My dead friend isn’t supposed to be on the whale watching tour. It’s a pale summer morning, the harbor glazed with fog. I’m standing on the boat’s upper deck directing tourists aboard, gesturing to empty seats, passing out pamphlets. And there she is, lined up behind a family of five. She’s wearing a navy windbreaker, jean shorts, and muddy white sneakers. Why are you here? I ask. You’re scared of the ocean. Only the Pacific, she says. The Atlantic is fine. I say, Okay, but don’t freak out the children. We jet off, gliding over the glass panes of the sea surface. It’s an hour journey to the watch spot, the boat picking up speed once we reach deeper waters. Roughly fifty passengers sit sardined on narrow benches, stuffing their arms into jackets as the cold cuts into the air. My friend follows me to the mic station. The concessions guy walks by and glares at her, since the area is roped off from pedestrians. I tell him she’s a wealthy socialite, so it’s fine.My voice vibrates through the shitty speakers: As you can see in your pamphlets, there are many types of whales. Blue Whales, Orcas, Sperm Whales…Forget about those. We’re here for the Humpbacks. A little girl, whose wispy hair is whipping in all directions, asks something. Her voice is drowned out by the engine, so I tell her to speak up.How long are Humpbacks!? They can be 48-62 feet, slightly larger than a school bus. My friend cups her hand to my ear. Are you on birth control? I mute the mic. Not everyone’s birth control kills them, I say. I know yours gave you a pulmonary embolism, but something like that simply wouldn’t happen to me. You were on some weird high-hormone brand anyway. So don’t worry. Now the little girl’s father is seasick. He puts his head in his hands, moaning and rocking. This kind of thing happens often. Through the intercom, I command him to stare at the horizon. Something about it resets your balance. But there is no horizon. Due to the fog, the gray blue sky melds to the ocean. Guess he’s out of luck. You weren’t my favorite, my friend says. But you were the fun one.You mean the slutty one, I say. I remember our first fight. In college I helped her make a Tinder, taught her how to scam men for money. But she got upset, called it amoral. She actually wanted to go on dates, to be touched. I called her unrealistic. That was a nice fight, she says. By the end, we saw each other’s perspectives, and I got a boyfriend. The dad is trying not to throw up, his forehead all sweaty. A stranger gives him a swig of Pepto Bismol. His daughter keeps poking him and shouting, Look at that! Look, Dad, look! She points to nothing. He stands up. Don’t go to the bathroom, I holler. It will only feel worse in there, and we need it available for the others. He sits down. I turn to my friend and say, I suppose you’re here to blame me for your terrible taste in men. That was the algorithm’s fault, she replies. You don’t have to make everything about yourself. I do make everything about myself. I wish my friend hadn’t died. It’s never fun to discuss at parties. I shelled out all this money for a therapist. For a whole six weeks, I stopped having sex. Then for a whole six months, I had too much sex. Her death makes me hate the ocean, which she always lied about being afraid of. The fog thins, tinting the water blue, deep blue, endless blue. I continue my spiel: Before a whale surfaces, there are clues. Look for circles of bubbles. If you smell something rotten, it’s their bad breath. The little girl gets a kick out of that. Her dad finally throws up in a paper bag, and the couple beside him flees. You know, I was in love with you, I tell my friend. There you go, making everything about yourself again. Isn’t that why you came, for a confession? No, I came for the whales. The boat slows, then stills, the engine clicking off. Bubbles form. We watch, wait. A Humpback breaches in the distance, a sliver of gray slicing through the waves. People rush to the railing to take zoomed-in pixelated photos for Facebook. Water spouts from the blowhole. Its tail tips up before submerging. The onlookers ooo and ahh. You should stop taking birth control, she says. Not any good. Do you want me to get pregnant? Kind of weird. Maybe if you got pregnant, you’d finally get over me. Now here she is, making everything about herself. When I take my pill, I think of her. When I meet someone with anxious-avoidant attachment, I think of her. When I imagine kissing a woman, I think of her. If she would have kissed me back. If she would have said I was doing it for attention. But isn’t it human to want attention? She’ll never understand that.The boat idles. The little girl is jumping up and down, struggling to see around the adults, and her dad has thrown away his bag of vomit. The sun spurts through the clouds. I point out more whales. To the right! To the left! Go, get your fill, your eighty bucks worth. The crowd clusters from one side of the deck to the other. You know, you weren’t in love with me, she says. Grief makes you uncomfortable, and pretending you loved me makes it easier to process. This is really homophobic of you.No, it’s homophobic of you. You’re fetishizing a dead woman. So what am I supposed to do? Just get over it?Yes! Just get over it! People die all the time. Go get knocked up by some man and move on with your life. You’ve been bumming me out. I announce that it’s time to get going. The engine starts, and everyone sits. I hand the dad another bag to barf in. I let the little girl keep her pamphlet, even though I’m supposed to re-collect them for other tours. I tell my friend she’s right. When I step off this boat, I’ll quit birth control, find a nice man to knock me up, and stop having gay fantasies about my dead friend. I saw the whales today, after all, and that’s what’s important.
Will Cordeiro’s fiction unfurls a kindly finger and beckons you to follow an uncommon path. As you tramp along seldom visited trails, your mind wanders as much as your feet. You arrive at the peculiar, the disquieting and the mysterious, without a clue how you got there or even if you want to leave. With Whispering Gallery (DUMBO Press, 2024), Cordeiro invites entry to an off-kilter world, where those who disappear into the mist entrust their steps to the uncertain ground beneath them. I spoke to the author about this curious collection.Rebecca Gransden: Some people claim that time isn’t real, that it’s just a byproduct of our mental processes—as if the mind’s cocoon prevented us from remembering the future, from knowing the past was as much alive as the present moment.What do you think of when you consider time in relation to Whispering Gallery? From when are these pieces taken? What led you to include them in the collection? Will Cordiero: First off, speaking of time, thank you for taking the time to read my book and conduct this interview. It’s always a delight to hear questions and musings from someone who’s given my work such thoughtful consideration. It means a lot, especially given how many other things, I’m sure, compete for your attention on the daily. The manipulation of temporality is one of the storyteller’s oldest tricks: to reshuffle the chronological deck, to stretch out time like a taffy-pull, to quantum leap whole centuries with a paragraph break, or to freeze the scene and rove about with the camera’s eye. But time itself is also a central subject matter of many of the pieces in Whispering Gallery. There’s a kind of time that’s the objective rate of change and then there’s a subjective sense of the onrushing flow of events as they occur in our minds, a sense which is revealed by eddies of memory, or revels in glimmering intuitions of futurity. There’s a cosmological dimension to time, as well, a question of whether time exists independent of our perceptions of it. The paradox of time is one of Kant’s antinomies, not to mention the old (the timeless?) battle between eternity and the transitory things of this world. Then there’re specific cultural senses of time, too, such as the pastoral cycle of seasons, for example. All of which is to say that these pieces often juxtapose different understandings of the temporal order. The flash form affords me brief bursts and ruptures. I try sometimes to pull the rug out from under the reader by suddenly reframing the sense of this elusive dimension. I play with both narratological tricks (how temporality gets represented in a story) and with ontological questions (what’s the nature of temporality itself). We fall in love with the world then it’s gone in a twinkling. How can you capture that mysterious, that heartbreaking flux? Every time you remember something, you change the nature of that memory—you have no access to the past, only elusive rewritings of it. Is the future fixed and fatalistic or can it be changed with our free will? Time is at the heart of so many of our most tantalizing enigmas. I’ve been writing these pieces—and others like them—for over two decades. I assembled most of my favorite oldies together and added a sprinkling of newer work, too. There were many iterations of this book over the years. Even the draft the publisher initially accepted was markedly different than the final version. Along the way, I chopped, stirred, culled, seasoned, tossed in some cayenne, simmered, let it settle. I had overlapping principles of organization. Sometimes I like the contrast between two pieces, in mood or content or style; a short piece next to a longer one, a funny punchline against a somber tale. Other times I want pieces to speak across the book, letting a theme return in a surprising manner. Maybe a piece ironically turns another on its head. There’s an infinite branching network of ways these pieces relate to each other: I didn’t want to be too heavy-handed in imposing the order. I want to allow some breathing room for the reader to find their own connections and leaps. Or even flip around and reassemble the book to their liking, skipping over some, rereading others. Which, honestly, is what many of us do anyway when we return to a collection, isn’t it? RG: Have you ever had a nickname?
