Garage Rock and Grand Rapids: An Interview with Natasha Stagg

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Fame and success in an era past meaning is what Natasha Stagg saw and interrogated before most people admitted it existed. Her pithy dissections of New York’s art, fashion, and contemporary culture collected in Sleeveless (2019), Artless (2023), and now on Substack, helped ease us into a world where fame is a dissociated ambient metric, a universal source of anxiety or fleeting satisfaction. In the literary world, that means legacy media seeking young writers absent discussion of literary work itself, if there is any to speak of. Books themselves recede from view, while the performance of literature resembles braindead megaphones blaring Guantanamo-style in a panopticon, a social media future that Stagg’s first novel, the Tucson-set Surveys (2016), spied the horizon of, and makes it the perfect time for her to return to the novel form with Grand Rapids, a book about a young woman coming of age in the titular Rust Belt town.

I spent my teen years in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and as it turns out, so did Natasha Stagg, at the exact same time in the early 2000s. Although it colored my most formative years, there’s something inchoate about the place. I’d never heard it described in writing nor ever felt I could adequately describe it myself, and was fascinated by the idea of this midsize Midwestern city, neither Chicago nor Detroit, beginning to take form in the popular imagination. I wanted to interview her, something in the vein of an expat summit. What was Grand Rapids, Michigan? What did we do there? Why did we leave?

Stagg’s brave, heedless narrator, Tess, colors in fantastical shades from her real-life, unsung metropolis—the Fish Ladder, the Amway Grand, her namesake La Grande Vitesse. In our long-ranging conversation at a coffee shop near our apartments, we touched on the essentials like Paul Schrader, Founders, Vertigo Records, Yesterdog, Morningstar, the DAAC—the proper names that made up our shared Grand Rapids. We may both live in downtown New York now, but as the city drowns in gimmick readings I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we’re looking back. Are the real signifiers still out there, somewhere back in the past, even still extant somewhere in the Great Lakes?

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Chris Molnar: I want to start with a quote from Artless: “Hometown talk is like weather talk, and it usually includes weather talk, attractions that locals never visit, wildlife that no one really sees. Still, I asked, ‘What did you do there?’” Of course, neither of us are originally from Grand Rapids.

Natasha Stagg: That’s true, so it doesn’t count.

CM: What brought you there and when did you move to Grand Rapids?

NS: I grew up in Tucson, and my parents got divorced when I was fourteen. My mother’s family lived in Grand Rapids. Pretty simple: She wanted to have more of a support system, so my sister and my mother and I moved there, and all of us lived with her sister and her husband.

CM: From when to when was that?

NS: All of my own high school years. I think that was calculated by my parents. They didn’t want to move me in the middle of a school, so they announced their divorce after they’d already felt separated from each other. But my sister and I had no idea. We were so self-involved, because we were teenagers not paying attention to our parents. So they moved us when we were going into a new school. It was just those years, I guess 2000 to 2004.

It was a very big culture shock because it was not only moving to a different state, but moving to a different class. As a kid in Tucson, I had been expecting to go to the biggest public school, Tucson High, which had a huge dropout rate, not a prep school in any way. Forest Hills Northern was almost a prep school.

CM: Thinking about both Surveys and Grand Rapids in comparison to your non-fiction, there’s more of a hazy sense of place. I guess in part because it’s fiction, but I feel like there is something about New York, just specific landmarks—like China Chalet—that you’re going to and can count on people to know about. There’s something accurate about it, in that Grand Rapids itself is sort of hazy to me. How much of that is on purpose in terms of how you think of these places?

NS: I mean, yeah, I did think a lot about naming places and whether I would or not, and I think most of the places that I named don’t exist anymore or they’re just locations. I almost renamed Blues on the Mall and then I was like, that’s kind of funny because all these people who, like you, have been to Grand Rapids, will know what I’m talking about.

It was constantly being said aloud. And then later you’re like, we’re saying the words Blues on the Mall? We didn’t want to see a blues band play. That’s not the point. But yeah, I do think—you understand this, having written about Grand Rapids, too—it’s so hard to describe the identity of the place. And I don’t necessarily want to be the person to do that, because I don’t think I can.

