Diminutive, bespectacled, and possessed of a knockout intellect, Lori Gum has her hands in many pots here in Columbus. A program coordinator for the gay-rights organization Stonewall Columbus, Gum is also the founder and CEO of Periodisa Publishing, an upstart brand that focuses on publishing our local writers. One of Periodisa’s imprints, Filigree, is a literary magazine with a distinct look and feel and features a local artist or photographer’s work on each cover.

As a one-time writer for Filigree and a participant in another of her business’s projects, I am always excited to get a chance to sit down with Gum. Her wit and self-effacing humor bely a serious thinker with dreams and ideas not even yet revealed to the rest of us, just sitting under her hair, percolating. In the course of the interview, Gum, a voracious reader, recommended no fewer than three books to me as emergency must-reads. I told her that I had seemingly picked a shoddy time to approach Herman Melville’s classic Moby Dick, with all these more immediately demanding tomes awaiting my perusal. However, Melville’s whale book had long enjoyed her fancy.

Do you see any value in Moby Dick today?

Moby Dick is the layman’s Torah, because everything you need to know is in Moby Dick. With the Torah (I converted to Judaism 10 years ago), the idea of reading it is, every time you read it, you are a different person: you are a daughter or a son, and then you are a wife or husband, and then you are a father or mother, and then a grandfather. The book changes as you change. It’s the same thing with Moby Dick. I know that allegory went out of style even before Moby Dick, but it makes you consider evil and good and being a fellow traveler to that, all those big issues. That’s why it’s been interpreted in so many ways: Anybody can be Ahab. And it just changed the hardwiring in my brain.

So, I want to write like Melville, or even better. You are into writing – in your estimation, how does one become a great writer?

I believe great writers are made, not born. [People often] ask me what it takes to be a good writer, and really, first thing you have to do is read voraciously. I do not know a good or great writer who does not read. Read books, novels, classics – all that. By reading and becoming familiar with that, it will start to flow out of you. The second thing, having read probably 500 submissions to Filigree (Periodisa’s bi-monthly literary magazine) – learn punctuation and grammar. I mean, it is that basic. There are plenty of online courses. Get the use of the comma down. Maybe give yourself the use of two semi-colons every hundred pages. This is just showing respect for your reader. I’ll read the first few pages of something and tell them, ‘You know what? You need to go take a basic punctuation course.’ It’s like being painter and only using green paint. You are limiting your tools.

Has this interview become an intervention?

No, no! There are different styles of writing. It is a craft to be honed, like a blacksmith. Because people act like that doesn’t matter anymore, like if you talk about a comma, suddenly you’re a grammar Nazi.

(Here, the interview becomes a confusing tangle of what I believe were veiled threats and conciliatory references to Francis Ford Coppola’s 1972 crime epic The Godfather. Lori has both the threatening swagger of an oil baron, and editorial tendencies akin to your red-pen wielding English teacher, but she answers some questions like Lewis Carroll’s caterpillar.)

You’ve also worked in film and television. Are there films that have had an impact on you similar to Moby Dick?

Taxi Driver is my Moby Dick of film. I’m actually writing a whole essay on that. Travis Bickle saved me as a 14-year-old lesbian. It was the first character on screen that I could totally identify with: the alienation, the aloneness, the thinking you are meant to do something and finding no way to do it. I walked out of that movie with changed DNA; it’s why I went to NYU, why I moved to New York City for 20 years, everything.

How was working as a scriptwriter in New York City? Was it living the dream, or what?

Well, I studied Film Production at New York University Film in the early ’80s. But my most interesting and valuable “writing” gig working in the business was in story editing/story development department for the ’80s TV show, Tales From The Darkside. I started as an intern and then stayed on. What an incredible experience. I had to read every script that came in (there were stacks and stacks of them on my desk every day), summarize it and recommend it or not for further consideration or production and if so, provide suggestions for any “revisions” to my boss … a real crash course in figuring out what would work and wouldn’t dramatically and making it all happen in 20 minutes. All writers should have to work in television. Really. Makes you be simple, direct and articulate in very little time, even with a ridiculously stupid plot. But my real experience was writing full-length screenplays. I was a spec screenplay writer for 10 years. I lived through all of the horrors of endless agents, absurd meetings, producers, readings and Tinseltown idiots. Never got one produced for all of my trouble, but did get a few “options” to live off in the meantime. It was the most demoralizing experience of my life. I almost stopped writing completely. Hollywood is a cesspool – all writers should stay as far away from it as they can.