(Will Cordeiro / Will Cordeiro in an anime)
WC: Funny you should ask. I’ve had nothing but nicknames. My birth certificate nominated me “Billy Joe Bush.” However, my immediate family called me “BJ” when I was young. I grew up in downstate Delaware, below the Mason-Dixon line. Not at the beach, either, which is the only area downstate anyone’s heard of. As a kid, I came up poor in the rural sticks—a land of swamps and chicken farms and trailer parks. It’s a warp-zone to the armpit of the Deep South. My mom had second thoughts. When she remarried, she had my name officially changed to “William Joseph Cordeiro.” Much fancier sounding. But I often went by “Will.” Later, in high school, that led my buddies on the track team to nickname me “Free Willy.” In college, I was dubbed “Fake” (long story). These days, I live in Mexico, so everyone who knows me here calls me “Memo,” which is the apodo for “Guillermo,” the Spanish equivalent of “William.” Constantly taking on different names probably gave me a more mutable sense of self, as if my many sobriquets were a form of cosplay, embodying different avatars and drag personas. “BJ Bush” and “Dr. Cordeiro” and “Fake” and “Memito” and the trunkful of other monikers I’ve gone by give me a malleable personality composed of aliases and fictional guises. To this day, I’m not keen to identify as any one thing: trying to locate a single locus of so-called “authenticity” seems like a mug’s game. But then, can’t most of us say, with Whitman, “I am large, I contain multitudes”? I’m not someone who’d cling to a stable narrative of self: the story of who I am changes with each retelling. Selfhood is not important. The elemental force of metamorphosis is what’s more vital. RG: Your style displays a relish for language, and an appreciation of word timbre and rhythm when it comes to construction. Do you rewrite a lot? Do you have an approach to drafting that repeats itself?WC: A few pieces—often the small ones—came close to their finished form in the first sitting. I tend to write slowly, weighing the words, waxing poetic, whittling things down even on my initial foray: I double back to adumbrate or embroider before I finish composing each sentence. Pieces emerge gradually, condensing into shape over many drafts. Yes, it is iterative: loops within loops until I’m totally loopy. On occasion, I’ll let a piece incubate in my head for some days: I work out the concept, dwell on a character, or figure out the narrative threads before hunkering down to scribble on the page. No matter, all my pieces go through countless revisions and tweaks. This collection is the fruit—the vinegar—of over two decades. I return to each piece, usually over the course of many years, fussing and fidgeting with syntax and diction, with rhythm and mouthfeel. With the grain of the voice. Even when writing stories, and not poetry, it’s very much like a musical composition where I listen for the overtones, the resonance and timbre as you deftly put it, as much as for the referential sense. Of course, with any piece I must also attend to the workaday plot, the tension, the turning points. I guard against becoming too precious, too self-indulgent, with the prose—the story’s pacing sets the momentum. After all, tempo is a crucial musical element, as well. These pieces may be miniatures, but they’re rarely minimalist in nature. I love textures and layers and lyrical excess. RG:Its antennae blinked like the cursor on a screen.Many of the pieces included in Whispering Gallery address the fundamental forces that constitute existence as we know it. Forces of nature and science that are at work while everyday life moves on. Do you view your work as having a philosophical component?WC: Sure, in the sense that many stories by, say, Calvino or Cortázar have a philosophical component. Professional academics don’t have a monopoly on philosophy. Analytic philosophy frequently has an off-putting, pedantic tone anyway. It often presumptuously arrogates the rules of the game to its own methods. Yet, for me, philosophy can also be the everyday process of reflecting, interpreting, questioning: of reconciling oneself to life. Besides, lockstep, knockdown arguments rarely compel me. Instead, I’m more intrigued by paradoxes and dilemmas. I like it when stories contain an enigma, or as Sebald says somewhere, a spectral trace of a ghost. Stories can act as thought experiments and intuition pumps. They help us deliberate ethical situations; they provoke us to imagine stranger, more far-ranging metaphysical possibilities; they sharpen our epistemic knives, showing us ways our equipment might be limited or faulty. My own thinking is so often unsettled. To dwell on any idea begins to disorient me. The hermeneutical circle’s not a smooth wheel—it’s wobbly and oblong, punctured by disruptions and bafflements and afflictions of doubt. My own elliptical insights can swing from sudden revelations to ignominious defeats. In many cases, it’s this inner adventure that I portray in my characters; that I want to recreate in my readers. I try to use tools like defamiliarization, humor, skepticism, and irony to move my readers, to incite new recognitions, to instigate a playful tension between differing values or perspectives. I don’t aim for any foregone conclusion. I hope my work acts as an invitation to contemplate nuances and ambiguities, at times holding contradictions in abeyance. Perhaps my work can cultivate a richer sense of “reality,” whatever that means. Or perhaps it only impels a reaching-forth amid vast ranges of uncertainty, a bewitchment of one’s curiosity. Stories can cast enduring spells. Don’t most of us want stories that can make the humdrum world thrum once more with the undercurrents of its secret magic? Plato and Aristotle both believed philosophy begins in wonder, which is the same place most of my stories start from, too. RG:Everyone had gone to sleep in the city. I wondered if the buildings might vanish—if they were only the collective apparition of the inhabitants. It was dark out my window. Only pinpoints of glister winkled in doubt: starburst, lamp-glow, hallucinations. The streets were empty. Wherever the people were, they must be dreaming of something else.“Lucid Moment” makes reference to hallucination and dream logic. What part do altered states play in Whispering Gallery?WC: I enjoy those moments when reading can induce a tripped-out and ecstatic wakefulness. Imagining a story is a bit like concocting an illusion: it’s knowingly dwelling within this hallucinatory space you’ve projected. Visionary flashes of perception don’t need to come from a mind on drugs or dreams or yogic navel-gazing or religious epiphany or tantric sex or Neuralink—though all those scenarios can be interesting. Merely thinking can be a kind of drug almost, generating a giddying habitation of umbras and insights; and thinking (one might think) is an activity that’s intrinsic to minds. To talk about “altered states,” you’d need a baseline of what a normal state of consciousness would be, right? To me, consciousness itself has a magical quality to it. If my work appears to explore altered states of consciousness, perhaps it’s a way to goad readers into recognizing the spooky inner workings of their own apprehensions; a method to defamiliarize and thus reenchant the world. If milk is the mildest of liquors, as Carlyle wrote in Sartor Resartus, maybemeditation—whether lovelorn or logical, lucid or ludicrous—is one of the strongest.RG: “A New Realism” raises some interesting questions on deception, authenticity, artistic practice and the right to privacy. What is your approach to the promotion of your work? How important is privacy to you?WC: I’m not temperamentally a self-promoter. No shyster barking and jiving, I. No desire to be an influencer, a marketeer, a celebrity shilling their own brand. Power, money, fame: none of ‘em’s my bag. Of course, I’ll exercise my power by voting; I want enough money to have the leisure time to read and write, to travel a bit, to afford healthcare; I’m not such a recluse holed up in my room that I won’t saunter out to give a talk once in a blue moon or respond to interview questions such as you’ve been so kind to ask. There’s no real danger of my becoming renowned or popular, in this lifetime anyway—it’s not like I need to disguise myself in sunglasses and a big floppy hat on the street or use assumed names at hotels to avoid the paparazzi. I don’t need to retreat from all media appearances to go plunk myself in a cave in New Hampshire. As if. But maybe I do live in a cave, sort of. And not just a Platonic one, like we all do. I mean—I’m not on any social media. Isn’t that pretty hermitic, hermetic even, in this age? I just find it a huge brain-rotting time-suck which is disastrous for one’s mental health as well as the health of the body politic. So, I’m also not famous to ten people, either, the way a lot of folks are these days. It's not that I’m private per se. But I tend to resist drawing connections between fiction and real life, as your question does here, for example. I doubt there’s some childhood trauma that’s fed my writing or some ghastly secret I’ve been hiding that impels me to tell stories. Whatever tales I spin out about myself probably obfuscate as much as they illuminate anyhow; I spin them out because it’s my nature to unspool these spider-spit writerly threads. One story hides behind another. Looking for the root of a text in an author’s supposed lived experience is an ubiquitous move in literary culture nowadays since audiences want to know about the author, hear anecdotes, feel connected to the source as if they could thereby come into contact with the work’s aura. Or maybe it’s just that authors are reduced to media “personalities” since often audiences haven’t read—don’t want to read the work. I’ve met a fair number of authors, and the majority are just regular Uncle Jim-bobs or Aunt Mays; some are a little dopey or true snoozefests. Others are snooty academics or anxious fusspots or doddering busybodies. They’re a scrapheap’s worth of skipjack jackanapes spooning boondoggerel. Myself perhaps included. (I’m ambivalent—as I am about most things). Authors come in all types. But a literary work distills an author’s ideas into their wittiest and most vivacious expression, if the author’s any good. Why should it surprise us, then, to feel disappointed when the incarnate human being can’t live up to those expectations? “I’m Nobody! Who are you? / Are you—Nobody—too?” as Dickinson said. Who wants to end up “public—like a frog—”? I’d rather be the prince of my own solitary room, voyaging around my head. Sometimes I wonder if writing is a ceremony converting the stuff of our language—what could be more public? common as air—into the fabric of our interiority; and simultaneously airing our most inward-turning thoughts into chirps and croaks. RG:Looking back now, years later, the whole city seems an underworld, an air of cinders, foreshadowing its own downfall. A field of cenotaphs. Long rows of ruins frozen into schlag and marzipan. Pediments like dinosaurs. Everything half buried under the weight of what it once had been.Frequently Whispering Gallery contains a tension between the immediacy of your descriptions and a more contemplative framing. Are there pieces that stand out to you as being a memorable experience to write?WC: In what sense can you say that you will your thoughts? Thoughts, the better ones at any rate, often come unbidden. We do not think our thoughts; our thoughts think us. Writing usually occurs when I’m pinballed around by powers almost outside myself. The sounds entangle their own eerie melodies; ideas stray paths of errant logic; characters chatter in voices not my own. It’s not that I throw my voice—rather, I’m thrown by the voices. They ventriloquize me. Where these thoughts and voices come from remains something of a mystery. You harvest them from reading and experience, perhaps. They are what we vaguely term “imagination.” You can make yourself receptive to them, a quivering electrometer that picks up the subtle variations in magnetic charges that coruscate the atmosphere. But who has the muse on speed dial? No matter how much you plan, there’s always an element of spontaneity. The voices can’t be summoned at will. The best you can do is prepare and practice, listen and long for them to return. Afterward, the editorial and critical parts of your brain apply the scalpel to shape this material into a more handsomely polished, more sure-handed form. My descriptions often try to shed light on earthly flora and fauna, figuring the minutiae of landscapes and the immensity of dreamscapes, thereby gesturing toward how invariably blind we are to the larger cosmos around us. They juxtapose scales and temporalities, points of view and paradigms. Still, we don’t call a stone blind. As Heidegger says, blindness afflicts only those beings who are capable of seeing. To ask whether someone is blind foreshadows—shadows forth—the very possibility of their having the nature of a being with sight. I try to trace the contours of both our perceptions and our presumptions. I attempt to look closer at the things around us while reframing the background concepts that inform how we see those things. It’s this dual, this dialectical unfolding that unveils how the seemingly immediate experiences of our own body and environment are, nevertheless, already mediated by our mental and corporeal equipment. To see anew is to recognize that one has, all along, been blind to the world; and maybe thereby to recognize that this new sight could, upon another disclosure, reveal itself as a type of blindness, too. There may be no end to revelation.RG: For “Sadness” the world you create sees an air of melancholy descend. If eras are defined by a prevailing mood, what do you view as the tone of these times we are living through?WC: Chaos? Malignant asociality? A giddy, trollish nihilism? It’s hard to understand the era we’re living through. These, unfortunately, are interesting times. In my youth, reading history with the aid of hindsight, I’d often wonder how people could be taken in