Rebecca Gransden Archives

DREAMS OF EXURBIA: AN INTERVIEW WITH NOAH RYMER by Rebecca Gransden

May 6, 2025 · Interviews & Reviews

Noah Rymer’s domain is that of the illuminated store, the lonely places on the outskirts of town, the back rooms of an America in thrall to the failure of its own myth. With denouement (Anxiety Press, 2025) Rymer envisions a peripatetic slumberland, surroundings subject to abstruse moods. Nowhere addicts succumb to an anaesthetised pulse, ensnared by the numb rhythms of a society gone ill on its symptoms. I spoke to Noah about the book. Rebecca Gransden: Simple place to start, where did denouement begin? It strikes me as a piece that has a lifetime’s worth of backstory and experience tied up in its making, but do you recognise a point at which it came to take hold, to form its current incarnation?Noah Rymer: denouement definitely has its roots from a lifetime spent in suburbia, but it’s hard to think of when it all came together. Most of it stemmed from a desire to explore the psychogeography and mythology of the American suburb, the misé en scene of what surrounded me growing up.I remember being very much influenced by classic Americana literature such as ‘The Swimmer’ and Don Delilo’s White Noise, the latter of which I stole heavily from. Reading Delilo really set things in motion, and helped flesh out a lot of what I wanted to do with denouement. Hearing The Specials’ “Ghost Town” for the first time was huge—it became the theme song for the book. I think reading Baudelaire was crucial to the story really coming together as well; my unnamed character quotes a bit of French in the graveyard scene, which is actually a prose-ified part of my favorite Baudelaire poem, “The Swan.” His [Baudelaire’s] understanding of boredom-as-vice plays a huge factor in how the story develops, because almost everything is arrived at because of an inherent desire not to be bored, to satiate a certain curiosity.RG: Your writing lives in suburbia, on highways, down supermarkets aisles. The places that are everywhere and nowhere. How do your characters react to these environments? There’s a background uniformity, a sameness, to the landscape that suggests a melancholic form of inertia, as there is no hope of a different place to escape to, even if a moving away is possible. How does psychogeography factor into your work?NR: I think my characters are suffused with an inherent sadness, a damning boredom from their surroundings. I know I was. There’s always been something sinister to me about suburbia, and I’ve carried that sense of unfamiliarity within me ever since I was a kid. They (my characters) are trapped in a state of limbo, a kind of purgatory, a labyrinth with no apparent exit. Psychogeography has been a fervent interest of mine these past couple of years, and denouement definitely wouldn’t’ve been the same if I hadn’t read Debord before working on it; reading the Situationalist International Anthology was huge for me. I love the dérive as well, although I utilized the tactic more so when I was in the city. I believe I unconsciously applied the tactic to the lives of my characters—they themselves are drifting through life, their whims their only guide, and so they move through the story semi-randomly, through their own desires. But I still think that, eventually, they will escape. Purgatory implies some progression towards the divine, a sanctification through trials, and that is what I intended for my characters. After I wrote denouement, actually, I understood it as part of a triptych—like Bosch’s The Garden Of Earthly Delights, or a literary trilogy—like Dante’s Divine Comedy. So this is my Purgatorio; I’ve just finished writing an Inferno, and right now I’m penning my Paradisio. So all of what I write is guided towards an ultimately hopeful and cathartic end, even if it doesn’t seem that way at first.RG: she moved like a ghost throughout the two-story and basement as if it were a decrepit Gothic castle, damaged by an unspeakable past with an uncertain future in permanent collision with the former, crashing in slo-motion. her voice came out scratchy and uncertain, like the movements of a deathly-rusted machine. The machine is a theme I picked up on, whether it be rattling radiators and air-conditioned rooms of suburban living or the gasoline gods that drift the roads of a ritualized America. There is a rhythmic force to your writing that parallels the propulsion of the machine. How do you view the machine when it comes to your fiction?NR: denouement is very much car-centric because it is a product of American culture. Yet it is fetishistic in a different way than how Crash approaches it; it is fetishistic in the sense of ‘fetish’ as an idol worshiped. The car becomes the byword for ‘freedom,’ self-propulsion, to be one’s own person. The car is Promethean. In other moments, though, I can see and understand transit (the metro, the car, the bus) as a kind of modernization of Charon’s ferry, so there’s a duality there: that of self-propulsion, and of being brought to one’s end, in the teleological sense.As an aside, I also think that the rhythmic propulsion that you mention was influenced by listening to acid house during the writing process. It’s the kind of music that seeps into you, dictates how you pound the keyboard, how you understand the movement of your characters—both in their own gestures as well as how they themselves glide through the story by your own writer’s hand. And acid house, of course, is a perfectly machinated genre of music. It is thoroughly inorganic and plastic, and, as such, perfectly represents and replicates the prefabricated and artificial social structure of the suburbs.RG: denouement addresses the protracted decline of a