The Day Interview
Torture begets genius, if you're willing to stare it down.
I started seeing this man’s writing as soon as I got on Substack. He immediately stood out not as the most intelligent, nor as the most provocative, (he’s got those too) but as the most raw. From behind his mask, he lays it all out. His shit is gorgeous in it’s honesty. Not honesty from him to you, but with himself. He indulges in exactly zero rationalizations under those surfer locks. It’s as if we’re drinking from a spigot coming off his frontal lobe. No filter.
He doesn’t hesitate, and they don’t back him down an inch.
-Travis.
THE DAY INTERVIEW Written Questions with Travis Neville, March 2026
Day: You know Travis asked me to do a podcast with him and well I actually have been on podcasts before but I cannot give away my identity now.
The myth is growing. It’s not the right time. And the world will see someday, God willing. I can feel it in my chest the way you feel a wave building before it breaks.
But I always remembered researching my favorite authors like Charles Bukowski and Thompson and finding written interviews, whether that be newspapers or compilation books people found from archives, and I’ve seen how those things live on forever.
Bukowski did some of his best work sitting across from a journalist with a bottle of wine and a cigarette and zero fucks to give. And honestly with the written word you can answer these types of questions better.
You can go deeper. You can be more honest. When you’re talking on a podcast your mouth moves faster than your brain and you end up saying some version of what you meant.
When you’re writing you can say exactly what you meant and make it sound like a fucking poem while doing it.
So it’s long overdue to let the world know a little bit more about Day.
Here we go. Welly welly well.
Do not edit a single comma Travis.
Travis: Not a chance, hoss. Not even that one.
Here is your blood.
Travis: If someone who truly knew you read your work, what would they say you’re pretending about?
DAY: Give a man a mask and he will tell you the truth. Writing is a superpower because it allows you to become the absolute, maxed out avatar of your own reality. The god of the page, It allows you to say the terrifying things that polite society won’t let you say out loud and just never happens in real conversations. The mask doesn’t hide you. It reveals you. It allows people to actually quit pretending and say what they really think and who they really are. That’s why pretty much every favorite writer you’ve ever known had a pen name/persona.
But to actually answer the question. If someone really knew me, if Daisy read my work, well she does read my work. She loves parts of it and hates parts of it and understands where I’m coming from and what I am doing even when the words make her wince. She’d probably laugh at the certainty though. She’d tell you I write like a man who’s figured everything out but I still go crazy, still get too drunk, still am ascending and learning and changing , and still check the locks twice before bed.
Travis: So Daisy is a legit part of your life. She’s not a model for the pics. Badass.
I write in a very cruel and brutal fashion but that’s what this internet economy of attention demands. It doesn’t allow for nuance. If you actually met me in person or reached out to me and many have, if you showed me respect, you’d find a human being on the other end. Not the drunk psychopath you sometimes get from the essays. Just a guy who gives a shit about whether his words actually helped you or just entertained you. Both matter to me but the first one keeps me up at night.
people don’t realize about me is I’ve always been this way. I was a creator from the jump. When I was barely two years old I memorized an entire Spider-Man book cover to cover. My mom knew damn well I couldn’t read but I’d sit there turning the pages reciting every word making it look like I was reading. Did the same thing with bible verses as a kid. I had the whole thing stored in my skull before I could tie my shoes. Before I was even in kindergarten I was picking up chapter books trying to read them(star Wars I liked Darth Vader) . The obsession with words and stories was hardwired into me before anyone taught me what obsession meant.
Travis: Yeah, you either have that shit or you don’t. I taught enough kids writing in my time to know that. I can think of maybe two in my eleven years who had the shit. One is writing for the Chicago Tribune. Or he was. Who knows now. The real searchers aren’t much for settling down.
Then it was photography which Then led into video. And the video led to me doing absolutely insane shit because if you’re going to film something it better be worth filming. So I was the kid flipping off cliffs and skateboarding behind my convertible Porsche with a rope tied to the bumper going 40 and climbing construction cranes in the night with my friends and hanging from them in the dark and exploring abandoned buildings. From the video stuff I later grew a large following. All of it came from the deep well of creation. I’ve been making things and putting them in front of people since before I had a driver’s license.
