by Evan Minsker

burned my tongue

on christmas blend

on february twentieth;

shunted to cabinet side

until we ripped through

five lbs of smooth &

buttery medium-dark

roast coffee from

five hundred seventy

nine miles south, this

red shiny crinkled bag of

contractor-gifted

corporate christmas drink:

“traditions new and old,”

“chocolate and spruce.”

it’s a dark roast that

I don’t have to pay for,

that doesn’t taste like

any tradition I recognize

aside from the tradition

of utilizing slash drinking

an entire buffalo; I’m

hesitant to burn the

contractor’s gifted

holiday candle that

smells like a cvs,

though part of me

wonders if that’s a

cool smell for the

garage (local man

burns down garage

out of candle guilt);

the holiday gnome

hand towels, once bleach

white, are permanently

stained by turmeric

and christmas blend.

after the steam

adequately rises out,

another sip of christmas

blend with closed eyes,

to see if traditions new

will flow through me,

but I’m cynical, doubtful:

I’m the only one in the

house stubborn enough

to christmas blend any

time of year. searching

for spruce tips with

scalded tongue, I

taste fleeting energy,

diarrhetic, union-busting,

GMOs, promise of the real

whistling “o tannenbaum,”

brownyellow-streaked holiday

gnome wondering why

he’s neither santa nor elf:

a homegoods offering for

the holiday agnostic and

yet the coffee is called

christmas blend. another sip,

nary a spruce tip to be found,

and at least another month

and a half of scalding

christmas left waiting

for the guileless hatch.

An Interview with Evan Minsker

by Sophia Schmitz

“I don’t want to work in journalism ever again, I just want to do it as an art.”  

Upon meeting Evan Minsker, a former Pitchfork employee and more recently a poet, podcaster, and freelance journalist, I felt a sense of calm center me on the hard chair on which I had plopped down. He was, after all, a career journalist who had interviewed others countless times before, the position I now assumed as he gazed at me through the computer screen. Thanks to this, he brought with him a chill, Midwestern dad vibe that put me at ease through the FaceTime call. However, I quickly found out that while he was indeed a Midwestern dad and had lived in various Midwestern states during his entire adulthood, he was in fact, not a Midwesterner by birth.  

Born in the tight peaks and valleys of the Appalachian Mountains, Minsker is native to Huntington, West Virginia. His adolescence spent obsessing over Pitchfork articles and dreaming of becoming a journalist brought him to the Colombia College of Journalism in Chicago, Illinois. Determination then gained him a sought-after internship at Pitchfork. He spent his first professional years at the journal publishing stories that ranged from reviews of obscure indie bands to news reports, to the coverage of Daft Punk during their breakup, to an album review of a Michigan-based punk rock band called Tyvek that earned an online readership of a few million. However, Minsker acknowledged that the job could become tedious, highlighting how, “It wasn’t always creative,” especially when covering the news. Another challenge was, “The institution gets credit,” rather than the writer, which is a side effect of working for such a well-known online journal. His ten-year-long experience at Pitchfork ended with the larger trend of layoffs in the field of journalism.  

When Evan Minsker got the news that he was to be let go, he had a series of self-discoveries over the span of a few months, focusing on the pressures of being a new parent alongside his goal of writing poetry every day while navigating the early days of unemployment. He humbly reminded me that poetry, “doesn’t have to be good, it just has to be there.” He described this experience as, “exercising a different part of his brain,” after years of writing in such a specific style. It was during these months that he wrote the two poems published in Barstow and Grand, “meat yard”, and “drinking christmas blend”. This practice of pumping out poetry daily lead him to realize that poetry and journalism share a central theme. Minsker described it as, “Poetry and journalism are all about brevity; you said this in ten words when you can say it in five.” Perhaps the most seismic revelation was his shocking discovery about his career, a career that he had been dreaming of ever since his adolescence. Minsker surprised me by stating “I never want to work in journalism again, I just want to do it as an art.” I waited for him to elaborate on this point but quickly realized that he didn’t need to. As he stated before, he had an amazing repertoire of work from the past ten years at Pitchfork. He didn’t have to prove a thing, which was clear to The New York Times and NPR, both of whom have hired him as a freelance journalist since he was laid off.  He also was able to pursue his passion project of finally starting his own music review journal online, without the all the corporate pressures, as well as curating his own podcast called Punk This Week, hosted with a longtime friend. For now, Evan Minsker is primarily focused on his longevity, a future every artist must face. However, Minsker hinted that his voice, even as a young intern at Pitchfork, was not something to be comprised, beautifully summarizing that he does it all for, “...the hypothetical me.” I am sure we will hear more from Evan Minsker in the future, but for now, enjoy his piece, “drinking christmas blend.”