by the Know-Nothing Party or William Jennings Bryant’s “Cross of Gold Speech” or other such flights of demagoguery. Today, living through a tumultuous period of history, I’m equally baffled by how a good chunk of the populace can be hoodwinked by criminals and charlatans. Confidence men worry great pearls of falsehood upon tiny grains of truth. Then again, there’s plenty of born suckers. The broligarchs can manipulate people in nearly clandestine ways: think how innocuously an app might change its terms and conditions, for example, or the way algorithms spread misleading stories much faster than true ones. Lots of folks are upset, at what or whom they’re often not sure, and that very anger is then redirected to their disadvantage. The ethos of “move fast and break things” has become a goal unto itself, writ large. Democracy depends on an infrastructure of news sources, public forums, civic organizations, educational institutions. These are being atomized, privatized, or wiped out so that the robber barons can have unregulated control to exploit and extract wealth. Most people are too preoccupied with their everyday drudgery to pay attention, read, participate in their communities, or make art; this leads to a vicious cycle where the oligarchs can turn the screws on a disengaged and uninformed citizenry, beating you down and fleecing you even more. Everything’s a distraction from something worse on the horizon. Doomscrolling might be a good metaphor for how the system uses our own anxiety against us: we can’t help rubbernecking the wreckage that our tech addiction itself has caused. To bicker about the problem only fuels the flames—and flame wars—higher. We’re too burnt out to care that a handful of folks are burning it all down. Climate change isn’t happening fast enough for some folks, I guess. We’re accelerating toward a corpocratic state, a zombified corpse state, the necrotic triage of vulture capitalism: escalating scarcity for the many, overwhelming plenitude for a vanishingly few. But people just keep going about their business because business is what people do. RG: What was your conceptual framework for “The Lost Gospel of Caiaphas”?WC: I think the initial inspiration was reading excerpts from some of the Gnostic Gospels and chapters from Elaine Pagel’s book of that name. The Nag Hammadi manuscripts were discovered in 1945 and only made readily available to the public in the 1980s. They were Coptic papyri discovered by an Egyptian farmer in a sealed jar with a likely provenance of the 4th century—and their impact was revolutionary, upending the scholarly understanding of the historical foundations of Christianity.Too, rewriting the gospel narrative is a veritable subgenre unto itself—novelistic examples include The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (Saramago); The Gospel According to the Son (Mailer); Figuras de la Pasión del Señor (Gabriel Miró); and King Jesus (Graves). Barabbas by Pär Lagerkvist is one I recommend. Siddhartha by Hesse or Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra do something similar in other religious traditions. Apocrypha and heretical accounts have their appeal. They are the marginalized and forgotten stories that were refused a place in the church, that is, the dominant version of the church we know now—the one which survived from competing sects and schisms that cropped up as early as St. Paul (or one might claim, as early as the disciples themselves). At a time when revisionary histories (on the left) and “alternative facts” (on the right) are popular, when everyone questions the official version of a tale, when nobody is satisfied with a univocal canon, it makes sense that apocrypha would have its allure. Besides, the canonical gospels themselves are four wildly different stories that vary both in style and substance. There’s already a pluralism built-in to the structure of the gospels. Their gaps and contradictions gesture that no single version is definitive. Co-opting a gospel-like narrative gave me the freedom to appropriate a simple yet vatic tone to write parables, proverbs, and epigrams—to make mystical pronouncements: it’s a type of writing that, while I find it has a uniquely enthralling energy, can be very difficult to pull off in contemporary English without some such framing device. One can’t make oracular, rhapsodic pronouncements in propria persona. Yet, once that framework was established, I felt disinhibited and could make witty underhanded comments against authority, tell stories that took on different significations to different audiences, and challenge the reader’s habitual understanding of traditional values—all things that the gospel narratives (whether apocryphal or not) are often so good at, though we sometimes can’t appreciate their weirdness and originality. RG:There’s an erotic charge around these objects: they’re ghosts leftover from being handled. Things you would find in any mall, swap meet, flea market are transfigured at every turn. A remote control appears moon-beamed in from science fiction. A salad fork looks like a cannibal’s keepsake.The ordinary is given fresh perspective in “The Museum of Ordinary Objects”. As well as raising questions on the meaning attached to such objects, the story invites speculation on the nature of viewing in itself. How do you view this story? If you were curator of your own Museum of Ordinary Objects, what would you exhibit?WC: I went gallery-hopping during ART WKD GDL last Saturday. In one gallery, you couldn’t tell where the curated displays ended and the unfinished work and raw materials of the studio began. There was a Xeroxed paper affixed to the wall with blue painter’s tape next to the painting the image on the paper was of. Was this just the haphazard environment of a working artist’s studio or was it some kind of self-referential meta-conceptual hijinks? I liked not being able to tell. Across town, in a different gallery, I entered an empty room. My partner was looking at a prominent pile of debris exhibited at the center of the floor: multicolored paint flakes and assortments of concrete gobs were framed against the checkerboard tiles. This one was my favorite piece so far, I thought: the paint could be house paint from the wall; the dust could be the crumbling wall itself. It made me feel the transitory nature of the space—the visceral, immolating decadence of ruin porn. The whole site-specific exhibit up to this point had been about repurposing stretched canvas and frames and painterly materials in a sculptural, almost environmental way, that referenced the architecture of the gallery itself (it was a house designed by Luis Barragán). Barragán’s architecture transforms spaces into planes of color; the artist, by contrast, transformed planes of color into spaces. While we were rubbing our chins, shrewdly observing the piece, along comes the gallerist with a broom—sorry, she says, we’re still getting everything settled. In certain frames of mind, I inhabit a world where any object can become a Duchampian readymade. I’m reawakened to its aesthetic dimensions, its anthropological significance, the Barthesian mythologies it extrudes. I observe an item’s singular quiddity; its multivalent symbolism. Every point is the origin of the universe; every node stands at a crux reticulating it into the warp and weft of meaning. Perhaps I’m low-key infected by the disorienting palpitations in the presence of beauty, a condition known as Stendhal syndrome. Art has a way to induce a manic state in me at times. Or maybe it’s the mania of the gorging eye or florid mind that imbues an object, any object really, with the same arresting qualities we seek out when we view great works of art. It’s the opposite of museum fatigue. Looking can become a frenzy that feeds upon itself, rendering the dizzying optics of scopophilia. Any ol’ junk—gum-wrapper, paperclip, tissue box—begins to iffily shimmer and zing with ineffable brindles of import. It’s not the object that matters, it’s one’s susceptibility to cozy to it with a rigorous vulnerability. The process of being whelmed in the sheer presence of something, looking deeply at it, prompts a scatterbrained brainstorming, an ornery—an incorrigible—associational vigor where a thing becomes at once dis-cultured, relieved of its habitual connotations, and yet enwoven into countless symbolic networks. RG: “Masquerade Store” presents an ordinary town caught in the spell of a business that sells masks, identities. A deep sense of unease unfolds as the town’s nature is changed. How do you approach high concept stories? Where does the weird come into play in your fiction?WC: “Masquerade Store” was a later piece I added to the collection. I’m still uncertain if it really captures the full sense of unease I was going for. I’m glad to hear you think it works. During the writing process, there were a few adjustments that helped. I created two turning points in the story. What at first seems like a description from an impersonal third-person narrator about the facts of a garden-variety, deteriorating town (though it is “our town”) emerges as a fulsomely first-person voice about midway in the story, where you realize the narrator is implicated and complicit in the events being described. This shift of perspective, of narratorial vantage, relocates the stakes involved and may also undermine the seeming objectivity of the first part with hints of unreliability. What once appeared to be a sociological description of a town retrospectively turns into a fucked-up person’s defense tactic to distance himself from his problems by using a more clinical, arm’s-length tone. Another turning point occurs near the end, when the narrator suddenly gazes off into the distance, using a collective voice, “we.” The yearning both to watch banal superhero movies and to dress-up as some powerful if exoticized “other” is exposed, at the end, to be predicated upon inchoate heroic longings. A grandeur that’s glimpsed in sunlit oracles and sublime flames but cannot be realized, a longing that ultimately casts each person further adrift in their lonely quest to circumvent the self as much as to find it. Yet such drift, we might say, is what unites the citizens of the town as a civic body, too. Who one is must be projected and absorbed from those around one in a hall of mirrors; yet, doing so requires a motive power of self-transformation. Heck, rereading the story now, I realize that the third-person voice quite quickly begins ventriloquizing in the second person, using “you” in a way that is ambiguous between meaning an anonymous, impersonal “one,” calling out the real reader, or addressing a particular person offstage. This is even before the first-person voice fully emerges. These peculiar gear-shifts between points-of-view and subtle changes in tone help convey the breakdown of coherent identities the town is undergoing, whether these devices are explicitly noticed or not when you’re reading. Still, each story is different: a lot of my writing is a search not only for a compelling plotline, but for the adequate technical means to have a story express some conceptual dilemma, oftentimes one that’s a bit abstruse, so that it’s uncanny, disquieting, and affecting for the reader. RG: The collection was released by DUMBO Press on 31st October 2024—Halloween. For stories where the veil between worlds of strangeness is thin, this is a wildly appropriate date to present the book to the world. How have you found the experience of releasing the book? What is next for you?WC: Yes, Halloween felt like the perfect release date for this collection! These are eerie, metaphysical tales influenced by the likes of magical realism and Gothic and absurdism and offbeat speculative fiction. I’m happy to see Whispering Gallery launched into the world. To hold the tangible book validates the years of effort—the writing feels more real than when it consisted of dozens of little stories trapped on my computer or floating around online lit journals, many of which are now defunct. It’s gratifying when I gain readers. I’m very thankful DUMBO picked it up. At the end of the day, though, this book’s an odd duckling published by a small press. It won’t be everybody’s jam. That’s ok. My hope is that a handful of readers will really crush on it. Maybe a book goes in search of its true readers. Whatever others think, I write because I enjoy the process. The grind of sitting down to peck at my keyboard can feel ecstatic and ravishing. I’ll give two-three readings or talks, a couple interviews (like this one), maybe get a review or two if I’m lucky. That’s the nature of small press publishing. Small presses provide a space for such queer birds to take flight or just waddle around—for books to pursue their own ideals, and authors their own evolution, largely outside the pressures of the mainstream marketplace. I have several other projects on tap in different stages of completion. I’m currently sending out my second poetry manuscript while tidying up poems for another. I’ve been slowly accumulating essays for a nonfiction book, mostly dealing with art and travel, which has also taken decades to compose. And I just started a notebook to jot down plot points and outlines as I ideate my first novel. I write plays and operas on the side, too: I just wrapped up a new three-act opera that was produced last year, which could use a few rewrites maybe. But my most concerted task currently is completing a textbook, The NewFoundations of Creative Writing, which I’m writing with my long-time collaborator, Lawrence Lenhart. Our pitch just got a contract offer from Bloomsbury. We started this project from all the material we couldn’t fit in the first textbook we wrote together, Experimental Writing, which came out from Bloomsbury last year. Most introductory textbooks in the discipline feel twenty years out of date. It’s a very contentious time in the field—there’s a lot of debates and changes taking place in the discourse, both within academia and the industry; that will make this book quite a challenge. Or maybe that’s why we’re the only ones foolish enough to attempt such a preposterous errand?