I was the football captain in high school who never cared about fitting in with the popular crowd. I was the guy with the menace group of friends, the outlaws, but I also kicked it with the honor roll kids and the athletes and the drug dealers and the so called losers all in the same week. I was in the drug scene. Running with people your guidance counselor would call a red flag and your mother would call a nightmare. Jumping off bridges into water that could’ve killed me and Flipping off cops from moving vehicles and trying to outrun them. Sometimes getting away clean. Sometimes getting caught and thinking well this is going to be a fun phone call home. I’ve always been able to float between every group because I never belonged to any of them. Deep in my heart I’ve always been an outsider. A creator. Because I see the world differently. I really watch it like all writers must be able to do.
And the athletics, man the yin and yang of who I am, the extremes, the all or nothing wiring in my brain that makes me a great writer also made me a nightmare and a danger to myself physically. I couldn’t turn it off. Couldn’t find the middle. I either went so hard I destroyed my body (couple surgeries before I was 18) or I didn’t go at all. Some serious injuries in high school took certain paths off the table permanently and at the time it felt like God was closing doors but looking back He was just locking me out of the wrong rooms so I’d eventually find the right one.
Interesting story. In high school I took a college literature class and the teacher took a liking to me in a way I couldn’t explain at the time. She treated me different. Read what I wrote. Watched how I moved through people. And one day she gave me a letter that said “I know you feel like an island. You’ve always been different. That is your gift.” Her and one other teacher asked me to give a speech to the school my senior year. I always wondered why they chose me. I didn’t do it though. I didn’t know I wanted to be a writer then. I was just obsessed with reading and had to write an essay every day in that class. Well I see now that paid off big time. She was the first one to see the Day before the sun came up. I should send her a letter.
Travis: Write the fucking letter. Write the whole damn book, just like I told you to.
So what am I pretending about? Maybe that I know what I’m doing. The truth is I’m just a guy on a balcony making it up as I go and writing it down before I forget.
Travis: This is what we all are, if we have any shred of honesty about the human condition. Sad part is how few are willing to accept that fact. Everyone is waiting on some outside force that isn’t there.
Are you writing from wisdom… or from wounds you still haven’t dealt with?
DAY: You framed the question wrong.
Wouldn’t writing about the wound in itself BE dealing with it? And wisdom is only available to those who search it out and find it through the absolute agony they are dealt. That’s the only way you earn it. Wisdom doesn’t come from books. Books are just other men’s wounds organized into chapters. Wisdom comes from blood. You have to earn it the way you earn a scar, by getting cut.
Isn’t anyone worth reading wounded? Isn’t that the only reason they can reach out and grab someone by the throat and say I KNOW WHAT THIS FEELS LIKE?
You can only describe the fire to someone if your skin melted in it. If you smelled your own flesh cook. A man who writes about pain from the outside is a journalist. A man who writes about pain from the inside is a artist. And I’m not a journalist. Thank fuck.
I lived in chronic pain in my knee from 18 to 21 because I trained like a rabid wolf and I have no off switch. Few surgeries and A dull grinding invisible ache in my fucking knee every single step that nobody could see. Three years of smiling while my brain wandered hallways it had no business finding. When pain is the only constant in your life you stop fearing death and start resenting the morning. I’m healed now God did that. Fully. And I thank God for every second of that suffering because He wasn’t breaking me. He was breaking the road I was running on and reroute me. The one that led here. He broke my leg so I’d stop sprinting toward the wrong life and crawl toward the right one. I laugh now because God yin yanged me so hard into the opposite dimension the devil got confused.
