Rod Moody-Corbett’s début novel, Hides, is a rare thing: an exploration of masculinity with no time for macho antics. Set against a backdrop of environmental decay and political disillusionment, Hides follows four men who retreat from the world to embark on a week-long hunting trip in the wilderness of Newfoundland. Their motives are equal parts cathartic and supportive. One of the men is riddled with grief, having lost his son in a recent mass shooting; the others, including the narrator, accompany him as a show of solidarity. But the days they spend in company turn out to be more complicated than any of them supposed, fraught with tension and punctuated by one-upmanship, confrontations, recriminations, and the unearthing of deeply buried insecurities.

That said, this all makes Hides sound more sombre than it actually is. It can be bleak, sure enough, but it’s not po-faced; Moody-Corbett takes care to not let the drama descend into melodrama; he lashes it with bitter humour and tempers it with moments of abstraction and surrealism. It also boasts some of the sharpest dialogue you’re likely to find anywhere, and that’s all the more impressive when part of its purpose is to anatomise the evasive silences of the hunters’ words. Following the publication of Hides in the summer, Moody-Corbett spoke to me to discuss his aims and inspirations, and the place of Hides on the broader territory of literature about masculinity.

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Hides opens with an epigraph from Herman Melville: “I felt a melting in me.” As well as the way that sentence alone lends its meaning to your novel, your choice of a source—Moby-Dick—calls forth a few juicy themes that you take up. How do you see this sentence from this source speaking to the concerns of Hides?

I may title my novel Hides, but I make no bones about my loyalties. Moby-Dick is my favourite novel, and by some distance. I don’t know what second place is, but second place is very far off. I read Moby-Dick for the first time in high school (a shabby hardback with illustrations by Warren Chappell and inane annotations on the order of “simile” and “imagery” de moi), and then again (and again) in university. I love it for all the reasons people purport to hate it: too encyclopaedic, too abstruse, too circuitous, too cetaceous, etc. I re-read the novel alongside Elizabeth Hardwick’s Herman Melville and Paul Metcalf’s Genoa early in the drafting of Hides. Hardwick describes Moby Dick as “an antagonist without knowledge of the plot.” Which is sort of how I feel about my narrator. All narrators.

In Moby-Dick, the sentence (which happily enough opens Guy Davenport’s wonderful essay, ‘Ishmael’s Double’) initiates a filial turn in Ishmael and Queequeg’s relations, a moment of tenderness that anticipates (or could be said to anticipate; god knows I’m not the one to mount this argument) my own narrator’s narrower appeasements. But, divorced from this immediate Melvillian context, the sentence takes on (to my ear) a starker temperament. Call it, as Raymond Williams might, a structure of feeling, a ruined mood. Joy Williams’ Ill Nature—title and essays both—encapsulates this mood exactly. A sense of endings, of living in vestiges. And the certainty of all this bundled deep inside the self, the common self.

Now, of course, that’s in Melville, too; and the wary reader, rounding Melville’s eighty epigraphs, every last one of which: essential, needn’t loiter long in Moby-Dick to find it. Three pages in, and Ishmael, with his hypos and Cato and damp, drizzly November in his soul, gives us this:

“Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States.

“WHALING VOYAGE BY ONE ISHMAEL.

“BLOODY BATTLE IN AFGHANISTAN.”

The election alluded to by Melville little resembles present degeneracies, but you get the idea. The melting, the me.

Of course, an epigraph from Moby-Dick also invokes other themes like masculinity and ambition, especially as they play out in an arena for hunting and slaughter. They’re not made explicit in the epigraph itself, but you’re drawing some energy from Melville’s reservoir.

Absolutely. Though I should say that there were other epigraphs in the running. A Barthelme, a Beckett. Samuel Johnson defines hide as “the human skin: in contempt.” I like that. But Melville prevailed because I couldn’t dislodge the line from my mind; and, too, because so many of his thematics mirror my own. Not to say that my hunters find themselves engaged in a retributive pilgrimage, thwacking their way through thorny brambles and tuck, in the hopes of felling and flensing (to keep our verbs whalelike) some indomitable caribou, no. But the violence, the companionship, the dulling maleness more generally, the loneliness. At one point, Isaac recalls seeing Giuseppe Penone’s Tree of 12 Metres at the Tate Modern, and the impression this leaves on him somewhat resembles Ishmael’s discovery of a whale skeleton in an Arsacidean wood. Commonalities and Easter eggs abound.

One of the most impressive aspects of Hides is the way the novel mediates between particularisation and abstraction. The narrative is set in a particular place at a particular time, in a world that is recognisably ours: the action takes place in coastal Newfoundland, against a context of real-world geopolitical events. But the setup also requires your characters to cut themselves off from affairs outside their own little group: they retreat to an island where they’re forced to hand over their phones, as per the rules of a hermetically-enclosed hunters’ estate known as the Castle—perhaps a nod to Kafka. So it really feels like things are always oscillating between these two poles, these two antipathetic modes of representation. What was it that attracted you to this narrative dynamic?

The particularities of the geopolitical moment versus the abstracted or faintly surreal feel of the hunt proper—and perhaps, too, the oscillation or dissonance between these two worlds—appealed to me from the first. I knew that I wanted my characters to spend the bulk of the novel away from their technology, their devices, if only to keep myself from writing 600 sentences like “I checked my phone” or “My phone pulsed [buzzed, thrummed, hummed, chirred, whirred, etc.].” Writing off-grid excites me in the same way I imagine suppressing a vowel incentivizes a stumped Oulipian. The constraint interests me, linguistically, insofar as it forces me to move around in other words.

As a reader, I’m drawn to strong descriptive writing: Thomases Hardy and Browne, Elizabeth Bishop, Karen Solie, Peter Matthiessen, the Eden Robinson of Monkey Beach and the Marilynne Robinson of Housekeeping. Cormac McCarthy, obviously, the Tennessee novels—Suttree, for me, is the high-water mark. I read greedily of these writers as they compel me to the page. With nature writing, one sometimes risks falling into a kind of delusive lyricism: adjective comma adjective noun. A little of this goes a long way. Probably I prefer descriptions (of bushes and shadows and birds in mid-flight) that tether themselves to a mind or credible witnessing agent: thought through my eyes.

In Malcolm Lowry’s last letter to David Markson (dispatched about a week before Lowry’s death), he offers the young Markson the best piece of writing advice I’ve ever read: “Do you know which stars are which and what bird is flying over your head and what flower blossoming? If you don’t the anguish of not knowing is a very valid field for the artist. Moreover when you learn something it’s a good thing to repossess the position of your original ignorance.” By which I understand Lowry to mean basically this: good to own the app that tells you what shrub is what, what redstart warbles where, but better, artistically, to reinhabit a noticing uncluttered by the most graspable fact. This goes some way in explaining why the sentences of Thomas Browne loom so large for me, particularly as they twist and teem with detail. In The Garden of Cyrus, for instance, you get these stunning images—frog lungs like “two curious bladders not weighing above a grain,” the “pulpy sides” of lupins, the “rudimentall stroaks” of breeding duckweed.

You’re saying you feel an urge to particularise the abstract, but maybe not in a verifiable way? So, then, an impulse towards particularisation with poetic license?

Yes, that’s part of it. Getting into the grit, fleshing things out. An early version situated the action much more concretely in the here and now of 2020 (ish), but—as you can imagine—a fruitless game of Whac-a-Mole soon ensued. I’m not saying that a novelist should abjure the contemporary and avoid taking on weighty subjects, only that, as I drafted, I discovered that my interests lay elsewhere.

I wanted to render the simulated wilderness of The Castle (which, yes, indeed, Kafka; ditto the Muir of Judith Muir) abundantly tactile. I grew up in Newfoundland, lived in St. John’s for most of my life, but wrote the first draft of this novel under lockdown in a small west-facing basement office in southern Alberta roughly 6,000 km afield of its predominant setting. I consulted old hiking books, travel memoirs, field guides. My parents sent me their copy of W.J. Kirwin’s Dictionary of Newfoundland English, a feast of a book. Mootie, spraw-foot, drenty. My geographical displacement proved useful. I can’t seem to write about a place while I’m living in it.

The other aspect that intrigued (and maddened) me involved orchestrating a recognizable present without namechecking every sociopolitical infacility. A federal election occurs in the course of the novel, but we don’t know who runs or wins. Some of the characters are dismayed by the results, though none voted. Protests erupt across the country, while the men junk their phones, take up their guns, and get drunk in the woods. I’m not sure if this particular brand of privileged indifference abounds but it certainly seems plausible.

There’s a lot to unpack in any discussion of the relationships between the characters in Hides. That goes firstly for the relationships between the various men. When you look at the power-plays between the men—the jockeying for alpha-male dominance, or else the deferral to a domineering force—how do you see the dynamics going to work on the ways these men might otherwise relate to one another?

I see the men of my novel as a thwarted, failing bunch, vindictive and niggling, broadly flawed. They are all grieving (the narrator, a mother; his best friend, a murdered son), and each feel entitled to an ample emotional handout—they want to be looked at and listened to and understood singly—but refuse to extend this want of focus beyond themselves. Money, status, various generational and political disparities, complicate reconciliations, invariably. They are as ill-suited to the times as they are to each other.

My narrator, a lapsed Beckett scholar, booze hound, and perennial sessional, who’d sooner be seen reading Marlen Haushofer or Mircea Cărtărescu than read Haushofer or Cărtărescu (his loss), seems most at home in his unhappiness, locked away in his basement, far away from family and friends. The great Norman Rush in a review of Horacio Castellanos Moya’s The Dream of My Return diagnoses these sorts of men as ones who “respond with disaffection, dysfunction, or withdrawal when they are unhorsed or irritated by changing fortunes that the social machine spits out… plunging status, national disgrace, political or religious disillusion, extreme boredom.” Doubtless my narrator sees himself as too proud a member of this camp.

And then there’s the relationship between each of these men and the woman who oversees The Castle, Judith Muir. How does her presence skew their relationships to one another?

Judith skews the singlemindedness of these men in a way that seemed exciting and structurally refreshing if not vital. I admire narratives—novels looking to root themselves, whether in first person or third, in a single voice—that disrupt the performance of their own dominant chronicling by embedding or encoding countervailing voices (or accounts) into their midst: the Ludo sections of Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Percival Everett’s Erasure. Here again the appeal comes down to language, an opportunity to graft the oral quirks of secondary characters into the book. I wanted Judith (and to a lesser degree Willis) to inhabit large sections of the text because their voices interested me. There’s a throwaway line near the end of Faulkner’s Absalom! Absalom! where Shreve (that dutiful listener, that total Canadian), interrupting Quentin to take up briefly the telling, says, “Let me play a while now.”

Play. That’s the word for it. A sharing of toys. A passing or smashing of the conch. Just another mead-addled Geat in Beowulf unlocking—per Maria Dahvana Headley’s remarkable translation—​their “word-hoard.”

It’s interesting to hear you refer to Judith’s role in structuring the novel. She doesn’t read at all like a structural device; I’d even say that in many ways she’s a character with more dimensions than most of the men around her. We get a decent chunk of her backstory, though not all of it connects causally with her role at The Castle, and at times she seems as ambivalent towards the ethical status of life at The Castle as any of the hunt’s other participants. But as you say, she also does allow an element of play into the novel: there’s a change in atmosphere when she enters. Can you talk to some of the technicalities of defining this character? I’m thinking along the lines of language, as you’ve mentioned, but also gender, desires, power. There must have been a process of chiselling out some lines of distinction between her and the narrator. How did that come to consciousness for you?

By structural I mean something closer to architecturally integral. Judith was with me from the beginning: my eco-Kurtz of the Great Northern Peninsula. I agree that she exudes more dynamism than most of the men rioting around her, and that she stands in direct opposition to my narrator: celebrated researcher and academic, proleptic and canny, a formidable entrepreneur. She can field dress a caribou (solo) and hold forth sans Google on the etymology of the northern gannet. My narrator’s cynicism sounds a bitter, plaintive note—if the world is disgusting and stupid and doomed, so be it. Judith seems a more active presence. I wouldn’t go so far as to call her hopeful, but distress spurs her into action. She has no time for masculine lassitude.

I delayed reading Marlen Haushofer’s The Wall until I’d completed a draft of Hides. So I can’t quite claim her as an influence, but I see definite affinities between Judith and Haushofer’s narrator. The Wall (which my narrator debates bringing with him on the trip) strikes me as the loneliest of the last-person-on-earth novels and the bravest—better than Guido Morselli’s Dissipatio H.G., better than Wittgenstein’s Mistress.

“If there should come a time when I am without fire, without ammunition,” Haushofer’s narrator confesses near the end of her report, “I shall deal with it and find a way. But now I have other things to do. As soon as the weather turns warmer I shall set about converting the bedroom into Bella’s new byre, and I’ll also manage to break open the door. I still don’t know how, but I’ll definitely find a way. I shall be very close to Bella and the new calf, and shall watch over them day and night. Memories, mourning and fear will remain, and hard work, as long as I live.”

Dealing with it and finding a way even if you don’t know how. This seems like Judith all over.

And I had fun writing her, pursuing her bendy digressions. The sentences remain relatively long but the punctuation loosens. The paragraphing changes. Images that might sound ridiculous or overcaffeinated coming from my narrator (oiled-over birds like civet de lièvre anyone?) were suddenly permissible. I remember listening to a recording of Wallace Shawn’s The Designated Mourner (directed by André Gregory) as I was revising the Judith sections and catching myself reading her parts out loud in what I can only begin to describe as a very (very) poor man’s Deborah Eisenberg.

Finally, I would say that it was through Judith that I found a way to articulate without equivocation my novel’s dominant problem: men, or the world of men.

As for the men around the narrator, the word that comes to the forefront for me is: repression. Both as sort of a default state for their sense of masculinity, and as the thing they’re compensating for every time they pull the trigger of a firearm. In some ways that’s a given, especially since the narrative set-up frames the hunt as a way of both addressing and not addressing the consequences of a shooting. But I’d like to hear your take on it. What is it that these men can’t say to themselves or one another, that can only be expressed in bullets?

Yes, there is a silence, a hiddenness, that marks each of these men, a Prufrockian reluctance to “say just what I mean.” They want to confide (and some of the men ultimately do) but they’d be better served if they could articulate their emotional needs more immediately. That they don’t, and prefer, instead, to suffer in proud silence, pampering their resentments, nurturing their wounds and wounded aspects, seems most indicative, to me, of their common sadness.

As for the ineffable? If an unspoken confession lurks slyly within them it might be this: Help me. Simple as that. I am no longer among the well. Send help. Soon.

Greg Gerke is one of the most acclaimed writers published by Splice. His collection of short fiction, Especially the Bad Things, has been hailed by Garielle Lutz as “heartachingly hilarious… fresh and revitalizing.” His essay collection, See What I See, was praised by Michael Dirda as the achievement of a writer who “strives to transform each of his sentences into a little work of art or, failing that, of gorgeous artifice.” In June, Splice published Gerke’s first novel, In the Suavity of the Rock, and Greg and I marked the occasion by joining Ben Lindner to discuss the book on the Beyond the Zero podcast.

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Ben Lindner

Welcome to a special episode of Beyond the Zero. I’m your host Ben. Joining me today is Greg Gerke and my co-host is Daniel Davis Wood. Greg is a writer and his new novel is In the Suavity of the Rock. Welcome to the show, Greg.

Greg Gerke

Great to be here. Thank you, Ben.

Ben Lindner

And I’m also joined by Daniel Davis Wood, who is the writer and publisher over at Splice. Thanks for co-hosting with me, Daniel.

Daniel Davis Wood

Thanks, Ben.

Ben Lindner

I want to start with you, Greg, because I realized that we last spoke almost two-and-a-half years ago. I listened back to that recording and it was a Covid outbreak or something like that in New York. Just give us an update. What’s the Greg Gerke story over the last two-and-a-half years?

Greg Gerke

A lot of editing of the novel with Dan over the past, I don’t know, year-and-a-half or so. I was working on another novel for a lot of last year, then I stopped but I think I’m going to go back to it and also assembling a second essay collection, A New Scar in Time, that I’m trying to find a publisher for currently. So, a lot of work.

Ben Lindner

Okay, we’ll come back to that later, because I want to ask you all about that. But Dan, what about you? How’s life over in Scotland?

Daniel Davis Wood

Good. Really wet, unfortunately. We haven’t had much summer yet, even though we’re supposed to. And I’ve been busy, as you know, because you’ve spoken to Nate Knapp and you’re speaking to Greg now: so there have been two books that came out from Splice in the last eight weeks or so, which is a really busy time. In between, [I’m] working on my own things, not at the pace I would like to of course, but maybe later in the year there’ll be time for that. I’m just hoping to give these two books a good ride through the summer and into the second half of the year.

Ben Lindner

I know when we spoke at the end of last year, you were talking about getting your book hopefully closer to completion. How’s that going?

Daniel Davis Wood

It’s always close to completion! It’s close to completion forever and ever and ever and ever. I would say it’s about 90% of the way there, but it’s that last 10% that kills you.

Ben Lindner

I want to ask you, Dan, about the way Splice has got these two books out, and they work so well together. Can you tell us about that experience of getting Greg’s manuscript and working on it?

Daniel Davis Wood

Getting Greg’s manuscript and working on it… There was an open submissions period, and there were a bunch of submissions that came in, but I think I’d read Greg’s manuscript just beforehand, outside the submissions period. Greg had written it and he tried to show it to some people, see if there was any interest, and he showed it to me and said, “What do you think?” This was in my mind when it came to that open submissions period, so if you look at Nate Knapp’s Daybook—the other book that Splice published [recently]—when I came to that book [among the submissions], I probably already had In the Suavity of the Rock in my head. It probably set the tone, more than there being a really serendipitous connection at the same time, and I remember… [Greg] sent it to me while I was away [from home]—this was a summer, two summers ago maybe—and I was on the Isle of Skye when I read it. So [I had] one of those reading experiences that in my mind is very vividly connected to a place. And Greg said something like, “I’m not sure if I should go on with this. I’m not sure if I should take another shot with some other places or if I should put it in the drawer.” And I didn’t write to him, I think. I think I talked it out. I used a voice recorder and just said what my impressions were. I was on a beach, talking into a phone, and the takeaway was, “Don’t put this in a drawer. There’s something here. There’s a kind of X factor; there’s something mysterious that makes this book move. And whatever that thing is, that force, I think the book could be edited to sort of hone that and bring it out.” So, yeah, it had a power, and I thought that whatever that power was, it was not something that should be buried—and I said that. And at that time, I wasn’t sure if Splice would actually have the budget to do another couple of books, so there was a bit of an uncertainty around it. But then some money came through from a private source, which I’m extremely grateful for, and I said to Greg, “I think we’ll go with In the Suavity of the Rock.” We worked on it for six months, eight months maybe, back and forth, big picture first, then line by line. Is that how you remember it, Greg?

Greg Gerke

Yeah. And I do remember that you sent a voice recording of your reaction. I think that was two years ago, because I was on a summer break then as I am now, and that was really nice to get. I mean, I had only sent it to one person—Jim Gauer at Zerogram—and then I just thought, “Let’s go to Splice.” Because, [Ben,] I think Dan understands what I was trying to do. I mean, just in general, he understands. I think he was just much more open to the novel, and this bears out with the editing, how he saw into it. Basically, everything he said [about it], I could see that he was right—you know, moving certain sections around and cutting a little bit here and there. It all worked out. And to hear how receptive he was two years ago, even though it took two years… I mean, for some people, it could take four or five. I just saw someone—2028, their book is coming out. So this is quite fast, in a certain way, and since October it [has gone] very fast because that’s when the real meat of the editing started. It was pretty amazing. And then it was showing up in, at Unnameable Books in Brooklyn, even in April when me and Nate Knapp did the event there. So thank you, Dan.

Daniel Davis Wood

I think I remember period in the autumn before Christmas, with things coming together from you. You were bringing in your final edits and things were getting typeset, then they were getting re-typeset and the edits were getting incorporated, and there was a feeling of coherence there that had a kind of momentum to it—which I was glad to get after those two years.

From my perspective, yes, books take a long time. It feels slow. Some are coming out in 2028. [But] for a press like Splice, which has only got two books this year, that is actually a long time. It’s a concentrated period of time—eighteen months to work, just to dedicate oneself to only a couple of books. There’s about 100,000, maybe 150,000 words all up, between the two of them. That’s a good slice of time to really get into [the text] and take time to think things through, figure out what should happen here—“Does this work? Doesn’t this work?” So [Greg] had the liberty, in some ways, to experiment with some of those editorial suggestions. Move something around—“Does it work on this draft?”—move it back if it doesn’t. That’s maybe a luxury that some don’t get in a more crowded editorial field.

Greg Gerke

And Dan is a serious, serious line editor. We were talking about every word. And commas. And I know a lot of friends who have books—some presses don’t go by line, or they don’t give a lot of edits. So it’s really only to the benefit of the author when they can have an editor like Dan.

Ben Lindner

I think that shows across these two books [Suavity and Daybook] because they almost feel like they’ve been selected for what they bring [together], even to the point where you’ve got almost matching covers. They just work so beautifully together—the subtext in both books, the way both books are written, I think does show that there’s this big sense of overarching thought that goes into both of the books from the editor.

Daniel Davis Wood

Yeah. And I [come back to] just the principle, really, which is that any book that I think is worth publishing is one that lives or dies at the sentence level. If I find myself on a page where there’s a sentence that I’m looking at, I’m like, “Why is this here? What is this individual sentence doing? It doesn’t belong. It doesn’t feel right”—whatever [the response] is—once you get two or three of those in quick succession, it kind of clags up and the book just wilts for me. It’s like I’m not reading it anymore: I’m not in the experience of reading it. It’s like it’s like ash through my fingers. And so Greg has been called by other [readers] kind of a master of the sentence, [as if] this is where his artistry really begins—the seeds of it are right there at the sentence level—and I agree with that. That’s what speaks to me about [his work] and it’s what made In the Suavity of the Rock really such a pleasure to edit, even though it took that time. And I do go through, line by line, word by word, quibbling over every word choice that makes me even slightly doubtful. I will flag it up with a note. And Greg is patient enough and has enough goodwill to tolerate all my many suggestions, but I think it’s always worth considering and reconsidering [aesthetic choices] to make sure that [the text is] just exactly the way it needs to be.

Ben Lindner

I found it interesting, just looking at some of the people who have given positive praise to this book, and some of your other work as well Greg… You’ve got people lining up to praise this book. You’ve got Joseph McElroy, who I think is probably the greatest prose writer alive on the planet at the moment, you’ve got Emily Hall, Jen Craig, a cast of thousands coming in to praise this book. How has that reception been so far, Greg?

Greg Gerke

Wonderful. It’s really what it’s about. I mean, [the book] went out to a lot of early readers, many of whom are writers—I think maybe all of them are. To get those emails from them, and some weren’t even used as blurbs, they were just coming in to see how they read the book. A lot of them read it in the same vein, very generously; they seem to know what I was going for. There’s no doubt that it had some appeal, and maybe because it has this kind of double life as a roman à clef, it’s about a writer, and so many times you hear, “Oh, you should never write about a writer”—it struck a chord. And of course, the McElroy is the crème de la crème, but it was never on my mind to have him say anything about the book. I didn’t think he would. I just wanted to give it to him as someone I know. But to have those words, and the others you mentioned, has been staggering. Hopefully someone who doesn’t know me will weigh in, even if they don’t like it, and just say something. I think there’s at least one or two reviews coming. It’ll be interesting to see [a response] from someone who’s not too familiar with me. I’m looking forward to that.

Ben Lindner

I think I saw a photo of McElroy with you, at the launch. How is he? He’s got to be, what, 98 or something?

Greg Gerke

He’ll be 94 in August.

Ben Lindner

I’ve aged him.

Greg Gerke

He’s very spry. He took the subway to the reading. Dynamic. It’s like he’s 64, really, and a lot of people remark on that. He does yoga, he’s in very good health. To have him come—and there were other writers, Sergio de la Pava, Mark de Silva—to have that was really an amazing experience, because I admire them all, all the writers who came. Anna de Forest, Emily Hall. It was very emotional, in a good way. I wish Dan could have been there.

Daniel Davis Wood

I wish I could have been.

Ben Lindner

I want to ask you about the title, because it’s got this beauty to it. It goes so well with the cover art as well. Tell us about In the Suavity of the Rock, because it’s just such a curious title to start with.

Daniel Davis Wood

It’s stolen from Ezra Pound, from the Cantos—canto 17—talking about the cave of Nera, ancient Greek stone and water, and caves, porphyry smooth. Some of that recurs in the novel as well. I definitely came up with it after [writing] the book, and the book kind of begins on sea and rocks, and it ends on a beach with more water and rock—a different beach. So it just seemed like the right title for this particular narrator, who is very squirrely, melancholic, acerbic, bitter—the “suavity” part, how that plays in it, how he’s in his own rock, but he’s in the suavity of the rock, and how that can play off as the book goes on, that he’s always been in this rock, his whole life, but in the last fifty pages there’s kind of a new rock, a new meaning to those words. You know, like Tender Is the Night comes from Keats—I think a lot of the best titles are like that, they come from poems or literature. No Country for Old Men is Yeats. There’s a lot of recurrences of Ezra Pound’s work and Wallace Stevens in [my] book, which kind of comes from [the narrator’s] background. Even in the last paragraph, there’s Pound and Stevens, so a lot of it was built on a lot of American writers as well.

Ben Lindner

It was funny, because reading this book, you do start in Ireland, and then the way the book works is you spend some time in Berlin and places like that. But it had me thinking about James Salter in a way, an American overseas. Do you want to just give us an idea of how this book functions and where we start?

Greg Gerke

Yeah, definitely the Salter, yes. I was definitely thinking of Salter, and particularly the beginning of A Sport and a Pastime. After the prologue in my book, the character gets on a train and goes into France, and I believe the beginning of A Sport and a Pastime is a train into France, or a car, and just impressions, impressions, impressions. So it’s kind of looking at the American who goes to Europe to find his or her artistic wherewithal, and there’s a lot of the token Van Gogh talk or Cézanne. And those names recur throughout that first section, because actually [the narrator] toggles between Arles and Aix-en-Provence, the two towns of those painters. So there’s a lot of coming-of-age [material] which, in some of the reactions, I think people might get a wrong idea about the book, because some people have thought, “Oh, this is just a coming-of-age book.” But once you get over that second section, it switches, and it goes where you think it might not go, and then in the third section, I think it goes where you really didn’t think it was going to go—and this was all kind of intuitive. I didn’t plan this out. It was very intuitive that suddenly I would go there or there, and then suddenly, even in the last thirty pages, there would be characters popping up from childhood that for some reason have a bearing on this man’s life when he’s in his seventies and going onto a beach. So, there’s a lot of that spirit of the expatriates, and he is an expatriate for some of his life, but then [for] the rest he’s not, and there’s a lot with family and girlfriends and wives and daughters that comes back to haunt him.

Ben Lindner

There’s also a lot of things like [an interest in] film as well in this book, and I think this is where we see a bit of Greg Gerke coming in with your love of film. Is that true?

Greg Gerke

I put that in, and I do remember Dan saying there should be more of that, and he was right. I think there has to be a failure even before the other failures, and I think that’s in him. That’s in his rock that he’s carrying around, that maybe he really wanted to do that [ie. become a filmmaker] in his life. In fact, the first two sections both end with references to film, so there is this kind of melancholic looking back. One’s about Bresson and the other’s about watching films with his then-wife. There is a bittersweetness.

Daniel Davis Wood

I think what I like about the film thing in particular is that it’s kind of connected to what you said about the section on Van Gogh and Cézanne. There, you used the word “token”: there are “token” references to these guys in [France]. I think the narrator actually often distinguishes between the token way of taking a work of art—as something that’s in the culture—and a more authentic way of taking it.

[For example], you can take Van Gogh as the guy who’s on postcards and tea towels and all this sort of stuff, but there was also a man there who had experiences, who lived a life that was unseen by many people at the time he was living it, who was standing there with the tools to make art that nobody else would see in his lifetime. He made that art. He was answering some kind of impulse that didn’t have this commercial outcome at the time. So there are these two ways of thinking about art—the way it’s taken into a culture and the way it feels for an individual—and that runs all through the book, particularly in film, where the references to films vary quite a bit from popular trash, like “token” works of cinema and the Land of the Lost TV series—schlock—to some really sincere considerations by the narrator of what particular directors are doing when they’re making a film as art, and how it feels to him as a viewer, as someone who also would have liked to have been a maker of something sincere, but didn’t become that, and then asking himself, “Well, what outlet do I have?” It’s as if the thing that makes him want to make art keeps welling up inside him all his life, and the means that he’d hoped to generate that art fall out of his grasp. So, then, what is he left with? This is the direction the book is moving in, and this is what’s behind a lot of the stuff about cinema and painting and other forms of art—and literature too.

But at one point, I think you said, Greg, “Don’t write a book about a writer,” and this is not a book that’s about a writer writing. There are a couple of sections where he publishes stories, he talks to another novelist, but really his public identity as a writer is also cut off. For him, writing, the only real writing that he can do is the writing of the thing that we’re reading—which, in his life, within the world of the book, nobody else is reading. It’s a private document, for the most part. Whether it will remain that way beyond the end of the novel is an open question, but within those pages, it’s a private document, and that’s as much writing as he can really produce. That is the art that he generates, but for whom? If it’s not for someone who’s out there [in the world], then there’s an imputed, real deep authenticity to it that he can’t bring out any other way. I think that’s where the energy of the book is coming from: the source of it.

Ben Lindner

I’m going to curse really badly now. This is the slur that this book is going to get hit with, which I find just erroneous and stupid, but I’m going to use this terrible word. Feel free to turn your kids’ ears down if they’re listening to this. “Autofiction.” At the end of the day, a lot of people will probably pick up this book and they’ll go, “This is just Greg Gerke writing about his life in some offhanded kind of way, just adding some details here or there,” and that’s what they’re going to call it. But this book is so much more than that. It lives beyond that in a completely different James Salter kind of world, rather than this bizarre thing that autofiction has become, where it’s just some writer reflecting on writing, which is generally really boring.

Greg Gerke

Yes. It’s much more in the vein of Elizabeth Hardwicke’s Sleepless Nights, let’s say. I’m not really familiar with all the newer practitioners of autofiction. I mean, I’ve read a little bit of them, but T.S. Eliot [once said], “People are always trying to guess what’s real in my poems, and I noticed that they often guess what’s real is not real, or what really happened, they think this really happened, but no”—he made that up. There might be a little of that going on here, because obviously, there’s an entire section of the book when the narrator is 70, and I’m nowhere near that age. So there was a part of me, going in, that was like, “Oh, if you really want some autofiction, I’ll give you it, because none of these books that I hear of goes beyond the narrator’s current age, or the author’s current age.” I’m sure there are exceptions—there always are—but this was much more in the vein of Naipaul’s autofiction, The Enigma of Arrival, or even The Tunnel, which I would add to that last question: yes, this is a confession. This is not autofiction. This is a confession, and I didn’t really know that that’s what I was writing until, I think, after it was done.

Ben Lindner

Interesting. Okay, Dan, how do you feel about that genre of things at the moment?

Daniel Davis Wood

I’m not sure I would call it a genre. I think it’s a marketing term. It’s a marketing term, and it’s kind of a hot one, but it’s also used pejoratively sometimes. That’s maybe what we’re treading around here.

But I think that a lot of books that do get that label and wear it quite comfortably—the classics of, you know, Ben Lerner and Sheila Heti and those kind of writers—they’re [by authors who] do something with writing about themselves, or a version of themselves, that Greg actually does radically differently. And it’s connected to what Greg was describing when he said that the book starts off one way, then it goes somewhere where you think it’s not going to go, and then it goes somewhere else.

See, in a lot of the classic autofiction, you get a narrator who’s talking about themselves and then, at the end of it, everything adds up. You get a picture of this narrator, or a feeling of a sensibility through various pieces that might not be connected in time, that might be taking place years apart, but there’s a coherent self, someone who says, “Yeah, this is me. I did this. I still have this shame, or this trauma, or whatever it is, and that kind of explains why I am the way I am now.” But In the Suavity of the Rock doesn’t do that. There are multiple selves here. One of the words used early on in the novel is “kaleidoscopic”: there’s a kaleidoscopic sense of self and relationships. Each section is one version of this person, [the narrator], and then it’s almost like the writing of [each section] is bringing out vestigial memories of when he was someone completely different. Then the kaleidoscope turns, and you get a different sense of a fractured self, and that gets written down. And then, as he’s writing that, there are other buried memories and recollections of a different self, someone [for whom] the pieces don’t always add up.

The narrator doesn’t feel stable, and his relationships with the people around him throughout these years don’t feel stable. And in fact the novel is a series of interactions between the narrator and other people who—well, you’re not always sure exactly why he’s chosen [to describe any particular] person, because they don’t contribute to an overarching narrative of a life or the overarching construction of one self. But, through the pieces, you get someone who is multiple and mercurial over decades, until he’s not really sure who he is or why he is. And what tells us at the start doesn’t have the explanatory power to let us understand really why he might or might not do what he’s thinking about at the end—so I think that kind of like explodes autofiction.

Ben Lindner

On the back of the book, there’s a word that you don’t see very often on books. You’ve got “mercurial” there already and you’ve also got “prismatic.” And I think that really encompasses the book for me in one word.

Daniel Davis Wood

Yeah. I think, as you’re reading it, every page is giving you a shard of something, and it has jagged edges with the shards around it. So what are you looking at? It’s not smooth. It has multiple dimensions and planes that don’t always intersect easily, not in a holistic way. And the confessional aspect of it: I think it’s like meeting a stranger, and the stranger is not going to tell you what he’s really feeling for the first hundred pages or so. And it, but as it proceeds, more and more comes out.

GREG

But a couple of writers complimented me that I didn’t make it all about [the narrator’s] father’s death, so holding this all the way back until the end of the book was a much better course than laying it out in the first twenty pages. So it’s like being with someone who’s not going to be intimate with you for a while. It’s kind of like that modernist thing, that Gasa said of The Tunnel: “You’re not going to get into this book so easily. It’s going to take a while to get there.”

Ben Lindner

One of the things that, when you have to go back and check something ten times—and I did this yesterday—but [it’s to do with] the words “début novel.” For me, reading something like [Suavity], it feels so assured and obviously the product of a very long experience in writing—you’ve got your essays and stories and things like that. But this, honestly, I would’ve thought this was [a book by] someone who’d written like, fifteen, twenty novels by the time you get to this.

Greg Gerke

Well, there were stepping stones before this, and a lot of throwaways. But I really think the essays, which Dan generously published five years ago, set the tone for this book. I don’t think I could have written this book without going further into the essays. And even the first part of this initially almost began as kind of a memoir-ish thing, which I quickly disposed of. But there was an Ezra Pound essay written, and that’s kind of where the focus on the “suavity of the rock” came from—that line; I was particularly examining that. That came in the year that I was initially writing the book. So a lot of those essays came into the making of this novel.