TODAYToday a bully from my high school is coming by to beat me up one last time (he has cancer). AMERIKKKAOf course Amerikkka leads the league in serial killers. There are a great many serial killers in town right now—because of NYC’s favorable tax laws and enterprise zones and the big serial killer parade we have every year, and because in a lot of our restaurants serial killers eat free. A JOINERHere’s something you might not have known about me: I was a joiner in high school. Carbona Club, Whip-Its Society, Nutmeg Club, Friends of Cough Syrup, Society of Huffers & Baggers, Air Dusters Club, United Helium Party, Poppers & Snappers Study Group—I did just about everything. THE DARK WEBAnother strange aspect of the dark web is that some entrepreneurs have set up shops there. So you can stop and enjoy a hot dog. Or you can take a break at a little booth and get your photo taken with a monster (it’s really just a cardboard cutout, but it looks very real. And the teeth work). PROVERBCan’t have people looking up your cornhole. I think Benjamin Franklin was the first one to say that. BEATLEI’m told 60% of “A New Film About the New Beatles” had to be reshot because of me. Unfortunately, that was the end of my movie career. I checked around but nobody needed a Beatle right then, not even one with as much experience as I had. (I said I had a hundred years experience.) JAILHow did I end up in jail? When I got to Yuma I hadn’t slept in two weeks and hadn’t shaved or showered. My clothes smelled like farts and clams and were stiff from sweat and dirt. The police got dozens of calls claiming a caveman had just robbed the bank! I got a chuckle out of that one. RSVPSadly, due to a bean diet and other environmental factors, I will be unable to attend. THINGMy hand starred in the TV show The Addams Family. Yes, it’s true, Warren Beatty was definitely up for the part of Thing but I eventually snagged the role. I did an excellent job in the macabre/black comedy sitcom and to this day it’s still considered the best TV show of all time.
I found the file by accident.It was tucked between Q3BudgetProjections.pptx and TeamSalesSeminar_2021(final_FINAL2).pptx on the shared drive.Jesus.pptxJust like that.I clicked it out of curiosity. Or maybe boredom. It's hard to tell the difference between the two when you spend the day in an office staring at spreadsheets that mean nothing to you. The file was empty. One blank white slide. No title. No bullet points. No formatting. Just a white void.A warmth emanated from the screen. I stared at it for a while. I bathed in its glow. My body slackened. My thoughts dulled to a low hum. Like I was recharging. Like I had taken something I wasn’t prescribed. Somewhere below the static, I thought I could hear a choir humming. Maybe it was the computer’s fan speeding up. The electric sermon lulled me into a trance. I don’t know how long I sat there.A wave of anxiety snapped me out of it. Any of my coworkers could have walked by, caught me slacking off. I told myself to close the file, to get back to work. But I couldn’t. My hands moved without me. My fingers hovered over the keyboard. I started typing.I wrote:I was the one that stole Rachel's underwear at the 6th grade sleepover.I had never admitted that to anyone, though the memory haunted me awake with guilt many times in the 20 years since. It felt good.I typed another confession. Then another. And another. I kept going until—"Mary," the voice said. I looked up, heart racing. My coworker stood across from me, arms crossed. "You're in this meeting right?" he said. "You coming?"I clicked save and exited out of the file.It wasn't until later that night, stoned and half asleep in bed, that it occured to me. Other people had access to the shared drive. My stomach twisted. I sprung upright, grabbed my laptop, and logged in. Jesus.pptx was in my recent folder.I opened it up. Checked the file history:File owner: Mary SLast edit: Mary SI didn't remember creating it, but then again, I hardly remember anything I did at work. Assured that no one else had read through my confessional, I shut my laptop and drifted off.Weeks passed before I opened it again. Work got busy. Days blurred. But one slow morning, restless, I clicked the file. Just to vent. Just to kill time. I typed secret after secret. My muscles unclenched with every confession. I wrote down my hopes. My childhood fears. I described my first kiss. It was at that moment I decided I would speak to Jesus.pptx every morning when I got to work.The next morning, however, I discovered something strange.I opened the file, expecting relief before the first slide even loaded. But a new slide had been added:I miss the way my mother stroked my hair.I was hit with nausea. My vision tunneled. I hadn’t typed that.I deleted the text and replaced it with a secret of my own choosing:I google myself everyday. I saved the file. I closed it.I began checking the powerpoint every morning.Like clockwork, new slides appeared. And they knew things that I barely admitted to myself. Things I had buried. I wasn’t sure if the feeling it incited stemmed from feeling seen or feeling surveilled. Slide 16:It felt cold and sterile and free of guilt. No one noticed.Slide 21:I haven’t been touched in 46 days.Coworkers glanced at me differently. "You look great," one said in a tone that meant nothing. "You seem tired," another offered, like a question. I started bringing lunch from home, eating alone. I stopped taking breaks. I withdrew, unsure if I was becoming more real or if I was being erased.Eventually, the file ran out of confessions. It had mapped every failing, every fleeting shame. It started predicting my future.Slide 56:I won't be needed after Q1. I stopped checking the file after that. Not because I didn't believe it. Because I did.On March 31st HR called me into their office. I knew what was coming. Before packing up my few belongings and returning my laptop to IT, I deleted the file. Cleared the trash.On the way out, I passed the printer. A stack of fresh printouts sat waiting for someone. In big bold letters the title page read:JESUS (FINAL).I didn't stop to read it.
Every weekend we begged our mothers to drive us to the mall, to leave us at the arched entrance by the Red Robin, and not to look back. We pooled our money. Birthdays, summer chores, quarters from fluorescent plastic Easter eggs. We bought T-shirts emblazoned with the names of bands and bracelets shaped like penises, breasts, middle fingers. We wore our contraband to school under our jackets and swapped shirts while waiting for the buses. No other kids recognized the faces spread across our chests, and we liked it that way. When we stared at our navels, we tugged our shirts tight until the singers’ black eyeliner stretched and smeared, until we were looking in a mirror. We straightened our hair, fried it, frizzed it, teased it with combs and cut layers up to our temples. Only Shyanne could convince her mother to buy the black box dye from Walmart. The rest of us concealed our envy and relief. We once went too far. We met older boys on the internet who sent us songs thick with screams and photos of their beat up cars and blue bangs and wistful eyes. Shyanne’s parents found our messages and phoned the school. We pleaded with the counselor not to tell our mothers. We laid low. We waited for the summer when Kelly would come to Grandma’s for a week. We smuggled a book, Introduction to Buddhism, all the way to New Jersey, desperate to decode the Nirvana lyrics all the blue boys wrote in their statuses. We wore skin-gripping gray jeans to Sunday Mass, and when Grandpa found our Buddhism lessons, he made us sit at the kitchen table while he read from the Book of Job. Grandma felt guilty and drove us to the shore. We wandered the sandy boardwalk, breathed salt air and never changed into our bathing suits. We yanked our tank tops above our ribs and let a local man give us henna tattoos. Peace signs, yin yangs, bold exploding suns. We said No when he asked if we wanted an outline of Italy on our inner thighs. We said Yes when he asked if we had enough olive oil at home to rub into our stained skin. That’s the secret to it lasting longer, he said with a wink. We made a plan to hide our bodies.A few weeks later, Kelly’s mom discovered the olive oil stashed behind the toilet, and we soon fell out. We went back to school, different schools, all of us. We swore we’d talk everyday, but Kelly told us not to call anymore after we tasted vodka with Shyanne’s brother. We got boyfriends, drank too much, lost each other's numbers when we lost our phones in dark rooms. Our lives unfurled on Facebook. We got tattoos, permanent this time. Kelly got married. Shyanne’s profile stayed frozen in our past. A middle school mall selfie. The sun ricocheting off a backdrop of parking lot snow, her black hair catching all the spare light. We have what relics we can remember. Not relics, fossils. The figures that left depressions in the sand are long gone, sand themselves now, returned to a great current I remember the Buddhists call a stream.
Ever since her husband was hit by a municipal bus, Mrs. Atwal would spend her afternoons watching the hippos at the aquarium. Their fleetness of hoof belying their primordial size.At two o’clock, on the nose, the hippos were isolated in a separate part of the tank and the mermaid show would begin. Children crowded the double-paned glass. A drowsy piano tune was piped through the speakers. The mermaids emerged from some unknowable recess in the tank. Each time one of the mermaids waved at Mrs. Atwal, or otherwise made eye contact with her, she imagined a hippo breaking loose of its enclosure and flattening the mermaid against the glass.“Afternoon pick me up?” The question threw her, as the man was small—very small—and she couldn’t be sure whether he was asking to be physically picked up.“It’s the good stuff,” he added, and held out a large soda container with a crooked straw poking out from the lid. Then shook the drink so the ice rattled against the sides. “Seems like you could use an eye-opener.”She declined as politely as possible. They watched one of the mermaids purse her lips and blow a kiss to the children.“I hate these floating turds. I wish one of them would get crushed by the hippos already.”She decided she liked this man, and when he asked her if she wanted to visit the food cart—the one by the penguin exhibit—she accepted his invitation.Outside, an axolotl-shaped balloon escaped a child’s hand and floated skywards. The man pointed at the boy and bent over in laughter.“Idiot,” he said. “How hard is it to hold on to a balloon?”The man ordered a single tray of fries, which he proceeded to slather in ketchup from the condiment pump. Mrs. Atwal ordered a small pouch of chips, which she slipped into her bag for later. They sat down at a picnic bench overlooking the Gentoo penguins.“You know how much they pay you if you fall into one of the exhibits?”She shook her head.“I mean, with a good lawyer, we’re talking millions. Even with a bad lawyer, you’ll be set for life. Just for slugging it out for a few rounds with some puffin.”He continued: “A couple of months ago some kid got bit by an otter. Guess what? A quarter million dollars. Can you imagine? He was ugly as sin before the otter got him. A quarter million! What would you do with all that money?”She tried to think of an answer. It shouldn’t have been hard to imagine as her husband had taken out multiple life insurance policies before he died and she had that much—more—in the bank.A seagull flew over to pick at the greasy jetsam under their table.“Fuck off, you ocean rat,” he said, trying to kick at the gull, but his feet couldn’t reach the bird from his seated position.Mrs. Atwal rose to go to the bathroom.“Where are you going, lady? It’s just an ocean rat.”The bathroom was precisely empty. She sat down on a toilet seat in the stall and thought about whether seagulls could digest fries or if it caused them to get sick and throw up later.Under the stall, she saw a coral blue tail fin trawl across the floor tiling. She opened the stall to find a mermaid in a silver wig crying over the sink. She edged beside her.“Why doesn’t Jason look at me the way he used to?” the mermaid said.She wondered if Jason was the other mermaid in the show. Or a land dweller with the biologically appointed number of toes.“He’s always talking with Miranda. And she can barely go thirty seconds without reaching for the air hose.”Mrs. Atwal nodded conspiratorially.“Miranda doesn’t have the lung capacity for this work.”“Right?”“And Jason, I saw him laughing earlier when a child lost his balloon.”“How cruel.”“Cruel indeed.”The mermaid threw her mammalian arms around Mrs. Atwal.“Thank you.”The mermaid hopped and shimmied out of the bathroom. Mrs. Atwal returned to the picnic bench, where only the man’s partially eaten tray of fries remained. She took out her bag of chips and ate them leaning over the railing encircling the penguin colony.“Ma’am,” said the moon-faced attendant. “You have to stand behind the red line.”She looked at the red line, which was several inches behind the railing.Would standing behind this line shelter her from life’s assorted dangers? A tall order for a band of paint, she thought.But like the well-mannered woman she was, had been raised to be, she stepped behind the red line, and for a moment even she believed that nothing bad could befall her.