And I think I know where this question is really coming from. Because I write about other men in such a brutal, on the surface mean way. And don’t we only abhor and hate the things we once saw in ourselves? Don’t we only rage against the weakness we felt the pull of? I felt the seduction of comfort. I felt the pull of loserdom. I felt the rocks crumble at the edge of that cliff when I was staring over it. And maybe that’s what this whole thing is. Maybe I’m stepping back from the edge and screaming at every man walking toward it because it’s not water at the bottom. It’s jagged rocks that hate you with countless dead sheep impaled on the bottom, disguised by a mirage. And I’m bringing the Day to let you see them in the light.
So am I writing from wounds? Yeah. And the wounds are the wisdom. They’re not separate things. They never were. A man who writes from a healed place has nothing interesting to say.
Travis: That’s accurate. If you’re living a perfectly happy life, I don’t want to read your shit. I’m not a huge David Goggins guy, but I read his book. That fucker has some DEMONS. And holy shit, with that in your back pocket, yeah. You set pullup records and run ultra marathons. That’s an extreme, but any artist better have some fire burning from some level of failure, pain, regret, etc. Without that, your shit is beige.
What topic are you avoiding because it would expose too much about you?
DAY: There’s no topic that’s off the table for me. The pen fears nothing. The man holding it sometimes does. But the pen always wins.
That said. The thing I haven’t written yet, the thing I’m circling like a shark, is the full story of how I left the the Cage and had to leave Hawaii recently. There are people still breathing who would prefer I kept my mouth shut about certain things. The novel will fictionalize it enough to protect the living. But there’s a chapter of the origin story that involves decisions I made that weren’t heroic and people I hurt on the way out the door. I haven’t earned the right to tell that story yet because I haven’t finished making it right. When I do you’ll hear all of it. Every ugly detail. It’s called Kill Me in Paradise and it’s been a work in progress behind the scenes for a long time. The life is the research and the story. The mask is doing its job. But one day the mask comes off and when it does it’s going to be the most unfiltered, in depth, terrifyingly real look at Day and who I am as a writer and a person. Everything in full.
Travis: You’re working on the novel. Good man. What truth about yourself would make your readers respect you less?
DAY: It depends on the reader right? The ones who fuck with me fuck with me because of who I am despite my flaws. They’re smart enough to see that I’ve constructed certain things, the narcissism, the cruelty, the cockiness, to deal with the world we live in. I’m designing my own avatar. Building my own operating system to produce the fruit I want. I don’t want to be the fig tree that looks pretty from the outside but God destroys. I want to produce the fruit.
But what would make them respect me less. If they would’ve seen me four years ago before I took the gun out of my mouth and bought a one way plane ticket to Paradise instead. The version of me before that. Yeah. I’ve laid on the floor. Felt the darkest of feelings. Every one. But I always saw the light. I always saw the Day. Even in the cage, scared every day, full of rage, not living in accordance with who I was supposed to be. I didn’t respect myself then. So how could I expect anyone else to?
Travis: It’s impossible. Even if they did, you wouldn’t have been able to see it.
I also have really bad OCD sometimes. And I know OCD comes from fear and a ravenous hunger to be in control of a chaotic world. It is the literal opposite of faith and I hate it. That’s been with me as long as I can remember. The brain that creates is the same brain that obsesses. The engine that drives the art is the same engine that keeps you up at night checking the locks and rearranging the silverware.
And they’d probably respect me less but expect nothing less when seeing me belligerently drunk doing absolutely unhinged shit but I’m working on that. Cleaning it up. Putting more fuel into the writing and less into the bottle. The brain is the engine. God is the guide. Better to Steer clearly in this ocean of life or the current takes you somewhere you didn’t sign up for.
Travis: Have you ever written something that sounded powerful but you knew deep down it wasn’t fully honest?
DAY: That’s the thing about writing with conviction on topics like women or masculinity. When I write something like “10 Brutal Unfiltered Truths About Women” I’m writing it full of conviction and it IS true in the broad sense. In the general. But obviously there’s outliers and different circumstances in everything. I don’t have time to write footnotes defending the exceptions. Truth lives in the pattern, not the outlier. Finding one exception does not disprove the law. That’s what weak thinkers do. They find the exception and use it to deny the obvious because the obvious makes them uncomfortable.
