so what are you working on these day” and then ignoring everything the other person says counts as a good conversation. If that sounds like a deal breaker for you, close this book right now, place it back on your bookshelf, and immediately purchase several more copies of this very same book to see if one of them works out better for you.

“But wait,” you ask, “who are you to tell me what career I should choose?”

Good question. Although most books, including this one, feature an author biography that answers all of that, we’ve already established that books are scary and new for you, so I’ll help you out with this. My name is Ross Bullen. I’ve worked at a beer bottle factory, a small-town Renaissance Faire, and a McDonald’s across the street from a maximum-security prison. I’ve also spent the past two decades teaching off – sometimes way off ­– the tenure-track. And I can attest from personal experience that getting shafted by the Ivory Tower hurts just as badly as it sounds.

For those who don’t know, “tenure-track” means a job where you are expected to receive tenure, i.e., a job for life, unless of course you work in Florida, West Virginia, or [INSERT NAME OF LATEST REPUBLICAN-RULED NIGHTMARE STATE HERE]. The typical tenure-track career path is Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, Full Professor – at which point you can either become a Dean, a Vice-President, or Jordan Peterson (disclaimer: none of these options are healthy or endorsed by the author). The problem is that the number of tenure- track jobs has been declining steadily for the past 40 years.[2] These days, most professors work jobs with weird titles like LTA (Limited-Term Appointment), VAP (Visiting Assistant Professor), or RACCOONS (Rejected At Community Colleges Or Other Nice Schools). But the majority of college teachers are what’s known as “adjunct professors.”

The original idea behind adjunct professors makes sense: sometimes schools needed an outside expert to teach a class in a niche area, and even though this expert usually had another job, the school still paid them a stipend for their trouble. So far, so good. The problem is that once colleges realized they could hire professors on the cheap, they decided they should always do this. And although a handful of new tenure-track professors get hired each year, most people teaching at colleges in the U.S. (and elsewhere) do so as adjuncts. The typical adjunct professor career path is Adjunct, Adjunct, Unemployed, Subway Sandwich Artistä, Adjunct. Technically, tenure-track professors get paid for research and service in addition to teaching, and adjuncts don’t, but that just means that adjuncts wind up doing research and service for free (how else are you supposed to prove that you’re worthy of a tenure-track job, should one ever become available?).

If all of this sounds bad, that’s because it is. But this book is not called How to Avoid Working in Academia (although if anybody has a book like that, please, for the love of God, send it to me ASAP). It’s How to Succeed in Academia, and that’s just what I’m going to teach you to do. This book will guide you through every step of your academic journey, whether it’s finishing your dissertation on time (or at least before the heat death of the universe), applying for an academic job (by summoning the ancient Mesopotamian demon Pazuzu), or overcoming imposter syndrome (even if you’re a family of raccoons living in a Fjällräven Parka).

So, grab a seat, a nice mug of warm milk, and settle in for some good old fashioned book reading (at least until your shift at Subway starts). You’re an academic now!

How to Succeed in Academia (While Failing at Everything Else) is available now from Humorist Books.

6 Important Writerly Questions with Ross Bullen

Attention students, administrators, and adjunct professors: Ross Bullen, author of How to Succeed in Academia (While Failing at Everything Else), is speaking. It’s the go-to guide for career academics (and a whole lot more weird and dark places) from someone who has been in the trenches of faculty life and seen it all and survived, albeit barely. We conducted this interview with Ross in a format to which he’s accustomed: homework.


1.Who are you? What are you doing here?

I appreciate that you are starting this interview with a question that you could ask to either a writer or an old man you caught shoplifting cat food from a bodega. Fortunately, I aspire to be both of those people. My name is Ross Bullen, I’m an English professor at an art school, and I live in Toronto.