Daniel Davis Wood

I think what you’re feeling is, like, someone who has lived. There’s a quality of accumulated experience and attentiveness to the world as it is, and to being in the world, and what it feels like to have certain experiences—tactile, emotional, psychological—and who has put [all that] away into a storehouse of material, to then transform into language at a point in life when one’s control over language is really highly developed through other forms. So it has a “wisdom novel” quality to it, in a way.

Greg Gerke

And the other novel was not the first novel that was published, so I was very lucky in that way.

Ben Lindner

I do want to ask you about some of your other writing, because you were telling us before we started recording that there is a 600-page novel that may either get buried or may see the light of day.

Greg Gerke

Right. It is more of a first novel, with a lot of dialogue and a big focus on New York, and I guess we’ve all seen that. I think it was very good to constrain into [Suavity] and play against my strengths of dialogue: there’s hardly any dialogue in this book. There’s about three or four pages total, maybe five, otherwise it’s all narration.

I’m not sure what to do with that other [book]. It might just be too bloated and it might be better to continue on that other novel I was talking about, and also this passages/sentences project I’ve been doing over the past half-year. And yes, this new essay book, a couple people are currently looking at it. There’s a large section devoted to growing up with The Shining and Stanley Kubrick’s films, and basically it’s concerned with how one lives in art, so it’s kind of a memoir in criticism along the lines of the first one. But it’s also going into those deeper issues of Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space: he said that the poetic image makes us, as we read; it makes us the thing that it’s trying to get at. I’m not quoting this right. I wish I could. But it’s about the experience of the viewer or the reader and how they take in the work and change it into their lifestyle or their life. A lot of those concerns are in this new essay book.

Ben Lindner

Interesting. Okay. And how’s Socrates on the Beach going?

Greg Gerke

Good. I’ve taken a little break, but I did open the submissions recently and I’m starting slowly to go over them. So I think there’ll be an issue coming out at the end of the summer, or maybe September, and I’d like to do more. We’ll see what happens, though.

Ben Lindner

Okay. I’ve got one more question about this book for you both. The cover art is stunning. Can you tell us about that?

Daniel Davis Wood

Do you want to say what it is, Greg?

Greg Gerke

Well, the Heceta Head of Oregon, in the middle of the Oregon coast. I think I sent Dan some pictures and I wondered if it could be something like that—not a total reproduction—because that’s a lot of “the rock,” you know, one of the meanings of “rock” [in the novel]. And it’s also where the book basically takes place. The whole thing takes place there, in [the narrator’s] possible final days while living in the Oregon coast. So I sent it to Dan and this wonderful designer brought all this back, right?

Daniel Davis Wood

Yeah. It’s a photo of the rock that is on the beach in Oregon. And then Nate [Moore] designed it. People might notice that it’s the same font, the same kind of aesthetic, not only as Daybook, but also Waypoints. [Nate] designed those covers with my notes, which were basically, “Can we please go simpler? Can we please just simplify everything?” To the point where you can see the change from Waypoints, which is in colour, to Daybook and Suavity, which are both black and white. I said, “Let’s get something nice, monochrome,” and I ended up settling on this photo. There were a couple that we could have gone with, but I liked that one. I liked the way the water snakes over the sand at the bottom; it’s very evocative of the mood, the headspace that the narrator is in, as he is putting this book together, as he’s thinking about these things on that rock.

Ben Lindner

I so love it to see when books align with publishers. Like, obviously we see things like Fitzcarraldo or NYRB Classics. There are so many publishers who do this really well, a lot of them who don’t do this at all. But is this something you’d like to do in the future, to have your books kind of look like Splice books?

Daniel Davis Wood

It’s hard to say. I think I wouldn’t like Splice to have an overarching identity. There was a point very early on where that was a possibility. If you look at the publisher And Other Stories, their first batch of books were all quite uniform in their design; there were a few different things for each cover, but basically you could tell [that each book] was theirs. And early on I said, “Yes and no.” Like, yes, I want the books to go together if they have resonances in the material; yes, they should have a uniform look or a thematically unified look. So Suavity and Daybook do, right? And there are other books in the Splice catalogue that are meant to kind of go together, so that people who read all three, or both, or all five in that series, can see things about the ways the works speak to each other, which the reader of one of those books will not see. So I wouldn’t want Splice, I think, to have one look for everything, but definitely to keep one look for a series. I think that’s an interesting quality for books. It’s something that you can’t manufacture and it requires a bit of serendipity—and once you get that serendipity, it’s important to recognise it and harness it and help other people share in it. That’s what that design is meant to do.

Ben Lindner

Speaking as a reader who’s read, I think, almost everything you’ve got out from Splice, I’d say these are by far your two strongest books and the way they work together is amazing. So what’s the future for Splice? Are you doing stuff next year?

Daniel Davis Wood

Depending on funding, the submissions may open later this year. But actually, honestly, I’m on the fence about whether to open submissions or to just go for a direct approach, because there are two writers who I really want to see a book from, who haven’t published a book yet but have the material for one. So there’s a question of whether I will have the resources internally, like in myself, to work with them to help them bring some books out that Splice would publish. I think they’re really deserving and I think the readers will be there. And then I do also receive submissions outside of windows from agents or from people who, for one reason or another, I’m connected with. Funnily enough, this week I received a submission of unpublished work by Alexander Theroux. I don’t know if that will lead anywhere, but it’s wonderful to see him pop into an inbox. And the website Minor Literatures is now run by Toby Ryan, who I think Greg has spoken to, [and Toby] is also a writer with a manuscript that I’m reading now—it’s dark and bizarre and all sorts of interesting. So it may be that submissions don’t open up, so we do things outside of that. That’s undecided. But there will be a decision by the end of the year.

Ben Lindner

Cool. And when can we see your new book?

Daniel Davis Wood

God only knows. I hope I can finish it this summer. I think I will. Greg has just discussed the travails of a 600-page novel and that’s something that I might discuss if this one doesn’t go anywhere as well. But it’s about that length and it’s quite tightly constructed, although it can look big and baggy on the first pass. So we’ll see. It may go nowhere.

Ben Lindner

Before I let you both go, I want to hear about some of the books you’re reading at the moment, because I know you’re both amazing readers. So let’s hear about what you’re reading first, Greg.

Greg Gerke

Well, I would say out of the books published this year, the two books of the year for me are Garielle Lutz’s Backwardness [and] Schism Blue by Christina Tudor-Sideri, from Sublunary. The Lutz is staggering. It’s like 930 pages, but most of it is memoir. There’s about 250 pages of fiction, but the memoir sections are so funny and some of them are so sad and emotionally bloodletting, especially about her mother and her mother’s death. I’ve hardly ever read anything like that in my life. I really think this is her masterwork. Yes, the short stories are one thing, but this is another thing. [And for Tudor-Sideri], if one could come up with a term, very Maurice Blanchot-ian, or even Marguerite Duras. There is no character, it’s all feeling. It’s all words and sentences. So that’s that’s something that I’m enjoying very much at the moment. And also Michel Butor’s book of essays called Inventory, which a lot of people have told me to read over the years, and it’s quite a great book.

Ben Lindner

Excellent. Yeah, the Garielle Lutz book. If that is not my book of the year, it’s going to be something which will blow me away, because that book… Honestly, before I got the hard copy of that book, I read it electronically, which I generally hate doing, but I went through that book in about a week. It is compulsive, it is brilliant. It is just, as you said, it’s emotional, it’s funny, it’s just got everything in it. And yeah, I don’t know why that book hasn’t got a lot more people talking about it, because it is just so good. It’s amazing. Dan, what about you?

Daniel Davis Wood

Well, Backwardness is on my to-read pile, because I haven’t had the time I need to devote to it, but you’re selling me on it. Three of the best things I’ve read this year… One of them was Molly by Blake Butler; I think the last fifty to seventy-five pages especially are some of the bravest writing. I don’t really like using that word, but [in those pages Butler] is asking questions about his own experience and about the ethics of what he’s doing that other people just are not asking. And the fact that he can get to those questions that are just as self-lacerating as hell, in the state that he was writing that book from—it just blew me away. And it is kind of relentless, especially that last section. And I’d give a shout-out as well for his Substack, about literature and about his movement through the world of small presses and big presses.

Ben Lindner

It’s called Dividual, right?

Daniel Davis Wood

It’s called Dividual. Yeah. I subscribe to that. I think it’s great.

A couple of other [books…] One is a very short book from CB Editions, Spent Light by Lara Pawson. Again, it’s just a lot of feeling. It’s a bit like Christina Tudor-Sideri in the sense that this is a woman who is in her house and she just looks at an object—it is just about the most mundane objects in her immediate environment—and from that, she draws out these very pithily written but very conceptually complex chains of associations of memory and cultural meaning and emotion. You don’t really get a sense of who she is; it’s like a narrative without a character, like there are these objects and this person who lives among them and you can get a sense of a situation but not the person who’s living in it. It’s a fascinating book, the way it’s put together. And then I also really enjoyed an older book from Fitzcarraldo Editions from a few years ago, by Jeremy Cooper. It’s called Brian. I don’t know why I picked it up. But it’s similar in some respects to parts of Suavity. It’s about a man who lives by himself. It takes place over about forty years. He lives alone in London; he works this dreary job. He may be autistic. He doesn’t have relationships with anybody. And one night, purely on a whim, he goes to the BFI, the British Film Institute, and sees a film. And the BFI plays a couple of films every night, night after night. They’re usually random. Sometimes they’re like little festivals organised by [a particular] director. And this guy just goes, over forty years, every single night, film after film after film. His thoughts and his responses to the films are incredibly articulate and charged with meaning, and [the novel] asks this really strange question about whether someone whose lived life is extremely barren and restrictive has a less fulfilling life as a result of that, or whether a life can be just as fulfilling as one that is connected to people, almost entirely by way of artistic experience and responses to art. I don’t know. It’s a difficult question without an answer. And I think Cooper walks a very fine line between saying, yes, this is fulfilling, and no, it’s not. Anyway, it’s a fascinating book. Brian is what it’s called.

Ben Lindner

Okay. Now you’ve both given me stuff that I need to go and get. One other book that I want to mention, because Daniel and I were emailed about this book: Let the Boys Play by Nicholas John Turner. I’m about halfway through. I still haven’t managed to finish it yet. But I’ve said to a few people, I think it’s one of the best Australian books for a very long time. But tell us about that, because you’ve read this book over a long period, Daniel.

Daniel Davis Wood

I did. I read it in manuscript. It was something that I would’ve liked to publish. [Not publishing it is] not to do with the material, but it would have just been that the selling of this book, I did not have the capacity for. I think it’s really challenging. It’s confronting. It’s graphic. There are naked bodies all over the place and scenes that reminded me of, actually, nobody so much as Robe-Grillet in the nouveau roman, where basically, you know, Nicholas describes a scene as a series of intersecting angles of vision. It’s very kind of geometrical in sections, where you’re looking at a triangle of grass and how the light passes across it and how things interact around it. And, in some ways, in its artful excesses, it’s very similar to Hang Him When He Is Not There. But it’s longer and more expansive. [Nicholas] is working on a much bigger canvas. It’s much more integrated. There’s a lot more narrative and characteristic integrity, and it does have the feeling of, I guess, the same writer as Hang Him coming into a greater confidence and more expansive powers, wrangling material over a greater scale. What else can I say about it? I mean, it is one of a kind, but it’s a really tough sell. Like, everything that is great about this book depends on having read the book. There isn’t a hook that you can take to a person, or to a reviewer, and go, “This book is about X” or “This book makes you feel Y and this is why you should read it.” Everything is there: it’s just what’s on the page. That is what makes it brilliant. To understand that, you have to read the pages.

Ben Lindner

Yeah, it’s an insane book. I don’t know if Sergio de la Pava has read it, because I know Sergio was a huge fan of the first book, but this book is so visceral and so intense. I think that’s probably why I haven’t finished it yet. There’s this surface layer of stuff that you’re reading about, and it’s very much about bodies and about these really physical kind of interactions and violence and things like that. And then there’s this background of some kind of bizarre… It’s set in Brisbane as well, which, Greg, is kind of like the third city on the east coast [in Australia] and everyone knows Brisbane’s a bit of a shithole in some ways. And this book is kind of set in this, I wouldn’t say post-apocalyptic… But it’s like a company has taken over Australia, or, you know, we don’t even know how far it’s gone. But essentially, it’s set in a bizarre kind of old world. And this book has so much in it. It is just crazy.

Daniel Davis Wood

[Nicholas] has that thing where he uses really very simple words, but with this syntax, these sentences, this grammar that is just, sentence by sentence, relentless. Like, it’s just this plod; it kind of beats you.

Ben Lindner

I think maybe that’s the way to sell it, hey? It’s like Greg was talking before about William H. Gass’ thing. It’s like you have to pass a test to get into this book. Here’s the hurdle. And if you get over that, then this book is for you. And I think this is one of those books, right? If you like Gass’ books in that sense, yes, you will like Let the Boys Play.

This is kind of my take on this now: if Krasnoharkai grew up in, like, the outer suburbs of Brisbane, that’s what would happen.

Daniel Davis Wood

Yeah. And to the point where, if you think of the Krasnoharkai of Seiobo There Below, where he’s got this kind of mystical way of seeing things, that’s in [Let the Boys Play] too. You can see this attempt to channel some kind of divine power just through what you’re paying attention to. It’s really remarkable.

Ben Lindner

We’ll have to send you a copy, Greg.

Greg Gerke

Yeah, I’ve got to order a copy. But Socrates did publish the first chapter of this, and it was called a different name.

Ben Lindner

Yeah, I remember seeing that. It was, yeah, a completely different name.

Daniel Davis Wood

The Soft Castle.

Ben Lindner

All right. I should probably wrap it up with you. It’s been so much fun chatting to you both. Before I let you go, Greg, can you tell us where we can go and get this amazing book and where we can find you online?

Greg Gerke

The Splice website is the best place to get it. Otherwise, maybe Bookshop, Barnes & Noble, those types of places, bookshop.org. And I’m online. My name, there’s a website, there’s a Twitter page. So I’m around.

Ben Lindner

Excellent. Daniel, what about you? Where we can get in touch with you?

Daniel Davis Wood

Well, you can find Splice at ThisIsSplice.co.uk. And you can find me at danieldaviswood.com and my very long neglected website, which is way overdue for an update. It’ll get one soon.

Ben Lindner

Brilliant. It has been such a pleasure chatting to you both. Congratulations on this. Congratulations on these two works, Daniel, as well, because together they are fantastic. Greg, this is an unbelievable piece, and congratulations to you on it.

Nathan Knapp’s début novel, Daybook, is fiendishly difficult to encapsulate: it’s a novel of philosophical and moral depth, of stylistic ambition and assuredness, of biting humour, self-exposure, and extraordinary emotional intelligence. It’s a very contemporary novel, moving from the ethics of livestreamed interactive pornography to the effects of Covid-19 lockdowns on love between intimate partners, and it packs in much more than you’d expect from a slim 150 pages. It finds its narrator on the verge of winter as he begins speaking to an empty page, unpicking the threads between his ancestry, his desires, his failures and uncertainties, and the love that has held him in exile from the world of Christian faith he once knew. As he writes, over the course of a year, he finds himself revising his own self-understanding and self-expression in realtime, laying out lines of prose that loop back on themselves, incorporating into the narrator’s concerns the very possibility of saying something meaningful in this or other modes of writing.

Knapp has given a couple of fascinating interviews about Daybook: to Jason Christian at Full Stop and to Ben Lindner on the Beyond the Zero podcast. But reviewers have yet to reckon with the novel’s aesthetic intricacies, ethical circumlocutions, and commitment to self-appraisal at all costs. Following the publication of Daybook in April, Knapp spoke to me about how he approached these aspects of the novel while also addressing monumental themes: faith and death, intergenerational inheritances, desire, lust, and shame.

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Daybook opens with a quote from Emil Cioran: “A writer’s ‘sources’? His shames”. To set the stage: what does shame consist in for you, and where does it get enough generative power that an entire book can spring from it?

As far as the most powerful emotions we can think of, I’m not sure if there’s a stronger one for the writer than shame. Without shame we have no Dostoevsky. Probably also no one who emerges from his tradition, either, nor most of those capable of being terribly funny: no Nathanael West, no Flannery O’Connor, no John Berryman, no Sebald, no Dag Solstad, no Knausgärd. No Suttree by Cormac McCarthy nor any Outer Dark. Without shame there is no wrath and as such no King Lear nor Thomas Bernhard. Of all the human emotions, shame is the densest. In that sense it’s a good source of literary energy. And yet it has the potential to wreck the entire process of composition.

Wreck it how?

There was a point after I’d written the first sixty or so pages of Daybook where I had to stop working on it altogether. The thought of anyone I knew reading it was an absolute horror, and still is, to some degree. Took me six months to get back at it. When I did, I found that the act of writing it formed a kind of externalization of that shame, and I felt like I was freeing myself from it, but that process was itself painful. Writing it did not make me feel better. This sort of brings us back to Dostoevsky as outlined in The Brothers Karamazov and elsewhere. Freedom feels awful. It’s terrifying. By and large we are all happier without it, which is in a sense why it’s always the first thing given up in a human life, before everything else.

Even when I follow you here—from freedom to shame, to the horror of a witness to one’s shames, perhaps to anger at oneself for seeking freedom in this way—I’m startled by how quickly you connected shame to wrath as an inciting force for prose. Daybook doesn’t strike me as wrathful at all. The narrator is very introspective, not outward-looking enough to be wrathful—and to the extent that he does bear ill will towards others, it’s more with a sense of despondency than wrath. Do you see wrath in the book?

It’s more something underneath the prose than in it, I think. Wrath both at the idea of God that I was raised with and God himself. Wrath at the warped ways in which my faith shaped me and also wrath at my faith for abandoning me—I never wanted to stop believing in it. Anger at the insidiousness of Christianity’s relationship to the body. Anger at the beauty that inheres in Christianity’s notion of self-sacrificial love and the awfulness of a religion that says one’s body’s desires are inherently evil. Wrath at the failed promise of eternity: I was told we would be made new, would be made whole, and to no longer possess that promise feels like disinheritance.

Which brings us to the subject of faith: not quite the heart of the novel, but close to it. The narrator of Daybook was raised as a Southern Baptist, though he doesn’t adhere to scripture any longer. I’m tempted to say that he sheds the Southern Baptist ways of being to different degrees. He’s not a Biblical literalist and he lacks a sense of the supernatural; but he does have a sense of the numinous, he trusts in both forgiveness and justice, and he still seems to search for something like God. Crucially, while he has mostly ridden himself of the fear that the faith instilled in him, somehow the shame seems to stick. So why does his shame persist, even as it loses the support structures of the faith?

If one thinks of faith as providing “support structures” for one’s life—which it certainly does if it’s sincerely held, particularly if you’re raised within it, as in my case and thus the case of Daybook’s narrator—one has to consider another word for that idea, which is that of scaffolding, and that particular word’s nearest neighbor in the dictionary, which is of course the scaffold itself, the site of execution. When one’s faith withers or dies, the underlying “support structures” remain. (I don’t think one has to be or have been a Christian necessarily for this to occur: the form retains its shape after the contents are emptied.) Which means the scaffold remains, only now there’s no God to be reached by climbing it, just a noose. At that point the only direction to go is down. If all your inner life has been spent in building that structure, I think it can become more vertiginous than a person can bear.

The end of one’s faith, for a person up there on the scaffold, faces one with a choice to take the stairs or leap. In a sense, one has to execute. I’m glad I was persuaded to take the stairs. Not everyone is so lucky. Daybook is in a sense one person’s attempt to get off the scaffold of belief and to get out from under it. Everything I write in the end seems to be in response to this structure and also forms a protest against the ghost of the God in whose name it was initially constructed. I wish it could be otherwise. I’d like to be rid of that ghost and of the need for what the ghost once represented to me, and yet at some point everything I work on reveals itself to be an attempt to get out from under that ghost’s shadow.

Now you’ve mentioned one of the novel’s key words—“ghost”—and I think it’d be easy for someone who hasn’t read Daybook to look at your response just now and assume that the novel finds a de facto antagonist in the ghost of an absent God, as if the narrator were simply working against that feeling of ghostliness. But in fact the novel is populated with a range of different and quite literal ghosts. There are hauntings of the conscience, of the self by the self, of the felt presence of the past; there are times when historical atrocities rise up from the earth, ghostlike, to haunt the meanings of events within the narrator’s purview… 

So why so many ghosts? There is conceivably a version of Daybook in which the function of these ghosts—to disturb a settled sense of morality, to provide a historical counterpoint to present concerns—is achieved by other, more introspective means. But the version of Daybook we’ve got is thoroughly populated by the dead, often viscerally. Why?

Good question. Hard to answer, though. To some degree I think I’ve seen the world this way from an early age. One thing that’s rare for most Americans these days, especially perhaps those that go on to become writers, is that I was raised in the same town where both sets of my grandparents lived and I knew three of my four sets of grandparents when I was a kid. This in the same incredibly isolated place—at right around a hundred residents it can barely be called a town—where my mother was raised and her parents and their parents were raised. It’s hemmed in by mountains; if I’m not mistaken there wasn’t a paved road to it until the 1960s. All four of my grandparents were Okies who did migrant work as kids, traveling to California and/or points-Midwest to pick cotton and fruit, poor as shit, and I was incredibly interested in that—that and the fact that their existence was so different from mine: if I ran around barefoot all summer it was not because my parents were intentionally holding off my shoes for cold weather.

I think it’s because of living around and with those people that I had such a strong sense that there was a past and that it was in some important sense not only still here but also the very fabric out of which the here and now are made—more personally, that those people, most of whom are now dead, remain in the sense that they are the fabric out of which I was made. That goes both for family and also the writers who’ve mattered most to me. When I go back to that landscape—southeastern Oklahoma, in the humid woods of northern McCurtain County, at the foot of the Kiamichi mountains—those people are still there and that version of me that I was as a kid is in some sense still there. In America the idea persists that people are made from scratch. Or that they exist only as the late expression of the various -isms of class and race and sex and sexuality. All those exert their influence. But it’s also important to look at how people are made from people, as Witold Gombrowicz insists, and, for me, how those people are both formed and deformed by each other and by the landscape in which they live, which is in a sense the dust from which they emerge. (Also, even if one counts God among the dead, that in no way prevents Him from exerting His influence.)

So, to the extent that living people incarnate a vanished past, ghosts inhere in them?

Not just people. There is a particular dead dog who waits on me in those woods. I had conversations with him almost every night when I was most recently back home. Maybe that sounds crazy but it helps keep me inside myself. The idea that there is nothing but nothingness in death haunts me, but it also has (I think) made me more attuned to the ways in which we live on in those who remember us—it’s the only version of immortality we have. In that sense the idea of the ghost becomes indispensable.

I should also say that reading John Berryman’s Dream Songs formed a pretty early influence in that vein. His work is as ghost-filled as anyone short of Shakespeare. Berryman’s many elegies are not just attempts to memorialize the dead, but to summon them up, to make his dead friends and his dead father physically manifest, in almost the same sense as that of the Catholic sacrament (the bread made flesh and the wine made blood) to make them present in the language of the songs and therefore to bring them into the very room with him. Most of that which in Daybook is most important to me is likewise an attempt to summon up the dead.

Funny: I just realized I was borrowing some of JB’s syntax: “Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up.”

In describing “coming down from the scaffold,” you said that one faces “a choice to take the stairs or leap”—and you took the stairs. But stairs don’t just lead down to safety. Stairs can also lead upward, to someplace both beyond one’s immediate reach, figuratively more elevated than the nadir one starts from. There’s a sense in which Daybook is the narrator’s attempt to build those stairs: a new structure which through the act of creation allows for a sort of ascension in the place of the absent God. What are the values and aspirations that the narrator is ascending towards, by way of writing this book?

Maybe it’s just another echo of my protestant raising but I’m skeptical of the idea of any kind of ascension outside of the structure of belief in God. Mostly I’ve thought of what I was doing in Daybook as a kind of descent back to the world and especially to the body. It’s dark down there but it’s where we exist! That’s also probably where all the emphasis on sex and sexuality comes in. And yet, as with your previous question, with all of the book’s manifold ghosts, there’s an attempt to get the dead to cross back over the line that divides us and to return them to the world of the living. I’m saying: return to me. If there’s any desired ascent in the book, I think that’s it.

Fair enough, but surely there’s more to it than that—more than returning the ghosts to the world of the living, I mean. To my mind, the most wonderfully alive character in the novel is Elle, the narrator’s wife, who is complex in ways that are hard to articulate: of fiercely independent mind, extraordinary liberality, something close to shameless sexual desire. Her complexity, combined with her humour and her comfort in her own body, feels to me like—well, a sort of idolisation, the result of the narrator’s attempt to place her above all other persons. Her development on the page feels like an act of appreciation—of dignification through details—and not just, or even primarily, for her bodily qualities, but for her ways of seeing the world and thinking about it, and for the force she exerts on the narrator’s life. Can you talk to that character?

I don’t know if I can in those terms. Maybe. I like that idea of “dignification through details”. And it’s a great compliment to hear that she seems like the most alive character in the book. I’m a little uncomfortable, though, with the idea of her depiction being an “idolisation,” because if it were, she’d be dead on the page, I think. While everyone else—what few other characters there are in the novel—gets presented more or less through the lens of the narrator’s mind, Elle gets to walk and talk.

Then again, I can talk to that character, because I live with her. I like that woman a lot. And yet… as Karl Ove Knausgård somewhere points out, a marriage is also a kind of fiction. Elle exists and does not exist, both on the page and in my life, in the same way that my own imagination-of-myself-in-my-marriage both does and does not exist. This isn’t to say that to work through the fiction of a marriage in one’s life is the same thing as to work through the depiction of working through one’s marriage in a novel. It isn’t a stretch, however, to say that the working through of the real life marriage did lead to the other. If the marriage-in-real-life did not exist, then Daybook also does not exist.

I assume that the various passages on sex, sexuality, sexual desire, and so on are mostly what you had in mind, earlier, when you said you feel horror at the thought of anyone reading your work. Are there other parts of the novel, aside from this material, that also make you feel mortified when you think of a reader?

Mostly those parts, to be honest. I say things in the book that I wouldn’t say in life to all but the closest of confidants. But I wanted it to be that way. For me, the main thing that a novel draws its power from, regardless of its quotient of invented versus nakedly biographical material, is intimacy. It’s what makes a novel or film or painting meaningful. That which I desire when I open a book, sit down in the darkness of the cinema, or stand before a canvas is the writer, director, painter naked, not on the other side of the work but inside it.

Last question, then. You’ve already connected your narrator’s journey through faith to your own journey, and the narrator’s outlook on the past to your own outlook. But Daybook is finally a novel—perhaps not a top-to-bottom fabrication, but in some sense containing enough veilings of the truth to not constitute a report.

Or is it? How naked does Daybook leave you? Do you see any part of it as a veil of any kind?

Daybook was a tremendously uncomfortable book for me to write because there is so little veil. And I think it’s bootless of me to try to dictate how it’s read: the narrator is a man who lives with his wife and son in an apartment in Nashville, doing most of the writing at a table on his patio, looking up at a pair of pine trees he thinks of as three—and I am a man who lives with his wife and son in an apartment in Nashville, doing most of my writing at a table on my patio, often looking up at a pair of trees which I formerly thought of as three but are actually two.

Generally I think that the memoir as presented in most Anglo-American publishing is just a novel which the writer does not believe has the shape—or who have not troubled themselves to bother shaping—into the form of a novel. In that sense, I don’t believe memoir really exists (talk to a memoirist who hasn’t made-up some part of their memoir, even if only to fill a hole in the memory: bet you can’t find even one). There’s also a fair bit of condescension out there right now, some of it from people whose work I admire, about the term autofiction, which seems to me misplaced. A work of autofiction still has to succeed, if it succeeds, as a novel. A lot of those novels suck. Most of them are mediocre. Then again, most quote-unquote made-up fiction is mediocre. Such is the way of things, no? Daybook is nakedly autobiographical. It’s obvious. It also has a shape—or at least I’ve endeavored to give it one. Therefore: a novel. Fiction, autobiographical or not, must in one sense make for itself and in another discover its own form. (Guy Davenport and others talk about this much more eloquently than I!) This form emerges in response to the literary culture of which the writer is apart but also must spring from within the author, from the author’s lifetime of reading, the author’s desire, biography, inner life. And if it doesn’t do that, no matter what quotient of it is made up, it fails. Very little fiction manages this but it remains for me the goal, whether there is very little “made-up” material, as here, or if there’s a ton, as in the book I’m working on now.

In any case: E.M. Cioran said somewhere that the greatest mistake an author can make is by answering too much about themselves, leaving no mystery. Nothing for his readers to wonder about. It’s true that there is an attempt in Daybook to remove as much clothing as possible. I’m writing this response, though, on an uncharacteristically cold spring day in Nashville, so I think it’s time to button-up!

Jared Pappas-Kelley’s Stalking America is one of those rare beasts, a truly unclassifiable novel: a text of a kind so mercurial that it seems to want to shrug off even that label. On its simplest, most rudimentary level, it follows the doings of a nondescript young man—and yet even in saying as little as that, the word “follows” becomes conspicuous, overloaded with meaning. That’s because the protagonist develops an interest in a reality TV series called Stalking America, which itself follows a woman who in turn follows, and films, other people. But then, just as you’re maybe thinking that the novel sets itself up to make something of the reverberations between these two characters, it does something different. It splits itself apart, cordoning off various sections of its narrative, slicing viewpoints into pieces, creating boundaries around and gaps between different ways of looking at (following?) events as they unfold. The result is something restless, a little insidious, equal parts frustrating and compelling, and made up of many more fascinating elements than a summary can capture. Following the publication of Stalking America last summer, Jared Pappas-Kelley spoke to me about the stuff that Stalking America is made of, and the stuff it tries to unmake.

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I’d like to begin by thinking a bit about your vision for Stalking America, particularly in terms of its breadth and scale. I’m not quite sure how to classify the book. While it often feels like a work of fiction, parts of it hew closer to autofiction and the text itself flirts with the label “memoir”—so let’s just say that it operates on a very personal level. At the same time, though, the prologue announces an intention to grapple with “this moment we currently inhabit,” and the text is also shot through with shards and fragments of what sound like fleeting contributions to “the discourse.”

So, to me, the vision of the book is one that pulls in two directions simultaneously: it both concentrates on a singular experience and broadens out to something more panoramic. I’d love to know more about how it came to be that way. Did you know, early on, that the book would be working towards this, or did it come about by trial-and-error and experimentation?

When talking with my editor, that was something we were trying to figure out—this slippage or blurring that was the structure—and he put forward an idea that for him Stalking America was what he’d classify a “thinking novel.” What I took that to mean was that it was primarily about a process of thinking or thought. For me, it became more about layering these impulses and drawing out parallels in the material, to let the threads pool together so that certain bits would click and others sort of drift back into the background in a mundane sense. And it was about blurring these approaches between fiction, or “discourse,” and playing with conventions that might cause someone to read it as perhaps memoir or biography or artist writings as a way of tracing a thought within this slippage.

I was interested in putting something forward that at the same time undermines or questions itself, that parallels the movement from the singular to the more panoramic, as you put it. Is this something that fiction can support? Or is it collapsing under its own weight when it plays out in this manner? There’s the idea of tricking a truth into revealing itself, but instead it might be a sidestepping, and as an approach it is maybe like with an eclipse—not something to be viewed directly. Building these overly-complex and clunky apparatuses or structures—like a hole poked in construction paper inside a cardboard box with a paper towel tube: an eclipse viewing box, to make the indirectly viewable visible—might allow us to approach this idea of truth, to catch it unaware or startle it into view like a woodland creature. And perhaps that’s tied to a notion of the post-truth, whatever that means, how to navigate and perceive or cut through.

I love the shambolic nature of those “clunky apparatuses” and I think the book absolutely pieces itself together in that way. Alongside narratorial discourse, you’ve got some typographic play (sporadic sans serif fonts, dialogue inset like a blockquote, a dream sequence rendered in double columns on a single page) as well as snippets of cultural ephemera. I’m thinking of text messages, magazine cover headlines (“Somali Gangs in the Midwest”, “It’s Time to Break Up with Your Boss”), and the detritus of digital life: “We would like to keep you up to date with news and events from our affiliates. To unsubscribe from this, please click here.” If Stalking America is a “thinking novel,” what are these bits and pieces contributing to the thought process?

The different bits sift together into something hybrid, or that’s what I was playing with, and in my head I approached it like threads or a feed aggregating in a way. How things have shifted or are shifting. How these elements coincide without always being attributed. That’s what I was interested in with the dialogue and those other elements, and it became more about texture and building an affinity or magnetism between parts. With the typographic and formatting elements, I was exploring this anatomy, ways to signal elements approaching from different sources, and flattening out, but also giving cues that they shift registers. How to map this experience on the page?—that’s sort of how I conceived it. I also wanted to flirt with a sort of call and response between what was accruing, these elements or ephemera, and a narrative that was developing. We have perhaps become so hardwired to read these cues or bracket them out, ignore them, so I was also looking not so much at what’s right there on the surface but what wanders behind it.

Which brings us to the subject of structure, the arrangement of disparate parts. What’s striking to me about the structure of Stalking America is the way it looks a bit haphazard but actually, on reflection, is working within a tight design. Can we talk about that design a little? The book more or less opens with some notes on the real-life installation artist Gordon Matta-Clark, who made his name by “cutting up buildings”—by literally taking slices out of enclosed spaces in the built environment. Matta-Clark’s work is important to the substance of the book, but also to the structure. How did his spirit inform the way Stalking America demarcates and arranges its various components?

Matta-Clark allowed me to work with someone else as a proxy or stand-in, to frame the book as a biography around his ideas and how he approached structures. Kind of in the way his houses and interventions served as a proxy for revealing something more through their cuts and there was a freedom in that. I tend to see myself most keenly in contrast to other people. His approach gave me permission to examine that contradiction, with lived or abandoned spaces dissected and put on display as biography or narrative, but beginning with somebody else—a significant artist—and his story and the way it is constructed. Without representing, it begins to resemble. Cutting into these narratives reveals something more within the material; into vacated spaces, a stairway that led somewhere once, an impulse.

So one thing I was playing with was this idea of over-identifying with something, and how that thing begins to blend into the original or take the lead. The main character in Stalking America is perhaps over identifying with the character Claire on the TV show. Sure, there may be some connection between them, and perhaps they grew up down the street from each other, but even in this it’s a bit tenuous or overstated, so it becomes more about self-construction through over-identification. I was also inviting myself to over identify with Matta-Clark in a way as a writer, his construction and process, framing something a bit tenuous or skewed but also something that traces a resemblance.

Yes, and you’ve even just alluded to one of the lines in the book that touches on these ideas: “It somehow seems fitting for my memoir of sorts (who the hell said it was a memoir) to begin with somebody else, a significant artist, his story, as I have always seen myself most keenly in contrast to other people, through an affinity but also where they are not like me, their experiences.” But there’s also, to me, another sense in which Matta-Clark is moving through Stalking America—or, if we prefer to think of Stalking America as a “thinking book,” then there’s a sense in which Matta-Clark is driving its mode of thought.