Travis: Yeah, but they do that shit to defend their own insecurity. It’s a coping mechanism. Coping for their mediocrity. I go hard too. And I do it with total disdain for the fact that the guys who read my stuff are going to apply it to their lives in some watered down fashion. Diet Travis. Ideal Man Light. If I don’t keep my mind off that, it’s harder to create.
What part of your life would you never put in a book because the people involved would hate you for it?
DAY: The ghosts of girls past. I got my beautiful Daisy flower now and I will never let her go. Respect for her demands a middle finger to the memories. The past girls don’t get real estate in the mythology. That chapter is closed. Bolted shut. Welded. Done.
I’m also never going to disrespect my parents. Not in the writing. Not anywhere. Sure some psychoanalyst could dig through my childhood and connect dots about why I have the mental makeup I have today. Cool. Have fun with that. I’m not helping you do it. I always found it distasteful when people talk bad about their parents publicly. The people who brought you into this world don’t get dragged through your art for engagement. I don’t blame people. I don’t do victim backstories. Whatever sharpened me, sharpened me. The knife doesn’t curse the stone.
Travis: Everybody has parental bullshit. Their mistakes were the first adult problem you probably ever had to conquer. And you leave that process knowing them as fellow adults. Which squares you with the world to some degree.
Do you think writers sometimes hide behind “deep thoughts” because they’re afraid to admit they’re still confused?
DAY: No. Isn’t thinking deep thoughts and writing about them the actual process of trying to figure it out? Isn’t that what writing IS? You don’t write because you have answers. You write because you have questions that won’t leave you alone at midnight.
And isn’t it understood as an adult in this world that everyone is confused? Everyone is a kid wearing an adult body. You look in their face in certain moments and you see that they’re still the little boy or the little girl they always were and always will be deep down. Confused. Scared. Making it up. We all just pretend. We all play in the same play together until the curtain closes.
The writer is just the one bold enough to admit it on paper and charge people for the confession.
Travis: Writing is just organized thinking. But there’s the damn emotions, experiences, alcohol, sex, etc. You’ve gotta make all of that into grammatically organized sentences and paragraphs. The catharsis is the necessity, but the ‘wounds organized into chapters’ is the bonus.
What criticism about your writing gets under your skin? We all have haters. I have a shit ton.
DAY: None of it. Hate never comes from above. It’s always the shitty crabs stuck in the bucket calling out trying to pull down the one who climbed over the rim. They’re mad at the bird who was placed in the bucket with them and realized he had wings and flew out. But he was always a bird. He was always gonna escape. The crabs just couldn’t see it because they don’t have wings and they think nobody else should either.
The haters are part of the recipe. Going viral and having your people hate you and just as many people love you is yin and yang. Flip the coin. Still the same coin. Obsession on both sides. And the obsession feeds the machine whether it’s love or hate. Both push the algorithm. So thank you. Genuinely. Every person who comments “this guy is a fraud” is buying me more and more freedom.
Travis: “...treat those two imposters just the same”
I laugh at the people who think it’s all fake. Because it’s like when a really muscular natural guy gets accused of taking steroids. Is that not a compliment? You’re telling me my life is so unbelievable that it must be manufactured? Thank you. That’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said about me.
But alright. You want honesty, one that itches is When someone calls it performative. Not fake. Performative. Because that one touches the one wire I can’t fully insulate. Day is real. The balcony is real. The mezcal is real. I am typing this from Hawaii living the life I write But the second you name yourself and build a mythology around the name you introduce the possibility that the character ate the person. And some nights I can’t tell where Day stops and I start. That’s the price of the mask. Sometimes it fits so well you forget it’s there. And when someone calls it performative they’re reminding you to check.
Travis: It’s entertainment, ultimately. For them, in the traditional sense. For the writer, it’s the spark. It’s the fire. It’s the center of the crosshairs for me. And nobody wants to read about the mundane parts anyway. It’s no different than music. Nobody writes songs about taking a dump or doing the laundry. We write about the peaks and valleys. I feel that responsibility.
