Interview with Charlie Zacks

Charlie Zacks is the founder and editor of Stimulant magazine, as well as a guest editor for the Swedish magazine L’Amour – La Mort. His fiction and poetry have been published by Spectra Poets and Expat Press, and his work has also appeared in Soft Union and Charm School. A recent graduate of McGill University, Zacks is now studying at Harvard Divinity School. Scrivener’s Jacob Sponga spoke with Zacks in July 2025 to discuss literary life in Montreal, Can Lit, “Alt Lit 2.0,” and his favourite contemporary writers.

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SCRIVENER

Tell me a little bit about Stimulant. Why did you start it?

CHARLIE ZACKS

At its simplest, I was reading through a lot of student magazines from McGill and Concordia, as well as some from back in the States, and I was exhausted by the way that they were arranged. They would have a poem by one guy and throw it up next to some watercolor painting by an old lady. They were completely different vibes and  had no place being put next to each other. I can understand why they’re doing it—they’re in these curatorial roles, these editors, and it’s the first time they’ve done it—but it sometimes felt a little unfair, or very unfair, to the work that these writers had given them. Being a writer, I know how much work and energy it takes to make something that you think is worth sharing. So, once someone does submit to a magazine or a newspaper or whatever, and they open it up and it’s surrounded by a bunch of irrelevant garbage, it lessens the presentation of that art. I felt like I didn’t see a lot of my taste in what I was reading, and if I did it would be placed next to something ridiculous.

SCRIVENER

You publish in what many might call the world of Alt Lit. You’ve been published by Expat Press and Spectra Poets, and have recently been featured in Charm School and Soft Union. You also loaned me the infamous novel Sillyboy by Peter Vack at a dinner last winter. Is it possible to talk about these publications, these writers and editors and scenesters in one fell swoop, maybe as one movement, for better or worse? Is there something that all this internet writing, as it were, has in common? Of course, I also want to know if you think any of it is at all worthwhile.

CHARLIE ZACKS

I think Alt Lit as a movement ended about a decade ago. I wasn’t there for it. But I guess I got into this new Alt Lit 2.0 thing completely by happenstance, because I wasn’t involved with anything as a writer until recently. In 2022, I started a Substack, which at the time wasn’t that much of a thing. Maybe you had heard of Tao Lin’s Substack or something, but it hadn’t become the cultural phenomenon it is today. My Substack accidentally launched me into that whole online writing world, and since then I’ve been published on some websites, and I suppose I now work part-time in “Alt Lit”—God forbid you put it like that—because I design books for some of these writers and I make some money doing that. But I think most people who say “Alt Lit” are simply looking for a way to write off contemporary writing. They’ll say something like, “Oh, don’t get me wrong, I love contemporary writing, trust me, but I just can’t stand Alt Lit.” It’s the same thing as the people who say, “I listen to all kinds of music but country.” I think the “but country” or “but Alt Lit” says a lot more about them than it does about country or Alt Lit. Any contemporary writing that is going to be tied to a major publishing house is never going to be considered Alt Lit. The closest you got was that Sean Thor Conroe book published by Little, Brown. Which wasn’t Alt Lit because it was published by a massive publisher. And that’s why it got so much press. I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of the animosity to Alt Lit was bankrolled by large publishing houses.

SCRIVENER

Did you read My First Book by Honor Levy?

CHARLIE ZACKS

I did, yeah.

SCRIVENER

Why do you think someone might discern something different about Stimulant from the rest of the literary magazines in Montreal?

CHARLIE ZACKS

I think about this a lot. I think at its core, we aren’t doing anything that different. We print magazines, we have a website where we publish prose and poetry, sometimes a review or whatever here and there. People see that we’re a lit mag and they get the idea. But I think the reason we stand out is we have a pretty unified vision. Even if you’re not sure who the writer is on the next newsletter, you have a decent idea of how it’s going to read. Some of the topics we talk about of course are interesting because they aren’t published in student newspapers. We’re not afraid to make people uncomfortable.

SCRIVENER

Who is your ideal reader?