2. Since “where do you get your ideas?” is a terrible question, what made you want to write this book?

I’ve been writing satire about academia for a while now. It started with angry Facebook posts before gravitating to the place where unhinged rants truly became an art form: Twitter. Eventually, I started submitting stuff to McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. After a normal-ish number of rejections (7?), I had a piece accepted. More rejections followed, of course, but once I figured out that academic satire was my niche, I had a lot more success. I noticed that a number of McSweeney’s writers were able to turn their short humor pieces into books, so I took a class on writing a book proposal with the fabulous and hilarious Caitlin Kunkel, and about a year later my proposal was accepted by Humorist Books!

3. How did you KEEP writing this book?

Cocaine, of course! Or at least it’s middle-aged equivalent: coffee and guilt.

4. Who is this book for, anyway?

Honestly, anyone who has ever been a part of academia, as a student, a teacher, a parent, or an administrator, would probably find something to love (or hate) about this book. But I’d say the audience who are most likely to enjoy the book are the extremely online set of academics sometimes known as “Academic Twitter.”

5. Any darlings you had to kill?

John Hodgman once made a list of 700 fake hobo names. I wanted to do the same thing, but for adjunct professors who sailed with the Pilgrims on the Mayflower. I could only come up with 99, so I guess that’s 601 darling adjunct professors that I had to kill.

6. What are you working on now?

I’m an English professor, so I’m always working on academic research and writing projects. On the more creative side of things, I’m starting research for a non-fiction book I want to write about a professor who taught at the same art school as me in the 1970s. He taught some really weird classes that involved things like LSD therapy, eating tiger meat, and abandoning his students on an island in the Bahamas. Remember when school used to be exciting? And kind of traumatizing? Anyway, I’ve been talking to a bunch of his former students and colleagues, and it’s been a lot of fun.

How to Succeed in Academia (While Failing at Everything Else) is available now from Humorist Books.

6 Important Writerly Questions with Brian Dunn (“Sleep, Little One”)

Just out from Humorist Books: Sleep, Little One: Bedtime Tales for Tiny TroublemakersWith the dark, realistic, and audacious storytelling of Brian Dunn and the whimsical and haunting illustrations of Lucy Mara Budd, this compendium of frank and honest bedtime stories won’t do much to crush your kid’s anxiety, but it will make everyone involved laugh. Here’s Brian Dunn to explain himself.

***

1. Who are you? What are you doing here?

I’m a somewhat nifty guy living and writing in Phoenix, Arizona. I’m here because my new book, Sleep, Little One: Bedtime Tales for Tiny Troublemakers, is a hilarious send-up of children’s bedtime stories featuring gorgeous illustrations by the talented Lucy Budd. Think of this subversive book as the unholy offspring of Lemony Snicket and Edward Gorey. You’d be wise to purchase numerous copies as quickly as you can before children’s advocacy groups ban its sale.

2. Since “Where do you get your ideas?” is a terrible question, what made you want to write this book?

I have to push back on this because I believe “Where do you get your ideas?” is a terrific question, and it’s one I’m delighted to answer here. While I shan’t, for obvious reasons, divulge my exact recipe for creativity, suffice it to say its ingredients include—but aren’t limited to—banana smoothies, Japanese whisky, and crushed yellowjackets. Oh, and chicken entrails. Lots of chicken entrails.

3. How did you keepwriting this book?

See my crushed yellowjackets comment above.

4. Who is this book for, anyway?

Sleep, Little One is a book for any parent harboring a moderate dislike for their child. Also, for children intent on turbocharging their anxiety. Also, for the childless. Most of all, it’s for you.

5. Any darlings you had to kill?

No, they all made it through the gauntlet and onto the printed page.

6. What are you working on now?

A musical comedy based on the movie Midnight Express commissioned by the Phoenix Youth Theatre Company and set to debut next summer.

***

Sleep, Little One: Bedtime Tales for Tiny Troublemakers is available now from Humorist Books.

Read an Exclusive Excerpt of “Sleep, Little One” by Brian Dunn

From Sleep, Little One: Bedtime Tales for Tiny Troublemakers by Brian Dunn, with illustrations by Lucy Mara Budd, here’s a story that won’t relieve little ones’ rightful and righteous anxiety whatsoever: “Thwart the Greedy Gut She-Devil.”