Are you more interested in telling the truth, or in being admired for telling it?
DAY: Do those have to be mutually exclusive? Can’t two things be true at once?
Anyone who writes has a deep, ugly, visceral hunger to be admired. In a sense worshiped. For who they are. It’s the engine under the hood and every writer who tells you they don’t care about the numbers is either lying or broke. I’m neither.
Travis: That’s the most honest thing you’ve said.
But I also think writers have just as deep a hunger to make sense of the world they live in. They think too much. They’re too curious. And they want to tell the truth just as bad as they want to be admired for being the one who told it. Or else they wouldn’t write. At least not in the aspirational style I write.
Is that honest enough for you Travis? No? Fine.
Travis: Horse laughed.
It’s 70/30 truth to admiration on a good week. 50/50 on a bad one. The 70 is the direction. The 30 is the gasoline. Kill either one and the car doesn’t move.
Travis: When did you last write something that scared you to publish?
DAY: AHhhhhhh, well I’m always scared when I write about God. Because I don’t want to lead anyone astray. I want to lead people to Christ and tell them the truth about what that relationship between God and me has done for my life and I just pray to God that He would never allow words to come from me that would impact the reader in a way that would pull them from Him.
I really understand I am a deeply flawed, fucked up, sinful, crazy person. I hope people can see the human in me and know that’s exactly why God matters.
God and Faith in Jesus Christ is all that matters. That’s the thing that has provided me the most strength and the most purpose. Everything else, the writing, the subscribers, the money, the balcony, all of it is fruit from a tree that God planted. I just water it and try not to fuck up the soil.
Travis: I don’t write much about faith either. It feels more personal than that to me. I want to keep some of this for myself. I’m sure you get it.
What personal failure shaped your writing more than your success ever did?
DAY: I wanted to make a difference in the world since I was a kid. I wanted to use my strength. I wanted to be military. Special forces. I wanted to be a great athlete. I wanted law enforcement. Well I did it. Became a Corrections Officer. And realized it wasn’t in accordance with me. The cage wasn’t just for the inmates. I was in there too. Just with a badge and a set of keys that didn’t open my own cell.
And the athletics. I was built for it physically but the extremes of who I am, the all or nothing wiring, I couldn’t find a middle. I either went so hard I broke myself or I didn’t go at all. Some serious injuries in high school took certain paths off the table permanently. At the time it felt like God was slamming doors in my face. Looking back He was locking me out of the wrong rooms.
George Floyd and Covid lit the fuse. Seeing how evil this world can be, how fast things crumble, how quickly people reveal who they really are when the lights go out. I always wanted to do something about it. Always wanted to be used by God. Prayed about that endlessly. And I failed to make any ground until I picked up the pen and write.
Travis: Haven’t read you going political ever. And I hope you never do.
I failed at every vehicle I tried to drive until I found the one that was built for me. And the surprise was It had been sitting in the garage my whole life. I was just too busy trying to fit into other humans cars.
It’s only been a little over a year of publishing. Many failures in the dark of the night before any light of the Day came through. But I knew. I always knew writing was the thing. I just had to fail enough times at everything else to be desperate enough to finally try the thing that terrified me most. Because the thing that terrifies you most is always the thing you were built for. That’s God’s sense of humor. He hides your purpose behind your biggest fear and waits to see if you’re brave enough to look.
Travis: If your entire body of work disappeared tomorrow, what would that say about who you actually are?
DAY: That I’m one of God’s children. And a guy who lives true to himself regardless of whether there’s a record of it.
Travis: That’s a cop out. You’ve got some ego here somewhere.
You can take all the writing away. Every essay. Every subscriber. Every stat. I’m still sitting on my balcony with Daisy, staring at the ocean, sunlight in my hair, smiling at this world, thanking God for the Day. Just as I do every single morning. Because this life is a gift. This is a test. God sent your character into the game and He believes in you and He loves you.