Against the verdant landscape of boarded-up gay bars, bluffs that swell over cresting waves, and hot sand between toes, a haunting, frenetic, and razor-sharp narrative scurries to life in Season of The Rat (Cash 4 Gold Books, 2025). Like the rat, author Elizabeth Hall invites her readers to “taste it all- flowers and cigarettes.” The result is a work which resists definition—part novella, part confession, part dissertation, and part infestation. The reader plays the simultaneous role of voyeur and confidant, observer and observed, the rat in the ceiling and the girl who listens to its scurrying steps below. Season of the Rat is subtle and riotous, “a fat California orange in the palm of your hand.” Hall invites us to examine how we are changed by our tragedies and our inquiries—every shard of human experience piled at the sides of our roads. It is an exploration of our private ruins and all that finds a home there. I sat down with Elizabeth in West Adams to discuss Season of the Rat, anal breathing, sex, shapeshifting, California, and what’s on deck for this literary powerhouse in the making.Aiden Brown: I was so excited when Allie [Rowbottom] asked me to read this book. Without knowing what to expect, or knowing you, it just blew me away. One of my favorite things about it is the ambiguity of its genre identity, so I have to start by asking how you describe Season of the Rat. Elizabeth Hall: I think I’m officially calling it autofiction. It’s definitely based on my actual life. I’m usually not very interested in writing just a straight memoir because I get bored easily. And so the research is a huge help to stay motivated, and also provide a necessary counterbalance of joy and exhilaration—so any memoirs or essays I’ve written in this vein dovetail heavily into research, for better or for worse. AB: That was one of my favorite things about the book—the research kind of weaves into and around the more emotional and personal narrative, which creates such a strong portrait of intellectualization while still resonating emotionally. Your protagonist’s—or your—exigence for the rat research is self-evident within the narrative, but what drew you to researching abandoned gay bars?EH: The bars were actually before the rats—I found this book about Orange County by an LA Times writer Gustavo Arrellano, and there was this anecdote in the book about them. My friend Caitlin and I started going on adventures to these places in Laguna. It was an avenue of research that served as kind of a reprieve from my other research about my mom, or the cult she was part of that was founded in Orange County. A lot of my work focuses on sex trauma. Some heavy things were coming up within my own family in that regard. So I think it’s natural that I gravitated toward locuses of queer joy, especially in what I tend to think of as such a stiff place. And that research, too, helped me navigate my own queer journey. It was easier for me to go to an abandoned place to discover my queerness in a way than to go to a gay bar with people in it. I took the introverted path.AB: That’s so interesting because in the book, there’s almost always someone with you in those scenes. Actually, that brings me to one of the things I loved the most about this book—I mean, of course, I don’t love that it happened—but the way your relationships, for better or for worse, kind of lurk beneath your research and weave in and around it. In particular, I found the connection between the trauma you endured and the research on rats, garbage, and ruin so striking. How did those connections develop for you? Was it something you planned going into the project or something that emerged over the course of writing it?EH: So, the origin of the book was the sex assault. It started, honestly, because of an argument with my wife. The scene was cut from the book, actually, this tiff about the tent. But it was the first camping tent I’d bought for myself, and I’d taken it on so many solo camping trips, including a journey from here to Portland for my first book tour. And when I was about to go camping by myself in Joshua Tree with it, my wife was like well, you’re not going to bring that tent. And I was like obviously I’m bringing the tent. I don’t have another tent. She and I had just moved in (this was during the pandemic)—my wife also works a corporate job, and so she was living at a very different income level than I was. So, I took the debate over the tent as almost a symbol of that disparity. Like, of course you can just buy a new tent while I have to be okay with sleeping in my rape tent. I also didn’t want to give [Mark] or the assault power over my beloved tent. Eventually, it became a joke between my wife and I—we had a riff on “rape tent” for a very long time. And so the first scene of the book was originally going to be about this rape tent. I had intended it to be an exploration of [Mark’s] and my relationship through the lens of class. Actually, the assault came to be more in the background compared with the original exigence of the project. I really wanted to emphasize how much resources play into why people stay in abusive dynamics. AB: Period. Absolutely. EH: This was around that time when it was really popular in certain lit circles to listen to edge lord-y podcasts like Red Scare. They had an episode—actually, just the other day—where the hosts speculated that people stay in these dynamics for psychosocial reasons—they were attempting to do a psychoanalytic read on various dynamics like narcissism, or codependency. So, there was also a part of me that wanted to write this in opposition, not to Red Scare specifically, but to that whole idea that people are addicted to their lover, or that emotional reasoning is even a primary motivator. I wanted to shift the conversation—people, I feel, are almost taking pains not to talk about the resource aspect. It’s expensive to live in Los Angeles, and a person shouldn’t have to give up their life in a place because someone chooses to do something to them. When the assault happened, we had already been broken up for a while, but we were still living together. My primary motivator for staying wasn’t that I was just having such a good time hanging out with this person, it was for want of choices which didn’t implode my life.The choice to stay was one I made to try and control the situation. I’d just gotten a nonprofit job, which I was able to turn into a full time position largely because of the stability I had at that time, and because of the stability I’ve had with my wife Heidi since. At the time I was writing this book, I was working at one of the most beautiful libraries in Los Angeles. And I’ve worked hard to get these two idyllic situations. Had I gone to a shelter or stayed on a friend’s couch, that destabilization would have been observable to an employer. And I’d never had a full time position. I wasn’t able to even get a tooth fixed. I’m a big proponent of Maslow’s Hierarchy—like, how are you supposed to concentrate when you’re worried about having your basic needs met? Without the stability I have now, I probably wouldn’t have been able to write this book, at a minimum. AB: What is your relationship with [Mark] like now? How did it change or what changed about your perspective on it while you were writing Season of the Rat?EH: A part of me wanted him to bear witness to the pain he’d caused. Another part of me wanted to write about it quickly—I wrote it within months of leaving the situation—to preserve the sense of love I still had for him. Another myth that I’ve encountered is that you’re supposed to immediately hate someone after they’ve harmed you in that way. But we shared all kinds of deep intimacies with each other over the years. I understand why people do close their hearts, and my feelings toward [Mark] have hardened over time.I don’t think of [Mark] as a monster—I think doing that makes it harder to heal. While I understand why people would need to think of someone who did that to them that way, it created a dissonance for me between the reality of what happened and the ten years we spent together, the friendship we had. And even after it happened, we lived together; we were in a band together. Prior to his violations, I really did enjoy his company. After the assault, he was still my primary emotional support, which was that much more destabilizing. There’s a pattern in my life of being close to someone that then I had to extricate myself from—music I couldn’t listen to anymore. I always knew I was going to write about him, and I wanted to do it with a degree of diplomacy. I mean, I could write another book about sex assault two years later and write it totally differently. AB: You say this in the book—and really it was a gut punch for me as someone who’s had similar experiences—that he never denied the assault, it was just something that didn’t impact him on the day to day. EH: Yeah, he just went on living his life. The day after it happened, we dropped off the other person who was on the trip with us (who didn’t know what had happened) and I noticed that [Mark] was already on dating apps. He dropped me off in downtown LA to go on a date, and I spent the whole afternoon floating through the city. By the time I’d gotten in my Uber home to San Pedro, he was taking selfies in the desert with a new girl he was dating. I remember going home, crying and just thinking I can’t run away from this—I mean, literally—I didn’t have a car. And he got to just go on like everything was normal.AB: I was really struck by that portrayal of the banality of that kind of assault, and how human—or maybe diplomatic is the word—you were while still expressing that anger and that devastation that comes with sexual assault. I mean, we harden toward them over time, like you said, but making them monsters can also obfuscate a situation for us in so many ways. It is like floating, or like walking a tightrope. That brings me to this tension between fear, harm, and love. I felt that tension very strongly in Season of the Rat. What’s the relationship between those ideas for you personally?EH: I'm someone who grew up very much fearing showing emotion with the exception of, perhaps, within the church system. Definitely one of those people who went wild at a youth retreat—hands in the air, all that. I felt like it was like a safe form of love, I guess. I'm not religious now, but when I was younger, the idea of Jesus providing unconditional love was huge to me. Especially because that was not something I was getting necessarily in other aspects of my life. My mom is a wonderful person, but she has a lot of anxiety that tends to manifest as hypercriticality of herself and others. I think she moves through the world believing criticism is really helpful, and that it’s a loving thing to do. She grew up in a very dysfunctional home that created that lens of get it together, you know—“lock in.” That was translated to me and my sister through her, so I don’t think I was ever going to have that easygoing, free feeling love vibe. Part of [Mark] and my whole relationship was that we were both very much afraid of vulnerability and emotionality. The main thing we did together was smoke a lot of weed all the time and listen to music together—we really were not linked up in a soul-bonded, emotional way. In fact, I don't think we ever even said I love you until we’d been dating for four or five years—which is insane—and it only happened then because I was having an emotional affair with someone who was so free-flowing with love. That's why I was attracted to the affair, I'm sure. It woke me up to the range of love that I was missing out on. Even today, I'm married and I still get very embarrassed about showing affection. My wife worked on a really big live show, and I was making her a little card for when she came home, and then I was so emotional, and it low-key embarrassed me. I was like, I'm not going to put this out. And then I was like, wait, yeah, I am. This is so dumb! I am almost 40 and married. I don't still need to feel that way. So it still happens, that fear of being seen, to use a TikTok phrase…AB: The mortifying ordeal of being known.EH: Exactly. I mean, love is one of the most vulnerable things about us—the fear that it won’t be returned. I'm not like that now—compassion is free, love is free; it hurts me none to share these things with people. I think having access to love from Heidi—she's a very extroverted person, very giving, a very different person—and seeing her vulnerability with me and with her friends has been really helpful in navigating that vulnerability and fear, and letting love kind of effuse within our dynamic.AB: I haven’t had the pleasure of reading your first book, but I assume by the title I HAVE DEVOTED MY LIFE TO THE CLITORIS, that it explores similar ideas around vulnerability, love, and sex from a different standpoint, since you were in a very different place in your life when you wrote