Alicia Kismet Eler wears many hats. Based in the Twin Cities, they're an arts journalist, critic, culture writer, and comedian. Much of their writing resides at the intersection of culture and technology, probing the impact of digital phenomena like selfies and memes. In this Q&A, Alicia reflects on the different genres they find themselves blending together in their work.

Your book The Selfie Generation delves into the millennial phenomenon of the selfie and its cultural implications. Can you talk about your decision to focus on the selfie and what it can illuminate?

Certainly! It was 2012, and selfie was all the rage. At that time, I was curious about the selfie and its broader cultural implications particularly because of the way it was being covered in mainstream media. One article would opine about the selfie as the end of culture/society because it was being seen as narcissistic, and then I’d find an article that suggested the selfie wasn’t all bad. So, I really wanted to unpack the selfie. 

In 2013, I started writing the selfie column for the Brooklyn-based art magazine Hyperallergic. My editor Hrag Vartanian greenlit the project and offered amazingly insightful guidance, and most of all he supported the vision I had for the column. I wanted to understand the selfie. I wanted to know why people felt upset when they saw other peoples’ selfies posted to social media. After all, artists had been making self-portraits since the beginning of art history! Why couldn’t everyday people take photos of themselves with their smartphones’ front-facing cameras and do what artists have always done? 

The weekly column included selfie submissions from readers, along with a paragraph or two about why they shot the selfie and what it meant to them. As the self-appointed selfie expert/critic, I also wrote a roundup and analysis of that week’s selfie news. I was most excited about readers’ submissions because I felt like that would help explain the disconnect between how people saw the selfie (usually in a negative light) and what the person who posted the selfie meant to express (usually something meant to communicate or express an idea or feeling).

After about a year of the column, it just made sense to spin this topic off into the full-length non-fiction book, The Selfie Generation. I wanted more space to try and extrapolate the deeper meaning of the selfie. I wanted to illuminate the selfie as a misunderstood phenomena, in fact. How could a single image of one’s face mean so many different things to so many different people, only just depending on who saw it and what mood they were in and how they saw the subject of the image? About the selfie, I wanted to tell people: Hey, it’s complicated. 

I also wanted to illuminate the ways that the selfie could have some sort of positive effect on culture. I did see potential for the selfie as a way to bring visibility to underrepresented cultural groups or minorities because with their own self-image in their hands, they could tell their own stories.

I wanted to also acknowledge the ways that selfie was further complicating issues of personal life versus public life, since it was clear that anyone could become a celebrity or just visible via their social media and, most of all, their selfies. I was struck by articles documenting the negative effects of the selfie, such as people being addicted to their phones, taking selfies in inappropriate places such as Chernobyl and the Holocaust Memorial, etc., and the impact of smartphones on communication and mental health.

In addition to being a culture writer, you are an arts journalist, essayist, and comedian. How do you balance these roles and forms of writing?

Thanks for acknowledging the many hats I wear! Yes, I do a lot of different types of writing. I would say that all of these types of writing feed one another and overlap. 

I was really excited about this reported story that I wrote a couple years ago for Hyperallergic, titled  “What Makes Medieval Art So Meme-able?” It did come out of my fascination with art meme accounts and the hilariousness of Medieval art becoming memes, and I wanted to write about it but as something between culture writing, arts journalism and an essay. At the same time, it was also funny but it’s not stand-up comedy. I think often I just go with the flow, and let the type of writing define itself. 

Like this piece “Beautiful Ghosts, or We’ll Always Have Istanbul” for The Markaz Review came from an intense sadness I was feeling about trying to figure out my connection to Istanbul, the place my father left in his early 20s, but always longs for. For me, Turkey and Istanbul specifically feel like a place that I have some sort of karmic relationship with. 

Growing up in America, Turkey was a place I kept trying to understand but through short vignettes, like these family visits for reunions or my cousin’s wedding. “Beautiful Ghosts” ended up being an essay, but I think I went about it in a journalistic type way of gathering information and doing some of my own reporting — but this time the subject was me, and the audience was other diaspora folks. 

I have been on-and-off doing stand-up comedy for 10 years, but I reactivated my interest about two years ago. This time, I decided to be consistent and stick with it, join the Minneapolis comedy community even. 

When I got back into stand-up, I initially used it as a way to take a mental break from the semi-autobiographical novel I was working on, A Tourist of Memories, which has some of the same elements as the aforementioned essay. In comedy, I found a more immediately gratifying way to talk about my journey with Turkishness, my confusing queer dating life, and the Jewish (non-Turkish) side of my family. I wanted immediate reactions, not this slogging away at a novel in the privacy of my home and with too many of my own thoughts, demons, nightmares, and fantasies. At least with comedy, everyone there is trying to feel a little bit better in that moment. 

Of course, these are all types of writing that sporadically earn me money. The foundation of my writing practice is my day job at the Minneapolis Star Tribune, where I work as the Visual Art Critic/Reporter! In this role I get to cover the thriving visual art community in Minnesota. I’ve been an art journalist and critic for over 15 years, and I’m proud to have this role. 

So, I think I don’t purposely balance any of these types of writing. Rather, I let the writing balance itself. 

What upcoming projects are you excited about? 

I’m really most excited about the stand-up I’ve got going on. I had a very busy June with I think nine shows, including two Pride shows. I am slowing down this month to give myself some time to breathe and live! In August I have two shows in Chicago, and I’m excited to go down there and do them, and take a road trip there with my girlfriend! Comedy helps me feel more present and in the moment, kind of the opposite of fiction.

That said, I’m also excited to one day finish my book, A Tourist of Memories, about a young queer Turkish-American screenwriter struggling to understand why her father left Turkey. In the process, she falls in love with someone online in Istanbul and secretly goes to meet her. I haven’t been able to work on this book really in almost two years, but that’s OK. 

When I get discouraged about not having finished the book yet, I think about something I read in an interview that writer Akil Kumarasamy did with author Michael Deagler, whose debut novel Early Sobrieties came out in May. In the interview, he said: “If you still feel compelled to work on a book in year five or six or seven, that’s probably a positive sign. It means there’s something there.” I’m only in year four of this book. I guess it’s just a baby. I think there’s still something there, but I’m letting it be for now.

What pieces of media are you currently drawing inspiration from?

I feel pretty hooked on just watching stand-up comedy clips on Instagram. I watched a funny one today by Turkish comedian Eda Kibar talking about the HPV vaccine, which is expensive in Turkey if you’re not a married woman (trust me, it was funny), and another one from Laura Laham about Arab Heritage Month and Pride month and the way many in the Middle Eastern people deny the existence of queerness. (I did send that last one to my girlfriend who is also Middle Eastern. :)) I also watched some clips by Mo Welch about the ridiculous politics in Alabama, where a court ruled that a frozen embryo can be considered a child.

Right now I’m reading The Fear of Large and Small Nations by Nancy Agabian, which is about Armenian diaspora, a dangerous romance, displacement and the Armenian Genocide. Although I am always reading a book, I think I spend too much time on Instagram. I recently wrote a joke about being on my phone too much.