"The essays are different because ultimately it's things I'm interested in, and I'm really just writing about myself and using those subjects as a prism." -- Chuck Klosterman
Charles John "Chuck" Klosterman (born June 5, 1972) is an American journalist who has written for The New York Times Magazine, The Believer, and The Washington Post, and has written books focusing on American popular culture.
"A lot of people have this strategy where if they have a hard question they wait to ask it to the end of the interview because they think the person is going to walk out. But what they have to realize is, is that if the person walks out, they have a pretty successful story.""A whole bunch of months passed and I didn't hear anything and then he emailed and asked if I could do a little piece on POD and Queens of the Stone Age.""Anybody who says they are a good liar obviously is not, because any legitimately savvy liar would always insist they're honest about everything.""Anyone who claims to be good at lying is obviously bad at lying. Thus - as a writer myself - I cannot comment on whether or not writers are exceptionally good liars, because whatever I said would actually mean its complete opposite.""At a magazine, everything you do is edited by a bunch of people, by committee, and a lot of them are, were, or think of themselves as writers. Part of that is because magazines worry about their voice.""Book writing is a little different because, in my case, my editor is a year younger than me and basically has the same sensibility as me.""Even though I wanted to experience all these things I was interested in, I couldn't get them. So I had to think critically and culturally about what was available.""I also did an Ozzy piece for him, and so I got hired. Everything happened really fast. I can't give people advice, because everything in my life changed completely in less than a year and it's still not something I am used to.""I feel sorry for people who have to edit me. Which is why book writing is by far the most enjoyable. Really the only thing it's based on is whether it's good or not. No book editor, in my experience, is getting a manuscript and try to rewrite it.""I grew up on a farm, and we didn't have cable and only limited radio stations, so I wasn't inundated with culture the way people in other parts of the country were. But I was really interested in it.""I keep saying the word "weird" over and over again, but it's the only way I can describe it.""I was fortunate that I was at newspapers for eight years, where I wrote at least five or six stories every week. You get used to interviewing lots of different people about a lot of different things. And they aren't things you know about until you do the story.""I've been asked about this constantly, and I compare it to how if you're walking down the street and some schizo guy comes up to you and vomits on you: You wouldn't be hurt by that, you'd just think it's weird.""If you're doing an interview, you need conversational tension. After you talk to them, you're not going to have a relationship with them, they're not going to like you, they're not going to be your friend.""In Fargo, they say, well, that's a job. How well do you get paid? For example, for this book I was written about in Entertainment Weekly, and it was kind of cool because my mom asked me if Entertainment Weekly was a magazine or a newspaper.""It didn't seem remotely possible. I had no idea how people got those jobs, I didn't know what the steps were, it never even dawned on me. It seemed so outside the realm of possibility.""It's just that what's important there is different there than what's important is here. Here, people care that you wrote a book or that you work in the media.""The biggest hurdle to writing Fargo Rock City was that I couldn't afford a home computer - I had to get a new job so I could buy a computer. It could all change though. In five years, I could be back at some daily newspaper, which wouldn't be so bad.""The biggest problem in rock journalism is that often the writer's main motivation is to become friends with the band. They're not really journalists; they're people who want to be involved in rock and roll.""The essays are very solipsistic and self-absorbed, I'm totally conscious of that. To me, book writing is fun, and I basically just write about things that are entertaining to myself.""To me, every interview, even if you love the artist, needs to be somewhat adversarial. Which doesn't mean you need to attack the person, but you do need to look at it like you're trying to get information that has not been written about before.""When you're writing for newspapers you have all these parameters. You can't swear, you have to use short paragraphs, all that. If you stay within those parameters, you have lots of freedom because you're writing for the next day.""You're trying to find new ideas in people. I always think to myself, what question I am least comfortable asking the person? And then I make sure I ask it early in the interview."
Klosterman was born in Breckenridge, Minnesota to Florence and William Klosterman, and grew up on a farm in nearby Wyndmere, North Dakota. Klosterman was raised Catholic. He graduated from Wyndmere High School in 1990 and from the University of North Dakota in 1994. After college he was a journalist in Fargo, North Dakota and later an arts critic for the Akron Beacon Journal in Akron, Ohio, before moving to New York City in 2002.Klosterman was a senior writer for Spin and had a column titled "My Back Pages" (formerly "Rant and Roll Over" and "### Words from Chuck Klosterman"). In March 2006, it was reported that Klosterman was fired after the magazine was sold and editor-in-chief Sia Michel was replaced, along with many other staffers. He still regularly contributes as a featured columnist to Esquire and has written for GQ, The New York Times Magazine, The Believer, and The Washington Post.
Klosterman participated in an e-mail exchange on ESPN's Page 2 with writer Bill Simmons in August 2004. In September 2005, Simmons interviewed him in his "Curious Guy" segment. Though initially recognized for his rock writing, Klosterman has written extensively about sports and began contributing articles to Page 2 on November 8, 2005. The ESPN site featured his week-long blog from Super Bowl XL in early 2006, and a weekend-long blog covering his experience at the 2007 Final Four.
In 2008, Klosterman spent the summer as the Picador Guest Professor for Literature at the University of Leipzig's Institute for American Studies in Leipzig, Germany.
In 2009, Klosterman married journalist Melissa Maerz.