CM: There’re all these people who’ve lived there their whole lives and have a totally different take on it. But at the same time, it’s something that I’m always thinking about. How would I write about Grand Rapids? I lived there. Things happened to me.

NS: Probably the same that could be said about any city, but it’s a litmus test of what someone thinks about that area. I brought it up the other day to this lawyer, and he was older and he had worked on cases suing Amway, so that was his experience with Grand Rapids. I was like, wow, it is so different to different people. Since writing the book, I’ve seen two different reality shows that are currently airing about Grand Rapids. 

One was about this family who had moved from Chicago to Grand Rapids because they fell in love with the real estate aspect of it. They were flipping homes, but they were interior design, like a team of people that would do beach houses. They were like, it has everything. It has this beautiful historical downtown. It has lake house properties that are kind of beachy. They were just talking about the historical relevance of the architecture. But also, looking at it, you’re just picking this green tile versus that green tile. It’s very basic and banal and aesthetic. I actually fell in love with this show. It’s like, you guys are not serious, right? You’re in love with this look, but it’s so boring to me. 

And then the other show was a police show, and it’s just the polar opposite in tone. Because for some reason, there’s this cop series that—I think they go to a different city every season, but right now it’s Grand Rapids. The premise is, it’s the most access to the actual system of arresting people out of any cop show ever. Kind of to prove how noble the cops are; which is every cop show kind of. But it shows really rough parts of Grand Rapids, sort of the opposite of this interior design show. It’s like, okay, this is a big city with lots of aspects to it.

CM: It’s funny because the back copy talks so much about the Calder sculpture when you only talk about it once. That seems more Hedi or something. It makes me think that after neither of us were there, they started the Art Prize. I only hear about it because my parents send me videos. It sounds kind of crazy.

NS: I had a friend who was an art writer years ago and was like, “Didn’t you used to live in Grand Rapids? They’re sending me on a press trip there to cover the Art Prize.” I was like, “Oh, is it actually a big thing?” Then the thing that he wrote about it was so funny because he was so used to Art Basel and bigger fairs. He was like, “That’s not what this is.” But it was getting press because it was the biggest money prize awarded to the public. The winner is always just massive. It’s actually like a giant painting. They’re like, “This one’s the winner because it’s huge.”

CM: Tess is writing in the book from Chicago, right?

NS: Yeah, a suburb of Chicago.

CM: That feels accurate, so many people I knew in Grand Rapids, that’s about as far as they got. It’s hard to get a little bit further than Chicago.

NS: Yeah, me too, and I think most of them do go back, like your Paul Schrader quote [“When you leave Grand Rapids, if you don’t have a lot of energy, you’re gonna get as far as Kalamazoo. They’re gonna bring you back.”]

CM: It’s like salmon swimming upstream.

NS: Yeah, because it spits them out. You feel this pull of going home every weekend. It’s almost like going to college, but part two.

CM: Did you go back to Tucson specifically for college?

NS: Since I was then a Michigan in-state person, I went to University of Michigan. But immediately, when I started having to pay my student loans back, it was like, Ann Arbor is basically as expensive as New York to rent an apartment. So I went back to Tucson with the idea that I would save money because I knew it was a cheap place to live, but also—I still think about this—I moved to nowhere. My family didn’t have a house there anymore. I just had to rent a shitty apartment right away, which I did. I don’t even know why I was there. I think I just missed my friends and didn’t let any decision-making get too hard for me. I ended up staying there for three years.

CM: It’s easy to underestimate how much of anybody’s decisions are like that at that age. What else do you have?

NS: I was dating a guy in Ann Arbor and I didn’t even break up with him. I just called him one day and was like, so we’re broken up. He was like, since when? He was shocked. I was like, oh, I moved, so I thought you would understand. From there, I was in the most angsty, depressed state, like I guess I’ll apply to grad school because then I won’t have to pay my student loans back. I only got into two schools and one of them was in Tucson. 

CM: Your essay about going back to Tucson is great, because you’re talking about these obscure places, like the Dragon Wagon, as if you were talking about Le Bain in New York. It made me wonder if you had gone back to Grand Rapids in that kind of way.