it compared to Season of the Rat. I’m curious how,if at all, your process differed between the two books?EH: Both were written during destabilizing times in my life. Going to CalArts for an MFA was a pretty good culture shock for me. I'm really more of an autodidact. I barely went to undergrad college, skipped a lot of classes; I thought it was like a hack to use a spreadsheet to track my class absences. It's not a hack, it was a waste, but I thought I was real slick. Going to CalArts was, in and of itself, a bit of a risky move for me. [Mark] had applied to grad school in California, and CalArts was the only place I got into near where he was accepted. At the same time, my mom was in the process of finding some things that had happened in the past with my sister which were pushing her to get divorced, and then she went bankrupt—her whole life kind of blew up. So, I don't think it was that surprising that I was drawn to an excessive research project. I think it was escapism. I'm a very escapist person, whether that be through marijuana or exercise. The idea for the clit book came from a poem that I had previously published, which was comprised of sex writing cutups, that people were responding really well to. I didn't feel like I had the writerly skillset for a novel, but what I could do—similar to the rats—was, and is, research. I can always do that because it makes me happy, and research is an escape in some ways. You get to live in another world. The clit research made me feel so alive. I’d wake up in the morning at like 5am (I’m an insomniac) and the sun would be shining—California sun, you know, every day.It was so beautiful, and I could travel to the sixth century or something and it felt crazy, and that made me really happy. I also was learning at the time how unhappy my sex life had been with [Mark]. Because I was raised really religious, he was the first person I’d ever had sex with. Even though I wasn’t religious anymore, there was still that internal backbeat of thinking it was cool that, although I was like 26 and in grad school, I had only had sex with one person. It was definitely misguided in retrospect. As I wrote, I was having a lot of compulsory sex with [Mark], because I just didn't know. I was having sex every day and giving blowjobs every day, and had no idea that wasn't a normal thing. And I never came, obviously, so—I'm only being this frank because it's a sex book—AB: No, I love it.EH: So, I was in the process of recognizing that cultural training, and of discovering that it wasn’t just me—it was actually everyone I talked to. I would talk to friends in the grad program and they all were like yeah we never come, even people who’d had upwards of twenty partners. I initially thought maybe it's just [Mark] and then it's like–, okay, no, this is systemic. Actually, until he read the book, I don’t think he had a desire to focus on my pleasure. I really think this comes from an internalized misogyny among many women and men, this idea that women's pleasure just doesn't matter. Like, no one comes from penetration. I mean, some people do.AB: Love that for them. Huge if true.EH: Right, it’s rare; the vast majority of people don't. And he was like Well, I've never had that problem with previous partners.AB: Okay, so those women were lying to you. EH: They're lying to you! Until he read the book, which probably hit home the ethical aspect of pleasuring a partner, did anything change in terms of us having better sex. But writing the book was eye opening for me and really changed a lot of how I thought about actual sex and agency around sex. It also exposed a lot of my own internalized misogyny, which I'm still working through.AB: Speaking of things you’re working through, I’m curious what your writing life has been like—how did you start?EH: I struggled with learning disabilities, and didn’t really read a book until high school, which was when I got into diaries—Sylvia Plath’s specifically. Then, I got into biographies of writers. Anaïs Nin was the first writer I was obsessed with. I was still very religious then, so I would go through and cross out the curse words and the sex words. I always knew I wanted access to a different life than the one I was living, and reading and writing were windows into other worlds. Reading shapeshifts time; you’re slowed down and almost living inside the book and alongside the book. I was interested in the lifestyle of a writer or what I thought that would be. A lot of my favorite writers were very craft-oriented like Nabokov, Miller. But Nin especially—she was self-taught and kind of a bad writer when she started, so revision was big for her. I knew with my academic sensibilities that it would be huge for me too, and that’s really informed the kind of writer I’ve become.AB: I really see the confessional style in this work. That’s so interesting you say that because my primary impression of this book (once I could catch my breath) was how well-crafted it was, both structurally and on the sentence level. Season of the Rat comes out in May—what else is on the horizon for you?EH: I’m not working on a big project right now, but I am working on some smaller essays. I write reviews, for Full Stop and other places. I really like doing critical work. I think I was scared to do any kind of review work because I didn't feel like I had the academic training to understand books systematically, but I found out I really love doing it and my editor at Full Stop, Fiona, is such an amazing reader and editor that I just want to keep working with her. I’m kind of loosely working a novel idea—the problem with novels is that I lose interest really quickly—but, it's about a health clinic that does anal breathing—AB: Oh, hell yeah.EH: —which doesn't exist, but it's inspired by trends in colonics. I've always written a lot about wellness and been interested in it, not as a practitioner necessarily, but as a cultural phenomenon. AB: I wouldn't be surprised if you don't see someone trying to harness anal breathing in a few years. EH: Oh, anal breathing is the final frontier. I feel like whenever my larger projects don't work out, they usually become a smaller piece. I have an essay coming out in Hobart that kind of dovetailswith Season of the Rat’s storyline. I feel like there is an idea for something about my mom that’s percolating. I tend to be inspired by things in a moment and then go hog wild over them. If I were a really disciplined person, my life would probably look different, as would my writing, but I let my ADHD take the reins creatively. I'm definitely here for the girls and for the messiness.AB: There’s a lot of really beautiful vulnerability in that too. Girls forever. I can’t wait to see what you do next.Season of the Rat is forthcoming this June from Cash 4 Gold Books.
Last spring the county newspaper paid me $200 to write about local dreams. I interviewed a man whose job it was to cycle out the books from the little lending library in the center of town. We met at a diner nobody liked and was always empty but stayed in business as such diners often do. He told me he mostly dreamed about colors. Yellow in spring, green in winter, purple in autumn. Summer heat made the man's legs swell and he didn't want to talk about what he saw those nights. He seemed uneasy about the approaching season. As we spoke my smartphone gathered time beside undercooked bacon. Recording a voice I'd listen to speak these words once and never again. This is the nature of the news and the people who write it. We fill our notes with memories and chronicle a world that grew so fast it forgot how to stop and remember.I ask the man if he believes in dream analysis, and he tells me when he sleeps on his back he sees faces in the colors. People he met when he served jury duty in Greenfield three years before. I don't know their names or anything about them, he told me. The day aged through the pollen-painted window. Buzzards circled above the bridge across the river to the rust-lined highway to Boston. The man fingered the bacon on his plate. Oh, he said. We sent a boy to jail for murder. Outside the diner the man asked me if I'd put him in my story. I told him it's up to my editor. I didn't know if that was true but when I don't know something I appeal to some faceless power. We shook hands and he asked me what I dream about. I told him reporters should never become part of the story. He laughed and said, No, really. Tell me.I told him when I dream about the places I used to live, they look nothing like those places, but in the dream it's all real and true, that I know those places like I do the people I've loved. Every place in my dreams has a road leading north. I thank him for his time. You're from around here, he said. Not really, I said.The man got in his car and backed into a fire hydrant. Water gushed like blood from a torn-off thumb. Then he turned the car around and gunned it against the hydrant. His engine sobbed. I took pictures with my phone but they were all blurred, out of focus, smeared with light. Faces filled the windows around us, some I knew, faces angry and entertained, faces of why now, of not this again, of I get it, man, I really fucking do.
&
The paper assigned me to cover a recent wave of carjackings. Not the carburetor thefts. They told me that was a different beat, and that we'd talk about pay when I had something good.As I waited at the light on Avenue E one morning a woman opened my passenger door, flashed a ten-dollar utility knife, and told me to drive.Where? I asked.South, she said. I gassed it. A pollen-clouded patrol car was parked outside the gun store at the intersection. A cop, leaning against the door, didn't look up from his phone. We left town. Drove past restaurants, gas stations, farms. All for sale. The butterfly sanctuary was closed for repairs. Further south a line of cars waited to park at a brewery. Food trucks belched steam and a couple locked arms on the grass. I nearly collided with the car ahead of us.Watch it, said the woman.Sorry, I said.The woman told me to take the highway. We inched through Sunday construction. Men clustered by potholes and idle machines. I wondered if any of them looked inside my car and confused us for husband and wife. I told her this.Don't say that, she said. She checked her phone and was on the verge of tears.Her directions were more forceful now. The ramp past Deerfield, left, right, left. Take it slow down this street. Look for a truck with no bumper. Apple red.The same, the woman said. The same.She was out of the car before I parked. The woman sprinted, slipped and shouted up the angled drive and flung open the garage door. Two men fucked on a yoga mat, free weights and kettlebells and gym clothes abandoned around them. A radio spewed dad rock on a chair. The woman grabbed one of the men by the hair and tugged. The men broke apart, their passion fissioned to sweat and rage. I see you, the woman screamed at one of the men. He didn't seem angry or shocked. Calm, almost, as if this was expected, predicted, even welcome. No one said anything. Just frozen acknowledgement, where no words suffice to explain how the resolution of tension causes both pleasure and pain. Then the woman shoved me back to the car. Pushing tears back into her eyes as she moved. Drive, she whispered. South I drove again. Small mountains rose as if the world was teething. We approached the tallest, one I'd climbed before blind-drunk on a snowy, lonely night. I hooked an observation road and shot past hikers too weary for the steep rock path. My legs ached from the long sit. At the peak we got out and gazed across the valley and the towns and the curves of the green-brown Connecticut River.I dreamed about this, said the woman.What do you mean? I asked.I saw my husband. Driving there. I felt how happy he was. How that garage felt more like home than ours.How did the dream end? I asked. The woman rocked back and forth, hands in her pockets.Like this, she said. What do you mean? I asked.I forced you to drive at knifepoint. When we arrived I forgot my knife in the car. My husband chose someone else. Then we drove up this mountain. Then I woke up.We said nothing for a while. A prop plane flew above us in a circle and then turned north, against the wind.Then the woman said, The way my husband felt. That love inside him. That deep, physical love. I'll never forget.Then she said, I don't have any money.We drove back to town under a rose-gold sky. There are no sunsets anywhere like those in western Massachusetts. I wondered if I had the right to tell this story, or if everything was off the record, or whether these things even matter when you're a witness against your will. As we turned onto Avenue E the woman pressed her knife against my neck. Wallet, she said. Then, more softly, she said, Please.She took thirty bucks and a gas station gift card and the picture of my nephew, then tossed the wallet in my lap and stepped out into the street.