CHARLIE ZACKS

Ideally, someone who reads in good faith. Anyone who is willing to approach the stuff we put out there with an open mind. Usually, that means they have to be honest with themselves, with what they read, and with the art they bring into their life. But I don’t really care; anyone can read what we’re putting out. If you come at my personal stuff with spite, you’re not going to like it. But if you come at it with an open mind—“Hey, this guy writes Family Guy poems”—it will be fun and interesting, I think.

SCRIVENER

You’ve said before that there is a “puritanical” attitude to literary life in Montreal. What do you mean by that?

CHARLIE ZACKS

I think the puritanical quality I’ve talked about comes from people who want writing to be high art, and who are willing to sacrifice freedom of expression for that. There are plenty of publications here in Montreal you can flip through and not remember a thing you’ve read, because it's all poems about birds over Beaver Lake or someone talking about cooking. That’s fine, I’m okay with that, but that can’t be everything. I really just mean that there’s this Corporate Memphis–style writing that people cling onto because it gets them grants. But all those people are moving to Brooklyn now, or Toronto, which are probably better suited to them anyways.

SCRIVENER

Do you think there’s anything that characterizes the city’s literature of the past five or so years, since the pandemic?

CHARLIE ZACKS

I’ve been thinking about this kind of idea for a while now. My honest answer is that I’m part of the anglosphere, so the literature I’m reading makes up a very small world. If I’m reading anglophone, Montreal writers, that’s two thousand people. From those two thousand, how much work actually finds me? Really, the question for me is what characterizes anglophone, youth writing in Montreal. I think that’s a focus on the digital world: a lot of writing about dating apps and going on the internet and YouTube videos and Omegle chatrooms. Also, a DIY kind of ethos has developed. The zine culture here is pretty strong—a lot have sprung up this summer. That’s really cool, but I also think that one thing that characterizes that scene is a weird purity complex, like “How independent can you possibly be?” But if we’re talking just literary style, I don’t think there’s much cohesion. People are not reading enough to have a cohesive voice.

SCRIVENER

What are you reading lately?

CHARLIE ZACKS

I’m reading four books right now. Probably not ideal, but I can’t really help it. I’m reading William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience. I read it a couple of years ago for a class, but I was just assigned my advisor at Harvard, and he’s a James expert, so I figured I should touch up on it. I’ve also been rereading the A Boy’s Own Story trilogy by Edmund White since his death. I’ve read all three of the books a couple times, but I wanted to go back and reread them since his passing. I’m also casually trying to read Ghosts of My Life by Mark Fisher, which has been really good but also tough, because I start listening to the music he’s talking about and then forget I’m reading a book. He was a genius. And yesterday I started reading One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad, which is a really popular book right now. It’s made me cry already like twenty times. It will probably be the most important book from this year.

SCRIVENER

As an American, what do you think of the idea of Can Lit?

CHARLIE ZACKS

You were the first person to use that phrase with me—maybe a year ago or more—and since then I’ve learned a lot about everything that has to do with Can Lit. I’ve never lived anywhere else in Canada but Montreal, so my idea of Canada is very strange. I’m not really sure about it, but I think “Montreal Lit” is definitely a thing. And “Montreal Lit” right now is basically “New York Lit” but five years too late. Although I think there is a freedom to what’s being written in Montreal that is beautiful and noteworthy, which probably comes from so many people here being students. The culture is very laissez-faire. It’s the kind of place where you can go from rock climbing to drinking twenty beers to running a marathon the next day, and during all that you’re listening to an audiobook about Hegel. I think a lot of what’s written in Montreal is influenced by that, by being in all these different places.

SCRIVENER

Have you read much Alice Munro?

CHARLIE ZACKS

I read Lives of Girls and Women in high school, in a class on women writers. I remember it being a beautiful book.

SCRIVENER

On the subject of different places, you’re moving to Cambridge to pursue a Master of Theological Studies at Harvard. Will Stimulant continue in Massachusetts?

CHARLIE ZACKS

We have two more books coming out in the fall, and then we’re closing up shop. Really, it’s a Montreal thing. Most of the writers we publish are Montrealers; all the painters and artists are Montrealers, too. I’m okay with things ending. I think it’s beautiful when a project ends at its natural conclusion. And while I’ve loved doing Stimulant, I need a break. The backlash—the side-eyes I get when I go to a bar—is stupid and isn’t fun to deal with anymore.