I mean something like this… There are the autofictional parts of the book, and then there are the reality TV parts, and then there are the “Lapso mori” sections. These intercut the other two parts with fragments of text that sometimes seem like non sequiturs in relation to the action, sometimes attempts at establishing thematic resonances with it—and I emphasise the “cut” in “intercut.” So the way I came to see these sections was essentially as prosaic versions of Matta-Clark’s cuts: as if Stalking America were a structure unto itself, with its enclosed spaces cut apart (and cut into) by the “Lapso mori” sections. But maybe that’s just me over-identifying with your narrator over-identifying with Matta-Clark! How do you see the “Lapso mori” sections informing the broader vision?

There’s this impulse of cutting to see what lies behind: carving windows as an excavation, exposing what remains or bleeds through, but not in a static way—seeking a sustained act of cutting-through in order to construct. Without that constructive aspect, it’s more of an autopsy of something gutted, or just a cluster of holes—that’s something else. So with the more autofiction bits of Stalking America, or the reality show or the “Lapso Mori” sections, perhaps an architecture reveals itself like a push notification—cutting through a proximity, reordering and observing previously obstructed vantages or lines of sight or thought, interjecting between these instances as when a wall is removed.

Well, then, after Matta-Clark, there’s another artist who could be called the second of the book’s presiding spirits: the photographer Sophie Calle. In fact, of the two artists, she is the one I was more familiar with before I came to Stalking America. Her work is evoked in the title of the book, given that she made her name in the 1980s with a series of surreptitious pictures of a man she stalked on a journey from Paris to Venice; and the reality show within the book (also called Stalking America) basically follows a woman who stalks others, albeit in a more mundane way. But my sense is that it’s the creative aspect of Calle’s work, rather than the documentary aspect, that resonates with the book: the framing, the selection, and what goes on between the gaps. Am I on the right track? How would you say Calle speaks to Stalking America?

Sophie Calle was definitely in the material and in the initial ideas of the reality show Stalking America. When Calle was secretly following and documenting her subject around Venice, in a sense he became a bit displaced and that was kind of the point. He’s a moving target but he’s actually pretty secondary to her project, because her approach it inverts the dynamic a bit. Calle said he wasn’t especially interesting to her, but that she did it simply for the pleasure of it, and that was the jumping-off point. There is something about the act of watching, and through her attention and focus it accumulates, it becomes about this process of looking and stalking an idea through its everyday or mundane habitat to sort of put something else on display.

In a sense we are stalked by our individual histories or experiences, or where we come from, and the show takes cues from that as well. There is a scene later in the book where another character kind of cool-shames or almost dismisses the kid’s own experiences, like: oh you like this cringey TV show, but the real version is this artist Sophie Calle. It’s as if the pop culture version is somehow less than, or less true. I was intrigued by how there’s something about authenticity, about the question of which is the real version (or is there one at all?), but there was also something a bit endearing about it as well.

That discussion about Calle marks the only time in Stalking America that she is named, despite the extent to which she haunts the book. But what intrigued me the most about the discussion was the part in-between the description of her project and the claim that she’s “the real thing.” We’re told that Calle, in addition to taking photographs of the man she stalks, “ makes diary entries about the time of day, about the weather, about the man’s coat, which he wears with a camera on his shoulder, on the bridge, maps of the routes he traveled, pigeons in the square, how she changes endlessly over time through the act of observing him” (emphasis mine).

In a sense, that describes what has been going on with the show all this time. And that’s the thing: the kid is observing this person, Claire, on TV; and Claire is observing this man she follows, who we don’t really know much about—just gathering detritus-level observations about his coat on a rack in his home, the objects in his refrigerator, the shampoo he uses. So there’s this sort of this echo chamber of watching. And the documentation and objects are all rather secondary, perhaps not very interesting or forgettable, so what I was intrigued by was how Claire sees all this and the kid perceives what she sees, and—as Calle says—they are changing endlessly through the act of observing. At the same time, the main character is trying on ideas, determining which fit, connecting some, discarding some, and constructing his story from what he finds.

Yes—so even though, as you say, we might be stalked by our experiences, something else happens to us when we record those experiences for posterity: the product constitutes a separate, perhaps more malleable version of oneself. And this dovetails with something else the narrator says in Stalking America:

Sometimes I kind of step back from what’s being said and I feel like the words are separate things from us that just exist. I picture them as brittle glass that comes out of all of our mouths to make this big shell that’s made up of all the conversations that anyone has ever had or ever will. When it’s warm, I think of it being more fluid, but when it’s cold it’s extra brittle, like something you can actually touch.

Ultimately, then, there’s a sense in which the words of Stalking America, frozen on the page, are as brittle as the narrator feels spoken words can be. And, in the same sense, so too are Calle’s photographs. Which suggests that inasmuch as Calle’s photographs are a self-constitutive project, Stalking America is a project of a similar kind, working in a way that starts off as autofiction but goes far beyond it into speculative terrain. But what, then, is the self that is constituted by the book as a whole—not only the narrator and Matta-Clark and the reality show, but also the cultural flotsam and jetsam, the Lapso Mori, and all the rest?

We kind of live in the shadow of all this stuff and then we step away. I am definitely intrigued by the idea of the malleable self, and in a way I think this is foregrounded in how people operate now. I read something a while back about how truth, when it is of the more universal variety, is wisdom. I don’t know if I believe that; it’s a weird hierarchy to think about. But I am interested in these specific bits of truth that might get lost in the shuffle, that don’t necessarily scale up to “wisdom,” or that when they are expanded become exaggerated or flawed or undone in that jump to the universal. So perhaps my approach to this is more like Mario collecting coins—gathering up all these bits of truth, attempting to hew together these fragments into this object that is a book, as self-constitutive, some bits discarded or chronicled and on display.

When writing my first book, I proposed it as a series of bombs in the shape of a book for understanding something. Maybe my approach in Stalking America still involves gathering absences, but now it’s less about gathering a series of undoings and rather about the act of gathering and letting the material congeal.

Missouri Williams’ The Doloriad, published by Dead Ink Books, is a novel that leaves the reader struggling to find adjectives that do justice to its shocking imagery and nightmarish atmosphere. Bearing cover copy that describes it as a “document of depravity and salvation”, it offers a disturbing depiction of a post-apocalyptic world inhabited by a family of troubled survivors—a family bound together by incest and by a matriarchal order that is destabilised when the legless Dolores embarks on a search for others beyond her kin. Taking its place in the slipstream of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, The Doloriad is a harrowing work that combines unforgettable imagery with stylistic flair and a powerful moral purpose. With the novel currently shortlisted for the 2023 Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses, Dead Ink publishing director Nathan Connolly spoke to me about The Doloriad and its reception.

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I have to begin in the obvious place for any reader of The Doloriad. Dealing with topics including incest, rape, mutilation, abuse, and other manifestations of brutality, it is a notably off-putting novel. But, to my mind, it’s off-putting in a way that seems determined to make the reader pause rather than put the book down—to confront the reader with their own response to being put off. So what was it that you found appealing about The Doloriad when you came across it, that made you decide to commit to the book?

It was the prose and it was the ambition. The Doloriad was a book that seemed completely unafraid of arriving on its own terms. It felt original and a little bit alien. If we are heading towards such a degrading future, as you put it, then the grotesqueries of The Doloriad definitely felt jarring enough to our sensibilities to ring true. I think once I finished my first reading I wasn’t sure if what I’d just read was genius or unhinged. And I think by opening itself up to that judgement I found myself falling in love with it. I don’t think The Doloriad feels like what we expect from a novel in the modern age and I think it is worth interrogating why that is. I still find myself thinking about it and trying to respond to it. There are questions that it asks of the reader that I don’t know if I will ever have answers to.

Since it was published last year, my read on the various responses to The Doloriad is that it has proven divisive—probably inevitably, given its style and subject matter. I mean, for every champion like Chris Power, there’s a reader like Jessa Crispin with a less enthusiastic take on the book. Do you feel that’s an accurate view of its reception, as far as you can tell?

Prior to publication, we knew that it wasn’t going to be to everyone’s tastes and it was going to provoke some strong reactions. I know that there have been negative reactions against the book in equal measure to positive ones. I’m not one to undermine any reader’s interpretation or response – any reaction you have is valid and you are entitled to your opinion. Personally, though, my thoughts are that Williams is attempting something genuine, something original and important.

Original in the sense of its provocations?

The book is provocative, and I do think that is important. Ultimately, though, I don’t think that Missouri Williams set out to provoke people with The Doloriad. She has spoken before about how certain elements were influenced by her own re-orientation between body and mind following a diagnosis, so the novel is, I suspect, much more personal than a lot of people appreciate. But because it doesn’t provide easy metaphors for simple translation into the personal, there’s a hesitancy to engage with it on that level.

That’s interesting; I hadn’t heard about that context and hadn’t thought about it in those personal terms, but in retrospect I can see how there might be glimmers of that personal background in the novel’s almost forensic investigation into the discomforts and limitations of the body. But it must have resonated with some readers, since it has sold well and found many admirers in places like Instagram and YouTube.

Yes, since publication The Doloriad has gone on to become one of our best sellers, which seems odd given that it has such a reputation for being divisive. But then I think readers are going into it with their eyes open, and the very fact that the book presents them with challenges is maybe part of what is driving the interest in it. It is a difficult book on a difficult subject matter and readers are hungry for that. A book that asks if the human race is even worthy of survival shouldn’t be easy.

I think this is probably key to an appreciation of the book, actually. When a novel depicts grotesquerie in a form as extreme as it is in The Doloriad, it’s flirting with accusations of gratuitous violence and depravity. But if, as a reader, you’re actually going to accuse it of such gratuities, you might not be attuned to what it is asking of you—you’re kind of looking beyond it, not at it, so you’re not really able to recognise that its unpleasantness serves a purpose.

Yes. In the end, it is a book that asks the reader to put work in and I can’t help but respect that. It is a strange, bewildering, alien book, but ultimately a very rewarding one that doesn’t surrender itself easily. There are things that we don’t want to think about and The Doloriad asks us to think about them deeply—and it does so because ultimately we may be on the path towards them.

With all that being said of the novel, I realise—to my surprise—that it’s the first Dead Ink title to be longlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize in the seven years since the prize was established.

It is indeed the first time we’ve been listed. I’m not sure why that is, but we pride ourselves on being a bit different so I guess we can just put it down to that if we want.

Different, perhaps, but also one of the more firmly established small presses in the UK. Mostly, I think, Dead Ink is known for publishing dark novels that flirt with the horror genre and others that are conceptually innovative – I have in mind books by Marc Nash, Lee Rourke, Naomi Booth. But if a reader is discovering Dead Ink for the first time through this longlisting, and falls in love with The Doloriad, whereabouts in your list should they turn to first?

I suppose if a reader wants to dive into our list a little deeper after The Doloriad then they might have a rough time, because finding comparisons to that novel is nigh on impossible. That said, Naomi Booth’s work is equally engrossing on a prose level and she isn’t afraid of prodding the putrid underbelly of life. Her début novel, Sealed, is a stomach-turning eco-horror based on a skin-sealing pandemic, so readers can knock themselves out with that one I guess. It is brilliant and a great entry into Booth’s work, which we’ve just re-released with a new series cover design.

We’ve also got a fledgling collaborative imprint with Influx Press, New Ruins. Last year we published Mónica Ojeda’s Jawbone, translated by Sarah Booker. It’s an ominous novel that pulls in everything from Lovecraft to Creepypastas. The New York Times described it as “capable of both beauty and horror”—a description that works just as well for The Doloriad, I think.

Nate Lippens’ My Dead Book, published by Pilot Press, is a novella composed of episodic fragments of text, some of them only a line or two in length, through which a narrator creates prose portraits of the friends and lovers he has lost to AIDS. Moving at a breakneck pace thanks to its sharp, curt sentences, it’s a short, shocking piece of work that details a succession of tragedies in the voice that veers from pitiless to wry, from cynical to numbed. With My Dead Book currently shortlisted for the 2023 Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses, Pilot Press editor and artist Richard Porter spoke to me about the origins of My Dead Book and its reception.

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Reading My Dead Book is an electrifying experience; the novella has a range of features that seized my attention and held it throughout. There’s the power of its central conceit, which is confronting in its own way, as well as the self-exposure that lapses into self-laceration and the steadily crescendoing sense of pathos. What was it about the book that made you sit up straight when you first came across it, and then decide you wanted to publish it?

The acuity of emotion and clarity in the writing. It hit me from the first sentence and just kept going until the end. I’d not read anything like it. The closest comparisons I could think of, that were still fresh in my mind, were Queer by William Burroughs and Memories that Smell Like Gasoline by David Wojnarowicz. I remember thinking: who is this magician? Why are Picador or Canongate not all over this? When I asked if he would be interested in me publishing it, I never thought he would actually say yes! The rest is history.

What is that history? Why do you think larger publishers weren’t willing to take on this book?

Like in the art world, the bigger you get in publishing, the less frequently risks are taken. This is why capitalism at its core is faulty. You’d think the more resources a gallery or publisher had, the freer they would be to take risks. This is not the case. But as a small press that’s good for me!

Do you mean risks with regard to the intensity of the material that appears in My Dead Book?

I think there’s a huge surge in the popularity of what is called “queer” literature at the moment, but I think that it is a selective interest, operating within a narrow framework. You only have to take a look at the shelves of an LGBT+ section in a bookshop to see the vibrant colours and attention-grabbing designs, what a friend calls ‘Bubble Tea covers’, to get a feel of what parameters the big publishers are working within. My Dead Book is hardcore. It’s intense and unrelenting in its despair. I can see how it didn’t find an audience at larger presses.

So did you take it on more or less as received, then?

As an artist, I never interfere with anyone’s work. I accepted the book as it was.

Part of its intensity, I suppose, comes from the way it seems to hew pretty closely to live experience. No doubt many readers will see My Dead Book as an especially dark work of autofiction, or even straight-up autobiographical prose, albeit one composed of small pieces in the manner of Maggie Nelson’s Bluets. In your experience, how have readers responded to it?

I was surprised by the number of straight men who said it was their favourite book of the year! I think the question of ‘is it autobiographical or not’ is really interesting. It’s a novel, it’s fiction, but people still want to read it as memoir. To me that’s the magic of fiction itself, but also a testament to Nate’s skill as a writer, and one thing that that the book has demonstrated is that good writing has universal appeal. It breaks through boundaries of sexuality, class, and race, and speaks directly to the soul of the reader.

As a reader myself, I wanted it all to be true because of how good the stories and characters are. How sad it is to discover it’s all just made up. These people never were. Or were they?

Personally, I don’t want an answer to that question! I like the poignancy to not knowing the extent of the fiction in the novel, or the fictionalisation of lived experience. But there’s a representation issue at play here as well: one that will appeal to readers who want to see a greater variety of identities represented in contemporary literature, and one that also ties into Pilot’s mission. Do you have any sense of how the book has been received by readers who are perhaps closer to the narrator’s demographic and/or situation?

Unfortunately, I don’t know that many people like the narrator in the book. I think most who I might have known are dead. It’s also set in Midwest America, so there’s a geographic issue there. I do know that the narrator spoke directly to my soul, and I’m a good twenty years younger. I think there’s a timeless quality to that sense of grief, longing, and ill-fittedness in society. I’m sure many who connected with it also connected on that level. It speaks to that feeling of brokenness and wild desire that, while trying to survive in a capitalist society, largely goes unspoken, unseen.

Let’s hear a bit more about that mission. Pilot Press is five years old and has a very clear purpose behind it: it enacts “an attempt to recover a philosophy of publishing and a sensibility lost to AIDS and free market capitalism since the 1980s”. Anyone who reads My Dead Book will see clearly how it advances the purpose of the press, but it’s an outlier in the sense that it is Pilot’s first fiction title. How did you come to decide that fiction would be a good direction for the press to venture into?

There was no “decision” as such. I simply read this book and that was it.

New avenues to pursue the mission of the press, purely on the merits of My Dead Book?

I’d never even typeset something of this length before! The desire to share My Dead Book with others was the main driving force, like everything else I publish. The press as a whole is very much an extension of my life as an artist in that respect. It’s just another form of communicating, of building a map of where we all are, where I am.

It’s a very personal project, then, to look at the activities of the press as a whole.

It’s highly personal. That’s the only way I know how to describe it: this thing made me feel something, so it might make you feel something too. That sensation of good writing is genre-defying. I wouldn’t say I was going in the direction of fiction, or encouraged in that direction because of the success of My Dead Book, but I’m glad to have added it to the fold.

SJ Fowler’s MUEUM, published by Tenement Press, is a novella equal parts gnomic, unsettling, and bitterly funny. Set in the apparently early days of post-apocalyptic civilisation—a civilisation that uncertainly apes a fragmented concept of what “civilisation” entails—MUEUM explores the ins and outs of a museum that acts as a repository for the ephemera of a long-lost way of life. With MUEUM currently shortlisted for the 2023 Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses, Tenement Press editor Dominic Jaeckle spoke to me about the origins of MUEUM and its reception.

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Look at the opening lines of MUEUM and it seems like something familiar enough, with its gestures towards a post-apocalyptic dystopia. But very quickly it turns into something less familiar, more difficult to pin down: abstract, often theoretical, an intellectual exercise, but not a cold one—an exercise in morbid self-deprecation and deadpan humour, as much as anything else. How did you encounter MUEUM as something you felt compelled to publish?

From the editorship of Hotel on through to the advent of Tenement’s activities back in 2021, I was drawn to the spike of SJ Fowler’s anarchic wit, and I’ve been fortunate enough to count on Fowler as a friend and frequent collaborator. With either the page or stage in mind, our collaborations have always leaned on conversation, and the candour of our exchanges always proved coloured by a free circulation of ideas. Be it a consideration of creativity, fresh enthusiasms, works-in-progress, or projects-in-percolation—all was ever fair game—and (in the best sense of the word) it seemed inevitable that, once the Press had found its feet, we’d begin thinking on the prospect of our working on a publication together.

The idea of publishing MUEUM emerged organically from the critical palette of such a kinship, from such a free market of mind. Fowler sent on MUEUM as a fully formed manuscript, and I was struck by the ways in which his first draft compounded an array of entrapments via his acute, curt prose. In MUEUM, we’ve the biographical; the bibliographical; the philosophical; the personal; the institutional; the intellectual; and a dedication to the psychic ironies and chemical truths that compete for attention in any circumnavigation of the notion of hourly pay. Of the value of time. All heady nodes in a constellation of concerns that butt heads over a short distance, like livestock suddenly all too aware of the farm’s fence line, in sum—and as a manuscript—MUEUM seemed to write itself down as a prism of prisons.

So what was it about the book that hooked you and convinced you to take it on?

As a début novella that owed to a writer of more renown as a champion of free association and spontaneity (by way of his dedication to the works of poets such as Tom Raworth and David Antin), my first reading felt akin to sitting with a bird whom seeks to speak to (and scrutinise) its own clipped wings. The manuscript felt like an experiment in articulating an idea in a continually narrowing space, and its reflexive response to the circumstances of such a claustrophobia (one part slapstick; two parts tragedy) gifted the novella a distinct magnetism. Following Steve’s first email, I read his pages in a sitting, and the book would publish a year later.

Formally, such an atmosphere is key to Tenement’s list more broadly. Tenement aims to platform works in which authors, poets and translators challenge the limited space afforded a page via a testing of the curbs of convention and, in biographical terms, MUEUM is also a fascinating rejoinder to Fowler’s own practice. Fowler has ever worked to establish his own defiantly independent context for his work (and a showcase of the works of others); his is a generous, assertively strange and ever-enthusiastic field of enquiry; but there’s always a simmering cynicism at the core of his writing.

In my first encounter with MUEUM, I was reminded of a line from his 2017 collection, The Wrestlers: ‘Diogenes the Cynic said nothing upon hearing Zeno’s arguments, but stood up and walked in order to demonstrate the falsity of Zeno’s conclusions.’ That “standing and walking” work as quite a beautiful means of thinking through the varied emphases of Fowler’s playful and prolific productivity as a poet is true, to my mind. However, MUEUM represented a study of the ways in which certain things inhibit our gait, our capacity for independent thought, our ability to freewheel through the corridors and wings of such an imagined glasshouse as Fowler’s “museum.” Rather than an imago of any free agent aiming defiantly to walk on, their strident sense of self intact, MUEUM—with Buster Keaton’s acuity and a brand of Bernhardian savagery—musters a picture of the ways in which the world (or a city, and its various ecosystems) interrupts any capacity to stride on freely. It’s a banana peel of a novella, and it’s that precise quality of Steve’s writing which first drew me to the project.

You mention the idea of MUEUM developing from your kinship with Fowler, but how did that kinship play out editorially in the development of the book? I mean, thinking on the book that was published a year after you received the first draft, did your collaborative discussions go beyond the idea to shape that draft into its final form?

The novella was near finished by the time it reached me; the fact of MUEUM very much preceded the idea of it as book, in this instance. Fowler shared the manuscript without much of any spiritual sculpture, per any sense of the writing’s more theoretical angles, nor did he elaborate at all on the political indications of its implications. We spoke a little to the bibliographic precedent to his putting pen to paper, but—in the main—such conversations centred on a reminiscence of using and abusing a university library’s facilities, and photocopying major and minor works of fiction in full (to then stroll away with the works of the Nestbeschmutzer rolled up in the back pocket like the daily news, treating a history of European literature like a cryptic crossword to be ritually abused with morning coffee).

Writing in the margins of the works of such authors as Witold Gombrowicz and Elias Canetti seems to have been key to MUEUM’s development. The Kafkaesque kicking “K” of Fowler’s work is a character called Greg—a human subjected to the demands of the museum’s stewardship—and it felt imperative that the sensation of subjection as the book would carry should never feel as though it was set in place in order to solve anything. The book is an apposite objection to the very idea of a Roman à Clef (the museum’s doors are open to the public on a daily basis; if they’re locked, they’re locked, and it’s the staff’s doing), and it felt imperative to allow for the novella’s architecture to build itself on a policy of plain speech. A dedication to the simple presentation of matter, of happening, and to sound out the burr of an all-too-human presence in the institutional sphere.

Descriptions of paintings; of trees; of hallways; signage; the colour of over-steeped tea; noises and visions… “The museum is a shop for all that,” as Fowler puts it in MUEUM, and he’d tooled and tilled the text again and again to strip the meat and muscle from sentences, levelling the language to a kind of line of sight, which’d prove handsomely to justify the book’s relationship with abstraction. Follow the metaphors to their logical conclusion, and—in end—things could simply sit there as things. This would qualify both people and artefacts as elements of the museum’s strange architecture—diminishing all symbolic hierarchies so as a fire extinguisher proves as triumphal a metonym for a history of human civilisation as a Horus statuette.

Indeed, there’s a quiet argumentative line throughout the novella per a need to disquiet a want to wash an idea in too much philosophy (knowing full well that philosophy would seep into the seams of the book irrespective of such), and our editorial collaboration necessarily proved a paean to the exercise of exorcising complexity. We’d worked to engine along on a policy of trial and error. Courting ways and means of framing, sometimes fragmenting, and then reforging the prose, Fowler worked in isolation in an enormously concentrated fashion. Letting the book percolate—rewild itself—to then boil the writing down, down, to its bare bones. This would resolve in the more skeletal prose as has landed on the page, and allowed for us to toy carefully with sentence, space, and paragraph as we’d worked our way through to print.

I’m curious about how readers of MUEUM have responded to it, as far as you’ve been able to tell. I imagine that some readers would be familiar with SJ Fowler’s work, and others might’ve come to it via an affinity for Tenement—but Fowler is a poet, and Tenement has published poetry up to now, so how has it been received as both the author’s and the press’ first foray into prose?

Responses to the novella have been gloriously diverse. Some have pointed to its innate calamity; its relationship with catastrophe; its scrutiny of work and precarity. Others have indicated its comedy as key, or spoken to its metatextual referentiality as fundamental (the Los Angeles Review of Books argued the novella is in direct correspondence with a “minatory canon,” vis-à-vis Ballard, Céline, and others). But the lens I’ve accidentally inherited owes to a long dialogue between Fowler and Gareth Evans we’d recorded in Resonance FM’s Bermondsey studios last Spring. Evans numbers the idea (and question) of “collective purpose” as at the heart of the novella. Opining the book as a “novel-come-manifesto” that queries all aspects of the museum, he’d argued MUEUM sits ever-interrogatively as “a radical prose intervention” into the very meaning of the word “museum.” What it stands for; what it means in civilisational terms; per its labour and stewardship… Why we forge museums in the present, as things around us so rapidly decay and shape-shift (and in light of the “staggering uncertainty” of the present), seems be a keystone to the book that conversations have gravitated around.

Readers I’ve had a chance to speak to have broadly responded well to the dynamic doubt that riddles this novella, but also to its want to raise questions rather than solve any particular thesis, table any particular theory, qualify any specific political direction. In MUEUM, we’ve an automobile that refuses to elect its lane, and that not only feels fundamental to the conversations I’ve had with readers and collaborators since the book’s publication, but also appeals to the curious place of the novel as an inquisitive tool in our present moment. MUEUM frames itself as in a satirical confrontation with historic matter—with the ways in which objects forge a false narratological glue for our comprehension of the present—and quietly prefigures the form of the novel itself as though a rare, disintegrating museum. A structure capable of celebrating its own misdirection, misgivings, and creative lineage. The work’s confusion is germinal, and that’s funny, in its way—or allows comedy to stew on the hob behind the scenes, page for page—but also seems to be the beating heart of Fowler’s project, the centre of its melancholy, and the thump of that particular brand of pulmonary percussion has been brilliant to privy to.

At a late launch for the novella last Autumn, Chloe Aridjis read from her own diamond-like novel Asunder (itself an incendiary portrayal of a museum’s staff), and she’d cited Jean Clair’s Malaise dans les musées (by way of Adorno’s pun on the link between a “museum” and a “mausoleum”) so as to home in on Clair’s signalling of the museum as an indicator of our shared desire for stasis and stillness; of a natural want to hold something steadily enough for proper observation. The problem, as Aridjis quite strikingly put it, is that every surface gives way to pressure eventually, to a kind of physical or critical craquelure. MUEUM deliberately sets out to amplify the crackle of antiqued paint, and speak through the noise to our tacit acceptance of often inhuman conditions in its consideration of the composition of culture, and the kind of labour called upon to safeguard a consensus around what any history of a culture looks like. This penetrates the novella’s relationship with language, with violence, with comedy, and—ultimately—expresses itself as a kind of a carnival of boredom (and cold portrait of its effects).

That a book sits still until you break its spine seems be Fowler’s coy smile or wry joke, and seems also to have chimed with the readers with whom I’ve been lucky enough to discuss the book. As a “first foray into prose” for Tenement, such ideas proved intriguing from the starting gate.

It’s quite striking to see your description of “the dynamic doubt that riddles this novella.” That doubt—that generative restlessness and refusal of resolution—is I think what I also responded to most strongly as a reader. How important do you think that sort of quality is to winning your enthusiasm when you’re looking at what to publish? I suppose I could almost see a commitment to a sort of creative uncertainty as an essential part of what you’re hoping to publish with Tenement, though I don’t want to put words in your mouth. Perhaps it’s easier to ask the inverse: are you likely to muster similar enthusiasm for prose that turns towards more traditional ends, with narrative setups, incidents, and resolutions?

A grounding thought for the architectonics of Tenement’s doings owes a great deal to critic Manny Farber, and his sense of a ‘termite art’ as in counterpoint to the work of the ‘white elephants’ of the twentieth century. Progenitors of humidor-like projects that showcase a ‘drive to break out of tradition while, irrationally, hewing to the square, boxed in shape and gemlike inertia of an old, densely wrought European masterpiece.’ Siding his ‘termite’ with the ‘tapeworm’— with ‘moss’ and with ‘fungus’—Farber alludes to a kind of creativity that ‘goes always forward eating its own boundaries, […] termite-like, it feels its way through the walls of particularisation’ to eat away ‘the immediate boundaries of [an] art, and [turn] these boundaries into the conditions of the next achievement.’

Resolution, as such, is not the enemy. If you write the story of a housefire, for example, that the building burns down is not a keystone to the telling, but is obviously intrinsic to the work. Likewise, Farber doesn’t flag convention nor the traditional ends-and-means of a story as any indicator that there’s an ‘elephant’ in the room (he cites John Wayne’s ‘bitter-amused’ performance in John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Vallance as emblematic of such a train of thought for its ‘intramural’ qualities). I feel Farber’s distinction and celebration of the ‘termite’ is key to literature’s part in our present moment, in attendant conversations that concern the place of the page in discussions of our political and philosophical present… “Creative uncertainty,” as you beautifully put it, is definitely a characteristic I’d always seek out as a reader, but largely as a means of ascertaining the porousness of a boundary or borderline (be it in formal, disciplinary, aesthetic terms, or otherwise). The “termite” helps frame the integrity and authenticity of an experiment, to my mind—rather than simply a want to flesh out its more chaotic characteristics—and it’s the termite’s aura we aim to better articulate via Tenement’s output.

I mentioned above that MUEUM is the first prose title to be published by Tenement, but since then you’ve published a couple of collections of short prose and you’ve got a novella coming out later this year. What’s the appeal of the movement towards prose for you, and how do you see prose and poetry co-existing at Tenement into the future?

MUEUM may be our first prose title, strictly speaking, but Tenement endeavours to evade organising itself in terms of such formal distinctions. Enthusiasm underwrites the Press, and the aim withstands that we seek champion a kind of internationalist experiment that concentrates on the cohesiveness of a work rather than its categorisation as one thing or another. This is as true of Fowler’s work as it is of Brossa’s El saltamartí / The Tumbler (translated from the Catalan by Cameron Griffiths), wherein we’ve a collection of miniature verse works that investigate how ‘a bird spreads its wings’ in moments of cultural unrest. Of Kyra Simone’s recent Palace of Rubble—a collation of prose vignettes spooled from a vocabulary inherited (or appropriated) from the front page of the New York Times and the daily news cycle. Of Pasolini, and his La rabbia / Anger… A collection of poems in sequence that antagonise the politics of mediated attention so as to stage an interrogation of the between-space of page and screen. Of Yasmine Seale and Robin Moger’s Agitated Air, and its tooling a chain translation of Ibn Arabi’s Tarjuman al-Ashwaq / The Interpreter of Desires so as to develop a study of the translator’s space, their labour, and elucidate the creative potential of conversation and creative exchange via concentrating on the distance a poem can travel.

Be it Jeffrey Vallance’s lifelong and Columbo-like scrutiny of spiritual esoterica—Stanley Schtinter’s anti-curatorial, lyrical antagonisms—or our forthcoming publication of the verse-prose of Reza Baraheni, the near-novelistic poetry of Dolors Miquel, or the epicism and revolutionary aspects of childhood as underpins the work of Mario Benedetti, Tenement aims investigate the margin between formal distinctions rather than think through any co-habitation of forms within a catalogue.

Our list hopes to blur categorisation, to build a conversation in series between titles, and to see what kind of arguments and ideas emerge via the act of simply putting one book beside another.

At the start of December, I had the honour of publishing Genese Grill’s essay collection, Portals: Reflections on the Spirit in Matter, and launching via a YouTube livestream. You can watch the launch event below, or read my remarks on Portals followed by a transcript of my conversation with Genese.

I’ve read Genese Grill’s Portals many times now and I’ve had something of the same experience each time: I was often put in mind of a somewhat famous sentence by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson, just for background, was an admirer of Hydriotaphia: Urn Burial by the mid-seventeenth century essayist, Thomas Browne, a polymath. Urn Burial is a rumination on ancient burial rights and rituals; it was sparked by the discovery, near Browne’s home, of some Anglo-Saxon urns buried in the earth, and Emerson said of the book that it “smells in every word of the sepulchre.” I find that phrase just wonderful for the sensual and essentially material quality that it gives to something so abstract and intangible. It’s not the pages that have the smell. It’s not the binding of Emerson’s copy. It’s the words that have the smell.

So I would find myself wondering, each time Portals brought this particular sentence back to mind: what do the words of Portals smell of? Parchment. Or vellum. Ink. Leather. Twine. Paraffin oil burning. Melted wax. The tang of aging brass. Lacquer on bookshelves. Mahogany. Walnut. The words in this book give it the smell of the books that the words are speaking of. Antique volumes, codexes, grimoires: painstakingly engraved or embossed with icons, runes on the cover, a sigil. And those words have not only the smell but also the sound and the sense of a book that is somehow out of its time. Or a book that is of its time, now, but only largely to the extent that it regards the happenings of these times at a remove from them. And from this remove, it takes on the vantage point of someone who is a little bewildered by what’s happening, perturbed, disappointed, and possessed of a way of seeing things which, if we were to adopt it as readers, might allow us to embroider the world around us with new encounters, and give the world a gloss that an obsession with day-to-day happenings would otherwise wear away to naught. That’s my experience of Portals and I’m happy to say that this book is now out there in the world.

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To kick us off, Genese, particularly for those who haven’t read the book, I think we need to begin with a quick sense of what Portals is and what it does. It’s really a grab-bag of assorted essays. It does have a holistic quality to it, but nor is it a monograph with a thesis that it’s trying to pursue. My impression is, it’s more like a book that is troubled or made restless by a problem that it’s turning over and turning over and turning over: and each essay is a new iteration of this kind of shifting quality, as if the book is trying to find a comfort that eludes it, a way to keep this problem at bay for a little while. I have my own thoughts on what that problem is, but I’d like to hear from you first of all. What is the problem that agitates Portals?

Fantastic questions and beautiful introduction. Thank you. Very touching.

I think I began with trying to understand what the relationship between the material world and ideas—what the many relationships are—and why our contemporary culture seems so critical of matter and, at the same time, so obsessed with materialism. And to try to tease out cognitive dissonances that exist and that we live with all the time, without being aware of about how we feel about materiality. On the one hand, we act like [matter] doesn’t mean anything—like it distracts us from something higher, something spiritual, something internal. On the other hand, we act as if it limits us in ways that it might not. I was looking at it in preparation for tonight, and I realised that a lot of the book has to do with agency, and how much individuals have creative agency to change the physical world, and how changing the physical world changes the spiritual, intellectual, and emotional world.

I’m going to stop rambling and see if you could help me make sense of that.

Well, I think that’s true. We’ve got some readings planned for the next short while and I think one or two of those will pick up on that idea of an interplay and transference between spirituality, broadly conceived, and materiality. But I’m curious about how this kind of problem sticks with you, in your being. It seems to me a problem as old as the Judeo-Christian tradition, really: the world is fallen and corrupt. The divine alone is pure. Or as old as Plato, if you like: the form—the ideal—is perfect; the thing itself is not. So, bluntly put, are you not fighting a losing battle against the foundations of Western civilisation?