NS: I did. Sort of. I’d mostly written the book already. But I wanted to. I definitely was like, if anything stands out, I’m going to like reorganize or add stuff, and I did actually do a little bit of that. I went back last summer and hung out with a couple of my old friends. It felt bigger than I remembered, even though most people say when they go back it feels small. It’s not small. It’s a big city. It was funny because I went to my high school reunion. That was the reason I went back. 

There was this one thing that stuck out to me at the reunion. There were so many people that kept talking about mowing their lawns, and how hard it is. They weren’t saying it to me, like “oh you don’t know, because you live in New York.” They were just talking to each other! They were like, “Man, I never would have guessed that mowing your lawn is this thing you have to do so often, and it’s so annoying. There’s so much of it. It just keeps growing.” And it’s true, unless you move into an apartment, which, who does that there?

CM: What was your circuit of things that you did?

NS: I would go to Morningstar.

CM: Is that Tate’s coffee shop in the book?

NS: Yeah. My friend worked at some other coffee shop that I don’t remember the name of. 

CM: There were a lot of coffee shops, just remembering. I feel like that’s a whole world that’s gone.

NS: It was the culture, like ’90s coffee shops, but we were a little late. That idea of just spending your whole day there. I remember meeting so many people for the first time there. 

CM: Morningstar is something that is really hard for me to explain to people, but I would go there every day in high school. I would say I was going to sleep over at somebody’s house and just hang out there all night. And they had movies on the VCR and all these band posters. It felt like this was what I should like, in a way that was really influential, and I don’t know what the equivalent of that would be now. 

NS: I know, I can picture the posters still. Memorizing what I should listen to. I don’t know if it was music I even listened to. Maybe it was also this idea that I was intimidated by everyone there, and so even the posters were like “this is for later. I’ll know about this someday.”

CM: I guess the other trendy idea of living somewhere outside of the coasts is not gentrifying the country, but rather this Gummo idea of a backwater as a primordial, authentic kind of cool. What do you think of all that?

NS: I think my real-life experience in Grand Rapids and in Tucson was maybe more Gummo-like than I let on in the book. I feel like the book is trying to get to this idea of how we present ourselves, and what things kind of gel into later when you’re talking about them. 

CM: You’ve said your parents were itinerant theater people. What were they like?

NS: My dad grew up in Washington Heights and he was in school to be a Broadway star. He was a dancer, and then he pivoted to being backstage. He was a stagehand technician, and eventually lighting designer. But he never did it in New York. He was always traveling to these theatrical productions outside the city. I think people don’t know, because I would never know this unless I grew up with it. But you know, theaters everywhere are not just local playhouses. They’re big.

CM: Sometimes I think writers need to live in New York City, in the way that any stage actor needs to live there because of Broadway. But are you saying that’s actually bullshit, even for actors?

NS: No, it’s not bullshit, and that’s with all of the operas and musicals and ballets that my parents both worked on. My mom, she grew up in, not in New York, but in New Jersey and Long Island, but she wanted to be an artist, went to college, dropped out, came to the Southwest, which a lot of people were doing in the ’70s to learn murals. She studied under a muralist, and became a very different type of artist, not a New York artist. Then she got a job painting scenery, and that’s where my parents met, in Tucson. They were both working in the backstage of theater productions in a studio, or company, multiple companies, and that’s how you can become involved in the theater anywhere. But if you want to be on the stage, that’s touring. You don’t live in Tucson or Grand Rapids, usually.

CM: So that meant you kind of had some sort of awareness of a broader cultural world, even if you feel stuck in a place that isn’t necessarily a center for culture.

NS: I mean, I also came to a lot of things on my own, but then realized later that there was a background for it. I didn’t have parents that were religious or conservative or anti-me going into the arts. It doesn’t feel the same as this idea that I set out on my own and rejected my shitty, trashy background.

CM: That’s similar to my experience in Grand Rapids, and maybe there’s something uniquely American about that. Where it’s hard to describe, or you’re not exactly from anywhere at all. It makes it harder to be like, what are you for or against exactly? 

NS: I also think it’s fun to then take a closer look at the different indicators of why we say this is trashy and this isn’t.

CM: Right, what do you mean by trashy?

NS: Like, you’re from real America and you’re not, or you’re this like elite, or upper class, or different part of existence. But really wealthy families have scandals. That’s a trope, everybody knows that and really poor families have those same scandals, everything in between.

