KMWR: How did "God Is My Co-Founder" come into being? I was blown away by the concept and would love to know how you built this up in your drafts.

MTL: The things I write often start with a single line or a single image. A lot of that comes from the fact that my typical genre, in terms of both volume written and time spent writing, is poetry -- a single line often is enough to justify a poem's existence. But I think that's more true about fiction than we often acknowledge. When I think of Shirley Jackson's "The Witch," I think not just of how masterfully compressed the prose is or of how perfectly crafted the characters are, I think of a single line of dialogue -- really a single word, pinched -- plunging the entire story into madness. When I recommend George Saunders' "CommComm," it's not just because of how delightfully idiosyncratic the diction is or how creative the story and setting are, but because I know the final sentence will leave them as broken and healed as it left me.

For this particular story, the line was "This was the only portion of his seven-page design document that the Founder could get to compile." Funnily enough, I initially envisioned this story as a purely humorous, light piece. The narrator talked me into something else. In many ways, that's how this story evolved in revision -- I handed the narrator more and more of the reins. 

KMWR: "God Is My Co-Founder" is complex in its themes of creation and modulation; I was of course delighted by its satirical close-up on start-up culture. I also admire how many lines can be extrapolated to be about writing: "What you find in the Founder’s career is a pattern: every function bifurcates in ways he neither expects nor intends... He gets so tunnel-visioned on what each will bring that he forgets to check the consequences. To be blunt, he forgets consequences exist." I'm curious about what you think is hiding in plain sight in this story?

MTL: The act of creation is absolutely core to how I thought about this story, probably unsurprisingly. My experience working at a startup has given me a very procedural view of creation -- whatever the specifics of the medium are, whether it's a piece of writing or a piece of software or a company full of people, creation is essentially a single set of steps. You make something, you get feedback, you internalize that feedback, you make changes based on that feedback, and you repeat. In a startup, the people giving you feedback are often paying customers or prospects, and what you're building is ideally something that's enough better than the competition that they're willing to pay you. In writing, the person giving feedback might be yourself for an early draft or a friend for a more finished product, and the frustration of feeling that there's always more you could revise might lead to you saying something timeless like "a poem is never finished, but abandoned." There's some oversimplification here, intentionally, but I do think the skills it takes to be successful in either area are the same: humility, creativity, empathy, and determination. My hope is that this doesn't resonate just with engineers at a startup and writers, but also composers, sculptors, researchers, and so on. 

KMWR: Can you speak more to how your writing life has evolved over your career? I'd also love to know your perspective on what it's like to have a creative life and a scientific life in your work as a data scientist. What's the inside scoop on how these two livelihoods coexist?

MTL: I think the sad truth is that there are many, many more talented writers out there than we get to read, and a lot of that is due to "regular" life encroaching on everything else as we get older. I know I naturally have much less time to write than I'd like, and I have to fight and push away other things I'd like to do in order to maintain that space. I think that's due to having to pay rent in 2025, though, not because my writing life and my scientific life are at any sort of natural odds. If anything, I think the two fuel each other. One of my other projects at the moment, which I've been working on for a few years, is a book of poems that are all drawn from mathematics. From that one field alone, I've found so many beautiful concepts and structures, so many clever approaches and people, and so many ideas reminiscent of both the most joyous and the most difficult moments in my life -- now multiply that by many other scientific fields! 

KMWR: What's your ideal writing session like? What do you like to have nearby to keep you motivated?

MTL: I grew up Catholic, and I have to admit that I feel it very intensely when answering this question. Basically, I need to cut out all possible distractions. Internet off, phone silent and on a desk out of arm's reach, apartment as silent as I can make it. I don't even want the chair to be too comfortable. Cafes work, but only if I build in a similar level of isolation. The one comfort I'll allow myself is a nice cold drink (or warm one on a cold day). I find that the hardest thing is just getting things out there in the first place -- going back and revising feels like so much more bang for my buck, but I have to force myself to be slightly miserable to get there. It's work -- I have to treat it like work and trudge through the mud. 

KMWR: What have you been reading recently and what would you recommend?

MTL: I'm going to give as many answers to this as I can get away with. My favorite books I've read in the last year are Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota series. As a Renaissance historian writing futuristic sci-fi, Palmer takes an approach to constructing a future world that I find fascinating and wholly believable, and she populates it with a stellar cast of characters. I adored This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, but the more of that book's surprises I leave to the reader to discover the better. In preparation to read Jeff VanderMeer's Absolution, which I am late to, I'm re-reading the initial Southern Reach trilogy, and they are just as creepy and fun as they were the first time around. On the poetry side, I've been reading through the collected works of Kay Ryan and Philip Larkin, both of which I strongly recommend. On a more personal note, I was delighted to discover the existence of Corrie Williamson's fantastic, brutal Your Mother's Bear Gun while searching for presses to submit my poetry book to. Corrie was one of my instructors at the UVA Young Writers Workshop back in high school, and I'm reminded how lucky I was to have such a strong poet advising me as a young writer. Finally, on the craft side, I am slowly working through George Saunders' A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, and it's teaching me something with every page. 

KMWR: Finally, can you share any current or new projects that you're working on?

MTL: I tipped my hat on this in a previous answer, but I've been working on a full-length poetry manuscript, which I'm currently calling Proof, for a few years now, and I'm at the point where I'm willingly submitting it to contests and presses. Fingers crossed, I am hoping to have good news to announce there in the near future. Beyond that, I am actually writing a novel right now. Not at the point where I'm ready to reveal too much publicly, so all I'll say is: if you enjoyed seeing start-up culture and founder culture as a backdrop for explorations of how people work and think in stressful situations, you may like this project. If you want to read my previously published poems, you can see them on my personal website. 

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Michael T. Lawson studied writing and biostatistics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, earning a PhD in the latter and fostering a love of the former. His work has been published in Grist Journal, Spoon River Poetry Review, Tar River Poetry, Ninth Letter, Nimrod International Journal, and Four Way Review, among others. He currently resides in Boston, MA, where he works as a data scientist.

Read “God Is My Co-Founder” here.