Meet Jackson Bliss | Author, Musician, & Content Creator

We had the good fortune of connecting with Jackson Bliss and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Can you open up a bit about your work and career? We’re big fans and we’d love for our community to learn more about your work.

My art has three faces: books, music, & content creation.

BOOKS: In almost all of my books, I write about mixed-race/Nisei/hapa/transcultural identity, AAPI masculinity, and the redemption of love in this broken world. I like to create smart, compassionate, complex, courageous, and hyphenated characters who understand the magic of language like in my backwards novel, AMNESIA OF JUNE BUGS. I like to experiment with and explore the many forms, genres, & ways that stories can be told like in my conceptual collection, COUNTERFACTUAL LOVE STORIES & OTHER EXPERIMENTS. And I like to write about mixed-race people and the children of immigrants who search for their homeland in the language of their existence and in the hearts of others like in my choose-your-own-adventure memoir, DREAM POP ORIGAMI.

MUSIC: I have been writing post-rock, electronic, and contemporary music since I was an aspiring concert pianist in high school (I attended Interlochen Arts Academy before ending up in California and then Chicago). My last two musical projects are ALL THE PLACES WE WERE BROKEN & ALL THE PLACES WHERE THE LIGHT SHINED THROUGH, an indie/post-rock/folk EP I started writing in Buenos Aires but finished here in LA during the rainiest winter in recent memory and “Space Station Love Song,” which is the musical score I wrote and set to a NASA video taken from the International Space Station. My electronic/lo-fi/IDM debut LP is SPACE AGE, which I also started writing in Buenos Aires but finished and mastered in Chicago & LA.

CONTENT CREATION: Most of my creative content is for my IG account and my newsletter, MIXTAPE by Jackson Bliss, but I recently created a YouTube channel called DREAM POP ORIGAMI by JACKSON BLISS where I post short and long video content too. Basically, my YouTube channel is just short music videos about my favorite places in LA and longer videos about travel, publishing, wellness, finance, & the art of happiness, among other things. It’s been a slow burn, but I’ve been enjoying this process a lot and I think you can see a specific Japanese American aesthetic operating in almost all of my content creation.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
One of my favorite things to do is go hiking in Griffith Park, walk down to Los Feliz afterwards, hit up Maru, our fave café in the neighborhood, and then walk back to our car a little sore, tired, and filled with vegan croissants and Vanilla Oat Lattes. To me, that’s a perfect day that blends the sheer beauty, topography, and climate of LA with its multicultural identity and flavor. I guess the older I get, the more I want things to be nourishing, harmonious, and meaningful and the less I need them to be superexciting.

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
I wouldn’t be here without LB, my wife and the love of my life. She’s been with me for every rise and fall of my artistic and professional career. When I wanted to peace out of America during the 2008 recession and spend a year teaching English in Argentina, she said okay, let’s do this. When I got into USC for my PhD program, she got a job at CHLA and helped us live way better than we would have on just my modest grad student stipend. And when I got hired for my dream tenure track job back in the Midwest, she got a job in Ann Arbor in like thirty seconds. Point is, she’s my emotional center of gravity and I owe so much to her. I also feel like I owe a lot to my writing & academic mentors: Aimee Bender, who is one of my fave people in this world, Viet Thanh Nguyen, TC Boyle, Valerie Sayers, Steve Tomasula, and Nathalie Nadeau-Wright, who was my first creative writing teacher who gave me the whole world in her workshop. I hope I’m making her proud. And then there are so many other people too: friends, fellow writers, scholars, neighbors, editors, family members, but I don’t wanna recreate my acknowledgment page, so I’ll stop here. But the gratitude overflows in my heart for all of them.

Website: http://www.jacksonbliss.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jacksonbliss/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jacksonbliss/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/jacksonbliss

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jacksonbliss

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@jacksonbliss/featured

Other: Substack: https://jacksonbliss.substack.com/

Image Credits
Aya Mac Erika Bliss