Transcending the Transactional

A Conversation with writer Thomas J. Bevan on the Anti-Mimetic Act of Creating Art

Stanczyk by Jan Matejko—an image my guest adopted as his avatar for a while.

I first met Thomas J. Bevan, a fascinating writer (because a fascinating person) who is based in a small town in England, after I started spending more time online during the pandemic.

For better or worse, I got back on Twitter for the first time in years. Within a short period of time, the algorithm began showing me his tweets (so, the algorithm has some benefits after all...), which led me to his recently-launched Substack, The Commonplace, where I was struck by the honesty of his voice, the sharpness of his prose, the anti-mimetic topics he was choosing to write about (“The Death of Lunch” / “The Meaning of Nostalgia” / “Catacombs as Metaphor”), and his willingness to share his story. His fiction is also stellar, even though the essays initially drew me in.

Though he is pseudo-anonymous, he shared with his audience that he had worked a series of relatively normal jobs (i.e. in restaurant kitchens) and most re…