Steve Roggenbuck: You recently did a west coast U.S. reading tour with Jamie Iredell, about 8 days of 1 reading/day in CA, OR, and WA, including a radio-station reading it looks like. What was/is your touring situation like, and how do you like it? Do you get money from your publisher or any of the venues? Do you book the readings yourself? Are you starting to get some people who know your work coming to the readings, or is it mostly new readers/strangers?

Mike Young: The tour was boss. Trudge work but not drudge work. Seattle to L.A in ten sun-licked days. Helicopters from our respective publishers picked us up in Seattle, and throughout most of the tour we had little baskets of fresh strawberries that outposted agents would give us. One of the agents didn't show up, can't remember where, but I'm reminded of that terrorist who picked Detroit to blow up because those flights were cheapest. This same terrorist was supposed to help blow up the U.S.S. Cole, but he fell asleep. When we ran out of books to sell, Jamie and I just wrote new ones. We did this by taking our shirts off and assigning barnacles to our backs. Also, sometimes we dropped people out of our helicopters by surprise and transcribed their reactions. To answer your last question, I have known and loved and stolen Dick Tracy t-shirts from everyone who's ever read anything I've written, so they should stop blaming themselves.

SR: A poem of yours in Glitterpony includes a set of lines I really liked: "Things that scare me include car dealerships at night / and the fact that snow cannot live inside my mouth. / Boom. That's it." I really don't know what kind of question to ask about the poem. Do you like those lines too, especially the end bit? I think it's great.

MY: I wrote that poem after I gave a girl a piggyback ride. We were listening to "Try a Little Tenderness," the live version. The right version, she said. She said, Write me a hundred love poems and maybe I'll love you back. Later she accused me of stealing her laptop, and I had to sleep in the kitchen. Her father was a shifty politician who nonetheless I admire in concept because he used to spray his wife's perfume behind the couch when he got lonely. Sometimes it's good to write a poem only for one person because then everybody else will want to break into your house. Well, not everybody, maybe seventy percent. This girl was worried I couldn't protect her, which was probably true, because mostly I just wanted to have breakfast with her. When I published the poem in Glitterpony, I asked them to take out her name. For the record, I wish her the best and hope she finds someone who doesn't want to take her name out of their poems. When I do this poem in public, I make it a play between two inanimate objects, like a stapler and a crockpot. Once someone on the street accused this performance cloak of fearing the poem's sentiment. Probably there's no such thing as a love poem, just a thing as love, or maybe just a thing as lovers: good luck knowing for sure.

SR: It looks like you've had your blog since 2006, posting somewhere between 50 and 130 posts per year. What does your blog do for you as a writer or a person? Has your blog given you any opportunities or helped you grow any kind of following that you maybe wouldn't have otherwise?

MY: Before there was the internet, there were these things called BBS's, where computers would just call each other one on one. Mano a mano, etc. There were message boards that different BBS's shared, so a lot of people could talk to each other. Modems made very plaintive noises. Once I showed my friend Josh some message boards and he said "None of these people are real, right? You are just typing them all in?" I could've done a lot to convince him otherwise, but nobody wanted to tell me where they lived.

SR: I keep noticing more and more factions and groups/collectives forming in the literary community/communities. I've been grouped in with some without even really trying; it seems to have benefits and drawbacks. What has been your experience with being grouped with other writers or being labeled as part of a movement or a trend, if any? Do you have any strong feelings about it, either based on the practical effects or on some more fundamental belief?

MY: I just watched a YouTube interview with the Nature Boy Ric Flair. Real class act, sort of like a real life The Wrestler except with fancier boas and swagger—in his day. He had a lot of scar tissue on his forehead. Red is green, he said. One of the YouTube commenters scorned him for losing all his money and getting three divorces, but most of the commenters were fans. One commenter said, "He use to have long blond hair but what does that have to do with wrestling? Besides, just because you don't think highly of plant life, doesn't mean plants aren't alive." When the interviewer showed Ric Flair a picture of himself sitting alone in the hallway of a Japanese wrestling arena, on his retirement tour, he cried. Sixty-four times and that was the last one, he said. When the interviewer asked Ric Flair if the wrestling business was tough, Flair put his finger up and said it was great.

SR: Bro, if you could tell the world just one thing… what would it be?

MY: In regards to the world, one time I saw a sign on the window of a hair salon that said NO DOGS ALLOWED, so I wrote this song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXuovh9zB1Q