***

Bet you like candy. Most kids do. It’s fun to eat sweet things once in a while, like when you go out for ice cream after a Little League baseball game or a mediocre choir performance. Or maybe your mom doesn’t want you asking a lot of questions, like why she and her new boyfriend nap so long on the weekends with the door locked, so she bakes you your very own red velvet cake with cream cheese icing.

But one thing you can’t do is shove ice cream and cookies and candy down your gullet—that’s a fancy word for throat—until your stomach almost bursts. (You’re not a goose in a foie gras factory, after all.) If you can’t control how many sweets you eat, you have what we call a greedy gut. And if you have a greedy gut, you’ll soon meet the sworn enemy of greedy-gutted children everywhere: the Greedy Gut She-Devil.

  The Greedy Gut She-Devil does her work in the deepest depths of your bowels. If you eat too much candy, she’ll poke you in your belly—hard! Then your tummy will emit a low, long rumble. You’ll suddenly feel like you’ve ridden a roller coaster four trillion times. But this ride wasn’t built for fun.

As the sounds coming from your belly grow louder, anyone near you will think there’s an angry elephant rampaging through your stomach. Then the cramps will start. Oh, you’ve never felt such pain. It’s like your insides are twisting themselves into an origami crane. You might actually poop your pants, and everyone forever call you “Señor Poopy Pants” or “Squishy McBritches” or “Skidmarks McGee.”

Luckily, the Greedy Gut She-Devil goes away after only 24 to 48 hours. The Greedy Gut She-Devil is awful, but she serves a noble purpose: to prevent candy-loving kids from contracting type 2 diabetes so they have to inject their enormous bellies with fresh, sweet insulin. Know when to stop eating sweets and the Greedy Gut She-Devil will never have to twist your innards.

 

***

Sleep, Little One: Bedtime Tales for Tiny Troublemakers is available now from Humorist Books.

Read an Exclusive Excerpt of THE DAY JOB SURVIVAL HANDBOOK

So. You’re about to embark on the thrilling adventure of white-collar life: endless emails, relentless calendar invites, terrible coffee, and mind games with co-workers and superiors. That’s where The Day Job Survival Handbook comes in. Having slogged through a parade of fluorescent-lit, khaki-coated, office park jobs himself, Matt Visconage of The Onion and UCB has written the guide to help you navigate those countless office absurdities and indignities.

But let’s say you can’t be saved… and you’re about to get fired. The Day Job Survival Handbook covers that contingency, too. Check out this GETTING FIRED BINGO card, an exclusive excerpt from Matt Visconage’s The Day Job Survival Handbookjust in time for Labor Day, cog!

Have the bandwidth for more The Day Job Survival Handbook? Well, circle back over to Amazon or Humorist Shop and they’ll get those papers over to you ASAP.

 

The Humorist Books Father’s Day 2025 Gift Guide

What do dads (fathers, if you’re fancy) love? Jokes. Comedy. Silly stuff. Being dads. Their cute little interests. We happen to specialize in those very things here at Humorist Books, and we’ve got great Father’s Day gifts at the ready for most any kind of dad… like your dad!
For the history buff dad:
People of the Titanic, by Shawn Carlow
For the dad who loves being a dad:
Langley Powell and the Society for the Defense of the Mundane, by Jeff Giles
For the storytelling dad:
Walker, by Sam Pasternack
For the brainy dad:
The Vowels of the Earth, by Matthew David Brozik
For the adventerous dad:
The Lobster Heist, by Erin McLaughlin
For the literary dad:
Limerature 101, by Lance Hansen
For the lone wolf dad:
Community Pool, by Keith James
For the political dad:
Red Tie, Blue Tie, by Gary M. Almeter and Reese Cassard
For the old dad:
How to Be an Old Person, by Brian Boone
For the travel dad:
What Am I Doing Here? by Mike Reiss

6 Important Writerly Questions With… Shawn Carlow

Shawn Carlow has written for a lot of shows you enjoy — Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Late Night with Jimmy Fallon — and now he’s written a collection of stories you’re going to really like. In People of the Titanic, he tells the stories of 30 doomed malcontents and oddballs who sailed on the ill-fated “Ship of Dreams” back in 1912. They weren’t all industrialists, innocents, and Leonardo DiCaprio, afterall.