&
The paper laid me off on the fifth of July. In June we covered bridge repair delays, unaffordable homes, church fires, community musicals, childhood illiteracy. Covered births, deaths and arrests. Covered sickness, hope and happiness. We covered the war, and then they shut us down. Some private equity barons out in Boston coveted the land beneath our office. I had an hour to clear the city desk I shared with three other journalists. One week's severance. Benefits 'til the end of the month.I asked my editor what to do with my half-finished story about a man who'd drowned in the river. He was a local, an institution, a bellwether figure. Sought your change outside the sandwich shop. Bought milk and bread from the communist theater group on the corner of Avenue G. Once, he told me a story about being a judo champion in California and as he spoke he hand-chopped the air and winced and bore his teeth, but he seemed proud to remember those moves. Ben. Ben Armstrong. I'd written his name on a notepad and circled it in red ink.Forget it, my editor told me. We were close in the way you become when you deal with the constant mess of private lives, because that's what local news is, a constant mess bursting into public, ordered and shaped by writers and publishers. But I knew next to nothing about him, his family, what he wanted, how he saw himself, here, at the end. But it was too late to ask. I watched him slide a half-dozen reams of untouched paper into his backpack and step nervously out into the light on the sidewalk outside our office. On the bathroom wall I wrote in permanent marker The News Was Here. Then I pissed, didn't flush, and left with some notebooks and pens.At home, I caught up on my drinking. Shouted at hummingbirds. Built a castle of beer cans on the back porch and staggered through its walls before a midweek thunderstorm could blow it down. Mostly I slept. My blanket gathered cat hair as I moved from bed to floor to couch like some forgotten, guilt-soaked king. I wondered whether the stories I told really mattered. If they changed the world or changed someone's mind. If any sort of story matters when a story must make noise, provoke, and never repeat.My mother, a man's voice said from beside the couch one day. It was the man from the diner. He gripped his legs with thick, red hands. Like many men who lived in town, he seemed on the verge of explosion. His eyes darted between the brown houseplants on the windowsills.Then he said, That's who I see in the summer when I sleep. That's not a color, I said.She is, he said. Like this. The man pinched his arm and then held it close to me. His arm shook and a small spot bloomed red then purple-brown. The ease of his bruise scared me and I wanted to tell someone about it.I loved her but she, well, you know, said the man. The man's arm kept shaking.Then the man said, Someone can love you and still do terrible things. Like nobody taught them how to do it right.Yeah, I said.I rolled over and listened as the man watched me and breathed. Am I asleep? the man asked.I think I am, I said.No, said the man. I'm asleep. And I really don't want to be. I want to wake up.I turned back toward him and then said, Sometimes when I want to wake up I open my eyes as wide as they'll go. Sometimes if I do it enough I can break through the sleep and escape.The man tried it. The valleys beneath his eyes turned the color of plums. He used his fingers to stretch the skin like he was trying to release air from inside his head.It's not working, he said.I'm sorry. Am I dead? Did I die in my sleep? I don't know.Please wake me up. Please. Please!Alright, I said.I threw off the covers and gripped the man by the shoulders. We made eye contact. Blue ones. The sky in spring.Ready? I asked.Yeah.I shoved him. As he fell backwards the man grabbed my face. I lost my balance and we tumbled together in darkness. I don't know if I hit the ground. Don't remember. All of a sudden I was awake, alone, in my blanket, and that was all. I sat up. I had nowhere to be. No stories to sell. I closed my eyes.What remained was a burst of relief. Like a bath of liquid gold. But it wasn't my relief. In half-awake clarity I knew that the man had escaped from the dream. His dream or mine, I wasn't sure. But he was free, somewhere out there, even if it meant returning to whichever hell had inspired the dream to begin with. I wanted, desperately, for the man's happiness to be my own.
Chase Griffin’s alchemical style continues with Peter Zoidoid & the Commonplace (Corona/Samizdat, 2026). At once a fanciful record of an unfathomable mind and experiment in merriment, the book is unabashed with its lingual adventurousness. When life gives you strange frequencies it’s time to whistle your own tune. Griffin is a psychedelic jester, and, as is common to that type, also the smartest guy in the room. I spoke to him about the book.Rebecca Gransden: Where there are gaps in this text, there are gaps in my life. I was only able to write this introductory material after an extended break from text of all types. They say the only way to get out of a black hole is to have never gone into it. While I don’t recommend going any further into this one, it’s already too late for you. -Roy Christopher, 2024 What’s the deal? When and how was this written and translated? Where does Roy Christopher fit into all this? Chase Griffin: Zoidoid was written in an alternate 1980’s by an alternate-me. And Roy is an alternate-Roy. And Roy has half-translated (half-translated because he suffered some Lovecraftian-madness while translating and he couldn't finish) Zoidoid from a fake future language (alternate-me is also a philologist) into English. Thanks for writing that intro, alternate-Roy!RG: How long did it take to write Peter Zoidoid & the Commonplace? Did time pass fast or slow or in-between?CG: It took a year to write Zoidoid in my head. I was working as an overnight stocking clerk at the time. And it took a couple nights to let the whole thing pour out of my head onto the page. The year was long because overnight jobs are fucking awful. The two days passed slowly, but that was a pleasant slowness. I think one of the greatest feelings in the world is being in the midst of that fabulous kind of writer's schizophrenia when time stands still and the alien worm voice guides the pen.RG: It’s been a while since I've written in commonplace. I shouldn't be writing so sporadically in here... the way I’ve been writing in here for the past twenty or so units. I am realizing now that I should be much more diligent. What are your aims regarding language and style for the book? Any intentions regarding world building or backstory?CG: Context: Peter has this notebook filled with his archeologist, archivist parents' writings on the past (our present) and the language of the past and how the language might be able to unlock the secrets of the mind control device permeating all. Further context: So the commonplace book referenced is both Peter's diary (the back half of the fictional notebook which makes up the whole of Peter Zoidoid & the Commonplace) and an archeologist book (the front half of the fictional notebook which we do not get to read).I went with this constrained epistolary style because that style best suits a story about translation and a world that makes unreliable narrators of its population.RG: Believe me, I wish I could turn off fresh emphasis. I don't want this trouble. I wish to be a googly-eyed wacko normie schmuck just like everyone else. Who needs this kind of stress?What would you like to emphasise?CG: I don’t know. Having a faulty, sparky monkey brain is great. There’s nothing wrong with the mass madness that is humanity. Because none of it matters. I love my madness. It’s my superpower. And only the outwardly mad ones are the sane ones. We’re all flawed and terrible because we’re gross animals. But who cares. Let’s all forgive each other for being born dumb animals. The sooner we get over this mass psychological determinism we are all bound to, then the sooner the big, dumb Doubt can begin, and then we can all accept it, and then we can go ahead and finally begin gently, cautiously being big, dumb monkeys attempting to not be big, dumb monkeys (which I think involves a lot of mass inaction and quiet and staving off entropy and the elders starving for the young (my modest proposal)). Maybe it is written that we will stop doing things for long periods of time. Maybe it is written that we will finally give up and realize we’re not good or better because we’ve done nothing bad. We’re just lucky. The circumstances we were born into gave us ourselves. We did nothing to earn a self. Not one of us has free will. So these words don’t matter. Nothing matters.God, I’m such a drama queen.Ask me tomorrow. I’ll emphasize a belief in something tomorrow.RG: Why am I still eating this dip?What is the best dip? What is your favourite dip? (Not necessarily connected).CG: Guacamole. Guacamole.RG: Have you ever smirked momentously?CG: Sure. After a good fart. RG: I believe I'm having a strange reaction to death. Makes sense. I often have strange reactions to many things.Have you ever had a strange reaction? Do you aim to establish a particular type of reaction in those who read your work?CG: Sure, I have strange reactions all the time. Life is weird and I have a faulty, sparky monkey brain. And no, not really. I'm not looking to establish a particular reaction in readers. I'm looking for readers who are down to have fun with the text.RG: I think I will crack open my briefing case. Today's setting will be archoniff sider and maybe it will help with my damn sass. What is the importance of sass to Peter Zoidoid & the Commonplace? Where does sass begin and end? How much is too much? Does sass have an objective measure?CG: It might not be sass. Sass might be a random word that Roy chose when he was translating. And I don't know about the beginning and ending of sass. Maybe there is no beginning or ending. Yes, I feel like sass has an objective measure and its measuring instrument is an oversized spanner covered in purposeless springs and gears. RG: Please introduce Bippy.CG: Bippy is Peter's dead mom’s cat. This prissy furball is the hero of the book and the best character I have ever written.RG: I’ve written too much and I am going to become an unshakable thing. How horrid!Have you encountered any horrid unshakeable things, either in the writing of the book or generally?CG: Surely. All the time. I encounter horrid unshakable things all the time. I live in a densely populated village. How could I not encounter horrid unshakable things? Don’t read the local paper, by the way. But what am I to do? Nothing really. I see it all as character building. I have to be like the Buddha Or maybe not. People suffer so much more than me, so why shouldn’t I suffer some too? I just got lucky because I wasn't born into terrible circumstances. No one earned anything. How horrid! RG: The book features song lyrics. Are there melodies behind these lyrics or do they exist solely on the page?CG: I have melodies for them, but the reader can make up whatever melody they want.RG: What significance does music have to Peter Zoidoid & the Commonplace? Do any bands or albums share common elements?CG: Music plays a big role in prosody, and prosody is very important to me.Music is always on my mindMusic prompted the writing of Zoidoid. One night at work, while I was listening to “Doctor Worm” by They Might Be Giants, I came up with the basic outline for Zoidoid.Also, Peter Zoidoid & the Commonplace and its fraternal twin, Satanic Panic & the Very Special Episodes (they will be published together as The Ampersand Collection on Corona Samizdat), are like the twin Guided By Voices albums Bee Thousand and Alien Lanes. The common elements are the signal issues and equipment blockage. The books and the albums have these fun messages to send you but the low studio quality and signal issues (mostly due on both parts to limited budget) only allow fuzzy snippets of the messages to get through. And, of course, this fuzzy snippet-ness (this constraint technique) is all a part of the charm.RG: I am the only untranslatable person in the world. There's no one here who can decipher the whispered gibberish.Does your writing demand comprehension? What is lost or found in translation?CG: My writing doesn't demand comprehension. All that matters is the emotion and the emphasis, the incomprehensible human-ness (the faulty, sparky monkey-ness), poking through the rigmarole-membrane of the literal and figurative institutions. My works are more like fantasy and fairy tales (which don't require explanations for their motions) than science fiction (which is like a fairy tale giving excuses for its behavior).RG: How do you define New and Old?CG: Pre-old is our time. Old is the glorious golden civilization that arose from the ashes of our time. New is the oppressive society that followed the downfall of Old.RG: Does Peter Zoidoid & the Commonplace have anything to say when it comes to politics and current affairs?CG: Not sure. I don't think there's much to say. We're all actor-bodies of the leviathan-theatre and all political conversation is a big script. It's all catechisms. Even what I just wrote. And also with you! Gesundheit!But maybe the book is asking about obscurantisms and mesmerisms. Are we searching too hard or too little for obscurantisms and mesmerisms? Are we too paranoid or not paranoid enough? Should we be putting our energy elsewhere? Is this, the searching and obsessing over possible hidden things, a design—like a figurative Air Loom? RG: How do you approach the use of signs and symbolism in your work?CG: Character and story always come first. The conceptual materials are handed to me by the