CM: Especially in a country this big, all these binaries are false. I think of a friend from the Bronx who talks about how deprived it was. But I think, you were literally a train ride from any cultural thing you could imagine. Whereas I had no idea where anything came from. 

What do you think is the next thing? Maybe that’s a pivot; how do you write about New York now? What would you write about? It’s a different New York than it was ten years ago. 

NS: That’s the thing, a lot of young people are writing about New York in a way that I can’t because they’re more in the youth culture of it. They’re doing it well, and I’m enjoying reading what they’re writing about it. I don’t want to be that thing all the time forever. I also was letting myself get pigeonholed a little bit with assignments. I think the next thing for me is just writing more fiction. Hopefully.

CM: Can I ask what sort of fiction? More from your life?

NS: I have a hard time writing about anything unless I’ve witnessed or experienced it, but I guess it’s not hard to go to other places. I want to try more fiction, but I always think that, and then I’m led to personal experiences that feel richer somehow.

My favorite authors are, like, James Joyce. He wrote about James Joyce. The modernists all wrote about personal experiences, and if they didn’t, they’d write something voyeuristic. It’s very small-scope vibes. 

CM: I think it’s just people not respecting the subtlety of writing about your life in a fictional sense. And not thinking about the books they like. Just a careless way of thinking. The people who are dissing autofiction are not reading about dragons or something. We’re all living in the same literary world. They just feel affronted if somebody’s using their real name, or obvious parts of their life.

There was another essay where you mentioned roommates living above a record store.

NS: Yeah, they lived above Vertigo. My sister and I were dating guys that lived together. They lived above the DAAC [Division Avenue Arts Cooperative]. So, next door to Vertigo, or down the street. And then Skelletones was right there. 

The apartments were so cool. They were huge, as big as the DAAC, each one. I actually went to college and came back to Grand Rapids for summer, because I didn’t really have a place to live. A person I knew from high school had a room, and so I lived in Grand Rapids for real, for the first and only time. On Prospect, downtown. It was some dilapidated, ugly house, but it was cool. It had a cool backyard. 

CM: Going back, downtown is so gentrified. It used to be cool in part because it was dilapidated.

NS: Yeah, it was shitty, but each house had a giant patio and backyard so it was not shitty at all. It was cool. So, me and my friend from Calvin worked for an artist in some warehouse somewhere, and that was really funny. We’d take the city bus to a decent neighborhood, working on installation art that never went anywhere. This weird world that we were in every day, making crazy foam-based sculptures for this guy, and he had enough money to pay us hourly. I don’t know how. Then me and my friend started a band together. We didn’t record anything, but we were just like, oh, we’re gonna like be in a band now. Everybody was always like, I’m in a band now. 

CM: That’s just what you did there.

NS: We did play at the DAAC, I think. We played like a couple shows, and one of them just was opening for Wolf Eyes, because everybody was opening for Wolf Eyes. I still think about that, because that was so cool. But I’m sure we sucked so much. 

I was in Michigan at the exact right time for a music scene. The noise scene was very happening then, and then right after that when I was in college there was like the garage rock revival and the White Stripes and all that, and I was hanging out with all these people that were actually playing huge shows, and I would go to them. 

CM: Like the Von Bondies. 

NS: I dated the drummer of the Von Bondies. I mean, I went on tour with the Von Bondies. That was the guy that I left without breaking up with. It was such a scene, like you could just be there and Vincent Gallo would be right there. You know what I mean? It did feel like there was something happening.

CM: It was cheap enough to live anywhere, and a band like them on a major label, that’s a huge thing. Everybody feels that connection to something bigger.

NS: I think the first time I went to New York was with that guy, we went on a trip together and he was introducing me to his friends, celebrities. I was like, this is a big deal. After the fact, I thought that was going to be my entry to all things cool, and I blew it. For a while I was like, well, that was my one chance. But no, everywhere you go, there’s some scene happening. And obviously New York, all the time, has something happening. But how many New Yorkers can talk about the garage rock revival?

Sometimes when I think of Midwestern in terms of being proud that you’re from the Midwest, I think of breweries, and coffee shops, and things that are very branded in this way that then became described as Williamsburg. But like Williamsburg in the early 2000s.