culture enthralled by consumerist doctrine. Stores are meccas, a place subliminally signaling a religion substitute, a surrogate for the protections of family. Shopping is framed not as a task undertaken out of need, but as an experience, with store displays taking on artistic dimensions. What was your approach to the theme of consumerism for denouement?NR: Mere observation. I think that’s what most of the novella was, actually—making passive observations and then adding my personal commentary. I think I tapped into consumerism in particular because I used to work at a grocery store for a couple of years, and so I was completely inundated by it all. I used to dream of working, actually. I couldn’t escape the flow of commerce. I heard the machinations of product in my mind, at home, wherever I went, and it became an all-consuming force. It’s also because America has an inherently capitalistic framework: consumption is built into the American mindset, is as natural as breathing. It also helps that I’m Catholic, and the parallels between genuine religious experience and its secularized equivalents become just clear enough to be properly horrified at. We live in an age of substitution, of signifiers who have forgotten what they signify. All of the crosses become inverted. RG: There is music to the world of denouement. The beeps from cash registers, the humming of refrigerators, all serve to create an environment primed to lull your characters into a form of unconscious automatic functioning, sleepwalking consumers wrapped in a narcotic and dazed mindset. Music acts find a place at a dive called Rat King. Traffic flows. I understood your characters as possessing an unconscious drive to break free from the rhythm. How do your characters attune to the rhythm? What place does chance play?NR: As I mentioned before, I was listening to a lot of acid house during the writing and editing process, and I think that dissociative groove is very much baked into the story. My characters are smart enough to recognize the palliative aspects of all of these forms of machinated harmony, to point it out and commentate on it, but cannot escape feeling dehumanized themselves by their presence, alienated by what surrounds them. They can’t escape it. Intelligence cannot, and does not, grant salvation, so even if Julie can, for example, see the kids at the house party and recognize how completely dead inside they are as they perfectly synchronize in doing the Macarena, she still can’t escape from feeling dead inside herself. Chance doesn’t play too big of a role in the story for me, but I do think it leads to revelation. The first example of this is the unnamed character wandering to the bedroom where they’re having the orgy, and she is able to see it for what it really is: a desperate hedonistic escape, a fantasy that has collapsed in on itself and is now shown in all of its depravity. The second example is at the end of the novella, when she stumbles upon the old bluesman singing his little hymn and at that moment is shown the light in a small but meaningful way. And she realizes a form of catharsis in writing down the events of the night. RG: Small details imbue the world of denouement with its own energy. Your descriptions ensnare the background detritus and panorama of modernity. Advertisements, branding, flyers become beacons. When it comes to style, is that something you’ve honed over time or has it evolved naturally?NR: It’s hard to say. I think it’s a little bit of both. In the process of writing denouement, I surrounded myself with a particular set of influences that would help me nail the aesthetic and the atmosphere: Gregg Araki films, Euripides’ Bacchae, Dub Housing by Pere Ubu, Jim Morrison’s poetry. So in that sense it was honed. But I do think my style has also evolved naturally, because I’ve always been writing about the dark side of suburbia—denouement represents the sum total of that. I think all the themes and ideas that I had experimented with prior find their fullest expression here. It was something that I was unconsciously working towards.RG: A character that stands out to me is The Milkman. He’s a purveyor of illicit substances, and the persona he’s invented for himself toys with the idea of drugs as a healing or palliative measure. He refers to his clients as ‘patients.’ What medicine is The Milkman delivering?NR: Milk was actually a cameo for a character I originally wrote in a short story, ‘Dead Los Angeles’. But in denouement he’s a lot more sinister, Luciferian, the closest thing to an antagonist within the narrative. I think it’s a negative healing that he delivers, that he ultimately wants to ensnare people within that palliative haze. But at the same time the drugs he administers to the unnamed character provide the opposite effect to what recreational drugs usually do. Instead of masking reality, he reveals it as much as he revels in it; The Milkman is physically a person, but spiritually an insect, a disgusting cockroach-like beast whose layer of humanity peels off as soon as my unnamed character takes the drugs. And so she sees things for how they really are—everyone becomes a manifestation of their own vice, and so their ugliness is presented on the outside as well as on the inside.I tried to reveal the spiritual reality through a material monstrosity the way that Flannery O’ Connor utilizes the grotesque in her stories to the same end. Milk was also inspired by the passage in Genesis where the serpent tempts Eve to eat of the fruit of The Tree of Good and Evil, and in a sense, the unnamed character has a certain innocence that Milk completely shatters. But to be completely honest, I originally wrote him in as an excuse to write the Burroughs-esque/Cronenbergian