Interview with Mallory Ortberg of “The Toast”

By Sarah MesleJune 29, 2015

Interview with Mallory Ortberg of “The Toast”
We interviewed over a dozen writers, artists, and social activists at the 2015 Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. Check out our interviews with Tavis SmileyCynthia BondKaren BenderRobert Putnam, and Octavia Spencer, and stay tuned for upcoming interviews with Lalo Alcaraz, Issa Rae, John Scalzi, Heidi Julavits, Rashad Robinson, and many more.

Mallory Ortberg is the co-founder of The Toast, a daily blog focused on humor writing and feminism. The blog also features Ortberg’s “Texts From” series — speculative text messages by historical luminaries — which spawned Ortberg’s recent collection Texts from Jane Eyre: And Other Conversations with Your Favorite Literary Characters. In this interview with LARB’s Senior Humanities Editor Sarah Mesle (whose review of Texts from Jane Eyre you can read here), Ortberg talks about her influences growing up, her obsession with “Weird Twitter,” and why she considers herself to be the Tom Bombadil of feminism.

¤


Sarah Mesle is the Senior Humanities Editor for the Los Angeles Review of Books.

LARB Contributor

Sarah Mesle (PhD, Northwestern) is faculty at USC and Senior Humanities Editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books. Prior to arriving at USC, she held postdoctoral fellowships in English at the University of Michigan and the University of California, Los Angeles. She is a 19th-century Americanist by training and is interested, generally speaking, in the long history of the American popular novel and in the many ways pop culture can excite, estrange, and surprise.

 

With Sarah Blackwood, she is co-editor of Avidly.org. You can follow her on Twitter.

Share

Did you know LARB is a reader-supported nonprofit?


LARB publishes daily without a paywall as part of our mission to make rigorous, incisive, and engaging writing on every aspect of literature, culture, and the arts freely accessible to the public. Help us continue this work with your tax-deductible donation today!