Where do you live and with whom?
I live in New York with my wife, Antigone, and my son, Leontios, who is a sophomore in high school. We live in a neighborhood in Harlem called Sugar Hill.

What did you have for breakfast?
A homemade tuna melt and unsweetened iced tea with lemon.

Describe your perfect day
My perfect day starts with a hot sweet coffee and Bob Marley in my parents’ house in Bradley Beach, NJ, then I’ll surf for as many hours as I can withstand. After surfing it’s lunch at Fins, a “surf cuisine” restaurant, where I’ll stuff myself with a huge plate of nachos and a steak burrito. After lunch it’s naptime on my parents’ front porch, then a second surf session, through sunset, then dinner with my son at Vic’s, a “red sauce” Italian restaurant and pizzeria in Bradley Beach with amazing thin-crust pizza. After dinner it’s gelato at Delponte Creamery, a gelato place on our way home from Vic’s, then back to the porch to fall asleep again.

Best book ever read?
So many, and for many different reasons, but one of my all-time favorites is The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B by JP Donleavy, an Irish American who repatriated to Ireland after World War II and the author of The Ginger Man, which many consider one of the 100 best books ever written. The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B is both one of the funniest and one of the saddest books I’ve ever read, and perhaps the best novel I’ve encountered about friendship.

Best childhood memory?
Seeing Star Wars for the first time when it was released in 1977. I was nine years-old. I still remember the blue sky above Tatooine when the second scene peeled across the screen.

What is always in your fridge?
Bacon, eggs, mayonnaise, mustard, Greek yogurt, lactose-free milk, unsweetened iced tea with lemon and butter, butter, butter.

What music are you listening to in the car at the moment?
I haven’t had a car in almost a decade, since I moved back to New York from Cyprus. This is probably for the best, since it’s expensive to own a car here, there’s no parking, I’m prone to car sickness and I’m a terrible driver.

What’s your spirit animal?
African elephants. Why? Their intelligence, their devotion to family, their memory… they love, and they experience loss. They possess a majesty few of us can achieve.

What are you most proud of?
My son, who’s brilliant and funny and a great photographer and writer and possessed of a singular charisma – and enough of it to burn. Sometimes I look at him and I can’t believe he’s mine.

What movie scene has really stayed with you? And why?
There’s a movie from 2009, Cold Souls, with Paul Giamatti, who plays a stage actor having a problem with a role. He finds a company that can remove your soul and keep it in cold storage; Giamatti’s character thinks this might help him better inhabit the character he’s portraying, so he has his soul extracted (customers of the company can also try out someone else’s soul, if they wish). At one point Giamatti is allowed to actually see his soul, and when he does it’s him and his wife, played by Emily Watson, standing beside each other at a window. It made me think of my marriage.

If you could pick anyone at all (alive or dead) to go out for the evening with, who would it be?
Can I provide a list? Bob Marley, Malcolm X, JP Donleavy, Ernest Hemingway.

If you could time travel when/where would you go?
I’m guessing the late 19th century? I’m a big fan of cafés and pocket watches and waistcoats.

What is your greatest fear?
Losing Antigone and/or Leo, losing my friends… surfing big waves also scares the stuffing out of me.

What would you say to your 18-year-old self?
Have as many adventures as possible (I did).

Name the one thing that would stop you dating someone.
An absence of generosity.

David A. Porter is a writer based in New York. He works across multiple genres including fiction, non-fiction, essays, and poetry. This summer, his first collection of poems, Ghost Season, will be published by Finishing Line Press. David has also completed a short fiction collection titled Protracted Adolescence