characters and the story. Then comes the welding torch.Going back to music, this is how a lot of the great concept albums were made. Fellowshipping equals motif discovery.RG: Onomatopoeia—what are its limits?CG: What are the patience-limits of your ideal reader?RG: How would you advise someone approach reading this book? Any particular demeanour or method of engagement that would enhance the experience?CG: My books like to be read aloud (although many readers have told me they prefer to read them silently)—in the same way Shakespeare is best ingested when read aloud aloud. Not saying I’m Shakespeare by the way. I need to add way more dick and fart jokes to my work if I want to be Shakespeare. With something like Hamlet, even if you don't understand the language and the cultural references, if you read it aloud you understand the emotions and the emphasis. And maybe that kind of understanding is more important than direct understanding, which is an understanding that always ends up getting folded into the flux.Also, use whatever pronunciation you want for my made-up words. And then stick to whatever pronunciation you choose.RG: I looked back to Shea to make sure he wasn't examining my facial expressions too closely.What facial expression best expresses what Peter Zoidoid & the Commonplace is trying to express?CG: How about that fun face Johnny Cash is making in that famous picture of him flipping the bird?RG: Do you hate computers?CG: Meh. I'm pretty indifferent. What even is a computer? Are they terrible for the earth, like air conditioners and cars?RG: Believe me. I didn't want to trust him. I didn't want to set aside my urge to stomp his brains in. I didn't want to not hate him, the fucking mentor fuck. But I submitted, and I set it all aside.Have you ever trusted someone to be your mentor? If so, what influence have they had upon Peter Zoidoid & the Commonplace?CG: No. No mentors.There have been Lots of cool old guys and gals in my life though and they’ve given me really good advice. Please excuse this aside. The most trustworthy old people I ever met was this hippie-pirate couple who owned this fantastic used bookstore and junkshop called The Memex. I spent most of my youth sitting in the back of their store reading old copies of Mondo2000, the Illuminatus Trilogy, Rocco Atleby novels, Ursula Le Guin, and the Whole Earth Catelog.RG: Do you ever get the feeling of brain growth caused by reading? In a physical, oh jeez, something changed and I’m not sure in what way?CG: Yeah, definitely. I feel squirming sometimes. And I hear a little voice. The voice says things like, “It's just you and me, buddy,” and, “More guacamole, please.”RG: What portmanteaus, neologisms and/or spoonerisms do you like? Are there literary devices you would NEVER use, because they are lame? Conversely, are there literary devices you consider underused, so would like to advocate for?CG: I like whatever looks good on the page. And, I don't like to knock stuff. Because I wouldn't want to indirectly knock a fellow writer’s style. Everybody is allowed to do their thang. And, I don't know what's overused or underused. I use devices when the need arises.RG: Is there a chance that Bippy could have her own spinoff universe?CG: Yes, absolutely. Bippy deserves ten books.RG: Which renowned philosophers would read and appreciate Peter Zoidoid & the Commonplace?CG: He’s a TV character, but I feel like Bernard Black might like my book. I had his voice in my head, impatiently making up words and saying sassy lil deconstructions, when I was writing this one.Although, Bernard would probably open my book, drop a piece of jammy toast in it, make a face at his mess, and then toss the book-jam-toast monstrosity at an annoying customer.RG: How is information transferred via Peter Zoidoid & the Commonplace?CG: Information is transferred through the air via the Air Loom.Spoiler alert: The Air Loom was built during the golden civilization when we finally figured out the horrible truth. We built the Air Loom in order to hide the Lovecraftian revelation from ourselves.RG: Have you ever kept a journal, diary, or log?CG: Yeah, I keep a journal. I mostly write about the cute things my kids do. I keep a commonplace book too. That’s where I do all of my story and character mining.RG: What is your dream for the book?CG: My dream is for it to get folded into the book cocooning all of my current books, SCHLEMIEL GAUCHO, which is about this one-man Brothers Grimm who is collecting postmodern fairy tales (my books) before they are swallowed up by the flux and incorporated in the fold.RG: Where is Peter Zoidoid and where is Chase Griffin?CG: Peter Zoidoid is in the book writing with the slime-pen filled and Chase Griffin is in Tampa writing this answer.
A miracle had come to the mansion that evening, dressed in peasant robes as she played go on the doorstep. The house of Lord Liu was in desperate need of a blessing. The past month had been disastrous for those staffed within its walls. The change from a serene yet celebratory atmosphere had quickly dulled after one of the maids caught sight of the Lady’s physician leaving her room with a cut over one eye. Surmising that he had said something to anger her, rumors spread over the course of a single night – vines choking the mansion halls, blossoming with fragrant anecdotes.The less fantastical yet albeit as shocking truth was made clear the next day, when all the maids were assigned dark sashes to wear across their waists. A sign of mourning, a homage to the Lady’s stillborn daughter. They were to wear them throughout the year and were warned to tread carefully around the Lady’s room, as she was, according to the physician's report, “of a disagreeable disposition.”When servants came to deliver her meal trays, they came silently, heads hung low like crouching flower stems. She would get angry over the most menial details – a stray stain on one’s cheek, a distractingly uneven gait. Once she had clutched a young maid by the cheeks, demanding she get on her knees and pluck out her own eyes.Those are my daughter’s, do you understand, you knave? My daughter would have had those eyes. Her nails dug into the maid’s face, drawing blood with her thin fingers. She would have had them. Greedy. All of you, taking what isn’t yours.No one could bring themselves to complain. Employment at the wealthiest home in their village was the best most of them could achieve, beyond taking up whatever meager trade their families specialized in. They were well compensated, and much of their pay sustained relatives. They were servants, masters of staying out of the way when need be, so they listened as she wailed night after night and learned to adjust.It was on another of those tumultuous evenings that the girl arrived at their doorstep. She couldn’t have been more than eight years old, barefoot in white robes, setting up black and white go stones on a wooden board. Her dark hair was short, brushing against her shoulders, two buns tied with lavender ribbon on either side of her head. At first, she appeared to be some beggar child, perhaps sent out to be the breadwinner by a parent. More careful parents would have their children rummage through the cook’s trash, and the servants, who had all come close to living similar lives, turned their heads whenever they saw mousy clumsily scampering off with bones and rinds. The nature of her posture, too straight and poised to be that of a poor person, was immediately suspicious. Her robes were free from blemish. Though she wore no shoes, her feet were similarly spotless. Most striking of all was her skin – the palest, most enviable shade imaginable. Courtesans spent half their earnings on lead powder to reach such lengths, and died before they ever could.The maids exchanged furtive glances. They ought to remove her quickly, or call one of the guards – how had she managed to evade them, anyway? And while lugging that wooden go board, too?Before any of them could attempt to escort the girl off the premises, the Lady appeared from the opposite end of the courtyard. None of them realized she had left her room, and her steps held no trace of a sound. Her dark, ebony colored hair slid in lazy circles down her back, uncombed for days. “Who,” she said aloud, in that quiet tone that suggested a beating, “are you?” “Hello.” She rubbed a white go stone between her fingers and looked up eagerly.That day, the Lady of the house received the daughter she had so badly wanted.
. . .
She was, according to the maids, a no-name girl from a no-name land.Her official words were that her parents had died of plague, and she was now an orphan. The go board and stones belonged to her father, the last sentimental possession she carried. The establishment they used to run had been burnt to the ground to stop potential contagion. She was – according to her words – all alone and dearly missing her mother, and had caught word of the compassionate Lady Yin of the Liu household. Compassionate? Was the same dry, echoing thought in all the servant’s minds. By now everyone had heard of how unhinged she’d become during her time of social recluse. She was still visited periodically by other court women, but solely because she was of higher rank and could not be disrespected in such a way without the possibility of punishment.Compassionate was not a word that could be used to describe her any longer, but it was the one the go-girl used, and just the thing to soften the Lady’s hardened heart. She had taken the orphan in and claimed her as her own. The Lord had contested the decision at first, but he worried that any comment on the girl would revert his wife back to her former state. Lady Yin kept the girl at her side during all her daily activities. During the few times she left the house – still publicly in her year of mourning – she toted her newfound child with her. The Lord had decided that the girl was a cousin they were charitably adopting. Visitors had no choice but to believe it – she had all the doubtless exuberance of a noble. She looked like the Lady, and many theorized that once she was of age, the two would be difficult to discern from a distance. The girl was not prone to childish outbursts. She wasn’t meek by any means, but she never seemed to share the tantrums of others her age. She settled disagreements by striking deals, a skill that amused elders of the House. They engaged in her games for their own fun, and thought nothing of the calculated way she examined their moves, mistaking her serene expression for complacency.But the servants noticed the girl’s strolls through town, where she talked with any established businessmen she could – and their sons. She was never swayed by material things. Birthday gifts of jewels and silk managed a thin smile from her. And when she was presented with a meal, she ate alone unless it was required that she dine with guests. A guard posted outside her window had caught her pouring soup on the flowers below, a wastefulness that could never have been attributed to someone of her supposed origins. All their combined observations were, together, a coal lump of speculation. How could they explain the bone-chilling coldness of the girl’s skin, the strange way she smiled, as though unsure of how her cheeks would shift when she did? How she embraced her mother with all the affection of an undertaker, arms stiff as wood? For a while they entertained the notion that she was a demon – told stories to each other in the servants’ quarters about how often the Lady and Lord would get sick now that they’d accepted the girl as their own. Some days it seemed they were well and truly dying, with how skinny the Lady had gotten, though she insisted that she was fine, that she was getting better; she said all these things as she cradled the young girl in her arms, the girl who was squeezing her fragile mother tightly, latched onto her skin like lice.The conclusion came upon them swiftly. The girl had come when the House was at its weakest, the Lady at her most vulnerable, to drain every last drop of good fortune from them. And what would the servants do once their master was buried and gone? Where would they go? Back to the streets, every last one of them, begging as they once did, or working in the sweltering forges, or sewing cheap tarps in the shops. They had been nothing before and would be less than nothing now, the dirt that lined the irrigation canals.So they plotted, as servants are naught to do, and waited until the girl had departed to her own chambers – which took days, to the point where the cook had suggested they just pry her off, the Lady was too delirious to know, she’d probably appreciate the lack of weight pressing against her feeble lungs. At the behest of the maids, they waited for the girl to finally leave her mother’s side, all teary-eyed as she sullenly returned to her room.They caught her as she was about to climb into bed. Her eyebags were swollen and dark, and her skin paler than usual. She shuffled onto bed like a maggot, and asked quietly for the furs she adorned herself with before sleeping. The maid held the blankets above the girl’s head, intending to drape them over her shoulders, and with the other hand sliced her neck.The girl made a sound, something like a whine, an animalistic noise. The blood gushed from her in crimson ribbons, streaming down the bed. The other servants left their hiding spaces and circled the maid with the knife to watch the demon die. It twitched on the mattress, writhing weakly, fighting with a frail, human-like strength. It made slow motions with its mouth. What demon cried out mother with such a cracking voice?They all seemed to shake their heads at the same time. No, they thought, watching the little girl go still on the mattress, she was killing them all.