While you wait for your copy of these (fictional, by the way) tales to download or to arrive in your mailbox, get to know the great Shawn Carlow, an agile author who pulled off nothing less than a high-wire comedy act.

1. Who are you? What are you doing here?

I’m a writer. I grew up in New Hampshire but I live in .LA. I’ve written a book that interplanetary travelers may one day study the pages of and conclude that the human race was worthy of extinction. Or they might laugh. I hope they laugh, understand why they’re laughing, and are even actually capable of that function.

2. Since “Where do you get your ideas?” is a terrible question, what made you want to write this book?

It went through a few iterations, each becoming longer and longer as time passed. Well over 10 years ago, it started as a standup joke that I told on stage about “the other heroes of the Titanic.” People usually know about the unfortunate captain who stayed at the helm of the ship, the band that kept playing as the ship went down, and the Unsinkable Molly Brown. I just tried imagining what other people could have been on board with them. A mime had to be there. And two brothers who ran a hot dog stand was a must.

Next, I thought of it maybe as a TV project broken into 10 segments.

And then the opportunity from Humorist Books came along to turn it into a book. Perfect.

3. How did you keep writing this book?

It wasn’t that hard. Once I’d started delving into this world, I found I enjoyed it quite a lot. Plus, I enjoy doing historical research and writing imaginative comedy.

4. Who is this book for, anyway?

People who like to laugh and who like history and like how things have changed, but also observing in a lot of ways how we’re very much the same.

And, listen, I don’t want to keep harping on the interplanetary visitors I spoke of earlier, but I would hope to have my consciousness downloaded one day so I could witness their reactions to my book in the distant future. Perhaps I could even win an interstellar prize from them that’s honest in a way that the Miss Universe Pageant is not.

5. Any darlings you had to kill?

Surprisingly few. The great majority of what I wrote is in there. Since it’s not one long novel but rather mini stories of the characters within, and occasionally how they intersect, I mostly just had to kill small bits where characters intersect and it didn’t make sense to the characters we’d already encountered.

6. What are you working on now?

A book of humorous short stories. My favorite story in the collection so far is about a young woman who brings her fiancé to visit her traditional grandmother — the kind who never stops feeding you — and it becomes a test of wills when it turns out the fiancé is a competitive eater.

Also, since that world has been so much fun for me, I’m partway through another 30 stories in the extremely imaginatively titled, More People of the Titanic.

People of the Titanic is now available in print and ebook formats. 

Read an Excerpt from Shawn Carlow’s PEOPLE OF THE TITANIC

On April 10, 1912, the Titanic departed England, ultimately bound for America. It famously struck an iceberg along the way, and as the mighty ship went down, it took 1,500 people with it, most of them good-hearted, innocent people. But what of the jerks, losers, weirdos, and malcontents? They were also People of the Titanic. In this comical, fanciful— and completely hypothetical — depiction of life on the Titanic, Shawn Carlow (Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Late Night with Jimmy Fallon) brings to the surface 30 stories of doomed souls who sailed upon that ship of dreams. Here’s one such yarn. Fellow passengers, behold the Detmer Brothers.

***

The Detmer brothers, Andreas and Stefan, were German businessmen staying in second class who ran a hot dog stand on the First Class promenade deck of Titanic – the only sanctioned food stand on the entire vessel. If you were in first class, most of the grand ship’s food was eaten in the sumptuous café, saloon, or restaurant. A slightly less accommodating but still extravagant eating space awaited those in second; trash chutes served the third-class passengers, delivering the contents of wiped-off plates and leftover soup straight down to the lower decks, where the rabble waited eagerly with their open mouths and collection buckets.