Well, I’m fighting the battle that a lot of people have been fighting, certainly for a long time. But I guess my feeling is that even though people talk about matter in a disparaging way, we actually do, in reality, love it. We need it and we can’t go on without it and it’s very, very important. Our relationship with matter is our relationship with how we live in the world—and whether we feel we can affect the world or whether we’re helpless, whether we’re controlled by some kind of constructs beyond that, have nothing to do with reality.

And of course it’s a losing battle. I mean, we all die. Everything. But as long as we’re here, and as long as we’re alive, we have to deal with materiality, with gravity, with mortality, with imperfection—all those things. We have to deal with them in, I feel, an honest way. If we love things that are beautiful, we have to also accept things that are imperfect and ugly and we can’t make everything perfect. So if we’re going to live—if we’re going to choose to live—we have to accept that, we have to embrace that, and not pretend that we can live somewhere else in our heads.

I’m very glad to hear you backtrack there and correct yourself a little bit. When you said “accept”—“we have to accept…”—[you said] that the first two times, then changed it to “embrace” the third time. And I think that the “embrace” is very, very true to the spirit of Portals. It’s almost an ethical calling that I want to work towards in this conversation. I think that’s probably close to where we’ll end up, but I’d like to begin with the material side of things—material creation in all its forms and the way that this changes the constitution of the world. I think you can kick that off, if you will, with the first of three planned readings for tonight.

[Reading from page twenty-seven of the hardback edition of Portals.]

I think that’s rather like Proust’s madeleine. Your entire project sort of develops from this passage. The whole thing sort of sprouts out of this, or all of Portals is contained in that. I’d like to draw out three strands of it, the project [that] seems [to have] three parts. The first one to dwell on, I guess, is something that in the editorial process I thought of, or referred to, as “the re-sacralisation of material things.” Material things have been seen as un-sacred, if not desecratary—able to desecrate [other] things—and you want to give them something sacred back, through the rediscovery of something sacred in this materiality. And [through] an awareness, a raising of consciousness—for people to be alert to the interplay, a continuous back and forth, between the material and the spiritual, the reciprocity—so that we can access the immanent through our sensory experiences of material things. That seems to me, as we discussed to begin with, very countercultural. And I can only imagine or assume that this countercultural way of seeing things came to you as a sense of something amiss with the culture at large. I’m curious about about how it developed, really. When it was first experienced, was it epiphanic or was it kind of incremental? How did it first wiggle up into your mind, your own awareness?

Well, I certainly was influenced by my life partner, Stephen Callahan. He’s always been interested in the nineteenth century aesthetic movement. And, you know, from when I was fifteen or so, I started to think about how although I was living in this very practical… Well, I grew up in a house of books and art. However, there wasn’t a feeling that things could be made beautiful and sacred. There wasn’t a sense that you could arrange things in a way that was beautiful, and there seemed to be such an American utilitarian ethos all around us that would say, “To do that is pretentious” or “To do that is aristocratic” [or] “To do that is to is somehow politically reprehensible.” And yet I was so drawn to all these beautiful things and they seem to be the markers and the portals to some of the most important, meaningful things in all history, in the legacy of the world, and it felt like we were throwing them out and turning against them. So my question was initially, you know, why are we doing that? And are we getting what we want by doing that? Is it working? I mean, if there’s some great, noble reason to do away with beauty, materiality, history, the artifacts and the keepsakes of culture, are we losing the world and losing our soul? It didn’t seem to be a good bargain. It seemed to be the wrong bargain. And that developed [in me] as time went on and and the world became, more and more, both utilitarian and averse to material beauty.

I’m struck that in your answer, you said, “These are the questions that came to me,” and yet what you were describing feels to me like you’ve gone on kind of a reverse journey. You had something that didn’t have readymade language for it—a way of feeling or seeing that didn’t have some some ready-to-hand expression—so that these questions were probably the result of a search. A search for what the thought equivalent is of this feeling that takes place through language. So can you run me through some of your first efforts to articulate [it], or to find the words that weren’t there, and how that may have influenced your thoughts?

The process is always a sort of dual process. The questions don’t come out of nowhere; the questions come out of contact with reality and experiences that are had. So the first essay I wrote for this book is the one about the book as magical object, and I was responding to books becoming virtual—ebooks and things like that—and I knew I didn’t like it, for aesthetic reasons, but I didn’t have philosophical reasons why that was. So I started to explore and question, and I think, through doing that, I came to the conclusion that when you disconnect the physical from the spiritual or the intellectual, you are taking away the agency and the potency of the individual to change the spiritual world. You’re acting as if what we make and what we do doesn’t affect reality, and if a book is just this thing floating around in the aether, with no beginning and no end—no choices—it doesn’t have a connection.

That’s just one example. The other examples are… thinking about whether everything is a social construct, this idea that nothing’s real. This is also a very important aspect of the materiality. What is real? What is solid? What is recurring? And what can we change? And, you know, the contemporary idea of the social construct as something that is sort of put upon us from outside—that has no connection to history, past, reality, experience—is, to me, much too extreme. I mean, certainly we create constructs, but they come out of our experiences, or the experiences of people who lived before us: their choices and their desires. So the question is: to what extent are we stuck in those and to what extent can we change them? And so [in] everything I read, and have read, I’m carrying these questions around with me. But it’s also just things like… the fact that noticing that when cities lay down a road to walk on, or a path, people sometimes walk on the grass instead. So visual things, experiences, books, ideas, literature, personal cataclysms, all these things, teach me and help me understand these abstract ideas, and the abstract ideas also come out of these ideas.

I don’t know if I’m answering your question at all, but it’s just…

One thing—the impulse to write, the impulse to articulate. This does this primarily come from those life experiences… But would that be your origin point for when you actually sit down to find words? Or would it be more the idea side of things, the abstractions?

I think the most immediate impetus to writing is the sense of a sort of jangling: things, ideas, contradictions, problems. They get inside me, they get inside my head, and it’s sort of like glass shards. There’s this chaos—this almost noise—in my head: this and this and the other. And I sometimes have to map it out, even in pictures, but the process is a way of ordering and organising these ideas so that I can be okay, even just for a moment. I think that’s what we [all] do. We’re arranging and organising ideas, just for a moment at least. It’s just a moment. It’s an arrangement, it’s an essay as an attempt, and it gives us pause and it’s what we do: making order. It’s not a treacherous attempt to control anyone’s thoughts. It’s a way of arranging the world for a moment. So that’s one [impetus] and the other thing is a need to explain myself to other people. You know, I often have ideas that are, as you said, countercultural, that are not the way a lot of other people think about things, and I feel very—emotionally—that’s difficult for me. So I have to work it out and find a way to explain. Why is it that I believe this? Why is it that? I think this strange thing and [need] maybe a justification. And then the glass shards kind of fall still.

Good. Okay. So that’s kind of where I’m going, because this would then be the second part of your project against the world: “I’m not one of them.” Anything better at the moment… [like] art-making… Art-making is at the nexus of these two sides of experience of materiality and spirituality. It’s where they’re conjoined, so that art that emerges from what you call spirit has a material result. That’s the creative side of it. And then, as observers, we may encounter art, and if we are attending to it thoughtfully and sympathetically with its creator, we kind of access something of the spirit that is in it, and feel an awakening within within ourselves. Can you clarify what you mean by “spirit” in this context?

Early on in the book, I explain that I’m using the word in the German sense of Geist, which is a word that, as a translator, is notoriously untranslatable. It doesn’t mean “woo-woo” spirit, although I don’t have anything against that. In German, it means “thought” or “intellectual activity” and it even means “culture.” It means “mind” and it means “what is not material.” I think you could also get to it by looking at the American Transcendentalists, or the earlier German Transcendentalists too, Kant and whatnot. But the problem is that [Geist] is thought of as not bound by the material, but it is—because everything is, because the mind is in the brain, in the head. But it’s sort of strange… We don’t understand about what consciousness is, and we don’t understand what happens in the brain, but we do know—or assume, or seem to think more and more—that it is physical, that it’s not something that comes from outside into our heads. So “spirit” is that which is to some extent free: imagination, thought. Imagination. You know, Thoreau is in jail in Civil Disobedience and he mocks [his jailers] for thinking that they can put up walls to keep him, because he’s free. On the other hand, he’s very, very in touch with dirt and ground, his beans, his house. So, I talk about that a lot too…

It’s quite remarkable to hear you say that, and to hear the difficulty of defining “spirit” and also the contradictory terms—that it is bound to materiality but it’s also that part of us which is free. I’m wondering how to… not resolve [that contradiction], because I don’t think that would be in the spirit of the book, but how to hold the tension between those [opposites].

Can I put it to you that there doesn’t seem to be any way that you use “spirit” with any kind of theological or scriptural import to it? Would you agree with that?

Yes.

Okay, so then it’s striking to me that we settle on this word, “spirit,” in what is essentially a secular context. But it also makes sense, in the same way that “being bound” and “being free” make sense. You know, you have the Simone Weil idea that if you are attending with all your being to something, there is something devotional in that—that you are committing part of yourself, by way of your attention to the work; you are contributing or imparting value upon the thing that you’re attending to. To me, this [idea] has never made sense for a thinker like Simone Weil, who was Catholic, because I think it depends on the impossibility of an afterlife: it’s only by knowing that our time is finite that what we choose to give our time and attention to has value, and has a value that increases the closer we come to our death. I feel like that’s kind of where you’re going…

I was thinking the same thing, when you were pointing out the contradiction, but indeed the fact that we are bound—that our spirit is bound by matter—is best exemplified by mortality, or gravity, or something like that: physical facts create how we think about being in the world. So they form our spirit: the spirit can’t just decide that the world isn’t the way it is. And I’m not saying we have direct access to how the world is. I mean, of course, it’s filtered through all sorts of perceptions and delusions, and education and learning and constructs, all those things. However, we have to do our best to think about the world and think about ourselves and think about others in a way that is connected to will. Thoreau called it “fronting” the facts of life. I feel that that’s extremely important and, you know, in a way I used to call myself an idealist, but then, the more I read Plato and read philosophy, I realised I’m only an idealist bound by matter, my materiality. That goes back to those same questions. What are we bound by? What can we change? And I think if you don’t know what you’re bound by, and you don’t somehow learn to love what you’re bound by—I mean, I talk about Nietzsche’s “love of fate,” amor fati. And Hannah Arendt talked about it, too: the love of the world. You have to find a way to love the way the world is. Contribute and change and celebrate it. Otherwise, you’re living in fantasy world and it’s dangerous. That’s the liberatory gesture, I guess.

Well, from one one type of boundedness to another type of binding, let’s go to our second reading.

[Reading from page seventy-two of the hardback edition of Portals.]

I feel like this passage allows the book as a whole to speak to the third part of [your] project, which is the ethical part. In a previous reading that you gave, you used the phrase “existential decision-making,” and here we have the idea of a book as something that enacts this process of existential decision-making, word by word, line by line, where you’re necessitating choices: what goes in, what gets left out. In this way, [the passage you read] is conversing backwards through time, but also reflecting the present: with your choices of subjects that you’re addressing and texts that you’re engaging with, I think we have a pretty good sense of how Portals is reaching backwards to Emerson, to Thoreau, and many others. But how does it reflect the present? What conversations is it choosing to engage with in the present? And why do you think those conversations are the valuable ones that are existentially worth using your powers to engage with?

At the risk of repeating myself, I guess I very much want to counter the idea that the individual has no agency, that we’re somehow swamped by huge, disembodied forces that are somehow treacherous. That’s one part. And also, I want to counter the idea that the aesthetic is somehow either frivolous or antithetical to ethics, to show that these realms of open-ended and irreducible experience help us to learn how to live in the world and be in the world in an ethical way. And another part of it is also just the individual voice. In this time, when so, so many people are so afraid to say what they think, and there’s this tendency to think that we need to speak to the room or not be tone deaf—I really believe that it’s extremely ethically important for the individual to think for him- or herself, certainly in discussion and conversation with others. But this is endangered, the sort of bravery to do that.

So the turn against beauty is not just a turn against any beautiful thing or person, but it seems to me to be an attack on the whole human project from the beginning. I mean, not even [only] human: I would even go back to say [an attack on the] primordial ooze, the natural process of dynamics and battling things out. Dark and light, chiarascuro, contrast. Starting from the primordial ooze, the animals and the plants, then moving into human beings and cultures and different ethnicities, and different languages, and different histories and different art forms—all of this is just an incredible, beautiful pageant of wonder and amazement. And yes, people have gotten things very wrong and we’ve made horrible mistakes and done horrible things. But everything that we see behind us—in museums, in books, in history, in the geological record—is a result of people trying to make sense of the world, trying to appreciate what is beautiful, trying to love each other, trying to be okay. All the things that people try to do—there’s this sense that we could now just kind of wipe it all away because it was not right. There are problems and things that are problematic, so we should throw it all out, start fresh and clean and sterile—and that really, really upsets me because I love these things, and not just because I love these things personally, but I love them because of what they represent: the human spirit, striving and struggling, so…

I your love for those things is quite palpable. That was really beautifully. But, you know, I would submit that you sell yourself a bit short there as well. When you were talking about how one speaks and whether one is daring to be tone-deaf, I would submit that sometimes you do choose the position that might be called tone-deaf: not to be an agent provocateur, but precisely to go into it and rescue from it exactly the beauty and the appreciation for the manifold splendours of the world that you describe. I think particularly of a wonderful essay called ‘Psyche’s Stolen Pleasure,’ which articulates a very counterintuitive kind of feminism. The result that comes out of [that essay]—it’s about looking at beautiful things, and that includes people, in a way that some [readers] would say [amounts to] objectification. I think what you’re really asking for, in the act of looking, is not looking at someone as if they were an object, but looking at someone for the very things that makes them that someone: their haecceity. And if you can find that thing, you are dignifying them; you’re recognising their irreducible uniqueness, and to recognise that is a beautiful thing—irrespective of what the features are, whether they are physically beautiful or not. That act of recognition is where the beauty lies. Do I have that right?

Yes, and I’m really interested in that, and I think this is probably part of the subject of my next book. I’m really interested in what the actual relationship is between forms and meaning. Sure, we all know that an externally beautiful person can be shallow and all sorts of things, but they’re still externally beautiful. So there’s that: one. And two: there also does seem to be some kind of real connection, in many cases, between the surface and an interior, and that goes to part of what you’re saying—that that the beauty of a person or a thing has to do with individual, specific qualities and how they relate. It’s a theme that runs through this book, certainly, and it’s one of the reasons why I say that Thoreau is a materialist. His idea is that not that surface is bad, but the surface should match the interior: that we should live up to our houses, we shouldn’t just have external palaces and be, you know, shallow, wretched people. The ideal is to somehow shine out the the interior beauty through physical beauty, but I don’t want to denigrate the physical beauty, even if that all there is in some cases.

That’s diplomatically put! I think we’ll move on to our final reading, and this is very much on the theme of varieties of beauty.

Yeah, I chose this because I was just in Vienna again, and I walked through the these same rooms, so I just was thinking about it… [Reading from page one hundred and thirteen of the hardback edition of Portals.]

Just listening to you read that makes me feel a bit embarrassed. I had only one question at the end of it, which was: why did you choose that passage? But that is a ridiculous question and I’m not going to ask it. You [already mentioned] being in Vienna and being reminded of this. But I think there are other reasons why this passage was chosen and it reminds me, actually, strangely, of no one so much as Annie Dillard. Dillard has her wonderful kind of maxim, which is “Spend it all”—whatever you’ve got [stored up], spend it all on the page. I think [that passage is] where you really spend it all. It’s beautiful. … [But I would] like to finish with one last question, which is about what you are thinking about since we began work on Portals together. You’ve published one long essay in Socrates on the Beach—the venue that nowadays we go to, to find the kind of writing [we’re drawn to]—and then you’ve also published a more recent collection of notes about winter and your thought process at a particular time of year. Have you got other occasional pieces that we should be either keeping an eye out for, or wishing you well on? What are you working on at the moment?

I think I’m in at the beginning of a very, very long project right now. Which is not to say that little parts of it might not come out, but it may take another five years or so. I need to do a little reading, and I need to do a lot of thinking.

Five years. There you have it. If you’re listening at home, if you want to get your fill of Genese Grill’s wonderful writing, you have a long wait before the next lot. So now is as good a time as any to pick up a copy of Portals.

Mark de Silva’s The Logos is shaping up to be one of the most significant books of 2022. Since its first publication by Splice back in March, savvy readers and aficionados of postmodernism have pegged de Silva’s 1,000-page magnum opus as a title to be taken seriously: an intellectually-stimulating, ethically-challenging, perverse and playful work of literary art. Now, as autumn arrives, The Logos is on the cusp of a North American release through Clash Books. It’s one of the season’s most-anticipated releases and a starred review in Publishers Weekly has recently hailed it as “a provocative epic of ideas... an original, formidable portrayal of American commerce, where everything—including one’s vision—can be bought and sold”. With Stateside readers preparing to acquaint themselves with the loquacious, narcissistic, slightly sociopathic narrator of The Logos, Mark de Silva exchanged a series of emails with me to discuss the novel. He also looked back at his début, Square Wave, which sketches out a dystopian vision of an authoritarian America that is at once distinct from and resonant with the world of hedonistic artists, actors, and sportsmen depicted in The Logos. Beginning with Square Wave and its connections to both The Logos and the “philosophical novel”, the discussion led to a teasing-out of de Silva’s process and ambitions as a writer of prose fiction as art in a post-literate age.

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Let’s start at the start. Square Wave is a novel with a few different narrative strands to it—the mystery of the attacks on prostitutes, the historical material, the cloud manipulation, and more—so I’m curious as to how it came to take this form. What are the origins of these intersecting parts, as individual units of narrative? And then how did it occur to you that they belonged together, until you could see a shape for the novel as a whole?

The original idea was to juxtapose, without too much forethought, a pair of social conflicts separated by oceans and centuries: European colonialism in South Asia, beginning around 1500, and the disordered United States of the present and very near future. Weather modification and physics emerged pretty naturally in dilating on some of our current ideas about controlling nature and prosecuting wars. Much of my writing, really, considers violence and defiance; and so another kind of violence that came to mind while filling out the contemporary portion of the book was the crime spree against streetwalkers. As for the musical thread, in which I consider radical alternatives to classical (diatonic) harmony, that was mostly fallout from my making a couple of the characters, for no particular reason (other than my general interests), musicians.

This sounds like a more intuitive process than I expected, as if you began with a series of preconditions out of which the novel resolved itself, like a photograph in a darkroom. Can you take me a little deeper into the creative mindset that advances a process like this? I mean, there must be moments when you’re just riding along on sheer faith: collecting sporadic notes, maybe, and just having a feeling that something you’ve encountered in the world belongs in the novel you’re writing. And there must be other times when you have to knuckle down and intellectualise the things you’ve collated, putting pressure on disparate pieces, maybe (uncomfortably?) forcing cohesion or making a certain idea yield up more than it is willing to. Tell me about those challenges. Moving from notes and ideas to pecking out paragraphs on a keyboard, how do you know—or sense—when something won’t quite fly, and what you might do to get it off the ground?

There are first novels that owe their existence to humble apprenticeship, and there are those that come to be through unabashed presumption. Square Wave is of the latter sort. A book with so many ingredients could have easily failed to gel, and I suppose if that had happened, I might have abandoned it and begun a more modest manuscript. Luckily, I found it not only possible but pleasurable—profoundly so—to seek, in the free improvisation of novel writing, the sameness beneath difference and vice-versa.

Granted, as I moved through the manuscript, my imaginative freedom ran up all those details of character and scene and plot I’d already set down. So integrating further materials required more and more creative pressure. But I enjoyed applying that pressure, even watching material crumble away under it, not to mention seeing things you thought had little chance of hanging around end up sticking. The key was creating opportunities for my mind to bind the materials together, which just meant mulling over, between writing sessions, the many things I was reading. I think it was in this mulling that much of large-scale synthetic work occurred.

One of the most interesting features of Square Wave is the way it (seemingly) shifts between various genres of writing, or intermingles them, or occupies several concurrently—in any event, the way it appears simultaneously to disregard genre boundaries and to revel in the elements of different genres. One moment it’s noir, then it’s dystopian, then it’s theoretical or essayistic, a campus novel, pornography—and your language adapts accordingly. Speaking personally, when I look at “genre”, I tend to see mostly conventions and delimitations, an array of conceptual constraints. But you seem to see creative possibilities, because “genre” seems to mean something quite different to you. Can you take me into the mindset that gave you the urge to make of Square Wave a genre collage?

That’s interesting—the difference between genre conventions narrowing things down, creatively, and opening them up. I don’t know if I’ve considered it quite like that up to now, but yes, I think that’s right, I do see the deployment of genre tropes as broadening our imaginative territory, and not just in the usual parodic sense. I’m not keen, in Square Wave, anyway, on the metafictional satirization or critique of literary genres, as modernists were; nor am I mobilizing genres primarily as a matter of aesthetic play, as the pastiche artists (“blank” parodists) of later eras did. Rather, I am venturing—non-parodically—into imaginative and cognitive spaces that seem to me only accessible via an organically catholic mode of storytelling.

Would it be fair to say that part of your purpose is cultural critique, that your critique comes from accessing these imaginative and cognitive spaces, and that the remixing of genres opens up these spaces because it first involves a broad sampling of narratives and forms from across the culture? Or would you rather shy from taking on a purpose like this?

I think a kind of critique can issue from that process, depending on the ingredients that go into the mix and the mind that cooks them up. But it’s not the directed or sharply defined sort of critique that a philosopher or essayist might undertake. Which is quite interesting, I think. You might novels can serve critical functions without being critiques. And I’m sure both of my novels are like this.

When Square Wave came out in the United States a few years ago, a good number of reviews categorised it as a “philosophical novel”. But they didn’t necessarily mean this to suggest that it uses narrative to dramatise philosophical ideas, so much as that you adopt the form of the novel as a way of “doing” philosophy. What does this term, “the philosophical novel”, mean to you? And how comfortably do you think that term applies to Square Wave?

Everything hangs on the meaning of “philosophy”. If philosophy’s a practice that consists in the adjudication, tacit or otherwise, of quite general propositions about reality’s nature, then Square Wave isn’t really a philosophical novel. But if philosophy needn’t involve authorial assertion, and can instead consist simply in the prolonged dwelling within the realm of such propositions—that is, within the conceptual (and not just sensory) imagination—then yes, the book is, among other things, a philosophical novel. And that matters, since there aren’t so many novels that offer readers that.

I like that notion and turn of phrase: philosophy as “the prolonged dwelling within the realm of” propositions about the nature of reality—a “dwelling within” that is alternative or even antithetical to an appraisal of those propositions. I assume you’d consider The Logos to be a philosophical novel along these lines, too, so let’s shift focus to your latest work. Can you take me back to its origins? And then how you moved from the novel-as-idea into the writing of these thousand pages—orchestrating, narratively, a contest of propositions within which the reader might be left to dwell?

I started submitting Square Wave to agents in the fall of 2013. That manuscript had been my primary cognitive engagement for the previous four years, so I found myself, after a long time, suddenly free to explore matters not addressed there. I keep a running list of books that catch my eye, and at that time I noticed on that list a significant number about visual culture: graphic design, architecture, advertising, fine art, and more generally, books about what is left of contemporary public space—physical space, I mean, not cyberspace—along with the activities and social exchanges occurring therein. (Urban space in particular.) So I set about reading those books in no especially structured way, and I carried on like that for about two years before beginning to think about character, scene, plot, and the rest—and even then not too concretely.

Similar origins to Square Wave, then, but resolving from a very different set of preconditions.

Yes, although I did make some early formal decisions that only came at a later stage with Square Wave. This time around, for instance, I was keen from the start to write in the first-person; and second, I wanted to compose something seamless and flowing, free of obvious ruptures or discontinuities. Both of those were significant new directions for me. As with Square Wave, though, the basic narrative substance of the new novel seemed to issue forth organically from those years of reading, with most of the significant creative work occurring in the drafting itself. So there wasn’t very much early orchestration: no schemas outlined, no questions self-consciously confronted. And really there wasn’t much of these things later on. I wrote the first draft based on a clutch of notes about possibilities, and then I redrafted from the beginning several times over the years, using each new draft as a chance to think and feel and see again. You could say that each time I was looking through the book to the world it conjured, rather than looking at the text as a formal object and considering tone and structure and dramatic arc.

I certainly would say something like that, because one of the things I like most about The Logos is how warped the structure is, and the dramatic arc, in part because of how the narrator indulges in full submersion in non-narrative matters. (I don’t think “indulges” is an inappropriate word here, nor a pejorative one.) I’m particularly struck by the disorientating effect of the timeflow: out of the thousand pages of The Logos, the first several hundred all take place on one day, then the next couple hundred take place on one day a little later on, and the timeflow sort of telescopes in the second half of the book until weeks and months are flying by in the final pages. I see this as an intentional effect on your part, though one that’s perhaps a result of an intentional neglect or deprioritisation of proportionality between narrative events. Have I got it right or am I misreading it here?

I think that’s right. On the one hand, time is treated quite unobtrusively in the book, in that it flows in one direction, without dislocations or the sorts of swirls and eddies apparent in most modernist fiction; on the other, time here is entirely the narrator’s, so that the relative weights of his concerns largely determine the depth or nuance in which matters are presented. As events periodically force him out of a state of solitary meditation—a state that seems natural to him—time and perception cannot help but accelerate, for him and for us. Something is gained through this—variety, excitation—and yet something is lost: the grain of attention coarsens.

Did you have models in mind for all this? The earliest readers of The Logos have compared it to some of the usual suspects of maximalist postmodernism—Gaddis, Pynchon, et al—because of its size, setting, and subject matter. But aside from those sorts of writers, were there one or two others that readers mightn’t pick up on so quickly?

To give two, Gregor von Rezzori’s Memoirs of an Anti-Semite and Celine’s Journey to the End of the Night. There are so many ways in which these books differ from The Logos, but what they share is a narrator whose curiosity refuses natural limits. The result is work that is often bracing and occasionally menacing. Naipaul’s whole oeuvre has this quality, and he’s been no small influence on my own novels, despite chasmic differences in approach and effect. A House for Mr. Biswas and The Enigma of Arrival are especially relevant to The Logos.

I was surprised by something you mentioned recently in conversation on the Beyond the Zero podcast. You made a remark about the way The Logos owes a debt to the nineteenth century novel—in that it emphasizes in-depth characterisation, it resolves its narrative fairly conventionally, and so on. I can see it, now that you’ve pointed it out, but until then I wouldn’t have made the comparison myself because I don’t think The Logos has the “shapeliness” (if you like) of a nineteenth century novel. Can you elaborate on its resonance with the literature of that period? Did you have a particular novel or novelist in mind as a touchstone?

There’s a kind of narrative regularity to the novels of Balzac, Austen, and Dickens that is absent from The Logos. But that’s less true of late-nineteenth century novels. I’m thinking especially of Dostoevsky, where the pacing can be odd, even jarring, as it’s frequently disrupted by the psychic irruptions of his characters; and then James as well, who was a pioneer in representing subjective dilations—distortions, from the older perspective—in the novel. War and Peace, too, is hardly a tidy, balanced novel. Its greatness is partly a matter of its lack of proportion, I think.

I suppose that one way The Logos converses with the nineteenth century novel is in its treatment of values. Who values what, and how highly; who has the capacity to evaluate in the first place, and with what rigor; and who has the power to delineate and facilitate the transmission of certain values—these are all questions that arise in the course of The Logos, as in many older novels that weren’t afraid to address abstractions of such scale.

I think there is a certain socio-intellectual compass to The Logos that links it to works like Middlemarch, The Brothers Karamazov, and War and Peace. The difference—and this also sets my novel apart from twentieth century expressions of the form like The Recognitions and Infinite Jest—is that there isn’t much authorial adjudication going along with it, which might well seem odd to some: what’s the point of ideas if you don’t use them to discover truths, or frame urgent questions, or inform one’s decision-making?

It’s true that earlier novelists were generally more eager to pass judgment on the hierarchy of values, to moralise, whereas—and this is what I find most rewarding about the novel, which is to say aesthetically and ethically challenging—The Logos seems to be determined to resist: to construct and preserve an amorality, if one can purge that term of its negative connotations.

Scrutiny itself, if it’s carried off imaginatively enough, and surprisingly enough, can be its own end. Not all cognitive activity has to be a means to knowledge, or concept extension, or even (with Kant) the experience of freedom or the embodiment of beauty. The imagination, in both its sensory and conceptual aspects, needn’t serve any of these purposes. Instead, one’s mental energies, in writing a novel, can be turned toward the fabrication of a distinct sort of habitat, a psychic space, with its own geography and terrain. Reading a novel situates you in just such a space, and one may ultimately spend a significant portion of one’s biological existence, one’s “real life”, inhabiting these spaces. And this needn’t be a matter of escape or pleasurable diversion; depending on the novel, one can court real trouble just as easily as buffering oneself from it. Yet there is such a thing as good trouble. The Logos, I hope, can offer that. In any case, it doesn’t lend itself to easy instrumentalization, which is all to the good.

Hugh Fulham-McQuillan is an Irish writer whose strange, disquieting stories have been appearing in various journals and magazines for several years now. About a year ago, Dalkey Archive published his début collection, Notes on Jackson and His Dead, though the book struggled to win the attention of readers. Yet, in recently reviewing the collection for Splice, Daniel Green described the stories as “intriguing in their inspiration and persuasive in their execution”, comprising a volume that “both hangs together conceptually and provides sufficient diversification”. Green also pointed out that “Notes on Jackson and His Dead doesn’t quite fit readily into prevailing dichotomous categories—conventional vs. experimental, realist vs. fabulist—but this is a strength, as the book pushes against convention by reinvigorating aesthetic strategies that remain recognisable.” In the wake of this review, Hugh Fulham-McQuillan was generous enough to engage with me via email to discuss the writing, the ambitions, and the reception of Notes on Jackson and His Dead.

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You wrote the stories in Notes on Jackson and His Dead at a time when Irish literature is thriving, thanks largely to the proliferation of publication venues that your work has appeared in: gorse, The Stinging Fly, a reinvigorated Irish Times. But the book seems to have flown under the radar, relative to other writers who have published in some of the same venues during the same period: Nicole Flattery, say, or Rob Doyle, or Wendy Erskine in Northern Ireland. From the outside, this looks a little bit like the result of low-key nationalism—attention is given to Irish literature addressing Irish issues and Irish life, rather than Irish literature of a more abstract variety—but of course that’s an outsider’s view of things. What’s your view? And more broadly, how would you see yourself positioned in the wider field of Irish literature, if not characterised as “an Irish writer”?

It’s wonderful to see Irish writing doing so well, spurred on in no small part by editors who greatly value literature and seek to encourage it, and I am very thankful those who have published my work. I do wonder, though, about the usefulness of grouping literatures by nation as if writers were players on a national team. It has always felt slightly reductive to me. I have a theory that, in terms of influences on their work, writers have two selves. There is the one who is born in a certain country and who lives in this or another country, taking in the sensory experiences of their surroundings, amongst people and things, and they gather from these experiences what we usually call a life. And then there is the literary self that grows through reading the work of others.

I imagine one way in which writers differ is in the varying influence of the “real life” and that of the “literary life” on their writing. For many writers, real life is the predominant influence, and it may be true for every writer, but your history of reading will undeniably influence your writing too. I remember reading an interview with Javier Marías, when I was not yet published, where he spoke about publishers rejecting his books because they were not Spanish enough. I took encouragement from his insistence that while he was Spanish, the literature that inspired him came from many other countries. Ideally, we would group writers not only by their nation but by their reading and writing. They would have two passports, one depicting the geographical and cultural space in which they live and another depicting the literary traditions in which they work. We would speak of our nations as we always have, but just as importantly we would speak of islands and continents formed solely of books.

In saying that, I am an Irish writer, born and bred, and there is a fine tradition of what might be called experimental writing in this country. While Notes on Jackson and His Dead was due to be published in Ireland, the UK, and America, it has thus far only been published in the latter, and it seems increasingly likely that Dalkey Archive won’t be publishing it in Ireland. My book not being available in Irish bookshops is very unfortunate. Reading the experiences of writers during the pandemic who have delayed publication dates, and are unable to launch their books, has given me a feeling of sympathetic déjà vu. Despite my book being published a year ago this month, I never had a book launch, and if it were not for Chapters in Parnell Street and Raven Books in Main Street Blackrock, who, knowing of my publisher’s distribution, ordered in copies from the US, I would not have had the pleasure of seeing my book on the shelves of a bookshop, or even receiving a finished copy. It not being published in Ireland or the UK has probably played a large role in its position on the radar. I have heard that review editors are reluctant to publish reviews of books that cannot be bought in local bookshops, which is understandable, too.

When it comes to the stories themselves, one of their standout features is that they have an interesting relationship with their own status as “fiction of ideas”. In your ‘Research Notes’ at Necessary Fiction, you write of your suspicion that “ideas may play the largest role in th[e] early stages” of your creative process; but you also write that the ideas you make an effort to accumulate—ideas drawn from “history, philosophy, art and speculation”—ultimately place constraints on your writing, “curtailing the choices to be made”. Can you elaborate on how this works in practice? Do you recall a particular idea that animated a particular story in a way that limited it, or gave it direction, or otherwise made it workable?

I meant to say that ideas, or situations, are often the first aspect of stories that comes to me. For example, the title story grew out of the (very) idle thought: what if people shed their skin? I was initially writing as if I was observing this character who shed their skin, and this narrator became the documentary maker and the character who shed their skin became a conductor and so on. That story was actually written very quickly, in about three hours, which is extremely unusual for me, and so I didn’t need to do any research for it.

I often procrastinate by looking up something that I had decided was absolutely necessary for what I was writing, and getting lost in further research that then advances the story in an unforeseen direction. You are introducing a piece of reality, whether idea or fact, that is new to both you and the story. For example, I knew nothing about sinkholes before writing ‘Entrance to the Underworld’. For the purpose of the story, though, it made sense that the woman’s brother did know, and so learning about sinkholes, and how people have related to them in the past, fixed certain elements—such as the brother’s almost obsessive interest in the Mayan belief that sinkholes were openings made by Chaak, a god of life and water that led to the underworld, or the gaping mouths of earth gods. This, in turn, led to the title, as that Mayan belief reminded me of an article I had recently read by Lydia Davis, comparing her translation of Proust’s Swann’s Way to that of Scott Moncrieff’s. As evidence for her argument that hers ran closer to the original text, she compared Scott Moncreiff’s translation of l’entrée des Enfers, “jaws of Hell” with her own “Entrance to the Underworld”.

Another example is the story ‘Theme on the Character and the Actor’. While it is an homage to Borges’ ‘Theme of the Traitor and the Hero’, it came into being after I learned that that Abraham Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth, was a renowned Shakespearean actor, whose favourite role was that of Brutus, Julius Caesar’s assassin. Booth’s father, who was also a well- known Shakespearean actor, was called Junius Brutus Booth. The parallels were too numerous not to make it fiction.

