Q&A with Steve Roggenbuck

 

BH: What kind of barometer of quality do you use when you are staring at a first draft of a piece? What factors do you use when assessing works in progress and how do you decide when something is ready to be posted/tweeted/blogged/ebooked?

SR: It’s all about my intuitive response, how it makes me feel. If I don’t feel excited about it, then I’m gonna delete it. I don’t want to waste my readers’ time. Ideally I’m gonna make them laugh or feel something in a few lines and then get out of their way. Even with my longer videos — my editing process is to watch them over and over until there isn’t any boring parts — until my impulse is to just keep pressing Replay.

BH: How do you decide what content is going to go into what stream, be it a tweet, an image meme/macro, video content? Are there certain things you feel work better on a certain medium?

SR: There are a lot of factors. Facebook is ruthless with prioritizing content that gets immediate comments and likes: unless you’re super close friends with someone, only their more popular content shows up in the “newsfeed.” Your popular Facebook posts almost go “viral” in a mini form: maybe you get 1-3 likes on most things, then you get 25 likes on a particular status update — sound familiar? So if you’re gonna try to push something unpopular, Facebook is not the platform to have maximum impact.

Another tidbit: many people check Twitter on their phones, so links seem to be really bothersome to people — if you tweet a really good line, it will get more response by itself than with a link attached. There are so many little things like this I’ve noticed. Ultimately I don’t think a person’s success will be determined by these little things, but they’ve come to shape how I post on each site.

BH: How do you feel your aesthetic has transformed itself over the past year, both in your work as well as how you conduct yourself personally on a day-to-day basis?

SR: I’ve more fully embraced “personal brand” as an art form. A year ago I was most excited about building a specific website with a big subscriber base — Live My Lief — but now I’m more excited about building “Steve Roggenbuck” in general, and sort of being a leader as a person wherever I show up.

I’ve recognized that personally taking a stand about straight-edge and community building is an important role I can play as a leader. I have vision and courage to lead, and social media gives me an opportunity to build that effort holistically. When I post pictures of myself or talk about my traveling, or even my recent obsession with seltzer water, it’s all toward building a more memorable and fleshed-out Icon of what I want to be for people. It’s a very fun and interesting structure in which to build, it’s energizing creatively and I have so much freedom to create what I want because my followers just like me.

BH: Do you ever feel like you run the risk of engaging with people too broadly, that the word choices you make will lose an audience totally?

SR: I worry that my interest in being iconic sometimes leads me to delete my more idiosyncratic lines and kind of “streamline” my poems in a way that might make them “too polished”? But I’m aware of this, too, and sometimes I push back against it. I’m returning to some longer forms for this reason. If a long poem is an icon as a whole, that leaves me a lot of freedom to play and explore tangents within that structure, while still creating something that sticks with people as a whole.

BH: Where do you see yourself in 20 years? This can be answered ideally, realistically. It can be a manifesto, or a simple line. Or there could be multiple outcomes.

SR: I think climate change and our rapidly changing technology make it impossible to guess what anyone will be doing in 20 years. I hope I’m still working hard to inspire people, connecting with my community, appreciating people and appreciating the weather and the grass and the sky. ■

Steve Roggenbuck is reading as part of This Is Happening Whether You Like It Or Not 3, tonight at the Silver Door (Parc and Beaubien). The fun starts at nine, with readings from Laura Broadbent, Ali Pinkney, Alex Manley, Ashley Opheim and Guillaume Morissette and live music from MOONBAHN and Felix Green.