I see: all writers should work in television, yet stay as far from Hollywood as possible. You were recently invited to teach students about writing. How’d that go?

They’ll never invite me to talk to kids again, because I told them, “Don’t write what you know.” I told each and every one of them, “Your life is not interesting enough for me to want to read.” And I’ll say that for 99 percent of the people I read: don’t write what you know! This idea that we can all sit down and write a memoir – it is the narcissism of this age that makes everyone believe that they can sit down without ever having written before and crank out a memoir and it’s going to be a national bestseller. I would like to see those things disappear. I would love to see the memoir genre just go away.

Did you ever read a good one?

Two: The Autobiography of Malcolm X, which is essentially a memoir, and Jeffrey Dahmer’s father wrote a book that is exceptional. I’ve never read such raw, honest, truth, and it was just sort of under the radar. Exceptional, exceptional memoir. None of the others jump out, I’ve got to say. I know it sounds horrible, but I’ve never been accused of not being honest with a writer, because it does you no good. This whole memoir thing is just, it’s just … it’s too easy.

You’re gay. Is gay still a problem in 2011? Haven’t we figured anything out yet?

Yeah, you know what’s interesting, I lived in New York for 20 years, I lived in California for 10 years, and I was never a part of the gay community there. There were so many sorts of polarizing politics. I was involved in Act Up, to support all of my friends who died in a period of two years. I mean, ’86 and ’87 was the most horrifying couple of years of my entire life; I just turned around and everybody I knew had died, and nobody was talking about it. To have this happen, and it’s not on the news – it was absolutely horrifying. So I was involved in the community to bring attention to that, but I was never involved on an emotional level with the local gay community. Here, I found this dynamic artistic community, and I met [Stonewall President] Karla [Rothan] and the other members of the staff here and ended up volunteering for Pride, and became the vendor liaison in 2010, and I found this gay community to be the most welcoming, the most authentic; you know every community has those little political spats, but it’s really a non-self-segregating community and it felt good to be a part of it.

Have you noticed the digital age having any effect on the literature itself, on the writers?

I often talk to writers now and it’s been very educational for me, because I’ll ask them, ‘Is this a first or second draft?’ and they’ll sort of look at you like, ‘well, it’s just my piece.’ When I used to read screenplays or books, I would have stacks of the first draft, stacks of the second draft, stacks of the thirds draft. It just seems now that we put it forth, and there it is, and if there are drafts in there, we don’t have any record of them. What I really detest is this media representation of this war between digital and print, as though it’s a zero-sum equation. It is not. I will read my periodicals on my Nook, and I read books. It just allows us some more convenience. I will still say to the day I die: the gadgets are for gadget lovers, and books are for readers. And it’s going to stay that way.

But you yourself have a Nook.

I have one, and it’s interesting ... I don’t have a TV, I don’t have a microwave, and I didn’t have an e-reader. I’m a little adverse to the temptation of convenience, and quality of life. But I’m not averse to that digital revolution: as a matter of fact, it is the democratization of the digital technology that allows me to be able to finance a media company. If I had to finance a run of 10,000 copies of a book, I couldn’t do it. Now, I can do short runs, take chances on writers, work with my printer to do that. So it’s totally democratized the ability to be in the business of publishing.

Do we even have writers in Columbus that are worth reading?

I wouldn’t have started my business in Columbus if I didn’t believe that were true. I think we’ve found them, and are finding them on a regular basis. It was a decision when we started to initially stay away from the university writing programs. There’s what, 60 colleges within a 30-mile radius? We didn’t want just a bunch of sophomore or junior papers, from prose writing class. Not that that isn’t valid, but we were looking for the voices that are somewhat outside that academic setting. We want those voices more of the margins … mainstream publishing is already interested in that academic element of literature and we are not looking to replicate that because our market is more or less based in the artistic community, not the university community, and we wanted to be very clear about that.

How’s the effort to get the product out to the community been working out?

We are going into a partnership with Fringe Outfitters in February, and we are going to have a small retail store in there. We’ve been holding off with any advertising or anything until we had that space where people can go seven days a week and buy our product. We’re very excited about that. Again, I think that if people know where to go to buy this, it will really help, because no one wants to buy anything local online. I understand that. We’ve had great press, but we need that place where people can go get it.