At what point in the creative process do you move from the consideration of ideas to paying attention to style, on a sentence-by-sentence level? I ask this because I’m quite struck by the anti-visual nature of several stories. By this I mean that you use words to describe something that the reader can sense, if not exactly picture, in the mind’s eye, though it would be virtually impossible to capture on film or translate into a visual medium.

The title story, ‘whiteroom’, and ‘Fog’ contain the most prominent examples of this, and the indeterminacy of the narrator of ‘(Within This Space)’ speaks to the same phenomenon. Here it feels as if the writing itself is being driven by an exercise in style, rather than an elaboration on a philosophical idea that provides a narrative premise. That is, it feels as if you are using writing to describe something outside writing that can in fact only exist in writing, so that your words create a hermetic world rather than reflecting some prior conception of an external reality. How much of this is an intentional effect that you aim to capture before you begin writing, and how much comes about from the struggle to combine ideas with sentences?

I’m a slow writer. I go through a lot of drafts before I see myself in my writing. I think of it as a process of accretion, like a painter layering paint on the canvas until they’re happy with it. Really, the ideas serve as inspiration, something to get me into the space of writing. Depending on how well the writing is going, my focus quickly moves into the story itself, and my need for whatever idea it was disappears unless, as I mentioned above, the story needs it, or I feel I need it to write the story. I am very much a utilitarian in this way.

One of my aims when writing these stories was to create a sort of autonomous fiction like that of Beckett’s later fiction, as I strongly believed that that was the highest level of fiction that could be achieved, a pure literature that could exist only in language (my views have since become more catholic). While this was something that I had hoped to achieve, I couldn’t say that I intentionally aimed toward this when writing the individual stories, so I am delighted that they created that effect when you read them. As I did not study writing or literature formally, I’m not always sure why or what I have done, only that it works or it doesn’t. With each new story I tried only to make a piece of fiction that worked, from the first line to the last.

In the (decidedly mixed) review in Kirkus, your reviewer described the book as “ambitious but uneven” and lamented that “tremendous potential is sometimes buried beneath a miasmic stylistic expression”. I take it that the reviewer means narrative potential—the potential for a great story, unencumbered by “continental philosophy” and “contemporary cynicism”—but I find great rewards in your vexed relationship with the very possibility of straightforward storytelling. What does this relationship entail in the heat of the moment, when you’re putting one scene after another? Does it ever happen that storytelling itself threatens to run away with you, so you have to consciously cut back on events in order to not let narrative dominate? Or are these stories the output of someone who just naturally feels that there are more important and effective things to writing than narrative?

Thank you, yes, I think there has been an overvaluing of narrative in contemporary discussions around literature but also in our wider society. While narrative plays a large role in how we perceive and understand the world and ourselves, it necessarily skips over parts of reality, which is a problem because, as I wrote elsewhere, in the battle between narrative and fact, narrative almost always wins. It is an inherently seductive form, and it is for this reason that it is so popular, and it is for this same reason that I distrust it.

Beyond fiction, there are occasions when narrative is immensely important, like in therapeutic settings or in the broadening of societal narratives by including those of people who had previously been excluded. But it is also used whenever people want to elide the truth, like in advertising, or when the powerful want to demonise or divide the less powerful. Narrative is important. We couldn’t live without it, but we need to think of it as a tool that can be used to our benefit or to harm us, rather than an indisputable good.

So yes, I believe there is much more to writing than narrative. I am always trying to write against it in some way, and I most enjoy writing that manages to do this. I don’t think I could ever write fiction that doesn’t in some way acknowledge its status as such. It would feel unethical somehow, like I was condescending to the reader. I couldn’t do it.

Finally: influences. Also in your ‘Research Notes’, you credit “the Kafkas, Lispectors and Prousts” as influences on your work. Meanwhile, Dalkey Archive compares your work to Borges, Poe, and Donald Barthelme. These seem like quite distinct sets of forebears. Your choicess are more meditative and atmospheric; Dalkey’s are more allegorical and/or absurd (though Borges and Poe are both quoted in the text). And indeed, one of the things that Daniel Green suggests in his review of Notes on Jackson and His Dead is that the Barthelme comparison doesn’t sit quite right. But perhaps you see things otherwise. What is it particularly that you think you’ve picked up from Kafka, et al? And would you say that comic writers like Barthelme, or potentially others, have played a role in colouring your work?

When I mentioned Kafka, Lispector, and Proust, I was thinking of their inward focus. In their depiction of inner states, they are absolute realists. I would like to think that they have influenced me in some way. How, I don’t know, but their influences—and more particularly those of Kafka and Proust—have seeped into the literary atmosphere to such a degree that, when reading any serious writer who has come after them, whether they write in their wake or against it, you are more likely to be exposed to their influence than not.

I think the greatest achievement of these writers was their ability to go beyond convention, stereotypes, calcified narratives, and the structures of society, to excavate a hidden or previously unspoken part of the human experience and mimic this in their writing. They excavated parts of the human experience that had, until then, remained hidden. At the most reductive level there is the anxiety, existential and psychological, of Kafka’s characters, the analysis of identity and being in Lispector, and the study of perception and memory Proust. And most importantly, they each did this in a way that only they could.

While I don’t believe that we experience the higher levels of consciousness entirely in language, reading words on a page is the closest approximation to eavesdropping on someone’s conscious mind that I can think of. Literature’s greatest strength is that language is its sole material, which is why, in my opinion, many of the greatest writers have in some way transformed how we understand ourselves and how we relate to the world. Just as an academic finds that the more advanced they become in a subject the more aware they are of the gaps in their knowledge, great writing exposes the reader to the mysteries and complexities of experience. In contrast, the worst writing can only make our world smaller.

It was in the work of these writers that I found what I was trying to do in my writing. I would add Poe in there, too. I think I learned mostly that fiction is at its strongest, and most honest, when written from the first person (Kafka’s third person is an honorary first person). Describing the world is fraught with questions about objectivity and bias, but the moment you write from inside the narrator’s mind the shape of their perspective becomes as important as anything beyond it.

I haven’t read enough Barthelme for him to be a very strong influence. Rather than comic writers, I would say that comedy programmes have had a greater influence in my writing. I rarely watch drama on TV. But again, returning to those big names, Proust and Kafka can be very funny. I always appreciate it when a writer isn’t afraid to be funny. Writing is after all a form of play.

Deirdre Shanahan is a London-based writer who has been publishing short stories for a few years now with a lot of success. She won the Wasafiri New Writing Prize in 2018, and was shortlisted for the 2019 London Short Story Prize. Her work also appeared in Salt’s Best of British Short Stories anthology in 2017, and last year Bluemoose Books published her novel Caravan of the Lost and Left Behind. This year, in Carrying Fire and Water, Deirdre brings together sixteen stories which the novelist Alan McMonagle has described as “elemental, achingly honest, and delicately rendered”. The collection is published by Splice. Ahead of its publication date, Deirdre spoke to me first about her approach to the short story form, and then about the particulars of writing the stories in Carrying Fire and Water.

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Many readers who might be familiar with your work will have probably found you via your novel, Caravan of the Lost and Left Behind, published last year by Bluemoose Books. Can you talk a bit about your turn towards the form of the short story? How did the writing of these stories overlap with the writing of the novel?

Actually, the stories and the novel were completely distinct enterprises. There is no crossover. I think a novel necessitates some level of long-term logic or planning, whether at the beginning or in the later stages, overtly or not, whereas stories for me inhabit a different psychological space and arrive out of a different impulse. In everything—subject, tone, and language—they feel very different.

Maybe on a general level there is something common between Carrying Fire and Water and Caravan of the Lost and Left Behind: themes like the relationships between parents and children, and women escaping their situations. But in the stories I’m able to plunge in at different times in the characters’ lives, and focus on one thing, then charge on and come out again... I feel you can’t do that so much with a novel, where one works more with continuous time and gives much more attention to characters and their relationships. Stories work on a level beyond language, with symbol and shape.

I may have written one or two stories at the same time as the novel, but not most of them. Of course I take “writing” the novel in this context to be the original drafting and not the later periods of editing. I tend to write stories in gaps of time but not really when I am deeply engaged in a long piece of writing. With this collection, some stories arrived out of time away at residencies, in dedicated periods of creative work. And in terms of comprising a single entity—Carrying Fire and Water as a whole—they probably arrived more quickly than the same number of words in a novel.

So what did the stories offer you, creatively, that the novel didn’t?

The convenience of the short story, so to speak, is one of experimentation, whether that be to do with style or subject tone or voice. It is clear they offer convenience in terms of portability for a time-pressed reader, but they offer more than that to the writer. There is the chance to try out skills and techniques that may be rough or unproven. They can be more playful than novels; you don’t have to be so faithful to what you’ve written before, and you can take risks without too great a cost.

Your risks seem to have paid off pretty well, speaking as an observer. You strike me as quite a prolific writer and one who has had a number of honours in rather a short space of time, a few years. How did you start out and how did you get to this point? Was there a particular moment in recent years where you decided to commit to this pathway, honing your craft and clawing your way forward?

With the stories, I had worked on some pieces for a while before anything happened. I’ve always written stories but I think I did develop a clearer sense of what a story meant to me and what I could do, what I wanted to do, in the last three or four years. And I was fortunate to have some published, shortlisted, et cetera. But it certainly was a more gradual thing than may appear, and as dopey as it may sound, I think it had as much to do with “learning my craft” as with being braver and becoming more confident. The publications coming together—that’s coincidental. The stories come to me. I work on them and after a while they are hopefully good enough to go out into the world. But nothing is predictable or planned in any way.

One thing that maybe helped is that is easier to be in touch with a community of writers these days. I’ve always tried to take the opportunity to learn—for instance, I attended the masterclass with Claire Keegan at the Short Story Festival in London a couple of years ago; that was something I could not pass up. Of course, the real task is to carry with one what one has learned, to absorb and let it become part of oneself—not merely to attend passively.

It’s serendipitous that you mention the masterclass with Claire Keegan; this summer I re-read her début collection, Antarctica (1999), and was struck by its affinities with Carrying Fire and Water. I can say what I think those affinities look like, but I’d like to hear from you first. What were the most valuable things you learned in those classes, including Keegan’s? Are we talking about things related to process and technique, like the nuts and bolts of writing, or was it more to do with permission, freedom, inspiration—the intangibles?

Sometimes I think the most one takes away in any learning process is what’s unsaid. From Claire Keegan, I think I learned to have a complete dedication to the story itself and how it speaks. For the writer to write the story, they must not just execute an idea but excavate something from it, to find out what it truly is, and then write on—to follow its essence wherever it leads. And I learned to pay attention to the visceral, to the physicality of the world, in order to convey emotions. It’s probably no secret that Claire is an inspiring teacher but one with great warmth. Who could forget her description of a paragraph as sentences which lie against each other, one developing from the one before, nestled in together like piglets around their mother?

Let’s linger on that bit for a moment: paying attention to the visceral physicality of the world to convey the emotions of a character. It feels like a contradiction in terms, because a physical description of an environment just doesn’t represent a character’s inner life. But, if I can put it this way, I think you tend to do something along these lines, a la Claire Keegan...

You have a character in a situation, but you don’t dwell explicitly on the emotions of the situation. Instead, you have the character notice something in the physical environment and describe it. Now, what a lot of realist writers do is the “objective correlative” thing—the character notices something external, which is meant to suggest their emotional state, or symbolise their psychology, or something along those lines. But the things your characters notice don’t really have that quality. You just let the character notice them and then describe them, and describe and describe, in increasingly precise detail, often to the point where the sentences splinter into fragments—and the intensity of the description suggests the intensity of the character’s concentration, which to me suggests the intensity of the emotions they’re gripped by, which are usually emotions that they want to get away from. So the reader feels the emotions through the length and detail of description focused on environments that don’t have any emotions.

This is to do with my feeling that fascination with the world is what distinguishes people from one another. I work primarily from a sense of character; I “see” characters, often but not always in a particular place—they appear to me, imaginatively, from some other part of my life or experience, maybe bringing a location with them or maybe not. Sometimes, I may not know exactly why these characters are in one place or another, or what the connection is, but that is what I will explore and discover as I work on the story. Having said this, I think that a writer or any creative person must be, by the nature of their work and preoccupations, alert to the world around them in all its many and various facets. Basically, that is our material. I perhaps might make myself clearer by saying I studied art. This way of understanding the world has remained with me as one way of “seeing”—absorbing and interpreting—what is around me and how I go on to use it in creating fiction. How one experiences and interacts with the outer world helps distinguish someone who is trying to make art. If one is not fascinated by the phenomena of the world and the way we humans are in the world and how we behave towards or react to stimuli, then I don’t know what else there is to do. My characters may share that belief—not consciously, but in the way they hold themselves in the world.

You’ve said that your characters tend to be fascinated by the world they find themselves in, although it also seems to me that they’re lost in the world, or overwhelmed by it, and their fascination with external phenomena reads like a coping strategy or some way of anchoring themselves, or re-orienting themselves. Let me give an example, from ‘Araiyakushimae’. Your protagonist, Yolande, notices an irrigation ditch on a farm belonging to her family; she has returned to the farm after an absence of many years. The description is very matter-of-fact:

At the lower field, the brambles were pimply and underdeveloped because of the early summer rain. The bridge over the ditch was an old door with a few split planks supporting it, though its appearance belied its strength for it had been there through all the years from the time when her grandparents were still alive. Old rainwater sumped the soil around it. Grass and reeds clotted the flow, shimmering gold under the full light of the sky. She had jumped over the ditch as a kid, lost to danger, rather relishing it and not realising ditches developed from runnels and brooks, following the contours of the land.

There are some poetic qualities—the “pimply” brambles; the acoustic resonance between “sumped” and “jumped”—but otherwise this passage describes a sentimentally important place in a dispassionate way. What’s interesting about it, though, is that the paragraph before it is seething with rage. Yolande, we’ll learn, was abused by her uncle, who still lives on the farm, and the words preceding her observations of the ditch are brimming with fury: “He would have to listen as she spat out words caged in for years. She would challenge. Scald him with the truth.” So we jump, shockingly, from this intense urge to “scald” straight into a cold description of a ditch—but Yolande’s anger continues to come through the description of the ditch, because we know that she’s focusing on it so closely in order to keep the reins on her emotions.

There are lots of other instances of this, where characters interact with the world by really only reacting to stimuli, because they’re so badly at the mercy of greater powers and not able to be proactive in shaping their own selves. The closest we get to someone who acts decisively is in ‘The Stars Are Light Enough’, when your protagonist reaches an awareness of her limitations, her ineffectiveness, and calls it quits. Otherwise there are no real epiphanies or resolutions, more a sense of drift—and especially in stories like ‘Lost Children’ and ‘Weights’.

What is this a function of? I mean, would you say that you see the world in this way—as so vast that it mostly swallows up human agency and self-determination? Or is it more that you’re drawn to characters in disempowered situations, for dramatic purposes?

I think your point is relevant to ‘Lost Children’ and ‘Weights’, but I don’t want to convey the belief that we have no agency in the world. When it does happen, I think these characters have evolved this way for dramatic purposes: some might appear to be reactive in some stories and become more proactive towards the end, as in ‘Breakfast With Rilke’ and ‘Dark Rain Falling’. Sometimes I see characters as being at the mercy of their passions or the effects of the past, so in those cases they may come across as more passive, but it is often because they might be enveloped in larger societal forces or emotional currents than they can deal with. And in other stories, like ‘Foraged Things’, the character’s age determines the degree of change she can effect on her own life. There might be an element of “drift” there in the collection, but I hope not excessively.

Okay, so then how does all of this make its way into sentences for you? I’m assuming you go slowly, sentence by sentence, rather than scene by scene, because your sentences are so stark and rhythmic. So you’ve got the characters in your mind, the situation they’re facing, but when you sit down to write, where do you devote most of your attention? Is it, say, to the voice, the sound, the imagery? Or is it in fact the dramatic material, wanting to make the action happen?

It’s still the characters. I actually don’t think about “voice” —that seems to be too self-conscious. I’m writing about people, place, situation; I’m thinking about relationships and the emotions between one person and another, what they see in each other, how they might act and react. I’m not thinking consciously about style or how to write—just hoping to get something down. And I’m kind of writing to work something out, so there’s excitement to it as you create and enter your own little world.

You mentioned that you studied art, so would you say, then, that this visual background not only influences the beginnings of your process—imaginative visualisations of people in a scenario—but also fuels the process throughout? As if, if writing is not primarily an exercise in the sounds of words, it’s an exercise in finding words that animate imagery?

A little. I think all I’ve studied—along with experience, observations, conjecture, imagination, dreams, memory, et cetera—come to bear on my writing. The process is one I might describe as involving similar skills to those of people who work with the materials of the plastic arts. By that I mean I see the writing process often in terms of shaping, paring as a sculptor works, carving and cutting off pieces while having to be sensitive to the form one is handling. The way a story emerges for me is something akin to the way Michaelangelo’s prisoner sculptures appear, if that doesn’t sound too hifalutin. When I write, I am working on the notion that there is something in this original image that wants to get out and I have to find a way to release it to its rightful form, in the way it will be served the best.

And in doing that I try to use all my senses, on and off the page. So, for example, I like to walk rather than drive, because it’s a more sensual experience, there’s more stimulation of the senses. A journey might or might not be pleasurable, but in each case I am more likely to register more about my surroundings if I go through them slowly, on foot. And the process you are specifically asking about, whereby I might start with an image and then use words to make it move and become immersive, is the result of long stages of just doing the same thing, imaginatively—putting myself in a place, working out what it feels like, maybe researching or checking on facts, but essentially drafting and redrafting until the words I want, which express most acutely how it feels to be somewhere, are finally there on the page.

Which of the stories in Carrying Fire and Water did you have to subject to this process most intensely, in order to get them into the right shape? And which ones would you say came easiest, through a relatively speedy process?

Nearly all the stories fell into place, eventually, in the way I envisaged, but the one that springs to mind in terms of needing reviewing was ‘Weights’. Something about the tone wasn’t right to begin with, and there was also something else that I knew was amiss and but I couldn’t detect what it was.

Can you say more about it, and how you resolved it?

In its original form, I had a much more explicit version of what happened between the girl and the music teacher. It felt quite wrong, I think, but I could not see a way out until a friend read it. They actually did not point out anything but offered advice on childhood trauma—things I knew but had forgotten, as one does when drawn into the world of a story. With their input, though, they helped me see that I could take a step back and make use of the metronome as an object in the story. The metronome carried the emotional weight in real and metaphorical terms, and there is now a greater degree of suggestion, which I hope is more effective than the explicit approach I took at first. The experience reminded me that you have to have a consideration for the reader, and what they’ll take from a story, but also what they’ll bring to it—what depth of understanding. Anyway, after that intervention, I was able to return to the story and complete it in the way I had been striving for.

So, what next? I know you have more stories in reserve, but where are your ambitions taking you now?

I am working on another novel. But I also have ideas for two stories which I want to get the chance to focus on in the near future. Stories will always be part of my writing life. They’ll interweave and arrive at unexpected times—though they are a welcome interruption and I have to give them due space and attention.

Joshua Rothes is the founding editor of Sublunary Editions, a Seattle-based micropress with a focus on publishing beautifully designed volumes of short fiction. Sublunary’s core offer is a series of monthly mail-outs, but it has also begun publishing slim books featuring literature in translation—Pierre Senges’ Falstaff: Apotheosis, translated by Jacob Siefring—and newly commissioned work. Its first foray into this last area is Kyle Coma-Thompson and Tristan Foster’s collaborative project, 926 Years, published at the end of January.

Coma-Thompson is the author of the story collections The Lucky Body (2013) and Night in the Sun (2016); Foster’s début collection is Letter to the Author of the Letter to the Father (2018). They worked together on 926 Years from a distance, on opposite sides of the world, writing and revising the twenty-two flash fictions in the collection with editorial oversight from Rothes. Following the launch of the book, Rothes was generous enough to engage with me via email, to describe the process of publishing 926 Years and to discuss its place in the Sublunary Editions catalogue.

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How familiar were you with The Lucky Body, Night in the Sun, and Letter to the Author of the Letter to the Father before you picked up 926 Years?

Of the two, I was far more familiar with Tristan’s work, mostly thanks to social media (it’s good for something, after all) where we had struck up something of a rapport, buying each other’s books and the like. Letter to the Author was proof, when I read it, that Tristan and I share a lot of the same concerns, though we approach them quite differently. When he decided to take a break from the madness of Twitter, we began a correspondence via email.

What sort of concerns do you mean, exactly?

Now, the philosophical turn. The philosopher of science Wilfrid Sellars once wrote: “The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term.” I think that’s a pretty good summation of literature’s aims as well. What I see in Tristan’s writing is a concern with how life, in that broad sense, hangs together, how people fit together, miraculous as it seems sometimes. Also, how they don’t.

Sellars’ most famous idea was the idea of the manifest image: that is, how the world appears to us and how we understand it in the course of our everyday lives, as opposed to what could be called the scientific image, which is what we know of the world through experiment, theory, measurement, and which often doesn’t square with how we experience the world. Human consciousness, to my mind, is a kind of toolset for dealing with this sort of cognitive dissonance, and Tristan’s writing, to me, is full of situations in which people are trying to reconcile their experiences with something deeper, not necessarily scientific, but something that doesn’t quite square with the world as they find it, that creates a sense of confusion and dread and, really, sadness... people unable to communicate, to name what they know to be true, struggling to find news frames of reference that can anchor them, for a time, in the world. I won’t say you can sum up Tristan’s project in this way, but those are some of the elements that made me feel a kinship with him, as a writer.

Okay, so 926 Years kind of began from your interactions with Tristan, but in your Q&A with Joseph Schreiber at 3:AM Magazine, you said: “I wasn’t sure what kind of books I wanted to publish until I saw the manuscript for this one.” So how did it end up reaching you in that more detailed form?

It came up in the course of our correspondence that Tristan and Kyle had been working on a series of collaborative poems. (It was at this point that I bought a copy of Night in the Sun and fell headlong for Kyle’s unique voice in the short story form.) Just beginning to get into planning the monthly mailings for Sublunary, I asked Tristan about maybe publishing a few poems one month, and after reading through a selection I expanded my pitch to include a chapbook. Tristan and Kyle huddled, metaphorically speaking—distances and all—and came back with a pitch of their own: that they would write something entirely new, setting up some fresh rules-of-the-game for their collaboration. 926 Years was the result.

And it appealed to you because you found it speaking to the metaphysical/aesthetic concerns you share with Tristan?

I’d say that these concerns are a part of 926 Years, though I was not given any indication of plot or form when Tristan and Kyle made the pitch. It was very much a case of “What if we wrote something new instead?” and I gave them a rough page count to work with (which was happily exceeded).

How closely does their first pass at the collection resemble the finished product?

The stories were pretty close to their final form by the time I got the manuscript. There were some small changes made, here and there, but the number and order of them was the same as in the final product. Tristan and Kyle were (and are) like two blades, sharpening one another, which made my job rather easy, as they had pared down and tightened the book a good deal by the time I saw it—though the title, as I understand it, was in flux down to the wire, for obvious reasons. I gave them a good deal of my trust, and they rewarded it handsomely. Those are the best kinds of collaborations.

That’s an interesting image, the two writers as two blades “sharpening one another”. Can shed some light on their process? After all, it is remarkably difficult to tell which of the stories were written by Tristan and which by Kyle—and it’d damage the book to identify the particulars, since part of its beauty comes from the indeterminacy of authorship—but do you know broadly how they worked it out?

I’ll try to answer this as best I can, 1) as someone who wasn’t involved until the later stages, and 2) to not reveal too much of the inner workings of the book.

There was an initial idea put forth by Kyle, vaguely (again, the mystery), of fragmented reincarnation, a story about how the splinters of one life can lodge themselves in so many others. They took turns writing chapters, spurring one another on, pushing themselves with each piece, both in pace and content. The book came together very quickly—some pieces, while later revised, came together in a single sitting, from what I’m told. I won’t divulge who wrote each piece, but I can say that the last piece in the book, ‘Alexander’—the one that Edwin Turner at Biblioklept said made him “happy in a strange, nervous way”—was the result of a specific challenge, from one writer to the other.

When he reviewed the book on his blog, Joseph Schreiber also referred to the book as a “collaborative effort—not just between the authors but with the editor/publisher”. What can you say about your own creative involvement? In what respects did you push Kyle and Tristan to expand on, or pare back, what they sent you?

I agree with Joe’s assessment, but I do want to clarify that the text itself was very much Kyle and Tristan. I had my input, of course, as to how we would standardize certain things, I offered a few small suggestions, but my role in the text comes down to giving them the space in which to undertake it.

My most central role was in designing the book, both the cover and interior. I took some cues from how the manuscript was delivered—for instance, the title of each piece set opposite the age—and worked to bring that into the final product. The three of us have countless email threads going back and forth, discussing cover options, how the table of contents would be typeset, who to contact as early readers, how the marketing copy should position the book, and so on. Easy enough for me as publisher to say, but it never really felt hierarchical. We all had something invested in the project, and when one of us would become busy with non-literary life, the others would step up and help carry the load. It was a rare thing to be a part of, and I think we all felt that.

Finally, how do you see 926 Years as setting the tone for future standalone books from Sublunary Editions? Or in what ways do you hope it does? Obviously there’s already a format—short, compact—but how might this shape future titles in terms of thematics, aesthetics, the process of composition?

I think, first and foremost, it gives me the confidence to continue working with the size and shape of the books I’m doing now, as the response has been very positive. It also set a tone. Not necessarily a theme or style, but definitely a tone, a timbre that I will hold other books up to. Already, two more small tomes from Sublunary are imminent: Vik Shirley’s Corpses in March and A Luminous History of the Palm by Jessica Sequeira. They will, in their own ways, shape the future of the project, as Falstaff did before 926 Years.

But it has made me curious and excited about the potential of collaborative works. What 926 Years avoided so well was its cohesion: in musical terms, it sounded like a band, rather than two musicians put together playing the same tune but trying to elbow their way in front of one another. That’s a testament to the unique bond between Kyle and Tristan, which will, I imagine, be difficult to replicate. But I’m open to the right pairing. It’s something that I don’t think we see enough of in literature, which at all times I wish was more like jazz.

Greg Gerke is a Brooklyn-based writer who has been publishing short stories and essays for over a decade: his work has appeared in 3:AM Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Tin House, and many other venues. His essay collection See What I See, which Christine Schutt has described as a collection of “generous, thoughtful reflections on the beguiling experience of art”, is published by Splice. A collection of short fiction, Especially the Bad Things, has received praise from writers such as Gary Lutz, Sergio de la Pava, and Sam Lipsyte. Here, Greg spoke to me primarily about the concerns of the essay collection: first about his approach to art—its creation and evaluation—and then about the works of art that have meant the most to him.

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I’d like to start with the broad view of See What I See. It’s an unusual book in that it’s fundamentally a collection of essays on literature and film, but when I look back at the volume as a whole I’m struck most of all by how personal it is. Deeply, deeply personal. In fact there’s one essay in there, ‘All Naked, All the Time’, in which you compare the films of John Cassavetes with the prose of Gertrude Stein, asking whether they might both be examples of “emotionally naked art”, and so I wonder: would you see your work in this book as something like emotionally naked criticism? I don’t mean in an overly forthright, self-exposing sense, but more in the sense that you’re willing—with some conscious effort—to let your own vulnerabilities become visible, if that’s what’s necessary to make a particular point. Working on the book with you, I was often reminded of Nathaniel Hawthorne at the end of The Scarlet Letter: “Be true! Be true! Show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst may be inferred!” Would you agree with this view of See What I See?

I think, at some point over the years of writing these pieces, something I was not aware of began to happen—the insertion of myself, in hackneyed doses at the beginning, became more and more the substructure to the entire enterprise, and most extremely in the Eric Rohmer piece where the films become the gateway drug to analyzing my past. Not to say that this past is interesting, but in the context of the art, seemingly something shifts, because there is the art and you and all the possible imbrications. Pure memoir, unless Henry James, Gertrude Stein, Michel Leiris, and Paula Fox, is a hard sell. This dappling is something I’d been searching for in reviews and not getting. I don’t go to a review for a plot recap, I want to know what the art did to someone’s soul. The gesture of beginning and ending with little pretty personal anecdotes became too trite for me. The art needed to be submerged in the acid bath of the hidden personality (not the social media persona) and then reconstituted, which is what William Gass does without parallel. Cynthia Ozick wrote that the impression practiced by him is where “the criticism of the text vies as a literary display with the text itself.” It seems we go to art to learn about ourselves, even if we don’t think we do.

But it occurred to me that if art is, secretly, all about us (the time travel element, how we see our past through it), then one might as well not hold back. I’ve been disappointed in the memoirs and autofictions of people in my generation, as well as the Cusks and Knausgaards. It felt like they weren’t going deep enough—not in the way of truth-telling, more like how the poet Geoffrey Hill described creation: “It is the being forced down under the surface by the resistance of technique that inaugurates a self-alienating process which, as it drives down into strata that are not normally encountered, may produce alien objects.” Here is how biting art is made. Creation of a thing itself, not a simple journal entry on how one felt about something. The brouhaha about revealing (I had sex with so and so, etc.) was a sham—with a few exceptions (in non-fiction): Michelle Orange’s essay book This Is Running For Your Life and John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Pulphead. Having discretion issues is not the same as making art. Those writers weren’t going into the layers of consciousness and the skuzzy interiors—they wanted to keep looking good but it only made them more smug. A recent example of this is a much ballyhooed “takedown” of John Updike in the London Review of Books. Do any takedowns last, outside of Katherine Anne Porter putting her nails into Gertrude Stein? Even Renata Adler’s whitewash of Pauline Kael, while extremely well-written, is something I read once but have no desire to visit again. I hope what I’m doing is viewed much differently. When I began that Rohmer piece, I had no idea I would start writing about my past relationships; it came very naturally as if the experience of the films had willed it after months of stewing in my psyche. I think that art relates to your entire person and one must meet it with the same intensity and ferocity.

I think this is the fine line you walk, pretty much perfectly, in See What I See: not being self-revealing in a superficial or sensationalistic way, like disclosing a sordid past, and not looking at art for purposes of a “plot recap”, but focusing on the formal intricacies of artworks—so that somehow your attention to the aesthetics of art opens onto a deeply personal way of writing that is something quite apart from an autobiographical retelling of events.

There’s a line in your very skeptical essay on David Fincher that has stuck with me, because it cuts to the heart of the matter. You say there’s one simple question you’d like to ask artists like Fincher: “Why do you show me the things you show me?” So your starting point for analysing any experience of art seems to be that you want to seek out a justification for all of the tiny elements incorporated into the artwork, word by word in literature and frame by frame in film. You want to understand how the artist has come to his or her style, in Susan Sontag’s sense of the term: “Style is the principle of decision in a work of art. ... The most attractive works of art are those which give us the illusion that the artist had no alternatives, so wholly centered is he in his style.” And if you can understand “the principle of decision” that has led to the style—that has led for some things to be included, others excluded; some to be shown, others hidden—then you’re in a place where something in the work reverberates with your own soul, with your own history of decisions, exposures, concealments, in the thick of life.

Two wonderful examples come to mind for me. The first is from your essay on Sarah Polley’s Take This Waltz, where you try to find words for the “superlative” performance of Michelle Williams. Ever seeking out “the principle of decision”, you try to be attentive to what aspects of her presence and mood the camera captures, what Polley allows her to do on screen, in order to show you a particular selection of emotional states. It’s hard not to quote you at length here:

Michelle Williams is certainly the best American actress of her generation, as she continually fills out more and ever more complex psychologies. In Take This Waltz she conveys fear, surprise, awkwardness, tedium, control, regret, and fatigue with a naked spontaneity. I have seen her no-bullshit gaze in a few interviews and would have to assume she draws on the spirit of herself in order to inform her performances. I don’t know how she does what she does, if she employs a method. I don’t want to know, either. Her performance crystallizes as the thing itself. ... [N]o-one can wear pain like Michelle Williams; it oozes forth in the like manner that Wordsworth defined the sublime in poetry: a spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. Her whole body becomes a tourniquet, trying to clog the loss of spirit that marks her great characterizations.

You go on to look at the way she modulates her accent, and the way Polley structures certain frames and narrative strands around her, but I’ll stop there because that’s enough to get at what I want to ask you about. In a word: beauty. In particular: the principle of decision that leads an artist to present something knowingly beautiful to you, where beauty is understood not bluntly as something that ‘looks good’, but as an expression of the fullest possible range of human capabilities within the circumstances of a given narrative or situation. The works of art that reverberate with you are not fabular, or surreal, or magical-realist, or comedic, and certainly not works of cultural or political commentary, but are those whose primary agenda seems to be stylistic, so as to construct a concept of beauty and offer it to audiences almost as a gift. Would it be fair to say this?

I think you set down those terms much more clearly than I ever could, Daniel—and when you mention how the artist chooses to show some things and hide others, my eyes light up, because there seems to lie a secret of art. Robert Bresson:

The difficulty is that all art is both abstract and suggestive at the same time. You can’t show everything. If you do, it’s no longer art. Art lies in suggestion. The great difficulty for filmmakers is precisely not to show things. Ideally, nothing should be shown, but that’s impossible. So things must be shown from one sole angle that evokes all other angles without showing them. We must let the viewer gradually imagine, hope to imagine, and keep them in a constant state of anticipation. ... Life is mysterious, and we should see that on-screen. The effects of things must always be shown before their cause, like in real life. We’re unaware of the causes of most of the events we witness. We see the effects and only later discover the cause.

This quote provides the basis of that remark critiquing Fincher and other directors who fall short of auteur status, for me. The success or failure of a book, film, or play seems to relate solely to this—how much is shown. In Eyes Wide Shut, you never find out how the mask Dr. Bill wore was lost, though he locked it in his house. But how did it show up on his pillow? Who put it there? His wife appears oblivious to it, though maybe she did find it. Kubrick had no interest in a detective story—the mask is inexplicably there because it has to be there, which jives with the Sontag quote—yes, there are no alternatives; boom, there is the mask, deal with it—and it affronts the audience as it does Dr. Bill. At base, the mask is representative of our deepest fear, our hypocrisy (W.S. Merwin: “Something I’ve not done/ is following me/ I haven’t done it again and again...”). One can start from there and root out to just about anything. The whole film has been constructed so that at this moment everything that has occurred collapses—the character’s mind, the dream states, and the uncanny—such was Kubrick’s rhythm. I think Marianne Moore speaks to this: “you don’t devise a rhythm, the rhythm is the person, and the sentence but a radiograph of personality.” So too, everything in the frame of Eyes Wide Shut is the radiograph of Kubrick, who disappears and is only a cipher haunting his work.

So that’s all speaking to style. But what of style-towards-beauty?

I love your definition of beauty as “an expression of the fullest possible range of human capabilities within the circumstances of a given narrative or situation.” Overlapping this, I hope, one can feel the ghost of Walter Pater in certain nooks and crannies of the book; he is certainly there by name. Those works that do reverberate, as you say—yes, they construct a concept of beauty and offer it as a gift. And the gift has to be hard-hearted, as in, this isn’t going to come easy for you. Rilke: “You must change your life.” The gift is an interrogation.