SCRIVENER

You also recently began a new enterprise called New Publishing. What will its purpose be?

CHARLIE ZACKS

It’s a small projects company. Nowadays, you need to convince people to buy your books, and one way to do that is to experiment with the medium itself. Not just the writing within the book, but with the physical product as well. But I don’t want to be some middleman who goes to a print shop, spits out books, and sells them on my website. We will work with authors and artists and poets to make books of some sort out of their vision.  I won’t be the first person to try it, but I want to try my hand at it anyway. 

SCRIVENER

I often feel very down about reading and writing today. I am sure that excellent art will continue to be made, but I am increasingly unsure about whether that art will be poetry or prose. There is something too studied and cliquish about it all, almost dilettantish. What keeps you optimistic about the fate of literature?

CHARLIE ZACKS

The medium is changing—it might not be prose, it might not be poetry—but that’s okay. Be hip about the way things are changing and approach it honestly. There are a lot of cringey thinkpieces you’ll find on Substack and a lot of shitty meme poetry on Instagram and Twitter. That probably can be largely ignored. But there are thousands of great pieces of writing hidden in little magazines in Des Moines and in London, Ontario, and Instagram captions, and bathroom stalls, and phone cases. I don’t know anything about the future of writing, and I’m not really sure where it’s going to go, but I’m not really that committed to the medium. All my favorite writers were artists, not just writers. Dennis Cooper, David Wojnarowicz, Edmund White—they were  all writers and they’re known as writers, but they’re all also, you know, interventionists. I respect those kinds of artists, who put themselves directly in the line of fire, who made art that the dilettantes don’t want to think about. So, I think the future of writing is just the future of art. The good stuff will continue to be the stuff that intervenes.

SCRIVENER

Is there an author writing today—who has not been published in Stimulant, and with whom you have not corresponded—about whose work you feel confident?

CHARLIE ZACKS

So many. Marouane Bakhti, a gay, Franco-Moroccan author, wrote this book called How to Leave the World, which just stunned me. It’s a tiny little pamphlet almost, maybe a hundred and ten pages, and it’s so good. Also, Tomasz Jedrowski wrote this book called Swimming in the Dark which I read this year. Every chapter ripped me apart. I hadn’t read anything since Edmund White that crawled into my lived experiences and explained them for me until this book did. He’s another gay author. Outside of novelists, Nick Cave (the musician) has a blog called The Red Hand Files, which is so interesting. I’ll shout out two other books. Max Porter—a British author who’s pretty hip right now—wrote this book called Shy about one night in a teenager’s life, which is killer. There’s also this book Holes by Hilary White, which gives me hope that the genre that she’s writing in has a future—kind of theory-fiction or theory-autofiction.

SCRIVENER

How can one be a better writer?

CHARLIE ZACKS

The simplest answer is: read. But I don’t think that’s the whole truth, because a lot of people read and have no idea how to write. I think the best way to become a better writer is to be honest with yourself. Figure out what it is that you’re trying to do with this. Enrich yourself. Try to figure out what you love about this world. What scares you a lot; what makes you feel uncomfortable; what makes you feel extremely happy. Right before you fall asleep and you close your eyes, there’s that thing that makes you open your eyes again—what is that thing? These days, people will be on a run and they whip out their notes app, thinking, “I’ll turn that into a piece later.” Sure, think about what you’re going to write about, but also think about why you’re writing it down. It’s all part of a metaschematic that’s way larger than we’ll ever understand. But try to find your place in that, and I think it will make you a better person and a better writer. 

SCRIVENER

If you could add one thing to literary life in Montreal, what would it be?

CHARLIE ZACKS

More bilingualism. When I say bilingualism, I mean cultures as well as languages. As things in the province grow more and more heated against anglophones, it seems that the francophone literary and art scene distances itself more and more. It’s rare to find francophone writers at Stimulant events. That’s partly because we advertise to anglophone readers and writers, but that’s also because francophone writers are going to their own events. I think it would be beautiful if we could bridge those gaps. Ahoy is doing that, and Pastiche is doing that as well.

SCRIVENER

If you could take away one thing from literary life in Montreal, what would it be?

CHARLIE ZACKS

Stimulant.