CM: Like garage rock.

NS: Yeah, like the Strokes weren’t the first.

CM: They’re the prep school version.

NS: It’s funny because I bet most people don’t want to claim that. That actually, the Midwest started this aesthetic that was later the Williamsburg-ification of America. You go anywhere now and there’s this sort of steampunky looking bar. Just a little bit of a tin coating, but that was very Midwestern.

CM: There is a way that you can say the Midwest birthed all this shit that maybe it doesn’t want to take credit for.

NS: The brewery aesthetic.

CM: It is crazy that Founders is in every bodega. I’m always blown away.

NS: I know. I always see Bell’s Oberon. 

CM: I wonder if part of the appeal of living in Grand Rapids is that you’re controlling the narrative in a way that you can’t control in your experience in New York.

NS: That’s why I left. I felt like if your life is about keeping up appearances in that way, why not just go to New York? I remember leaving Tucson being like, I don’t know where I want to go yet, I’m just finishing grad school. And some of my friends in Tucson were like, why don’t you stay, I don’t understand. Like, why do you have to leave, just because you finished school? And I was like, there are a lot of problems with it. That person doesn’t like me based on this thing that I didn’t even do, all this little infighting stuff where I was like, I don’t want to go to that bar. Every time I’m there, that person’s going to be there. And that doesn’t happen in New York.

CM: Did you do events there for Surveys?

NS: The University of Arizona would invite back anybody who has published a book for their annual, alumni, accomplished people thing. So, it wasn’t for me, it was for everyone that had published something that year, maybe three or four people. So technically I did a reading.

But it was for the school. It was so embarrassing; I went to this bookstore that I’d grown up going to as a kid to say this book is by me. I think I even had somebody I was with say that it should be on the locals’ rack. And they’re like, we don’t care that this person grew up in Tucson. It’s just such a different vibe. Like a bookstore in Tucson is not interested in like a quiet coming of age novel. It’s more interested in erotic fiction. 

CM: There should be more dialogue between the small places, and the people that left. 

NS: Just because we left doesn’t mean you shouldn’t care about us. 

CM: Well, you know, we can be a resource for each other. Or else everybody winds up hating each other and it gets weird. 

NS: Yeah. There’s this book out, I haven’t read it, but it’s about Tucson. This reporter went back to Tucson because he’d grown up there partially and then he had this really strange experience. I read a review of it the other day that’s written by a person who also grew up in Tucson. It gets kind of competitive and weird, saying he didn’t capture it correctly. It made me very self-conscious because it was like, this is the way people are going to read what I write too.

CM: When Hardcore came out there was this multi-page spread in the Grand Rapids Press of all the locals ripping on it. But it’s kind of cool. They really cared. He really pissed off the entire town. You’d be in good company because Paul Schrader, he was born there, he was Dutch. He knew more about Grand Rapids than anybody, and everyone still hated him.

NS: Yeah. Like the guy that wrote about Tucson, I think the critique was so strange. This could be about any city. Why does it have to be so particularly about Tucson? It could be just a person sharing their experience.

CM: Which is what matters, and it becomes universal. As much as I wanted to know what is Berrylawn, I was still like, this is how it feels to remember Grand Rapids. 

NS: Heather Hills, that’s the real Berrylawn. When I was back this last time, my friend that I was hanging out with had also worked there, because a lot of my friends ended up working at this place. It was just a place that hired teenagers and there weren’t that many of those.So, we were like, let’s go. It was her idea to go look at it. She wanted to drive by it and look at Heather Hills. We walked in and nobody stopped us and we just wandered around this nursing home.

CM: It’s not a good sign for how it’s being operated. 

NS: Seriously. And then she remembered everything. She was getting flooded with nostalgia. But then I didn’t remember it, because there were two buildings. And this was the building that she worked in and I worked in the other one. So, I was like, let’s go to the next building. And we drove by that one and it was totally derelict. Just totally bombed out and there were these junkies sitting in front of it. But it was just weird too, because one nursing home was totally up and running and fine, like one block away from this one.I was like, but then where did they go? Because it was this thing where it was basically shuffling people from this place to place. The one that I worked at was more the older old people. Where do they go? They don’t have a next stop. They just have to die now.