I remember developing a friendship with a painter. She was in her late twenties and she modeled her works on works of the old masters. She had this stark affinity for similar works that entranced me, and we’d watch something by Tarkovsky or read passages of Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood out loud (or even just share our memories of a work we’d seen independently— Solaris, for instance). There wouldn’t be anything to say for a while after ‘taking in’ these experiences. We’d just sit there breathing (Hugh Kenner: “the whole point of a book is what happens in the five minutes after one has finished reading it.” We were still with the gifts coruscating over us, like the indelible line in Nightwood: “‘I have been loved,’ she said, ‘by something strange, and it has forgotten me.’” As Gass would say, that’s a monument to heartache and one feels many of the sharp shocks and long love pangs that have gone on in one’s life, but feels them inside-out—art is a great medicine.

Anyway, the shared silence, taking in those gifts—these are the moments that bring me to my knees. I think many people do incredible psychological work by engaging with art to this degree—there is a betterment process going on. We want to be as aware as we make out Djuna Barnes to be in Nightwood, the picture of her as narrator in our heads.

The gifts—the “hard-hearted beauty”—carefully cultivated through a deliberate style that is ultimately a process of selection, and therefore of revealing a personality or sensibility... That’s art for you, yes? That’s what it’s all about.

But I’m amazed at the terms in which you express your attraction to it, because they pull so strongly in two directions at once. I mean, on the one hand, I could imagine a reader looking at what you’ve just said and thinking, “No, this guy’s book isn’t for me because he’s too elitist, too aloof from the enjoyment a regular person gets out of art”—and quotes from Gass, Moore, Barnes, et al are ammunition for that criticism. At the same time, though, you’re so egalitarian, or democratic: you’re valorising the sharing of art and using the language of communion through art; you’re pursuing aesthetic experience in conversation, in dialogue; you’re getting mileage out of art via unexpected encounters and the way it gives fuel for the soul in everyday situations. And there’s a sense throughout all your essays that no special expertise is needed for these experiences of art. They’re open to everyone. You only need a willing disposition and a heightened sense of one’s lot being cast with the rest of humanity.

I guess that’s the risk one takes (judging one another being our favorite pastime), but I’m glad you see an egalitarianism. It’s best to be Janus-faced in terms of art. Geoffrey Hill has a great quote on coming into the country of the blue, or the force-field of a work of art one can’t shake: “Whatever strange relationship we have with a poem, it is not one of enjoyment. It is more like being brushed past, or aside, by an alien being.” I had the same experience when first reading Christine Schutt and Gary Lutz some twelve years ago, or when first watching Bresson or Rivette. I dare say this might be the same response people have to people they will end up loving.

So, then, I wonder how you see your egalitarianism dovetailing with your gravitation towards beauty, the aesthetic construction of beauty. I’m working towards the second instance of your looking at beauty that really strikes me, so bear with me. Here we are in the #MeToo era, and I could imagine some readers of See What I See looking at your remarks on Michelle Williams and thinking this is a textbook case of objectification. And the book contains passages on lust, desire, sex, and so on, which might give weight to the complaint, if one were to want to embark on a point-scoring exercise.

I’m against hypocrisy in all of its immense to itty-bitty incarnations. If what I’ve done is objectify in the sense of degradation (and doing so would go against my principles), that is for someone else to judge, an invitation that never needs to be sent. I’ve attempted to be as honest as possible; yet, of course, I’m using my own language, which certainly has a knack to corrupt. With this book I have indicted myself and my own failings much more mercilessly and consistently than anyone else. This maneuver is very true to my forms, both in writing and in the world. The book is part-memoir and to make myself look good would be to lie. Many of my mistakes are in relationships—I think one would be hard-pressed to find people who, every time out of the gate, don’t fall in love with someone’s image of another, rather than the person themselves. I’m interested in flaws because I am a flaw.

Right. And if I were to come across a reader who disputed that—who, for instance, took issue with your interest in the beauty of Polley’s images of Michelle Williams, without registering your interest in Polley’s beautification of Michelle Williams via the artful creation of those images—I’d be inclined to point back to ‘All Naked, All the Time’, where you have this to say about the spaghetti meal scene in John Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence :

[The scene] contains close-up after close-up of regular guys, most of whom never appear in the film again. It presents individuals and it doesn’t judge or condescend to them, especially when Mabel’s pale white hands are splayed around Billy Tidrow’s round, black, beautiful, smiling face and she says, “I love this face. I love that face. Nick, this is what I call a really handsome face.” The actor is non-professional, the action is startling, accomplished so matter-of-factly, and for a few minutes one could cower at seeing race not being an issue.

Here’s your egalitarianism again, pointedly not gender-specific. You’re as attentive to Cassavetes’ artistic construction of male beauty as you are to Polley’s construction of female beauty, and as appreciative of it. There’s further evidence of this in your discussions of Polley’s framing of the attractiveness of the men in Take This Waltz, and in your impressions of the male characters in the films of Eric Rohmer and Stanley Kubrick. It’s elsewhere, too, including in the more explicitly personal essays. In ‘On or About’, for instance, you even investigate the origins of your artistic preferences in your younger years, where a sort of social ostracisation has its own origins in your body: “I went outside. I had a flicker of how I was being viewed by the others when trying to stand eagerly, but unable to be a party to anything. Myself: tall, very overweight, morose. Who did they see?”

Is this egalitarian approach to beauty the result of a conscious effort to extend your gaze to the aestheticisation of masculinity, to not only play the game of female objectification? Or does it come to you more in the reflection on art and the act of writing, without premeditation?

I think if all films and possible copies of films were obliterated, and aliens were only left that spaghetti meal scene from A Woman Under the Influence, humanity would be represented well. Watch how everyone, while still following up on instincts, is trying to be nice to each other. It’s this bizarre and sublime confluence of decorum and improvisation. I’m sure everyone has had these bejeweled moments in life where people just click with each other—and also that sometimes, someone goes too far and someone else gets mad. But the vulnerability is there and the key is Cassavetes, who said, “It’s when you’re really saying something that people can hurt you. When you’re not saying anything, no-one can hurt you”—wisdom the Buddha or Dante couldn’t have nailed better.

The whole thing is about vulnerability, and I assume that when you talk about male attractiveness, it is more the degree of vulnerability in them that makes them beautiful or pitiful, but mostly some mixture of the two. In writing about the men in these films, I’m probably writing about myself because I see myself in them, even poor and conniving Barry Lyndon. But that’s funny, because when growing up and first seeing the women in Bergman and Antonioni, I identified more with them, but simply because I hadn’t lived enough—plus, I eschewed males; they teased and made fun of me, while women and female friends gave me succor. So it was easy to swap in Liv Ullmann, Bibi Andersson, and Monica Vitti as my ideals and, even more, as the poster images for my anima, the unconscious feminine side of a man. Men are harder to talk about because they speak less, mostly keep their feelings inside, and often define themselves by their athleticism—which is like a psychological desert, for me, though A Fan’s Notes is pretty good. I don’t care how many miles you biked today. Speak what you feel, not what you ought to say. Vulnerability.

When you realize at the end of A Woman Under the Influence that Peter Falk’s character, who threatens to kill his kids, should probably be in an institution before his wife, you understand how chaos will come and come again. Maybe 1974 isn’t so far from 2019 as many people think. There’s much work to be done.

Can we use this as a good point to turn from cinema to literature? I’d like to make the transition by picking up on a couple of aspects from what you’ve just said.

First: “Men are harder to talk about because they speak less, mostly keep their feelings inside, and often define themselves by their athleticism.” This comment grabs my attention because it males me notice something I’d sensed but not seen in See What I See. Throughout the book, there seem to be a few major literary lodestars for you, whose work you read aloud in the presence of another person in a way that creates and sustains (or not?) a relationship. In prose, the two most prominent are Cormac McCarthy and Alice Munro. In ‘Living Words’, you say you’ve “read three of Cormac McCarthy’s novels to three different lovers”, and McCarthy reappears in the centrepiece essay, ‘Highlight’. Munro also gets a mention in ‘Living Words’ and an embodied reading in ‘Highlight’. But—significantly—the gender roles are switched: it’s the über-masculine McCarthy who you read to your lovers, and it’s Munro whose words you read aloud in an extended exchange with another man, in a friendship of extraordinary tenderness and sympathy. Why? What is it about these writers that lets you create bonds with these particular people?

Well, we were young and we had time. As to the difference in gender, it’s probably just a coincidence; plenty of Munro passed between women and myself. McCarthy’s last two books came out back to back in 2005–2006, a time of many transitions in my life. I think what is at the taproot of all of it is the human experience of people passing time in a much more ancient and imaginative way than just watching TV. To share a human voice with someone is an incredibly enriching experience.

I remember I was at this huge event in Utah many years back, with the friend in ‘Highlight’, and I’d brought along some books—Austerlitz, actually, and others. We were camping at 8,000 feet and people sat around talking, playing music, taking drugs, and falling in and out of love—and in the midst of a late morning, I just started reading aloud William Gay’s awful, violent short story ‘The Paperhanger’ to a few people. Then a few more people appeared and a few more—and pretty soon there were a dozen people. I don’t think the story had any great interest for everyone; people just wanted to be close to the voice that shared—one might say a few wanted to fit in or not be left out, but I think it was something much deeper than that. We all wanted to be together on some plane of electricity, which is often language or eros—and how often can you keep telling your own stories? We needed something to reflect on.

I would guess that’s why book clubs are so vital—or ‘salons’ that still exist. We have to know that not talking to each other is ruining civilization. And email is wonderful—hell, we’ve never met and we’ve made a whole book together—but there is the live-quality, the face to face, which has no substitute. That’s why I’m nostalgic for bars without TVs. Yes, people were drinking, but at least they were talking and watching each other to learn about themselves, not looking at their phones to sop up their minutes of vulnerability.

When it comes to Munro and McCarthy, I guess we are talking about age and time. I haven’t had the desire to look at Munro for some years and I think that has to do with the language—how it is not a musical feast as in James, Patrick White, Gass, and Hardwick. I’ve similarly relegated William Trevor. It’s accomplished, it’s adept, but that cycle of writing where one leaves things out to suggest more has run its course for me—I would include Carver in this, but not Schutt, because of her uncanny music. The only writer I’ve discovered in the past few years who does this in a much more interesting way is Penelope Fitzgerald, more in the later historical novels, with The Blue Flower as the zenith. There’s too much to read, but I want those things that take a pick-axe to my brain strata like Proust, The Cantos, Moore, Musil, Stein, Ruskin, Emerson, Valery, Dante. With McCarthy, I’ve read all the novels multiple times—and I would not hesitate to read Suttree again—but I guess we pass in out of writers. I believe in an email we were writing about McCarthy’s blind spot: women. Which is, let’s face it, a pretty big blind spot. To see women only in terms of Madonna, whore, or suicide is as ridiculous as his saying, in one of his interviews, that he didn’t get Proust and James because there is little death in them. When you read White’s Voss, you get Blood Meridian and Mrs. Dalloway—at the same time. That’s a much more interesting proposition for me. And Faulkner knew how to portray women much better.

Second: why does it seem that Wallace Stevens succeeds, where neither McCarthy and Munro have the power to last?

Stevens still entrances because of the music and because the images he created avoid any easy apprehension. He was keyed into something, a spiritual realm of creativity, that only a limited number of people ever access. His Cuban correspondent, José Rodríguez Feo, said it the best upon meeting him and observing, “I realized then that to him a piece of fruit was more than something to eat. ... It was good enough for him to look at it and think about it.” And the book of essays called The Necessary Angel is exquisite. ‘The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words’ essay is as important as Barry Lyndon and Gruenwald’s Issenheim Altarpiece in Colmar. It’s one of the few works of literature that could just as well be philosophy, telling us why language so supremely affects us.

So then, how much, finally, does sense matter to you? How much does it or can it attract your interest in a work of art—or compensate for deficiencies of style—to make the work worthy for you? In your appreciations of Gertrude Stein, Stevens, and in cinema Terence Malick, I get the feeling sometimes that words and/or images are enough for you—almost that you crave a literature of ‘pure’ word-sound and a cinema of ‘pure’ image-and-audio, with no regard for its making sense. Or would that be overstating it?

Narrative probably has to have some vestige of sense just by its nature. Maybe if something is too sensical, it is too staid, too TV-series like—and here’s where the executive or money-minded editor corrupts art, as in the case of Robert Gottlieb, editor of Gaddis’ JR, who obviously didn’t understand the book, and recently wrote, “The problem was... the book didn’t sell.” JR is arguably the greatest English-language novel since Beckett’s trilogy—does anything in the last fifty years top it? These are the forces for “sense” one fights. The words of Stevens and Stein, or the images of Malick, and let’s bring in Stan Brakhage: the made objects of these artists are enough, but only because they are grounded in the action of their personality clashing with technique—to return to that Hill quote above—where you find the alien objects after giving your personality to the art. And likewise in Gaddis’ “Compositional Self”, who he said is the self who endures all the revisions.

The clash of Malick’s personality with his technique is documented in a Jim Caviezel interview about The Thin Red Line: “One day Terry asked me, ‘What do you think of Sean Penn?’” Caviezel recalled in the Rosy-Fingered Dawn documentary. “I said, he’s a rock, one day you can go and talk to him, the next day you go up to him and he doesn’t even know who you are—that’s Sean Penn. When we were shooting that scene, Terry said, ‘Tell him that. Tell him what you told me.’”

You can see here how Caviezel uses the line, while keeping in mind that Malick likes to shoot a scene at least twice, once with and then without words (just blocking), as you can see Caviezel walk in twice. In this sense, the literal one, Malick’s personality creates the story, but also the form—he could see the antagonism (and more from Penn) between these two men (the real people, not just the characters) and then, in his improvisations, he knew what button to push. Look at the last shot of Penn’s shrunken face after this encounter—one can believe more than the character has been cut down to size, a testament to Penn’s acting.

This is not too far from the process in writing—for me and a few others at least. I think one asks oneself, maybe mostly unconsciously, what do you think of your father, your wife, about the friend who betrayed you—and then it just bubbles out, this communing with the Muse. How this ties into “sense” is like a chain reaction train crash that should ideally leave little visual carnage, because if all writing is autobiographical (I think it is) it is all transformed into beauty. In a sort of addendum to the book, in a piece I wrote on Korean director Hong Sang Soo (published just as we finished the book), I wrote this: “It’s incredible that artistic filmmaking can really have little to do with the story or the form employed, but all to do with the biography of the person in charge—the ‘what the artist has to say’ bromide.” That bromide is repeated by Ingmar Bergman in the book, and I believe for the past years I’ve been revising what I’ve always taken it to mean—that it’s really all about form and not content. Having something to say is not about having words of wisdom or even ‘wisdom’ at all; it’s how attractive the form is made to engage, move, and upset others. Shirley Hazzard wrote of Patrick White:

“Imputing ‘inspiration’ to novelists is as dangerous as discoursing on Nature with farmers: but each of White’s novels has been blessed and quickened with a center of narrative power—large meaning in which the author seeks to create our belief. Without at least some measure of this mysterious ignition, which is utterly distinct from ‘content’, the most diligently wrought book remains stationary and merely professional. White has always been able to command it in abundance: his novels, plays and stories are irradiations from related central themes in which the author participates no less intensely than his characters.”

One takes their personality out on the art, so it is transformed into the raw tools of the art—the film frame or sentences, Moore’s “radiograph of personality”. To get back to the beginning, those made objects are the form the personality takes after the escape. The form itself is the sensical matter, the narrative is something else—and as I say in the review of Gass’ Eyes, the sound is the story. So yes, the purity of word-sound or imagery, but only as it is nestled in that “mysterious ignition”, which, when you are in its presence, you might follow anywhere.

Greg Gerke is a Brooklyn-based writer who has been publishing short stories and essays for over a decade: his work has appeared in 3:AM Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Tin House, and many other venues. His story collection Especially the Bad Things, which Gary Lutz has described as a collection of “swift, swervy, nervous fictions”, is published by Splice. An essay collection, See What I See, will be published at the end of October; it has received advance praise from critics including Steven Moore, Curtis White, and Vijay Seshadri. Here, Greg spoke to me about his body of work and his inspirations, and then about his writing process—story by story, sentence by sentence, sound by sound.

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Let’s start with the big picture before we focus on each of these two books. Especially the Bad Things is a collection of short fiction. See What I See is a collection of what I’ll call essays, for the sake of convenience. But despite the difference in form, I’d say these two books absolutely go hand in hand. There are reverberations between them, or glances cast from one to the other. For example, in the essays, you’ll meditate on the meaning of a particular word, and then you’ll deploy it without elaboration in the stories; or perhaps, in the stories, you’ll describe a person or place, and then one of your essays will wave towards the origins of the description.

This isn’t really surprising, I suppose, since many of these pieces of prose were written back-to-back (or concurrently?) even if they ended up in different books, but it certainly gives the two collections a shared atmosphere when read together. Would you agree with this? What do you see when you look at them in each other’s company?

I guess time breaks down when looking at one’s work. Most of the short fiction was written a decade ago and many of the essays were done in the past five years. Some of the essays were written in concert with a rather large work of fiction that I mined to add to Especially the Bad Things. The final story in the collection, ‘Descant’, is one you might have been thinking of because the essay on the film Take This Waltz examines a Yeats poem where the word is employed. Those pieces were probably edited within a few months of each other.

Some of the best essayists, like William Gass, V.S. Naipaul, and Cynthia Ozick, use similar technical swerves in their fiction. Gass has a metaphor holstered for everything. Ozick has a particular fondness for the word “scorn”—I reckon it is in every book of hers, even in multiples. When I look at my two books together, I see two separate projects and two different life experiences, with the fiction probably being a stepping stone of awkward dimensions, leading to the essays. Two autobiographies I see, but they have served me and now they go to the slaughterhouse and I will never find them again.

You’re right that ‘Descant’ is one of the examples I’m thinking of, but there are a few others which I’ll come to soon. First, though, let’s look at your short fiction on its own...

You’ve been publishing short fiction for about a decade now, and a good number of the stories in Especially the Bad Things date back to the beginning of your efforts. If I’ve got the chronology right, you spent “a very grueling winter” in Brooklyn around the time of the global financial crash, and, as you’ve put it before: “I remember sitting on a bench in Prospect Park, looking at its Long Meadow covered in snow and ice, and writing some stories in longhand while gloved.” A lot of these stories come out of that period, but you’ve also published more recent material that isn’t in this book. How do you see your arc as a writer of fiction, looking back from the here-and-now to that bench in Prospect Park?

It was the second winter after the financial crash, but I’d just returned to New York and the job market had significantly changed, which is to say I couldn’t find work. So most of the stories probably do seem to have the specter of the starving artist writing through the turmoil, like Arthur Rimbaud was reputed to do, writing poems in a cold barn at night—at least he did so in that DiCaprio film, which is truth enough for most people. In terms of the arc, there are the hidden books and the disowned books—ghostly figures which stand haunting Especially the Bad Things—but nobody knows that except me, and I’m sure they wouldn’t care. If Marcel Proust found out they are going to publish some “newly” discovered juvenilia (and they are about to), he’d throw all of Paris’ madeleines into the scuzzy Seine—and maybe himself.

So, then, would you say that your practice has become more focused or more refined over the years since you first started writing these stories? When you reflect on this book, where do you see it fitting into the bigger picture of your work?

I would have to think my work has become more focused and refined because I know so much more now, but maybe that doesn’t translate into great art—see Wordsworth. I probably needed to write small in order to write on a larger canvas, though I don’t think everyone is like that. Especially the Bad Things is a strange book; not its contents, but its existence, its spirit. It’s had three titles—and I can thank you for giving it the best one for its present (and hopefully final) iteration. A very accomplished writer told me that the book, after its first published incarnation, would draw notice slowly and surely, the way unusual books do. That’s all I needed. Another friend says he writes fiction in order to talk about what he is reading, so I suppose one could say Especially the Bad Things is a book report on reading Lydia Davis—at least that way no-one will try to look for the autobiographical elements, which are usually a ruse to something much deeper and scarier than the everyday details of someone’s life.

“A book report on reading Lydia Davis”—I like that; and, in the compression of your stories, Especially the Bad Things certainly has that feeling to it. But there’s something else there, too, something darker than in Davis. I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but the word that comes to me when I try to pinpoint this darker undercurrent of your writing is envy. Maybe this is me blending the two books together, but you’ve got an entire section in Especially the Bad Things on the petty foibles and obsessions of luckless writers, all under the section heading ‘Scribblers’, and in See What I See you’ve got an essay called ‘Envy, the Unsuccessful Writer’s Friend’, where the word “scribbler” conspicuously recurs. Here’s what you say at the end of the essay, which I’m quoting at length because there’s something in it that I find so unusual:

Envy lurks. Out of the many writers I’ve met, there’s not one who hasn’t told of some other scribbler who gets too much attention. Envy transposes our base will so it can foster a cleaner living, though keeping many in an invisible debt. When we envy, we empower ourselves. Like love, envy connects and repels, and those who serve it often don’t know how much they cherish its buttered and unbuttered sides. Sand to hold and fire to touch—envy is more than the best bitter slap to our angled impression that any deed not searing our skin fails us and so is unworthy. If one unsuccessful writer counsels another to make friends with envy, imagine this command is just short of shouted.

Envy, in this reading, is something good, something productive: a source of fuel for a creative force. But it’s also something almost tender—you compare it to love, you define it as something to be cherished—rather than a bitter swill for someone to stew in. And you’ve said elsewhere that you wrote the story ‘My Brooklyn Writer Friend’ during that hand-to-mouth winter, post-crash, after attending a literary event that filled you with “envy, despair, and anomie”. So maybe I’m not wrong in saying that, in Especially the Bad Things, your characters are driven—sometimes towards haplessness, sometimes (but rarely) away from it—by a sort of loving envy.

It’s almost as if, whereas Lydia Davis’ characters often give in to disillusionment or anomie, yours don’t, or can’t. To become disillusioned would be to give up on their envy for others, and to give up on envy would be to atrophy their capacity for love, even if it is a hypothetical love for a status they don’t possess. There’s something both exhausting and darkly comical in that situation, which I feel is what brings energy to your stories. I’m not interested so much in the autobiographical side of envy conceived as “the unsuccessful writer’s friend”, but I’m keen to know why this particular feeling preoccupies you artistically. And what sort of twists and turns did your thought processes have to go through, to bring you to a place where envy becomes almost a virtue—and so to sympathise with characters who are moved by it?

I think the best way to answer this is to examine the word itself. The OED gives the most recognized sense of the word as: “The feeling of mortification and ill-will occasioned by the contemplation of superior advantages possessed by another”. In another dictionary, “aroused” is used rather than “occasioned.” Both words conjure the queasy, but for different reasons. In fact, the word used to mean “malignant or hostile feeling” and “active evil, harm, mischief”—seemingly, we’ve come a long way. Certainly, I think the reference to the philosopher E.M. Cioran in ‘Envy, the Unsuccessful Writer’s Friend’ is the backbone: “To venture upon an undertaking of any kind, even the most insignificant, is to sacrifice to envy”. Cioran’s epigrammatic style of focusing on places where the irreal sun of seeing things in only black and white doesn’t shine has been more than attractive, along with Emerson and Gass. Gillian Rose is a newer addition.

It’s natural to envy, so why not make peace with it? I’m talking in a very superficial way here—but I would say this preoccupation is my own offshoot of the hugger-mugger around Gordon Lish’s workshop. I haven’t studied with him, but I’ve been to a number of his “talks”; enough to have taken what I needed. I believe Cioran was a source for him, but to get back to the issue—turning envy into a virtue is really just my creative process, the fuse that drives the flowering of The Muse. In a similar way, when Lish says, “You start with what you are hiding or what scares you”, there’s no question of error, because you are on your own path, however clichéd that sounds. No matter what it is, it’s your world and you have the responsibility of making it beautiful. And here is where the criticisms of college-like “workshop” and New York-centric literary cultures (agents and publishers) fail: because it is your world, criticisms beyond the cosmetic—for example, “I didn’t connect to the main character” or “I don’t feel enough is at stake”—are pointless. If you start trying to please people or become more commercial, it will show, like walking with a broken leg. But if you are mobilized in your area, you are safe—not insular, but rock steady. I see Lish, Gass, Cioran, and Emerson as people on the same team—it’s all about language; the soul (of the writer) is revealed inside the sentence and the sound therein is the story.

So, in this description of your process—or what seems to be a direction of movement, a drive, rather than something so methodical as a process—I’m seeing two stages, two steps. The first is the movement away from conventional, away from conflict-driven narrative and “relatable” characters and so on. Then, the second movement is the movement towards sound, into the acoustics of language. And the second doesn’t necessarily follow from the first, so I’m interested in the connection between the two.

Would you see Samuel Beckett as playing an instrumental role in your movement away from convention? You haven’t written much about him, and stylistically I don’t see him as an influence on your work, but in another interview you’ve mentioned reading Beckett at a young age, on the advice of an uncle, and in See What I See you’ve got an uncle (the same uncle?) making a caustic, Beckettian remark about Louise Glück. Is Beckett the prime mover here, the explosion that propels you away from convention? Or is it perhaps your uncle?

Yes, I think it’s fairly accurate to define it as a drive rather than a process and this goes to the heart of See What I See and the two most important quotations there: Proust on the innermost self who produces the work, versus the superficial self who talks about art in drawing room conversations, and William Gaddis’ “compositional self”, which does the real work, the constant revising and editing. So before tackling your questions, I should say I must be speaking in this drawing room voice because I don’t know if the experience of making the compositional self can be spoken of dispassionately by the author of the work—except as the product, the book itself. That innermost self is a comet and once you try to take a picture of it, it might not appear in shipshape form again. This might be superstitious, but I do believe in the entity called The Muse—it’s not necessarily me, I’m just maneuvering the pen. And certainly the best scenario would be to nullify all of one’s biography and just have the books in its stead. And upon death, that’s the best hope in terms of the writing life.

In talking about the two movements, you are spot-on: they did happen in that order, but a decade apart, with Beckett pre-dating all of that. That same uncle was instrumental—I went to visit him in Boston when I was twenty-one and he handed me a stack of Beckett’s plays and fiction; Sam Shepard and Harold Pinter, too. There are probably writers who teach you how to write and writers who teach you what to write about. I would think that, for an English-language writer, Dostoevsky, Proust, and other foreign writers would belong to the latter camp, due to the fact that the fine-tuned music of their sentences or verse is absent and filled in by the translator. And maybe there are writers who are so central that they get absolutely buried in one’s geology; that’s probably where Beckett is in me, his great granite face can’t be seen. I suppose I wrote in two ways for a number of years: straight-laced realism and something more undefinable. So I think Beckett always remained in my substrata. Then, when I found Donald Barthelme, Gass, Stanley Elkin, Donald Antrim, and Lydia Davis, some non sequitur phone call scene from a David Lynch film occurred and my unconscious got juddered—and going back to Beckett years later, after reading those other writers in the interim, enriched the experience of Molloy and so on. I felt some recognition and some splendor, as the root system in world literature seems to get more understandable, vivid, and propounding, because Beckett not only sat with Joyce, he took dictation from him. And Ezra Pound made some uncouth remark to Beckett the first time they met—Pound spoke to Henry James—James met Flaubert...

And then, apropos the spoken word, in the form of taking dictation, tell me about the movement towards sound “The sound is the story”—that’s Gass, obviously, and Lish, and Gary Lutz. What is it about acoustics that moves you, that keeps the pen scribbling across the page or the fingers tapping at the keys? You could move away from narrative convention in any number of directions quite distinct from sound—imagism, abstract aphorism, Robert Burtonesque elaboration upon elaboration, anatomisation—so why is it this that gives you momentum

The Sound is the Story—many people I say this to push back. I’m not claiming everyone works by this methodology. Certainly, for all her glories, Alice Munro does not apply to this—her rhythms are more staccato; it’s her narrative time-frames that astound. In terms of acoustics, I would again point to The Muse. Hopefully, The Muse will keep providing me more and more refined chunks of text that will need to be revised and revised, but The Muse gets them onto the page with hopes to be more an earful or a mouthful, something that will obey its own inner dynamics when spoken or heard, even by the reader’s head, which moves over the silence of text but which we translate into the sound of speaking in our head as the eye laser temporarily records it for sense. As Gass writes, “By the mouth for the ear.”

And maybe here is another distinction between writers—the auralists versus those who are better kept in the head than the mouth. Gass was all about his works being made for the mouth—he also read them aloud when editing, something I’ve taken on. I would also put Elkin, John Hawkes, Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo, Ozick, Elizabeth Hardwick, Lutz, and Christine Schutt in this camp. For me, Gaddis and David Foster Wallace are almost exclusively aimed at the internal reader, and yield the experience of the brain clogging with Foster Wallace’s information or its attempting to make sense of the contrapuntals of three Gaddis novels that are primarily dialogue—punctation, ellipsis, and spacing are very important. Reading Gaddis aloud, one often has to tell the listener what is afoot visually on the page. Reading Foster Wallace aloud exhausts my mouth, he’s not good for balancing the chakras. Neither has those built-in holds for the reader to pause and let the listener reconnoiter. Henry James might be the only English-language writer who can belong to both camps equally. It’s in the mouth and it batters the head; reading him is like playing Rafael Nadal on clay.

I think an appreciation of poetry ties into my way of working. Certain snippets of verse are always wading in and out of the stream—the beauty of the most basic words passing keeps me sane and I often ponder Yeats: “Get all the gold and silver that you can,/ Satisfy ambition, animate/ The trivial days and ram them with the sun.” The language is writing’s medium more than anything, but I guess one would be hard-pressed to say whether the language or the story of the greatest literature is what propels it. One is a measure of the other. The Da Vinci Code might be a good story, but the language is execrable and so, for me, unreadable. After reading Stanley Elkin and Sam Lipsyte, I can hardly tell what the story is about—the language takes away any need to “know” in the traditional sense; it’s like listening to Bach or Miles Davis, just relax and let it move you.

Okay, so you’ve given me a lot of names of the “aural” writers who you respond to: Gaddis, Wallace, Elkin, Lipsyte, et al. That’s your catnip as a reader. What about when you’re writing a piece of fiction? The inner sounds...

Sometimes it’s easy to pick up on the sounds that are motivating you to write, because as I read your work it feels to me that you’re hearing a sequence of sounds in your head, in your mind’s ear, and finding words to notate them, almost musically, as in the alliteration or rhymes of some of your titles: ‘Denise, Dogs, and Me’, or ‘Bach, a Beard, Two Women’, or ‘High on the Thigh’. Sometimes, though, it seems more—I don’t know how to phrase it, exactly... Maybe orchestral? You have sentences that roll on, rising and swelling over five or six lines, and then a break—an emdash, maybe—and then two or three staccato phrases, chopping up the rhythm. Or it gives you sentences like the five or six that make up ‘Careful’, where the ending, the climax, is deferred and deferred and deferred by clauses and subclauses, until finally it lands with a punch. Are these, too, elements of the sound that you write towards—sounds of strings of words, beyond the words themselves?

In this case, the work is done intuitively before the reviser comes along, who tries to still leave some things to seem like they were improvised with that energy. But really it’s like a John Cassavetes film—all of it has been painstakingly scripted and the improvisations only seem so because the camera is blurring and shaky. I work on a section at a time in revision, a few pages, going over and over, then reading aloud, then going over and over again. The fiction book is kind of far away from me, so it’s easier to talk about the essays, but the process is no different: both are made of sentences.

I read the beginning of a long essay from See What I See, the Eric Rohmer piece, out loud in front of an audience some years ago. There is just something about reading in front of people that can’t be duplicated when alone or reading for one. Even if the listeners make no sound (most don’t) I can usually tell the temperature of the room—there are more ways of portraying silence than any other posture. So I could hear things wrong in the sentences, at least three major impressions for every minute I read. For instance, suddenly a word in the first paragraph sounded too much like one in the ninth paragraph—something I could only hear if I read out loud with many pillars of judgment before me. Too much friction, the number of beats was off—and this may lead back to Lish and how the reading out loud in his classes was key. In the best interview with him, by David Winters, he said, “The span of our life, if construed in relative terms, may be no longer than four beats. And if you say ‘I mean I think’, you’ve used those four beats to say nothing.”

As for alliteration and consonance and assonance—that pretty much comes as meted by The Muse. I never sit and wonder what d-word will go with dog—it comes in one slough. There is a lot of chatter about the plain style versus a more ornate, hypnotic, and vivid style. A lot of the literary scene’s current gatekeepers favor the plain style and many of the most promoted fiction writers have relaxed into it or chosen it—there is an unconscionable fear of alienating the reader in a good portion of that work, which also translates into not taking chances. There is less to say about someone who knows what to leave out—a maneuver I’m not sure is always a good thing. But then, why would something aching to be realized want to be left out? In Gass, as in James Joyce, Patrick White, and William Gaddis, there is a replete feeling, one gets to the heart of the sensation, no matter awing or foul, not by winks and nudges but by full orchestration—the Sistine ceiling itself, not a postage stamp size .gif on the internet.

So “orchestral” may well be the right word for it.

I think there might be something occurring that may be “orchestral”. It is how all of our experience and impressions get broken down into language. It seems as if something like ‘Careful’ and many of the short fictions—because they are one page or less—came in one clump and it was more a matter of when to cut out, when the rhetoric seemed to be getting out of hand. In the essays, one wants to convey a different sort of impression and so often the music is gentler and purling, a day in the country, but with allowances. The sound I use there may have been born out of accretion—reading Guy Davenport’s essays over and over again. The first sentence of his ‘Dictionary’: “Some years ago, on a particularly distraught evening, the drift of things into chaos was precipitated by my consulting Webster’s Third International for the word Mauser.” So much is going on here and it’s not all ornate or all plain but a synthesis of the two. It certainly is hypnotic. It could be the beginning of a Sherlock Holmes story, but it quickly becomes Kafka, with “the drift of things into chaos”—something so beautiful, you think Keats wrote it and you want more of that beauty, that voice. Then the humor of the ending, and ending on that particular word. Yet there is also the time frame—you find out things drifted into chaos before you know the source of said chaos. In Davenport and the others, one gets sentences which have it all.

It’s serendipitous that you make this point about Davenport’s sentence, that there’s a sort of cleft between the narrator and the reader: knowledge is withheld, so we’re conspicuously not all on the same page. Serendipitous, because this is a situation I notice prominently in your work—the difference being that you’ll have it between two characters rather than narrator and reader. By this I mean that your characters tend to inhabit the same space as one another, being in the same place at the same time and being involved in the same basic experiences, but their impressions of all those things—the way they interpret them, understand them, make them meaningful—are often not at all overlapping, so that your people effectively end up inhabiting different and irreconcilable worlds. Or different sides of a Venn diagram that will never overlap.

I notice this time and time again in Especially the Bad Things. It’s there, front and centre, in the first story, ‘The Wrong Things List’, but also in ‘Or So’ (which uses white space to emphasise the separation of the perspectives), in ‘Bach’, ‘Issues’, ‘Mother’, and with a twist in ‘Descant’...