The Detmer brothers were well known for their antics when preparing frankfurters, catching them in hot dog buns behind their backs or through their legs. Many a hungry passenger marveled at the magical dexterity with which they performed, while also fervently hoping that their meal would not be dropped upon the deck, which most times it was not. Tom Cruise was said to have studied old newsreels of the brothers when he was preparing for his role in Cocktail. 

The brothers have also been credited with inventing the tip jar — and placing money in it at the start of the day to make it seem like people were leaving money, even if they weren’t, because remember, it was mostly wealthy people up on the promenade deck.

The night of the sinking, the stand had been closed for several hours when the ship struck ice, but when their dark fate seemed certain, Stefan Detmer suggested to his brother that they serve warm hot dogs as comfort food to the worried passengers. And a few survivors later told of how, when the ship was in its final throes and tilting downward, the brothers were seen handing hot dogs to people sliding by and entreating them to “tell all your friends.” The futility in that gesture was obvious, but, still, you have to admire their gumption.

The two brothers’ bodies were never found after the sinking, but remnants of the hot dog stand washed up on a beach in Greenland and were used to make a memorial to the brothers that still stands in Germany. In Hamburg.

People of the Titanic is now available in print and ebook formats. 

6 Important Writerly Questions with…Dewey Lovett

I got to talk with our newest literary breakout, Dewey Lovett, a very terrific stand-up comedian and author of the just as terrific Drinksgiving. What’s Drinksgiving? It’s a funny, twist-filled crime story about poor decision, unlikely friendships, disappointed relatives, small towns, beer, and the longest holiday weekend of the year made even longer. It’s the kind of novel you’ll read all at once because you’re so delighted and want to know what happens, and also the kind of book that would make a great host gift for whoever is having you over for Thanksgiving this year.

But let’s hear what Dewey has to say about it! Happy Drinksgiving, everybody!

***

1. Who are you? What are you doing here?

Hello! I’m Dewey Lovett! I am a comedian turned novelist. I’m here because telling a story this long and twisting doesn’t work on stage. I’ve always wished there were more FUNNY books in the world — and I don’t mean comedian memoirs! I want more funny fiction, so I did my best to write the book I wanted to read.

2. Since “Where do you get your ideas?” is a terrible question, what made you want to write this book?

To answer the terrible question, this idea came from a Thanksgiving morning hangover when I wondered ‘what could be the worst thing that happened last night?’ I also wondered, ‘why aren’t there more Thanksgiving comedies?’ At the time that this idea came to me, I had been studying the craft of longform fiction for a while, so I was ready to go all out!

3. How did you keep writing this book?

I stayed committed to writing this book because it was FUN to write. I looked forward to it after work. Also, my husband was super supportive and encouraged me to spend time writing and committing to the bit. He has also written funny novels so it felt like two flavors of support in one: husband-support and funny writer-support. I needed both. If I ever continued to feel unmotivated I just pictured how cool it would feel later to say I wrote a novel.

4. Who is this book for, anyway?

This book is for people who want an easy, fun, upbeat read. It might even be for people who don’t like reading but want to try it. It’s meant to be consumable like a beach read without the romance. Maybe something to be read on the plane ride home for Thanksgiving? It’s also for people who love reading. I hope this book makes its way into rural and girl power book clubs.

5. Any darlings you had to kill?

I had to murder almost the entire first draft and I’m so glad I did. The story was originally one omniscient POV. Now it’s dual first person and the pace and mystery are so much better! I had to make so many sacrifices that after a while I didn’t care anymore. Every time I cut a joke, I added a better one somewhere else. There was one darling my beta readers said I NEEDED to cut but I loved it way too much so I rearranged the plot around it. To be clear, that is deranged writer behavior! But it made the ending feel soooo good and I have no regrets.

6. What are you working on now?

On top of doing lots of stand up comedy, I am happily working on my next novel! It’s too early in the process to give a proper synopsis but it’s another comedy set in snowy Rochester, NY. Once again I look forward to working on it every day!

***

Gobble up a copy of Drinksgiving right now.