But I’ll be honest. The fig tree answer still applies. The writing is the fruit. Without it I’m just a man with a nice view and no proof he did anything with it. And that thought is what keeps me at the desk at midnight when every part of my body wants to sleep. Disappearance is not an option. The tree bears fruit or it burns.
But deeper than that. When you have a fire like mine in your chest, the world is going to feel its burn whether there’s a Substack or not. The writing is just the medium. The fire was there before the pen and it’ll be there after. I’d find another way. I’d carve it into walls. I’d scream it from rooftops. I’d write it in the sand and let the ocean take it and write it again the next morning.
Life is an ocean and God sent me on this wave and I am gonna ride it until he calls me home.
Travis: I get it. The writing can’t exist without the life. And so, they are one and the same. Nicely done.
Are you writing the stories you should tell, or the ones that make you look good?
DAY: I don’t care about looking good. And if you think I do you’re reading the whole thing wrong.
Why would I come across as a cocky, insane, drunk, cussing, nothing really makes sense or goes together right lunatic? Why would I deliberately piss people off if I was trying to look good? I hate writing where the author is always trying to make himself look righteous. Where every story conveniently ends with them being the hero. I am not someone you should emulate exactly. I am not a role model. I’m a man with a pen and a mission and a Mezcal habit and an ocean view and I fuck up constantly and I win sometimes and I fail often and I write about all of it because the mess IS the message.
Travis: When was the last time writing forced you to confront something ugly about yourself?
DAY: Every single time. Every fucking time I sit down. Writing isn’t a mirror. It’s an autopsy you perform on your fucking self. You have to swim deep into the cave of your own mind and paddle through waters so black you can’t see your own hands and what’s at the bottom isn’t always treasure sometimes it’s something with teeth that’s been waiting for you to come back.
I’ve always had thoughts that went places other people’s wouldn’t survive. The cave of my mind goes deeper than most and I’m not saying that to sound cool I’m saying it because it scares the shit out of me. I’ve seen what lives down there. The cruelty my brain is capable of imagining. The violence. The narcissism so thick you could choke on it. The fantasies that would get me committed if I said them out loud in the wrong room. I stared at myself in every reflective surface from a young age like a fucking vampire checking if he still existed. Maybe that’s the curse of being beautiful from a young age and having a mom who loved you so intensely your brain built a temple to itself. Maybe it’s being so overly sensitive to every opinion that I welded a suit of armor to my skeleton and now I can’t tell where the metal ends and the man begins.
Every time you go down into that cave you have to go deeper than the last time or you come back up with nothing. The first essay cost me skin. The fiftieth cost me muscle. The hundredth cost me bone. I am ripping myself open further every single time I sit down to write and the price keeps going up and I keep fucking paying it because what’s at the bottom of that cave, past the teeth, past the black water, past every sick twisted beautiful terrible thing I’ve ever thought or done or wanted to do to someone, is something so white hot and so true it burns your hands when you grab it. You have to descend to ascend, because everytime I go deeper I can rise higher with my writing. Yin and Yang. I go deeper every time. It hurts worse every time. And I come back up with fire dripping from my hands and I slam it on the page and somewhere some bastard reads it and something in his chest cracks open and for thirty seconds he doesn’t want to die anymore and THAT is God working through me. That’s the whole fucking point of me. Not comfort. Not safety. Not subscribers. To crawl into hell and come back with a torch and hand it to anyone insane enough to grab it.
I’ll do it again tomorrow and the Day after that and every Day until God himself grabs me by the collar and says alright son that’s enough you can rest now.
Good questions Travis. You actually made me stare into the mirror and bleed a little. That doesn’t happen often.
Travis: Glad to hear it. And I know you’ll apply that to whatever is on the screen in front of you next time. Keep grinding.
Thank God for the Day.
GOD BLESS THE WOLVES.
God Help The Rest.
-Day
BE GREAT AT BEING A MAN
Hawaii Hemingway
@Day