That seems the best reading of the book I could ever imagine, Daniel. Thank you. It is certainly a dour book and one probably only possible at that time in my life. There is a Stanley Kubrick quote I often toss around: “I don’t think that writers or painters or film makers function because they have something they particularly want to say. They have something that they feel.” I think this should be emblazoned everywhere. So the feeling you describe—the no overlap—that is all the feeling, the mirroring of society or autobiography or what have you. I’m sure after being married and having a child that these feelings are ghostly vestiges that sometimes bubble up, but often revitalized or more fuzzy, as something else. Yes, writing is therapy—in this case.

I’m not sure I want to foist a worldview on you, but would I be on the right track if I said that in this aesthetic tendency—the repetition of this situation—there’s a hint of a broader philosophical or humanitarian outlook?

I think it’s too soon to say; I have a load of work to do. But I do recall walking in the forest with a friend, who turned me on to Cormac McCarthy years before, as we discussed McCarthy’s outlook—one I don’t truly jive with. But the beauty with which he renders that world—and I know it exists in certain pockets—is still quite fulfilling.

Well, but maybe there’s a fissure between one’s habitual outlook on the world and one’s conscious response to the outlook. In Especially the Bad Things, the corollary of the situation you return to again and again—two non-overlapping impressions of a shared experience—is that there’s a strong vein of pessimism running through the book: everyone is always alone, stuck in their own little non-reconcilable world, even when in company. There’s the outlook. But in spite of this, it’s striking to me that the pessimism of the situation isn’t matched by cynicism on the page, in the consciousness of your narrators: for all the irreconcilability of their worlds, your characters keep trying to reconcile with others, Sisyphus-style—not always gently or generously, sometimes trying to shove reconciliation down another person’s throat, but trying nevertheless, striving for an impossible connection.

I wonder: when you’re writing with an eye towards characterisation—which I know is not the primary thing you’re doing when you’re writing, but you shape your characters nevertheless—do you feel an urge to redeem them somehow, on some level? Or is it more about making sure that the prose leaves off with a certain tone—however minimal, an ascent rather than a plunge into greater darkness?

I think because the darkness is already there, at least for my money, there is no need to go into more of it. Though ‘Descant’, simply because it was written years later, does, and the book ends on a different note. I believe that, more than anyone else, John Cassevetes would sit on my shoulder during construction of the book, and his words ring especially true: “I guess every picture we’ve ever done has been to try and find some kind of philosophy for the characters in the film, and so that’s why I have a need for the characters to really analyze love, discuss it, kill it, destroy it, hurt each other, and do all that stuff. ... [T]he rest of the stuff doesn’t interest me. … [T]hat’s all I’m interested in... love”. And maybe because the characters are inside of what is so-called “flash fiction”, their characterization is very minimal. They aren’t even characters, they are words, and because words are so sparse they take on so much more weight, like in a poem. I might be in a minority of one in feeling this, but most of the book is full of “I”, “he”, and “she”—no names. The people are words and also feelings, thinking back to the Kubrick quote above—maybe they are just more parabolic. Whatever they are, I think by the fact of me being alive, I have no choice but to redeem them, but better yet, to let them keep searching for the truth, with all the power of that ironclad cliché.

One last question. You say: “I have a load of work to do”. And you suggest that this would take you in different directions to Especially the Bad Things, perhaps wildly so. What more do you have underway, or planned? What more are you hearing from The Muse?

Well, there is the aforementioned long novel—a few excerpts from it will be showing up soon in The Kenyon Review and on Splice. There seems to be a stream of essays on various topics that keep coming. Reading the poetry and essays of Geoffrey Hill has seemed to add another cog to the wheel, along with John Ruskin. I’ve only discovered Hill this year, but to me he is the most Poundian poet since Pound—the verse, not the politics. His critical essays, soaked in study of Baroque Era prose and the OED, Hopkins, and Coleridge, have provided more solace and study as I continually view askance our “current” moment in which language is so debased and pulverized it has become a fine-grain powder in the trails that people’s egos continually stomp. A key quote he keeps returning to from Coleridge: “For if words are not THINGS, they are LIVING POWERS, by which the things of most importance to mankind are actuated, combined, and humanized.” It seems we need a language refresher, and Hill and his ilk provide that. Ruskin, who Hill also leans on, I’ve been circling around for a while. His disquisitions on painting, architecture, stones, and social issues (in Fors Clavigera) are exquisitely packed in slow-release sentences that hypnotize.

Thomas Chadwick’s collection of short stories, Above the Fat, was published by Splice in the spring. Thomas splits his time between London and Ghent, and his stories often focus on luckless men drifting back and forth between the United Kingdom and the continent. Two of them are particularly notable: ‘Birch’ was shortlisted for the 2017 White Review Prize and ‘Above the Fat’ was shortlisted for the 2019 Galley Beggar Press Prize. As the publication of the collection approached, Thomas spoke to me about his inspirations, his writing habits, and his ambitions, as well as discussing the experience of putting together Above the Fat.

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I’d like to begin at the end of the process, with something that has come about quite unexpectedly for me: Hilary Mantel. The two epigraphs to Above the Fat were some of the last pieces to be added to the manuscript, and one of them is taken from Mantel’s novel Eight Months on Ghazzah Street (1988). I would not have picked her as an influence on you, least of all with that novel. Why invoke her?

I read Eight Months on Ghazzah Street a year or so ago and was very taken with it. It does what for me all good writing does, which is to force a character to question an assumption they thought was secure. I thought the line in the epigraph captured that in a very direct way—possibly too direct. It asks the character to seek answers in their most mundane day-to-day behaviour—heart, habits, limitations, fear.

The idea that fear can tell us something was particularly important. Fear is normally something to be shied away from, but in the act of shying away we can learn a lot. I put the quote aside and for a while it was attached to another project that hasn’t ever got going, but then, when I came to go through the stories for this collection, fear appeared to be central to a lot of the characters. In some instances the origin of the fear is relatively obvious: economic ruin, heights, flooding, grief. In others, it’s more naïve: finding trousers that fit, getting lunch. But in each instance, the fear is ultimately and hopefully a cause for self-reflection, whether the character knows it or not.

Does Mantel’s work mean something to you more generally?

It has come to mean a lot. I only started reading her novels relatively recently, perhaps four years ago. I’ll confess I’d been put off for a long time because of the noise around the Thomas Cromwell books. I’d studied that period of history a lot at school, and then again at university, and so I think I shamefully thought it had nothing to offer me. Then I saw Mantel speak and was struck by not only her insight and intelligence, but also how funny she was. I picked up a copy of A Place of Greater Safety (1992), her novel about the French Revolution, and from there I started working my way through some of her other titles.

What is it that resonates with you?

Two things in particular. First, her sentences. I feel like the sentences in her novels have been cherished. Almost as if they’ve been carried around in the palm of a hand for several weeks before being placed on the page. They are so well-turned that they can be read rapidly, but at the same time each sentence is freshly weighted in a way that makes it feel as if you are reading the words for the very first time. The second thing I value about Mantel’s work is its feel for history. Obviously this comes across most immediately in her historical novels, but I think it’s just as important to her more contemporary work. Something like Beyond Black (2005), for instance. The novel follows a psychic named Alison around the Home Counties in the late 1990s and is mostly set on a red-brick estate somewhere near the M4, but there is history on every page. It is in Alison’s childhood, in the ghosts she speaks with, and in the world the novel describes. One of the key events in the novel is the death of Princess Diana—a cause for much traffic along psychic paths—but also a moment in which history was forming quite definitely in real time. For me, Mantel’s work captures the sense of history’s weight on the present perfectly.

Well, this is something I’m keen to probe further: this difference in feeling between the writing of the stories (yours) and the experience of reading them (mine), and the way that the passage of time might account for it. When you reflect on them, I’m guessing you see a long process of development, each more recent story being an extension of your skills from the story that preceded it. But when I read them, I’m seeing them all as the products of a process that has already reached its culmination in this book. So take me back to the beginning with a quick sketch: your first itch to write short fiction, your first attempts, your first publication.

My first attempts at writing were all attempts to write novels. To an extent I don’t think that’s ever really changed. Even when I’m writing stories now, I still think of them as part of a novel or look for ways to bring them into whatever else I’m working on.

After about five years of trying to write novels and occasionally producing a short story, I started sending some of the shorter pieces to magazines. Most of them got rejected, but I think the process of receiving rejections was very formative. ‘Stan, Standing’, for instance, started life as a list of “one hundred things that happened to Stan on the way to his brother’s wedding” or something like that. I think I came up with about forty things, then left it. About a year later I did a reading of some of the longer items from the list and people seemed to like it, so I started trying to turn it into a novel. I ended up with a very long piece that had Stan doing all sorts of things on the way to his brother’s wedding, but it wasn’t really a novel or a story—so, again, I left it. Later still, I wanted to enter something to a story competition, so I took my long list of things that Stan did on the way to his brother’s wedding and cut it down to get it under the word limit for the competition. It didn’t get shortlisted, but I got an email saying it was on the longlist and now I had a piece that was much tighter even if it was still a bit too long for most magazines. I spent the next few years gradually cutting words from it to make it eligible for various competitions and magazines. I think it had about three or four not-quite-but-nearly emails before it was eventually published in Bomb, but the story got so much tighter and that was only from receiving rejection after rejection. So I suppose, in that sense, I came to short fiction sort of by accident, as a way to do things with long, baggy pieces that weren’t ever going to be novels.

So this was a couple of years ago, and then ‘Birch’ made it onto the White Review prize shortlist pretty soon after that. Did ‘Stan’ ignite a sort of creative streak for you? How did you get from there to ‘Birch’?

In some ways ‘Birch’ goes back even further. The background to the story is drawn entirely from a conversation I once had with someone about timber prices in the 1990s. The basic story is that as the internet took off, there was an exponential rise in demand for paper. This led to many trees being cut down to produce paper and pulp, which in turn drove down the price of timber. The market only evened out, I was told, when firms started planting fast growing trees—such as birch—to satisfy the paper and pulp markets.

I had this story in the back of my mind for several years before I got round to trying to write about it. There were two things that I thought were really interesting about it. First, it struck me as a good example of the materiality of the internet. The cloud is an inappropriate metaphor for the internet—James Bridle’s New Dark Age (2018) is excellent on this and many other points—and the story of the internet and the timber trade seemed to capture the, for want of a better world, real world effects of the web. Secondly, and this has become more pressing in recent years, the timber trade is a good example of the UK’s reliance on the wider world. The UK has not been self-sufficient in timber for several hundred years. Also because of the length of growing seasons in the UK compared to, say, Scandinavia, Germany, Russia, or North America, UK softwoods are not as strong as colder climates where growth is slower. So timber not only emphasised the materiality of the web, but also was a way into the web of international interdependence which, as I was writing about it, seemed to be overlooked.

The result of all these interconnections was an image of a man surrounded by a birch wood that he was patiently waiting to come to maturity. This image never made it into the finished story, but ‘Birch’ was my attempt to prepare the ground for that image, so to speak. In that sense, I wrote the version of ‘Birch’ that was on the White Review shortlist relatively swiftly, in two or three months, but the ideas had been forming for almost a decade, and I have documents going back years on my computer with little descriptions of a man surrounded by birch trees.

There is a lot more I could say about ‘Birch’, but I’m conscious that not everyone is as interested in the timber trade as I am.

You know, I wasn’t interested in the timber trade at all until I read ‘Birch’, and that cuts to the heart of what I admire about your work. It’s an article of faith for me that there’s brilliance to a story or novel when it can take a subject I have zero interest in and find a form that earns my interest. The interest comes from the form, in the first instance, which in turn generates an interest in the subject—not vice-versa. The same thing happens for me throughout Above the Fat, especially in the title story.

I want to come back to this topic of the UK’s place in Europe in a moment. For now, can you walk me along the path that led you from ‘Birch’ to the other stories: ‘Purchase’, ‘A Sense of Agency’, ‘Bill Mathers’, et al, up to ‘Above the Fat’? I notice that during this period you started moving towards shorter forms than ‘Stan’ and ‘Birch’, opting for 2,000 words rather than 5,000, but then you came back to longer work with ‘Above the Fat’. Why?

I actually wrote most of those stories before ‘Birch’. Of the group of shorter pieces that you mention, I think ‘A Sense of Agency’ was the first, and I remember working on that for quite a long time. It’s in the first-person voice, which I would hardly ever use now, so it feels like a slight outlier in some ways. ‘Purchase’ I wrote very quickly and the reason for its brevity is simply because I entered it into the Ambit short fiction prize, which had a 1,000 word limit.

‘Bill Mathers’ came a little later as a story, although it had existed as an idea for some time. My original plan was to create a Twitter feed from the perspective of the narrator, who would relate a new thing that Bill had said each day on the state of literature, angling, politics, et cetera. I decided that in order to not run out of material, I’d better have a bank of things that I could use, so I kept a list in a notebook. I never got round to putting it online, but I did find the notebook a couple of years later and decided that it might be easier to turn the tweets into a story.

What about the other stories? Particularly the opening and closing sketches: ‘A train passes through the Ruhr region in the early morning’ and ‘The Beach at Oostende on a December evening’?

‘A train passes’ also started out as a list, but again I don’t think I planned to write it as a story. I was on a train from Brussels to Dortmund in the early morning and I made a list of everything that I could see from the window. My plan was to use the list to help write a scene in a novel, but then it was published in Corda, which was set up in the wake of the EU referendum.

In a way, though, ‘A train passes’ did lead to the other two shorter pieces in the collection. When I was putting Above the Fat together, I wanted there to be some sort of thread that ran through the collection. Given that ‘A train passes’ is set in the early morning, it made sense to add a short piece for the end of the day – ‘The Beach at Oostende’—and something at lunch—‘Death Valley Junction’. Apart from these last two, though, all the shorter pieces were written between 2013 and 2017. I think ‘Birch’ taught me a lot about the sort of fiction I wanted to write, ultimately. The earlier pieces feel like scouts, looking for different paths, styles, ideas. I think in that sense they were experiments, although at the time I was just trying to write.

So let’s look at ‘Red Sky at Night’, the last long story in Above the Fat. It’s a story that came into being while we were putting this collection together; you’d already written the others, but this one pushed its way through while the editing process was underway. And, not coincidentally, it emerged against the backdrop of the Brexit negotiations-cum-debacle.

I like ‘Red Sky’ on its own terms and I also like its contribution to the collection as a whole. To me, it picks up on a recurring situation throughout the collection, and it represents both a culmination and a reversal of this situation. The situation is one in which your protagonists—all men—are simply stuck, stuck in one physical location, in England, while their memories and manic thoughts lead them to become unmoored in time. In the shorter stories, like ‘A Sense of Agency’ and ‘And the Glass Cold Against His Face’, your characters are literally placed in confined spaces. In the longer stories, like ‘Birch’ and ‘Above the Fat’, your characters waver between being stuck in England and feeling more liberated in Europe: in Sweden and France, respectively. In ‘Red Sky at Night’, Paul, too, is in a literally confined situation—almost barricaded into Patras, cut off from the rest of the world—and he yearns for freedom. But this time—and here’s the all-important reversal—your protagonist is stuck in Europe, so that England is the distant place, the site of liberation.

Well, I think all fictional characters are stuck. Even characters that seem quite liberated on the page are still stuck on the page. Maybe this is one of the reasons we like to read, because fiction acts as a mirror to our own terms of confinement. In everyday life we can travel and move and avoid facing up to things, but fiction forces its characters to confront aspects of themselves they would otherwise prefer to ignore.

In the stories in the collection, then, being trapped physically is a relatively clunky metaphor for the way the characters are trapped emotionally, with the added benefit that being stuck might help nudge the characters towards some form of realisation. I also think it’s a result of my limitations as a short story writer. There are writers—Lydia Davis, Georges Saunders, Italo Calvino—who can paint all the broad brushstrokes of narrative with a very small number of words. I find that the only way I can condense a longer story into a small number of words is to restrict the narrative to a very specific place and time.

That’s true, but it doesn’t strike me as a shortcoming. I’ve always thought of it as planned out, an intentional constraint.

It’s definitely something I learnt by trial and error. I remember writing ‘Stan, Standing’ and getting to a point where I set myself the task of writing a draft where Stan never leaves his own hallway. It was the same with ‘Above the Fat’, where I decided the whole story would take place in the time it took the protagonist to fry an egg. By the time I wrote ‘Red Sky at Night’, I’d set up my restrictions before I even started writing. There was never a draft where Paul wasn’t stuck in Patras.

But this story came about—an English protagonist stuck on the continent—after the Brexit referendum, during the negotiations. How did that context shape ‘Red Sky at Night’?

It’s impossible for it not to. At the same time, I think all the stories are shaped by it in some way. That context has been there for a long while—certainly for as long as I’ve been alive—and Brexit was a large part of British politics long before there was a name for it. For me the story that’s most closely related to the referendum is ‘Birch’, which was mostly written in the autumn of 2016, right after the result of the vote; I feel I was trying to make a fairly deliberate point about the UK’s indelible connection to Europe.

I’ll confess I hadn’t noticed that reversal in ‘Red Sky at Night’. I think part of what I was trying to do was take a character who was very comfortable with where he stood in the world and make him uncomfortable. For Paul, though, this is less to do with Brexit and more to do with climate change. I wouldn’t suggest that Paul was a climate change denier, but I think he is in denial about how comfortable he is about his perspective on climate change. It has, in a way, become simply another way of presenting himself to the world. What he discovers when he tries to actually act on his convictions and take the boat home, not the plane, is that it’s really difficult and it might be that he was simply using climate change to hide other bits of anger in his life.

Well, very much related to that: you’re obviously in a strange and difficult situation—but a creatively productive one, if Above the Fat is anything to judge by—in that you’re an English writer based in Europe at this particular moment in time, writing about both Europe and England in a way that recognises their intertwining. I can’t think of a lot of writers who are doing this right now, at least not consistently; Chris Power and David Szalay are notable exceptions, though they’re both still based in the UK. In any event, I wonder whether you feel a responsibility to write in this way, about these concerns. I guess I mean this: how do you answer the politics of your situation in your creative practice, without being didactic?

I moved to Belgium in 2015 and have been living in Ghent ever since. We moved because my wife and I both got positions to study for PhDs at Belgian universities. At the time we just thought of it as a bit of an adventure, the opportunity to study and travel and live abroad. About eighteen months after we moved, the referendum happened and suddenly our decision to relocate was cast into the midst of a wider argument about Britain’s relationship to Europe. In that sense, as our lives have become more intertwined with Europe, the UK has started attempting to disentangle itself from Europe. I think what’s become increasingly obvious is that that process of disentangling is quite difficult. Maybe even impossible. Someone once described Brexit to me as like having each country in the EU crack an egg to make an omelette and then having the UK suddenly demanding its egg back.

I feel like that same entanglement has been present in my own writing, and not just in Above the Fat. In 2014, I started writing a novel set in an apartment complex on the Costa del Sol. It was about two generations of English people who find themselves thrown together on their respective holidays. When I started writing it, Brexit wasn’t even a thing, but over the next four years, as I continued to work on it, I had to keep making changes to try and keep up with the cultural narrative that was starting to unfold. So, in that sense, an interest in how the UK and Europe relate has been central to my writing.

More recently, though, I’ve found myself drawn to writing about small west country villages very like the one in which I grew up, such as in ‘Birch’ and ‘Above the Fat’. I don’t think my interests as a writer have changed, but I do think that I’ve relocated them. What five years ago I thought I could explore by taking characters to Europe, I now think I can explore by taking them to places in the UK. Where before I wanted to examine how the UK might relate to Europe, now I’m more interested in finding out how Europe is already in the UK. In that sense I do feel a responsibility. I don’t think anyone writing today could not, but I also feel a responsibility to take the writing to places where it might not be comfortable, where perspectives might not be clear. The way that we consume media makes it very easy to live within bubbles or echo chambers. I think fiction has a responsibility to look beyond that.

It’s interesting that you’re working in longer forms now, after your earlier attempts at writing novels ended up deflating and gave you the material for your short stories. In a formal sense at least, you seem to be now arriving at your original destination of choice (twice!) despite the detours along the way. Can you reflect on the differences in process as you move from shorter to longer forms? What did you discover about the form of the novel vis-a-vis the short story, in the process of writing, that led you to reach the end of a draft?

Writing anything of any form—novel, short story, haiku—is a constant process of learning and discovery. In that sense, writing functions a bit like teaching. Few things force you to learn something as thoroughly as if you have to stand up and teach it. In the same way, writing about something forces you to learn far more about a subject than if you were to simply read about it. Unlike teaching, though, I feel that the process of learning with writing is very temporary. I know I must have learnt to write short stories, but every time I sit down to write one it’s a bit like starting all over again. Rationally, I know this is not true—there must be things I’ve picked up in the process of writing that I can bring to new projects—but every piece of writing feels like something completely unknown.

It sounds pretty desperate to say out loud, but I think that’s part of the challenge of writing. If there was always a pre-ordained shape and structure, the process and the product would be very different. But because there’s not, because every time you write you have to figure out a form, then you can produce something that you yourself never knew existed. So, in that basic sense, I don’t see a massive distinction between writing longer or shorter pieces. I still don’t really feel like I know what I’m doing and I still feel that I have to figure out what form the piece is going to take all over again.

Where are you now with your works-in-progress?

I finished a draft of the Costa del Sol novel a year or so ago, which I was working on during most of the time I wrote the stories that are in Above the Fat. I guess the most obvious distinction between stories and novels is that if you decide to change the form of a novel it can take a lot longer to produce a new version than with a story where—in theory—you can bash out a new draft in a few days. I’ve mentioned it before, but when I decided to change ‘Stan, Standing’ so he never left his hallway, I was able to make those changes over a weekend. With a novel you can’t do that. Or at least not if you have other things to do alongside it.

I’ve spent the last year writing a new novel about Big Cat sightings. I finished a first draft last summer, but realised before I even finished typing it up that I needed to change the whole thing. I’m still writing the new draft now. I don’t think it’s a source of frustration, though. When I’m working on a longer thing over a much longer period of time, it’s easier to see how the form should take shape simply because you’ve spent a lot more time with it. With stories, where my engagement with them tends to be more sporadic, it can be harder to see that. I spend a lot of time basically just copying them out again and again to try and figure out what’s going on. I once heard Kate Clanchy say something along the lines of how, when she finishes a story, she puts it in a draw and comes back to it a year later. I find that really useful. With novels you end up doing that almost by default, but with stories I find I have to engineer it a little more.

Adam Scovell is a writer and filmmaker from The Wirral. He is currently based in London, where he recently completed a PhD at Goldsmiths. Scovell has been writing about film and art at his blog, Celluloid Wicker Man, since 2012, and his work has also appeared in such publications as The Times and The Guardian. To date, he is the author of two books: the monograph Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange (2017) and, most recently, Mothlight, his début novel, published by Influx Press. In reviewing Mothlight for Splice, I called it “a dark little novel of unaccountable power... dense with disturbing ideas, textured by subtle shifts in mood, and exacting in the execution of its ornate technicalities.” Throughout January, I engaged with Adam via email to discuss his inspirations and practices.

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The tone of Mothlight is one of its most powerful qualities. It’s dark and sombre, and it comes through a combination of the imagery and the narrator’s descriptions of the atmosphere, the attention he pays to the colours of things and the arrangement of space. And the feeling of the tone doesn’t seem too far removed from the interest you’re best known for: folk horror. Did you set out to write a work of folk horror once you’d found your subject, consciously making a contribution to this subgenre?

No, I’ve wanted to generally get away from it. The closest tie-in to Mothlight in terms of theory is probably Hauntology—and even then, it’s more about the specific mechanism that Mark Fisher, in particular, set out for Hauntology, rather than the nostalgic music genre it has become in recent years. Mothlight is more psychologised than horrific.

Can you elaborate on how Fisher’s work informs Mothlight? Fisher writes that a haunting “happens when a place is stained by time, or when a particular place becomes the site for an encounter with broken time”. But in Mothlight it often seems as if places are “stained” by other places from other times, not always earlier versions of themselves, so that they overlap in hallucinatory ways. Were you aiming to twist or push forward Fisher’s concept like this?

I always come back to the binary of Fisher’s when he first tried to figure out the different relationships between past, present, and future in Ghosts of My Life, rather than his specific theories regarding haunting, at least in Mothlight. For Fisher, Hauntology is either something from the past recurring or remaining to augment the present, or some futurism not yet happened but which is already augmenting the present. Both of these are narrative devices, within the worlds of the work he discusses, but the trend in general Hauntology is to simply insinuate the presence of a world and create something supposedly from within it; the so-called sense of “lost futures” in particular.

I imagine that the epistolary novel could possibly work with the latter. But, in general, conforming to the latter rather than former binary often allows for a creeping nostalgia to enter the work, which goes against a lot of what Hauntology was about cutting through. So, in Mothlight, the sense of haunting comes in particular from the past, in the form of memories—sometimes my own—rubbing against the contained memories in the photographs used in the text. Place is important but more as an indicator of a collapsing sense of the past and the self; as if another person’s memories of such places are overriding the actual memories of the protagonist.

What about the prose style, and the way it contributes to the tone in conjunction with imagery and the narratorial perspective? There’s clearly a bit of W.G. Sebald in there, maybe some Teju Cole, but were there other models for Thomas’ voice? Where did it come from?

I think the majority of the voice techniques come from European fiction of the post-war period. Sebald was and always will be the biggest influence on my writing, but the main voice that dictated the OCD recursions in Mothlight was Thomas Bernhard. I don’t think I’d have the bottle to write fiction the way I do without having read him, and he’s probably the closest a writer has come to recreating my own “head voice”. In particular, the way Bernhard uses repetition to lock you into the tics and worries of his narrators is really quite astounding, and you can definitely see what Sebald took from his writing as well. Teju Cole was another influence, generally. I love how he is building on the use of the photographs within prose, as well as his mental and physical meanderings. I loved Open City, and reading one of his essays on Sebald from Known and Strange Things whilst in Strasbourg created one of the most uncanny reading moments of my life, though I won’t say why.

What’s interesting about these techniques for creating the tone is that they’re all interleaved with the material on entomology and lepidopterology. What drove your research into this area?

I’m by no means an expert on moths at all, but they were definitely one of my first interests and a lot of moth-themed parts of the book needed only clarification rather than research as it was all embedded within me from childhood. An entomologist was the first thing I wanted to be, and I still absolutely adore moths in particular. My Christmas present from my father last year was a beautiful print of an illustration by a wonderful insect artist called Richard Lewington. It was of a poplar hawk moth, which admittedly was a bit of an eerie coincidence considering that my father still hasn’t read the book yet and doesn’t know of the significance of that moth in Mothlight.

So, then, was there ever a risk, in your judgment, that the research material you did rely on would overwhelm the rest of the novel? Did you have models for striking a balance between research and narrative, too?

Yes, I love books that balance theoretical writing and fiction anyway. It probably comes from Sebald and Bernhard, but also on feeling a likeness between the stories of Jorge Luis Borges and the writing of someone like Jacques Derrida, in which they both spin you round with words and ideas until you’re utterly dazed. I think the writing I generally like is being referred to as theory-fiction these days; those writers who refuse to adjust their techniques and perspectives of their works to suit one or the other. I suppose Mark Fisher partly comes under that in some sense, though so do other writers whose work I love, like Julia Kristeva, Georges Perec, Roland Barthes, etc. I imagine my leaning towards this will be more apparent in my next book, which mixes theory and fiction a lot more openly.

Can you say more about the direction you’re taking with new work? Given that you’ve started off with a novel that pushes its form in such unusual directions, where do you go next? Do you abandon the first-person voice, or go for a broader cast of characters, or move differently through time—or what?

I think I’m simply going deeper into that form through examining those parameters of voice, especially as photographs always seem to open up new pathways down which a narrative can go and whose perspective we eventually see it from. The next novel is dominated by another manic, melancholic narrating voice, but it’s interspersed with fragments of academic history, real and fake, that seem to be the research about Strasbourg that the character is undertaking as a replacement for the mourning of her father. The first-person voice evolves further in the next one, too, in that it switches between two very different types of anxiety within the same person; the younger voice is dealing with the horror of the past and the fantasies that revolve around it, and the older voice is looking back on the places where those bad things happened, through the broken prism caused by such events. Mothlight is only the beginning of pushing those voices to the edge.

Would it then be right to say that your work-in-progress represents an extension of Mothlight, by virtue of its beginnings in narrative voice? Mothlight seems to have had an image-oriented genesis, developing from things in the world, a collision of inspirations, but it sounds as if the process of writing Mothlight involved honing a voice which has now sparked the development of a new one...

Yeah, that’s partly right. The writing of Mothlight forced the process to be honed in regards to both the responses to the photographs and the techniques of the voice locking you into its world. I won’t say much about the next book for now, but I found it necessary to focus on voice as the next book is less autobiographical and doesn’t have the experiential elements that helped with writing Mothlight, I actually went out around Strasbourg in character, walking and walking for months until things began to be noticed, things such as buildings and plaques, or until conversations genuinely sparked up or were witnessed. I’ve basically acted out a vague version of the next book so that its base retains that sense of authenticity naturally present in Mothlight due to the real memories that underpin the story of Phyllis and Thomas.

That’s fascinating—like the literary equivalent of method acting. And it makes sense that that’s something you would do, if you didn’t have the same base of memories to work with as you did when writing Mothlight. Does this mean that there was something cathartic to the writing of Mothlight, if it involved discharging banked-up memories? Or is there something cathartic about it when you reflect on it as a completed work?

The real catharsis came from dealing with my move from Merseyside to London, more than anything else. In the early stages of the research and collecting the photos together, I moved from Liverpool to South London as my PhD transferred. As I’d lived on Merseyside my whole life, it was a pretty big tear—so much personal stuff collapsed around it that I can’t quite believe it all happened in around six months—and so the best way I found to navigate it was to put my characters in a similar situation, where they’re constantly and exhaustively drawn back and forth between north and south, physically and mentally.

It was certainly a little mean on my part, but there was something in making the characters go through those motions that made me feel less alone in that moving process, and I was soon a lot happier. Thomas, on the other hand, is always haunted by the potential of somewhere else and what it could perhaps mean to his own being; there’s a reason why he’s named after the character from Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up. I look back on Mothlight now mostly as a bridge between places and states of mind. But it’s good to look back and be on the other side of that bridge.

Sam Thompson is the author of two novels, the Booker-longlisted Communion Town (2012) and, most recently, Jott (2018). Jott depicts a friendship between two men finding their places in the world, in the socially conservative Britain of the 1930s. One of them is a psychiatrist with his own deep anxieties; the other is a writer of highly stylised Modernist fiction. Intriguingly, both of them are based on real people: the psychiatrist, Arthur, is a version of Thompson’s own grandfather, Geoffrey, while the writer is a version of Geoffrey’s sometime friend, Samuel Beckett. As he explained in a blog post for the London Review of Books, Sam Thompson developed Jott out of a series of letters exchanged between Geoffrey and Beckett, and over the last month he generously set aside time to talk to me about his process and the end result.

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The friendship you depict in Jott has its genesis in your family history, as you wrote in the article you published on the London Review of Books blog. But what about the genesis of the novel itself, the beginning of the writing process? Were there family legends or anecdotes that you knew about before you read Beckett’s letters, which maybe gave you the sense that there was a book to be written here? Or did you not really become aware of the possibility until you had the letters in front of you?

It was both. I always knew about the Geoffrey-Beckett friendship, and I became interested in the story when I got into Beckett’s work after reading Waiting for Godot (1953) at school—though I had no notion of writing anything about it at that stage! Later I did have a hovering feeling that something was waiting to be written, but it was when I looked at the letters that I started to see a way of going about it. I think the intriguing thing was the gap between the story of Geoffrey and Sam as I knew it from the family, and the story that was implied by the fragments of information in the letters: there was a whole hidden space there to explore.

In exploring this “hidden space”, why the decision to fictionalise the two men? Is it mostly a license to be speculative?

I never really decided to fictionalise the two men, because to me they were always fictional characters through and through. The book worked from real-life models, but I had no interest in being speculative, if that means speculating about what might have happened in anyone’s real life. The Geoffrey-Beckett story was the seed, but it wasn’t the point. In the writing of it, the book actually felt speculative more in the way SF is speculative: starting with something we recognise and extrapolating it to a fantastical place.

Were you conscious of contributing to a minor trend in contemporary literature? Jo Baker fictionalised Beckett in A Country Road, A Tree (2016), and a version of Beckett appeared again in Alex Pheby’s Lucia (2018). What’s your response to writing on a similar wavelength to these books?

You know all those ‘punk’ genres in SF—cyberpunk, steampunk, dieselpunk and so on? I like that terminology because it captures how fiction can take a certain setting, with its associated sensibility, paraphernalia and preoccupations, and work it up into an aesthetic which becomes an end in itself. Writing Jott felt that way to me. The whole business of writing á clef was really just an excuse to get inside an atmosphere and invent a world. So maybe that’s the nature of the kinship with A Country Road, A Tree and Lucia—I wasn’t conscious in advance of joining in a trend, but maybe Jott belongs to the micro-genre of Beckettpunk.

That’s an interesting idea, and thinking about Jott in this way gives it a new relationship to Communion Town. At first the two books seem quite distinct—Communion Town is built from a variety of styles and genres; Jott is comparatively more sober—but if Jott is read as an experiment in a fledgling genre like “Beckettpunk”, then there’s some more continuity between them. How did you feel yourself relating back to Communion Town as you wrote Jott? Breaking with the past? Building on it?

I think that’s just right about the continuity. The books look very different, but on the inside they have plenty in common. As you say, Communion Town is overtly a patchwork and an experiment, whereas Jott comes across as something more like straight-up lit-fic modernist-flavoured lyrical realism, but one thing I learned in writing the two books was how superficial distinctions like that are. The design of Jott looks more conventional at a glance, but inventing that structure was at least as difficult and as experimental as putting Communion Town together—and it was just as much a matter of playing with styles and genres, notwithstanding the fact that Jott is set in a less obviously fantastical world.

And then you also find that certain obsessions carry over from one story into another, whether you intend it or not. In Communion Town there’s this ghostly ‘flaneur’ figure who wanders around the city, and is a sinister presence because he embodies a kind of unknowable story, or a story that can’t ever be told. He came back in Jott in the shape of William Walker, a psychiatric patient whom the protagonist Arthur is trying and failing to psychoanalyse. Arthur is haunted by the fact that Walker’s reality is completely inaccessible—he is the story that can’t be told, and, as in Communion Town, he’s the dark space at the centre of the book.

So it seems to me, anyway—although this may all demonstrate how things that loom large for a writer don’t always match up with the reader’s experience!

What were the challenges of “inventing the structure”, exactly? You mention positioning Walker as the “dark space” at the heart of Arthur’s story, and with that relationship in mind one can see more easily the very delicate, almost contrapuntal positioning of Arthur and Louis and their interactions. But many of the signifiers of structure (transitions, breaks, juxtapositions, etc.) are so quiet and unobtrusive, so graceful in their movement, that the whole thing gives the impression that its structure came along effortlessly. What labours are being obscured here?