scene that follows. So I had a lot of fun writing my interpretation of a bad trip. But I’m also glad I found something to say with it as well. RG: the doors flew open with a quick BANG and quickly slammed against the wall as a robber, in an act of nervous bravado, announced his presence in a voice that was strong and shaky, the first-time tremor of a decent kid hard-up and down on his luck. his dialogue was clearly influenced by all the gangster movies he watched, his actions betraying famous scenes and heists studied carefully on the screen. but in his execution, it all fell to pieces, like a bad theater student trying their hand at improv.Your writing poses the question of what part the cinematic plays in culture, and to what degree the screen simultaneously reflects, infiltrates, or guides. Is film an influence on your work?NR: I’m glad you asked the question, because I used to be a film critic! Film is perhaps the biggest influence on my work, and I always imagine my writing playing out like one. I’m always thinking in terms of lighting, cinematography, staging, etc., and tend to think of my stories on the visual level, as opposed to in terms of plot, dialogue, or anything which would be more literary than filmic.I’ve always been interested in the mimetic qualities of film as well, which goes all the way back to Aristotle’s Poetics and his understanding of tragedy as something that we imitate, that we take on the emotions of the tragic hero and thus experience catharsis—the evocation of fear and pity. But, as you point out through the excerpt, mimesis can tend more towards the copying of actions, the erasure of the boundaries between real life and media. I think American Psycho influenced me in this way—there are scenes where Patrick Bateman is watching a horror movie before he kills someone, or pornography before he goes to pick up a prostitute. And then there’s Emperor Nero, who thoroughly blurred the distinctions between real-life and the stage throughout his tenure as ruler. I couldn’t tell you what all of this means, exactly—either in relation to my own work or the culture as a whole. But there’s definitely something there, something dangerous and revelatory. RG: Immediately, an intense, suffocating silence was draped over the masses like a burial shroud, stifling the slightest whimper or roll of a solitary tear with the immediate brutality of what had just been said. Death was supposed to be something far from our own reality, something that only happened to the elderly, or a distant relative. Now the truth had appeared, uninvited and unwarranted, with horrific immediacy. Class was dismissed for that day and the next. In “The Book of the Dead” a string of deaths brings a dose of weirdness to a small town. It is a place where conspiracists stir a form of religious apocalypticism and the residents look for a mystical driving force behind events. What is your approach to the strangeness of suburbia?NR: I think the strangeness is most defined by not delving into Lynchian territory (or trying not to, at least), even though Lynch has always been a huge influence on my work. So I write the alienation that I personally feel, and how that alienation can manifest outwardly. But I usually take cues/steal from horror movies and weird fiction in order to fully realize the ‘suburban gothic.’ I think of what I do as inherently expressionistic, that the inner world of my characters is reflected in their environments, but I do think it also goes vise-versa. RG: denouement will be released by Anxiety Press. How have you found the process of working with them, and what is your opinion of the small press scene in general?NR: It’s been pretty chill, honestly! I just sent over the manuscript to the E.I.C. and he said it looked cool, that he’d like to work on it. He sent over the cover art some time ago, which I liked, and that’s all there’s been so far. I haven’t spoken to the guy since August, but I figure he’s pretty busy as is, so I’ll try not to bother him. I am a little biased, since I run a small press myself (Pere Ube), but I do have a lot of love for the scene—at least, the handful of indies that I prize above the rest: I gotta give props to joints like Ex-Pat, BRUISER, and APOCALYPSE CONFIDENTIAL. I usually have a more adverse reaction to the other presses and mags, particularly the ones that are seeking to serve an agenda, to fill a quota. From what I’ve seen in a lot of contemporary indie presses, there’s a belief that fiction must have a social purpose, must be representative of diversity, must be didactic, and that all seems like such a drag to me. The small presses that I mentioned, that I like, are good because they prioritize the craft of the writing rather than the identity of the writer, and I respect that more than anything else.RG: Do you consider how someone who reads your work might react to it?NR: All the time! But it’s less of ‘will they like this’ and more of ‘will they understand what I’m trying to say.’RG: There is an idea that once you live long enough in the same place, it begins to turn sour the more you try to identify it, understand it, dissect it—ants swarming over the bloated corpse of a crow or spiders eating the insides of a caterpillar in well-trimmed lawns and clean-cropped woods, that very soon every house becomes a haunted house, even the one you grew up in and have lived in your whole life, and yet it all comes to a conclusion within the simple realm of psychology, paranoia, mental illness and the like, residing within little else but Zoloft-hallucinations and cough-syrup.The above excerpt is lifted from “Prom”. Does denouement haunt you?NR: Everything haunts me; denouement is just an attempt at putting it all on the page.

