To Infinity and Beyond: Joel Gregory and Emji Spero of Timeless Infinite Light in Conversation

If you haven't met Timeless Infinite Light yet, Open House Poetry has a very solid introduction. Who are they? Where did they come from? How did they get here? From Open House:

IJ: I realize I forgot to ask you, what was the inception of TIL? How did it form? How did it come about? How was it manifested?

JG: Let’s see, by a series of failures, really. It was a concept.

ES: Yeah, we tried a number of times, really. Before we had the community support to have an endless stream of awesome writers to publish, before like…and having…. Sorry, I just lost my thread.

JG: I feel like we were in different cities in different times and we had this idea and we had this name and we were sort of trying all these different experiments to get it to formulate, to get it to exist, and they were sort of hair brained, youthful and naive, I suppose you could say. I don’t really know what to call it. Probably dumb as hell.

ES, JG, IJ: {laugh}

JG: We were in New York and we were trying to secure some sort of warehouse space to build a complex, sort of like what the Omni is now, but we didn’t have the people, we didn’t have the resources, we didn’t have anything. We just had this idea, yet we were still wholeheartedly trying to make this thing just come out of nowhere. At some point it put us on the street, essentially. We were living out of a car for a while. And then we tried again in SF, a little more simply, but again, we didn’t really have that community. We didn’t have that content that we needed to really make it manifest. We made a book there but we have removed it from history since. But then, as Emji was saying, when we got to Oakland we just sort of took in the culture here and had our minds blown time and time again by the people who live here and pass through here. I think that’s when the identity started to shine through and materialize. Without that it was just a good idea but it didn’t have anything behind it. So it took coming here, essentially. Does that seem accurate?

ES: Yeah. [...]

Learn more about Timeless Infinite Light's achievements so far at Open House Poetry.