I’m glad if it looks effortless! The tricky thing was making a smooth, simple surface with a lot of hidden movement going on underneath. The book comes in five acts, each one set over a few hours, the five of them spaced across about two years, each with many years of past time folded into the present. It took some experimenting to make that work, and I suspect I may have just ended up stealing Virginia Woolf’s method from Mrs. Dalloway (1925)—what she called her “tunnelling process”, of digging out her characters’ lives as if they were “beautiful caves” that finally emerge into the light of the day on which the story takes place. I thought about that idea a lot when working on the structure, anyway, and found it very useful and inspiring.

In a way this goes back to Communion Town, again. In that book various voices tell various stories, and the idea is that they’re mutually incompatible—they belong to different genre-worlds, and so the city forms itself from tales that exclude one another but nevertheless have to coexist. In Jott, everything is held inside Arthur’s perspective, but the idea of conflicting and contradictory stories was equally important—it was my way of thinking about how the characters struggled with one another, or found one another mysterious. So, for example, Louis has a bitter, contemptuous view of Arthur’s relationship with Sarah, and Arthur has to find a way to free himself of that story and make his own account of what his marriage is like. And Walker is at the heart of this, because he’s such a riddle, and because Arthur and Louis read his story in such different ways. For Arthur, Walker is very sick and needs to be cured, whereas Louis doesn’t see him as in need of help or pity—he admires him, and even envies him a little. So all these stories flow along under the surface of Arthur’s consciousness, and I hope that as they interfere with one another they create the hidden drama of the book.

Another aspect of this is that Louis is a writer of quasi-Beckettian, would-be-modernist fiction. So here was where genre and pastiche came in: threading Louis’s writing through the text, and showing his style evolving over time, was a nice way of working in some contrasts of style, but it’s also a way in which Louis imposes his version of things on Arthur. He takes his friend as a kind of raw material and tells a story that Arthur finds almost unrecognisable as an image of himself, but with which he somehow has to reckon.

You describe the Beckettian prose in Jott as the product of pastiche, which it certainly is. What it isn’t is a parody of Beckett, though it easily could have been. How did the writing of these passages differ from the writing of the rest of the book? Did you have to rely heavily on Beckett’s work, or refer back to his texts, to make sure you were walking a straight line with it?

I did read and re-read Beckett a lot, especially Murphy (1938) and some of the shorter prose texts like First Love (1945) and The End (1960). As you say, the idea was never to write parody—Louis’ writing may be a travesty of Beckett’s, but it isn’t an exaggeration for comic effect. It was more that the pastiche was meant to create a sort of parallel-universe body of Beckettian writing, and by doing so get into an intimate conversation with Beckett’s work. You find out a lot about a book by pastiching it, and in a way Jott brings itself into being by arguing with aspects of Murphy—things to do with mental illness, or relations between women and men, or the attractions of solipsism. And in a simpler way, it draws a lot of its energy from Murphy’s bottomless well of bleak laughter. Jott is set as much in Murphy-world as in, say, “the 1930s”—though it’s not entirely set in either of those places.

And how did it all end up in print through John Murray Originals? It has been reported the manuscript found its way to Christopher Priest, who acted as its agent. Can you say something about how that happened, what he saw in the book, and how the editorial process played out afterwards?

I got to know Christopher Priest after I sent him a copy of my first book back in 2012. Chris and his partner, the writer Nina Allan, are models of what’s sometimes called literary citizenship: deeply committed to the work of writing, deeply serious about the importance of fiction, deeply generous in their support for fellow writers. Although Chris has been a friend and mentor to me ever since Communion Town, I only learned that he has a sideline as a literary agent after I found myself in need of representation for Jott. He had read the book and believed in it, so he offered to take it on. That was one bit of very good fortune I had with Jott; the other was that Mark Richards, the excellent and adventurous editor who published Communion Town, wanted this book too.

I had thought the text was more or less finished when I sent it to Chris, but I ended up having important conversations about it with him—and with Nina, and, later on, with Mark—all of which helped it to reach its final state. At one stage I did consider (in the words of Grace Paley) enormous changes at the last minute! I came to feel that the book was so preoccupied with the difficulties of entering into other people’s points of view that it needed to follow through on that idea and break out of Arthur’s perspective—so, very late in the drafting, I added extra sections told in Walker’s voice. I briefly felt it was vital to do this, but when I looked at it with a cooler head I realized I was trying to make my story do too many different things at once, and those sections didn’t belong in Jott. No writing is ever really wasted, though: I made discoveries by writing in Walker’s voice, and I have a suspicion that those discarded sections may be the beginnings of a whole other book, sooner or later.

March Nash is the author of five collections of flash fiction and four novels, all of which, according to his bio, “look to push narrative form and language”. His latest novel, Three Dreams in the Key of G, certainly fits the bill: in reviewing it for Splice, David Hebblethwaite called it a book that “feels like an intervention” and aims “to shake up conventional notions of what a novel can be”. Nash also contributes frequently to literary discourse in other ways: blogging (for a decade) at Sulci Collective, tweeting daily, and regularly sharing video discussions of recent books on YouTube. In recent weeks, Marc Nash generously set aside time to talk to me about the writing of Three Dreams in the Key of G, his interest in experimenting with language, and the process of getting his novel into the hands of readers.

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Let’s kick off with something notable about the title: the assonance, four rounds of “/e/”. This seems to be a signal to the reader, before page one, that Three Dreams will be a novel that relishes prosody and the possibilities it opens up: rhyme, wordplay, double entendre, and so on. How do these elements of style become part of your writing process?

I think about words a lot. Words that fail, that don’t quite convey the meaning I’m after (oh, for the German language’s facility for compound words); words that have more than one shade of meaning, and my attempting to suggest both meanings within a single usage in a sentence; and as you say, prosody, the sounds of words, puns, lexeme echoes and so on. I like using words in unexpected contexts, in sentences where you wouldn’t expect to find them. I like veering between high and low vocabulary, from scientific or words with august roots in ancient Greek or Latin, through to street slang or online speak. And when I say ‘like’, I mean that that tends to be my focus in the writing.

Because I’ve written a lot of flash fiction, fiction of 1000 words or fewer, I’ve written stories sometimes riffing off a single word. So a single word can prompt a whole chain of words in its wake. The words lead me. When I write, I don’t think about plot or character so much as voice and language. Character is fully contained within voice, so that takes care of that. And as for plot: again it comes back to the voice, what it’s saying and how it’s saying it.

How spontaneously do opportunities for wordplay arise as you’re writing? Or do you have a selection in reserve, to work into the prose when the time is right?

I’m not drawing from a preset stockpile, although I admit that in the editing stages I’ve often replaced a word with a better word I may just have come across—as long as it fits. Sometimes that can involve thinking about the word’s origin—is it Greek, Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norman French, or a colonial loan word?—so I may feel that its origin makes it inappropriate in that particular instance. And it’s very much a gut feeling, the writer’s reflex, rather than a matter of following hard and fast rules. My editing process is pretty unconventional, too. Most writers reduce their word counts through editing that tightens up the prose. I usually find some new riffs I hadn’t seen earlier, so my drafts expand the word count.

If you’re thinking less about things like characterisation than about style, how did the three distinct characters in Three Dreams come to you?

For me, a novel idea first comes together when I have the central image or theme and the narrative voice, and those two elements cohere. In this case, the metaphor was one of misprints in human DNA reproduction (and therefore alphabets and ‘wrong’ letters/spellings). That led to the human genome being given voice, but I also knew I wanted to contrast that with an actual mother observing the development of her children (nature versus nurture) so there were two female voices in place. And then I knew it had to involve three voices, to echo the triad of female archetypes—be it Virgin/Mother/Crone or Mother/Madonna/Whore. Somewhere out of that last idea emerged the third voice of the Crone.

Can you linger a little on the moment when you found the voice of the human genome? Giving the genome a voice is a crazy idea, at least in the abstract. Were there times when you doubted whether it was something you could work with successfully?

Well, while there are always doubts, I also have an adamantine trust in language to get over any humps. Getting the voice right, which naturally involves language, is the key. In the case of the genome, this came down to the little paragraph headers, combinations of the four chemical base letters C(ytosine), T(hymine), A(denine) and G(uanine). These could spell out tone-setting little words or acronyms, as well as delineate the different sides/characters and voice of the genome, which—as you say—doesn’t follow the normal laws of characterisation. This device also allowed me to drill below the level of sentence and word as the unit of the novel and hone in on the unit of the letters.

Right: it’s something that operates at the most micro level of the book, but its possibilities for recombination flow upwards to other levels—in the structure of the story of Jean Ome, for example, which continuously reconfigures itself as Jean’s journal entries are presented out of sequence.

But what about the two female characters? There’s no getting around the fact that both of them are female, and that they each have lots of things to say about femininity and masculinity with regard to violence, parenthood, sexuality. What was your internal monologue like, as you tried to navigate the minefield of gender politics while writing these sections?

The considerations of a male writer grappling with female characters, and annexing creativity and even childbirth itself, only bit in once I finished the book and was thinking about how I’d talk about it and market it. During the writing it really wasn’t much of a factor, again partly because of a trust in words, but also the personal material of being the main child-rearer of twins. I did that Piagettian thing of observing their development as part of my parenting and, unwittingly, that provided good source material. I’d also studied the transactional analysis of Melanie Klein and D.W. Winnicott at college, so that provided the theoretical frameworks too.

I’d thought about gender and read a lot of feminism twenty years ago, and things like #MeToo shows that nothing significant has changed in society in a practical way. I didn’t have to reread my feminist texts for writing this book.

And once the book was in a state of completion, it found its way into print with Dead Ink. How did that happen? Obviously Dead Ink has a subscriber base which provides advance funding for its publications, but how did Three Dreams receive backing?

Dead Ink put out a call for full manuscript submissions, and when they’d got enough that they were interested in publishing (about ten, I think), they applied for Arts Council Funding for the whole thing and were successful. Mine was one of those chosen. The books were to be spread out for a year, and initially each one would have its own crowdfunding drive, but the schedule got backed up and mine was in a bundle of five for a crowdfund in August 2017. You could pledge either for individual books, or for bundles of three or all five. I’m not a fan of crowdfunding books myself, and I’m not sure it’s something that Dead Ink will go ahead with from here, because hopefully the business has moved on to the next level as a publisher and doesn’t have to rely on crowdfunding.

How did the editorial process play out, especially given your tendency—as you mentioned earlier—to grow your books during editing?

Fantastic! Nathan [Connolly, Publishing Director at Dead Ink] said that as I had my own style, he was pretty much going to leave Three Dreams as written. He said he’d commissioned all ten works on the basis of what was submitted, so he didn’t foresee huge rewrites on any of them. The only subsequent edit was the copy edit, where some in-house style guide standardisation was brought to bear on my manuscript, which involved an awful lot of discussion about commas. As I’m not either Harold Pinter nor Samuel Beckett, plus it was late in the day and close to going to print, I didn’t argue comma by comma.

Finally, what do you make of the response to Three Dreams so far? It was called in as a shortlist entry for this year’s Not the Booker Prize, although it didn’t score many votes, and Sam Jordison seems to have put his finger on the dynamic between the book and its readers when he pointed out how uncompromised it is—and uncompromising. What has the response been like from your end? More critical or more engaged than you expected?

I didn’t really have any expectations going in. I just write the books I want to write—try and meet the artistic, intellectual, and literary challenges they pose—and once I’ve finished I move on to the next one to be written. Although, of course, when a book is published, you have to get your head back into it for the marketing push. Three Dreams was written a while ago. The time from acceptance by Dead Ink to release was a good two years (a year between the crowdfunding and release) and I had written another novel in that period which was where my head was when Three Dreams came out. Obviously, being called in for the Not the Booker shortlist was a huge help in terms of exposure and having people aware of the book’s existence. It was also totally unexpected, but then everything is anyway.

Those readers who’ve said that the book isn’t for them—I totally understand that response. Those who’ve discussed its themes and style have revealed things to me about my own book that I wasn’t aware of, things that had crept in subconsciously. It’s always a delight when that happens. I believe it’s important to never underestimate the reader, so I think I can be uncompromising (except for the style guide edit!) and just see how readers fare. I’m just going to offer you these words from William Burroughs: “in my writing I am acting as a map maker, an explorer of psychic areas, a cosmonaut of inner space, and I see no point in exploring areas that have already been explored”. Apart from the comma before the ‘and’, I agree with this approach entirely.

Helen McClory is a prolific writer of flash fiction and short stories, as well as a novelist and an advocate for overlooked works of literature. In reviewing her two story collections for Splice, I called McClory a distinctive writer who “survey[s] the stuff of folklore and mythology and weav[es] it into serious fiction with vivid imagery and poetic flair”. Throughout the summer, following the publication of her most recent collection, Mayhem & Death, Helen McClory generously set aside time to talk to me about her work, her interest in different literary forms, and her plans for the future.

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You have a really interesting, roundabout relationship with flash fiction. You’ve said in interviews that you wrote your first collection of stories, On the Edges of Vision (2015), after you’d written your novel Flesh of the Peach (2017), as kind of an exercise in creative fun. Now your new collection, Mayhem & Death, ends with a novella that is considerably longer than all the other pieces in the book. So it seems like your approach to flash fiction doesn’t just come from a devotion to one form of literature; it’s also shaped by your involvement with other, longer forms which you’re equally skilled at. Why keep going back to it, then—unjustly under-appreciated as it is—when you know you can do amazing things with forms that attract more respectability, and more readers? What does it give you, creatively, that longer forms don’t?

I’ve never thought about this before: why return to flash? I think that’s because ever since I discovered it as a form, flash has felt right, the right use of my tendency towards hybridisation. There’s something between the dog and the wolf about it: the poetic prose, but not prose poetry, able to shift into direct, more traditionally realistic modes, but then swiftly about-face and become wild again in a moment.

Longer forms don’t have that specific quality. A novel drifts through its moods over years, a big galley ship. A novella is an exercise in staging a set and following the story through to its end. Flash fiction shivers, mutates, blooms in its tiny space. I don’t know what I’m going to write when I set out to do it. I hope that the fluidity and experimental feeling of it is transmitted to the reader, too.

It’s amazing to hear you put it like that, because that is exactly what it’s like to read your work, and not just your shorter work. Flesh of the Peach does have a meditative, drifting quality; the novella ‘Powdered Milk’, which concludes Mayhem & Death, feels like a narrative set on a stage with the walls closing in; and your flash stories have the vibe of one-off experiments, a fresh start each time.

Just thinking back to On the Edges of Vision for now, can you elaborate a little bit on how you conducted your experiments? It’s easy to read something like ‘Ipseity’ as a piece of flash in the full sense of that word, conceived and executed swiftly, because of the way it undercuts its own scope. But it’s a bit harder to read ‘Pretty Dead Girl Takes a Break’ in the same way, or ‘Sexually Frustrated Mermaids’. The ideas behind these stories seem like they’ve been mulled over for a while, even if the stories themselves are brisk and pointed.

So is it the case that you sometimes sat down with just a single image in mind and tried to build an impromptu story from it, to see where the writing would take you? Or did you more often use the formal constraints of flash to give a sense of immediacy and urgency to ideas you’d been sitting on for some time?

Hmmm. A little of both, as every writer brings their life experiences, outlooks, peeves, and admirations to what they write. ‘Pretty Dead Girl Takes a Break’ is a good example. With that story, I really did just sit down and write in a flurry, so the actual writing of the story took maybe twenty minutes, but what led up to that point were decades of exposure to the misogyny of crime procedurals (and in particular, watching the first season of True Detective). I wouldn’t say I had a didactic mindset when I wrote it, but the personal is political and writing is political, and feeling the personal aspects of the political situation ignited the writing.

Other times, though, it’s not political so much as scientific. I’ll read a really mindbreaking piece on quantum physics, and I’ll be struggling towards understanding, and the ideas will spill out into the writing…

So how then do you use the flash form to contain the ideas? Your books are abundant with ideas (including ideas on concepts related to quantum physics!) but each of the individual stories seems to be fuelled by just one big burning concept. Do you have rules that you impose, to keep your stories contained and compressed?

Not rules, but principles. I have tended to write flash fiction with the idea in mind of building a collection, of writing stories that will end up alongside other stories, and I think the structure that keeps each individual piece together is, in a way, the structure I pick for the collection it will belong to.

On the Edges of Vision had a unifying theme of writing the monstrous humanity—what is monstrous about being human, what is human in the monsters of our myths. Mayhem & Death was built with the interconnective tissue of a story of a fraught relationship between a mother and daughter. These big structural choices, I think, ended up giving each individual cog, no matter how variable, an underlying tension, and a connection to the whole.

What sort of labour does this involve for you once you’ve taken a stab at a first draft? Revisions and scaling back where you feel that things are excessive? Building out details where you feel like you don’t have enough?

Editing after the first draft is the harder part of the process. Sometimes edits are very light, just shifting a line. Every word must justify itself, and that means that each word has to feel right, not just in terms of content but also poetic feeling. I tend not to have to cut down a lot; I write short, then add more in, although sometimes I end up adding extraneous material which has to be cut later again.

Overall, I think the bone or the beam is more beautiful than the fleshed body. Not always, but that’s the guiding principle. So, whatever the tone of the piece, I try to keep it fine. And keep it on-theme.

It’s interesting that you’re clear about the thematic distinction between On the Edges of Vision and Mayhem & Death. It’s noticeable, but what’s more striking is the difference in ambition. Even though most of the new stories are about the same length as the earlier ones, they’re more adept at evoking very abstract, complicated things (like the dynamics of a fraught relationship) in economical ways. So in Mayhem & Death you seem to be more ready, or willing, to take on thorny subjects in a form where the compression doesn’t make easy to go into details. It’s risky, but you pull it off.

Where did this readiness come from? Were you reading other writers who were doing things you wanted to respond to? What made you think it was time to test yourself by taking your stories in this direction?

Thank you for finding Mayhem & Death more ambitious. I honestly didn’t begin with a mission of complexity in mind, but I think it was a natural progression, coming from my admiration from writers who really push themselves to stare life in the face, people like Jean Rhys, Muriel Spark, Toni Morrison, and so on. I would feel pretty awful if my work became less ambitious, though thinking ahead, I would love to learn how to be formally simple and still have texts capable of bearing weight.

When thinking of what I am doing with my work, I think of all the people writing today, all the books written, a great mass of human communication constantly being produced, and I wish to make my contribution, small as it is, a little thread of being in the great tapestry, and I don’t want it to be a flimsy thread. Even though I know that my talents are limited—but as long as I am trying my best, and my best is a mark moving forward, I need not be ashamed.

What about your more stylistically experimental pieces? In Mayhem & Death, I’m thinking of things like ‘A Charm for the World As It Is’ and ‘Take Care, I Love You’, and even ‘The Inciting Incident’: all of which seem to waver between flash fiction and prose poetry in really beautiful ways. What is it that leads you to deviate from the style of most of your other stories here, while still feeling that these stories belong to the bigger picture?

All the above being said, I think a sense of play and experimentation is important, even if an experiment goes wrong – is unreadable, conveys nothing sustained – it furthers what I can do in the long run. It allows me to grow, it gives the reader something that requires them to engage in a way that challenges, and perhaps delights them. This is what I want when I am reading. Years from now, I hope to be able to have a whole range of techniques I can use, and still more ahead of me to find.

In terms of how they fit into the bigger picture, I can see that they tie in thematically to Mayhem & Death’s preoccupations with loneliness, the need to communicate, the desire for community amid the sense of the crumbling anthropocene of despots and environmental degradation. An experimental work is in a sense a statement of hopefulness, hope for the future, for change. Even if that change is not for the better, it is still continuity. Writing, generally, contains within it the idea that things will continue (as one page follows another) while experimental work allows for us to ask, but what if it were radically different, still words, but vital in a new way.

Speaking of the future, what next? As you continue to publish, do you feel the need to somehow build a bridge towards a new direction, given the longform conclusion to Mayhem & Death, or is your work-in-progress more of a break with the past?

I’ve just finished a novel which is in the hands of my agent right now, awaiting her keen judgement. It’s a triple narrative, three first-person accounts of the same period of time, a time in which the three met and connected and suffered possession by things from the past. It’s the longest whole thing I’ve ever written, and it is still relatively fragmented due to the nature of the form. First-person was a challenge, even gruelling at times; I could only rarely fall back on lyrical description, especially in two of the narratives due to the blunter nature of the characters involved, and I was examining some pretty dark mental health issues. I hope, after all that, that the results will be worth launching into the world. But if not, I don’t mind.

You’ve said elsewhere that you’ve also been at work on a collection of poetry, and more short stories. Can you say anything about the restlessness of the forms you’re engaging with?

I’ve begun another longer project that incorporates both of these forms, weaved into a longer narrative of heartbreak, art, Brazil, and apocalyptic thinking. There will also be a metafictional element again. The short pieces I am writing and luckily getting published will be attributed to the writer/character at the centre of the book. Clarice Lispector is a big influence, as is Kate Zambreno: there is a narrator overlooking all, pitying and judging the character’s actions, and perhaps (if it’s not too awful) her writing as well. I suppose I’m the narrator, though who can tell? I might be the character, too, or neither. I like getting into a tangle and picking my way through it.

The restlessness towards forms seems a result of my inescapable sense that fiction is an untrustworthy medium in which to express a conscious understanding of life and our times, as well as of course a means to reach out to others. And right now, as we all know, everything’s quite chaotic. It’s not enough to write something that can divided neatly into a poetry collection, a short story collection, a biography, or a novel. I feel like I must switch and dance about, while still holding out my hand. I want a reader as dancing partner. The reader as wire in an electrical circuit. What’s on the other side of this current, I don’t know.

Lytton Smith is the translator of several Icelandic books, including, most recently, Ófeigur Sigurðsson’s Öræfi. In reviewing the novel for Splice, I called Öræfi “a gleefully byzantine, oddly proportioned, confounding, compelling, and finally operatic achievement”, and described Smith’s translation as “a breathtaking feat”: “In Smith’s hands... every line, every phrase, sounds entirely natural, and there’s no flagging or stumbling in the momentum and rhythm of the whole.” In addition to his work as a translator—with other credits including books by Jón Gnarr, Bragi Ólafsson, and Guðbergur Bergsson—Lytton Smith is the author of two collections of poetry from Nightboat Books and a chapbook, My Radar Data Knows Its Thing, produced in collaboration with the artist Steven Fitzmaurice. He is also an assistant professor of English and Creative Writing at SUNY Geneseo. To mark the publication of Öræfi, he generously set aside time to talk to me about the pleasures and challenges of translating the novel.

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Öræfi is Ófeigur’s second novel, but the first to be translated into English. Can you give an outline of his stature in Iceland before its publication? How was his early work regarded?

Ófeigur has had a strong presence in Iceland for a while now. His first book, Skál fyrir skammdeginu (Cheers to the Winter Darkness), was a collection of poems that came out in 2001, so he has been building his reputation for fifteen years or so. His 2011 novel Jón cemented that reputation; it won the European Union Prize for Literature and made him the first Icelander to enjoy the honor. It also endeared him to many Icelanders, as it’s about a real historical figure who has near-mythical status in Iceland: Reverend Jón Steingrimsson, an eighteenth century clergyman, who was preaching a sermon, now known as the Fire Mass, as the volcanic mountain Laki erupted. He continued preaching to his congregation as the lava approached (a story referenced in Óræfi) and, the saying goes, the lava stopped before the sermon did, just short of the church, leaving everyone inside safe. Jón really put Ófeigur on the map, both in terms of its content and its reception.

And how did that situation change with the reception of Öræfi?

Öræfi came out three years later, 2014, and was in its fifth printing within three months. It also won prizes, including the Icelandic Literature Prize, and was one of the bestselling books of the year. So Ófeigur is popular as well as critically acclaimed. I found the book thanks to Jón Gnarr, former mayor of Reykjavík, whose trilogy of autobiographical novels I translated for Deep Vellum. Jón loves it, and raved about it to Will Evans at Deep Vellum.

Over time, Öræfi is a book that various Icelanders have mentioned to me, noting its eccentricities in very approving fashion. I feel like it’s a really interesting work in terms of genre. Ófeigur started published with experimental publishers, and that sense of avant-garde riskiness is definitely in Öræfi, where entire locations can transform without warning or obvious logic. But in a strange sense it’s also like Andri Snær Magnasson’s acclaimed political nonfiction treatise (later a movie) Draumalandið – Sjálfshjálparbók handa hræddri þjóð (Dreamland: A Self-Help Manual for a Frightened Nation), which tells the story of Iceland’s present environmental and cultural crises in a digressive manner.

With Jón and Öræfi, I think Ófeigur’s work has developed a style of historically-rich yet sprawling writing that’s able to weigh in on and even satirise contemporary political situations, and to do it all while having tremendous drama and narrative speed. It’s not a misrepresentation to describe Öræfi as a glacier thriller about a man lost in the ice, even though it’s clearly so much more than that—including a primer on obscure shepherding laws and conventions!

That’s an incredible success story. It sounds like every experimental writer’s wildest dream come true. Of course it’s one thing for a book to be both popular and critically acclaimed, but this is really something else because it’s hard to imagine that a similarly extravagant, experimental work of English-language literature would come anywhere close to selling out its first print run, let alone its fifth!

Just before we get to the particulars of the novel itself, can you say what it is that its Icelandic readers were responding to? What need was this book satisfying amongst the reading population?

That’s a good question. I’m conscious that my answer reflects most likely my own reading needs, inflected by what I imagine Icelanders to have wanted from it and coloured by the Icelanders I’ve discussed it with. But I think it’s fair to say the following...

The Icelandic language doesn’t have two distinct words for story and history. It uses the same word, saga, and so those two ways of writing are more closely connected for Icelanders than they are for us. The famous Icelandic sagas are the beginnings of Icelandic literature as well as essential records of the historic pasts. They contain history, yet they’re dramatically rich and read like novels. Öræfi, combining historical research with mountaineering mystery, taps into Icelandic expectations and aspirations for literature at a quite deep level, but it also plays with them: for example, with its forays into the Necronomicon and death metal. Many of its wonderful digressions allow Icelandic readers to meditate on their own national, cultural identity: why forests do/don’t matter to them, what their attitude is to outsiders and tourists, and so on.

Also, I find the book to be wittily but quite pointedly skeptical of the myth of Iceland, of too much buying into positive narratives of the country (although I’m influenced by having started work on it right after translating Guðbergur Bergsson’s dyspeptic modernist classic Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller, so that slanted my reading), and yet it’s so aware of the Icelandic past that I think it has enough for pro-Iceland Icelanders, too. It works as a great, page-turning read, but also as a reflective, cerebral book. And Icelanders are not only voracious readers, widely-read across cultures; they’re attentive readers, engaged and thinking along with a book. So Öræfi will have had a satisfying richness to it for them, an intellectual heft, in addition to being a bit of a thriller.

Lastly, I think the choice of region, Öræfi, is significant. The novel is a love song to this once-blighted, historically-significant area that bears the marks of lava destruction but also has fertility, partly because of the mineral richness of lava. It’s not the case that no-one has written about the area, but it deserved a contemporary novel, and I think that choice appealed to some Icelandic readers.

There are definitely some similarities between Öræfi and Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller, especially at a structural level, with stories within stories within stories. But one of the differences that sticks out is the different treatment of language at the sentence level. Tómas Jónsson has a lot of wordplay and punning, whereas the prose in Öræfi puts more energy into long, elaborate run-on sentences, lots of nested clauses, sometimes almost as stream-of-consciousness. How was the experience of translating Öræfi different from translating Tómas Jónsson?

I love that you’re picking up on energy and momentum, the run-on quality of the book: I think Ófeigur’s style in this book is a neat match for the precipitous way Bernharður organises his life, and also perhaps for some of the fervour with which the various administrative organisations in the book try to “fix” a problem by acting first and thinking about it later. While there’s a shared episodic/digressive aspect between this and Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller—and it was fascinating to work on them back to back!—the digressions in Öræfi are less whimsical, deeper-entwined, in a sense, than in Tómas.

I do think, though, that the two books share punning: one of the things I remember wrestling with, and Ófeigur worrying he’d have to give up on, is the set of puns around “cumin,” which emerge in English in part via a pun on “come in,” for instance. I love that in translating fiction—especially such creative, freewheeling fiction as this—one gets to “compensate”, to use a technical term from translation studies: you might lose something in one place but find an equivalent you can add in another. Wordplay rarely exactly matches across languages, but you can aim to create matching effects for readers in both languages, and Ófeigur gave me a lot to work with. And, as a poet, a novel about toponymy that hones in on the meanings of words, especially place names, is a real gift!

Was there anything this time around that gave you pause, that stretched your capabilities?

The combination of many narrative voices, nested inside one another, together with similarly nested different chronologies. There are many moments where a character is writing something down that someone has just told them, but we only know that because it’s been written down by another character (sometimes the first character, but at a different point in time). I wanted to make sure there was a distinctive quality to different voices, especially Bernharður and Dr. Lassi, because they’re drawn differently, but also to try to make sure that Bernharður’s voice prevails, for reasons that will become clear to readers (the mystery element of this thriller). I think Icelandic can handle tense more deftly that English—in part because English relies on extra words, what (some) linguists call temporal modal auxiliary verbs—and so I was trying to make sure the translation stayed nimble. I’m glad it might have a stream or current to it.

When you say that Icelandic can handle tense more deftly than English, does this mean that the original text has a clearer sense of which character is speaking at any given time because each of the narratives are reported at different times (granted that Bernharður is ultimately the narrator)?

I don’t know if there’s a clearer sense of who’s talking at a given movement, because one of the things that works so beautifully about Ófeigur’s narrative is that you can forget whose story it is, get swept up in it. Bernharður ultimately ends up in Iceland because of the power of words, via National Geographic, and the novel repeatedly considers what happens when words do or don’t get tended.

I think my point about tense might really be about voice, now that I think about your question: Icelandic strictly only has a simple past and simple present tense, but it has three voices: active, passive, and middle. Middle voice does a range of things including reflexivity and reciprocity, and while I can’t know if Ófeigur’s conscious of that, there’s a reciprocity of narration in the nesting of speakers, for sure.

Also, Icelandic loves a subjunctive mood, a way to express something hypothetical or conditional or polite, and that adds to the dream-like aspects of the book, like when several characters have one of those late-night-seeing-the-world-for-what-it-really-is conversations by telepathy!

You’ve said in an interview before (with Veronica Scott Esposito) that Icelandic “insularity”—as it comes across in Icelandic literature—doesn’t mean navel-gazing so much as it means being aware of a world beyond the island. This prefigures something that was said to me by Brian FitzGibbon, who translates the novels of Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir; he notes that there’s a tendency for Icelandic authors to write about Iceland from a perspective that almost looks at the nation from outside it. Do you see that sort of thing at play in Öræfi too? What is Ófeigur getting at with a protagonist who comes from outside Iceland, but is (academically) more in tune with its toponymy than the locals?

I love that point of Brian FitzGibbon’s; that’s so insightful. Yes, in a kind of “middle voice” way (if I can push that metaphor), Bernharður is both of Iceland apart from it, a tourist. A lot is made of him having grown up speaking Icelandic, being able to understand The Regular, and that’s not only narratively practical, but also a way to explore that sense of being inside and outside at the same time. Öræfi as a region is a kind of mini-Iceland, at times the purest form of Iceland, but still only one region of it, one which many others don’t understand, or tend to mock, and which for years they couldn’t easily access; it has a fairytale kingdom quality to it.

I think there’s a real question about what it means to belong. After all, Bernharður is more aware of toponymy than many locals, but he’s aware at times in the pejorative sense of the academic, which is to say the impractical: for many characters, place names matter in so far as they are navigable, which is something Bernharður admires about Koch’s naming. I think of Öræfi as a novel that complicates regional and national identification—often when characters try to fit in with a preconceived sense of something, they run into disenchantment or even tragedy.

And that point of Brian’s helps explain to me why it felt important that Bernharður be the name in the English translation, not Bernhard, as it might be in Austria: he’s inside-outside, not separable from Iceland despite visiting it for the first time. That idea gets taken up in this thorny issue of what trees and fauna are “native” to Iceland; the book is always unpicking origin stories, reminding us that they are attempts to wield power rather than understand or preserve knowledge.

On that note, it’s interesting that Bernharður, from Austria, shares the name of one of Austria’s greatest writers, Thomas Bernhard. In fact, Bernhard is name-checked in Öræfi and seems to have been a pretty powerful influence on some parts of the book. Putting him aside, what other influences can you see at work in Öræfi?

Contemporary Icelandic literature is fascinating in the ways it’s in conversation with European (and sometimes American) authors. It often seems to me that Icelandic writers are keen to enter into conversation with more well-known writers and literatures, and to explore what an Icelandic version of, say, a Bernhard story or style might be. That said, Öræfi is particularly steeped in reworkings of Icelandic stories, sagas, and myths, down to the fact that the park ranger, Edda, takes her name from the title of two key medieval Icelandic collections, the Prose Edda and the Poetic Edda; the former was written by historian Snorri Sturluson around 1220, and Edda is actually referred to as Snorri’s-Edda at one point, a joke on the fact that the Prose Edda is called Snorri’s Edda by many who reference it. So, at times, characters are less humans than manifestations in Bernharður’s mind of Icelandic mythology, literature written into the landscape through which he travels.

For me, Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s The Worst Journey in the World was a key touchstone for the novel, although I’m not sure if it’s true for Ófeigur; I love to think of him holed up with all kinds of Arctic exploration literature, especially dismal narratives, but I haven’t asked him that. I know he was doing a lot of archival and historical research—newspaper articles from the book’s various time periods, for instance—and so the sense of the book as documentary, as history itself, is crucial. That’s where the bizarre name of one of the horses comes from, an actual newspaper misprint.

That I don’t know more about the influences of the book stems in part from my process as a translator; I like to try to get lost in the style of the book at hand, and tend to resist too often following the book’s own influences (I didn’t set Pandora to a death metal station, for instance). That could be a shortcoming, but I’m trying to tune in Ófeigur and Bernharður; where I notice influences, I like to use them as reference points that help to keep me stylistically on track, and there are some sources that you need to have read for a book, but I’m not trying to replicate everything Ófeigur knows, of course.

Finally, any thoughts on why it’s taken this long for Ófeigur’s work to be published in English?

I don’t know, except for the fact that there are fewer translators, and publishers able to keep up with the translators, working on behalf of the nation that produces more books per capita than any other in the world. But I do think it’s fitting that Öræfi is the book that gets translated: it has a non-Icelandic protagonist, which offers readers an entry point, and is at times about what it means to be a tourist; it’s also a more realistic look at Icelandic culture than the glossy commercials and tourist-friendly YouTube videos we’re flooded with. Still, I’d love to see a press take on Jón: there are definitely Anglophone readers who would read about an eighteenth century cleric in Iceland living in exile in a cave and writing letters back to his pregnant wife, up North, whose former husband he is accused of killing... That’s not an obscure footnote in the history of a far-off island but a fascinating drama in its own right!