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JUDY WOODRUFF: Next, we turn to another installment of our weekly Brief But Spectacular series, where we ask people about their passions. Jonny Sun is an author who amassed a loyal Twitter following through his honesty, humor and candor. His latest book is Everyone's a Aliebn When Ur a Aliebn Too.
JONNY SUN, Author, Everyone's a Aliebn When Ur a Aliebn Too: Look, life is bad. Everyone's sad. We're all gonna die. But I already bought this inflatable bouncy castle. So, are you going to take your shoes off, or what? I think I have always grown up as like a shy, introverted, socially anxious person. I have always seen my Twitter account as like a personal account. And I have always been drawn to it as a writer for the fact that I'm able to be honest and open and vulnerable, I guess, in a way that I can't be in person. I have always seen Twitter as kind of this writer's sketchbook. I have approached it as a writer this whole time. And it's always been this place where I can, like, take ideas and test them out. Anonymity online has gotten this kind of bad rap because of a lot of the harassment and abuse, which, of course, is such a serious issue. The flip side of that is that being anonymous online allows certain people to have a voice and have a presence, especially when their real-life identities can't be compromised. I wrote a book. It's called Everyone's a Aliebn When Ur a Aliebn Too. It's an illustrated story of an alien who comes to Earth and meets a bunch of different characters and kind of gets to learn about their lives. Another, I think, characteristic of the voice that I have worked on and developed through Twitter and in the book is this idea of kind of messing with syntax and grammar and kind of doing intentional mistakes and doing typos and stuff. And I think that relates a lot to kind of the postmodern movements of poetry and the Fluxus movement in the '60s and how these artists were taking the look of type on a page and using that to influence voice and to change the ways we read ideas. Hopefully, that intentional clumsiness creates pure, honest, genuine voice for readers and for people to pick up on. I think about, like, death all the time. I think a lot of writers think about death all the time. I'm always thinking about how much I can do and how much time I have left. I have so many things I want to do. Accepting that one day in the future I won't be here anymore makes me really think really hard about how much time I have on this Earth and what I'm going to do with it. My name is Jonny Sun, and this is my Brief But Spectacular take on connecting with others.
JUDY WOODRUFF: And you can find additional Brief But Spectacular episodes on our Web site. That's PBS.org/NewsHour/Brief.