Robin Zlotnick

YIELDING AS GLASS YIELDS TO FIRE: AN INTERVIEW WITH MANDIRA PATTNAIK by Rebecca Gransden

February 4, 2025 · Fiction

Shifting states. The novel-in-flash Glass/Fire (Querencia Press, 2024) exhibits the unfolding travails of girlhood, a reality adorned in rich contradiction and symbolism. Mandira Pattnaik’s sumptuous language carries forth a deep and sensuous meditation on life’s volatility. The wildness of nature’s forces at their most capricious lend an elemental intensity to fate. A dynamic and revealing exploration of growth, I talked to the author about the book.Rebecca Gransden: In the mood we were in, fire could be liquid, could be sand, or molten like lava, or flames, licking the last of us.You open the book with the above line. How important are opening lines to you and what does this particular line suggest about the book in its entirety?Mandira Pattnaik: Thank you, Rebecca. I do not particularly stress over opening lines, though I greatly acknowledge their importance, especially in flash fiction. It’s helpful to think of the opening as the answer to the question: What does it all boil down to? So, it is essentially the essence of what I want to convey. I want readers to feel surprised, or jolted, or pleased, or offended—I want them to respond in whatever way. With fiction, I shepherd some of the things that I know as truths ignoring from which field of study they originate and insert them into my make-believe world. I’ve now grown to enjoy this kind of braiding. This line, while it braids certain facts about the nature of fire, also tells something about ‘us’. Do ‘we’, as much as we are ‘in the mood’, as yielding as glass yields to fire? I asked myself this question that hadn’t been answered or addressed in my mind and wished to take the narrative forward from there. That’s the way I approach writing—a kind of collaboration between knowing and unknowing. It becomes interesting how a fractured pattern forms that I must uncover in the process while exploring what remains unsaid. Since I had the scope of a novella, and it was the first time I was attempting something of this length, I had the liberty to take or not take the chance to provide answers, and hoping the reader will decide for themselves.RG: How did you decide upon the title—Glass/Fire—for the book?MP: Glass and fire are unrelated in ordinary usage, and it is easy to forget that something as common as glass is formed by subjecting moldable liquid to fire. But then, glass is fragile. Again, some of the toughest glass-made objects are very useful. Fire is energy, enormously potent, but it is shapeless. It has many forms just like glass. Firepower, however, again like glass, has been tamed to suit human needs. So, all these facts seemed very related, though not in a general comprehensible sense. When I set upon the idea of the novella, the opening story was already out in the world, titled as “Glass/Fire”. After that first piece was published, I was sure it was a title that was full of possibilities and that could be open to interpretation (which I kind of love about titles!), and I had to name the novella that I was writing with the same title.RG: A recurring theme is that of impermanence, the fluid nature of states, whether that be of the physical, tangible and chemical type, or the psychological or spiritual. What is your approach to transience?MP: In Indian Hindu religion and mythology, from a very young age, we’re rather familiar with thought-schools such as the cyclical nature of births and rebirths, the virtue of detachment (to possessions as well as relationships) as opposed to being attached, and how change and impermanence is in-built in the universe (as opposed to absoluteness). I understand the doctrine of impermanence is very important to us as a people. Neither are rulers forever, nor is the mortal body to last eternally. Similarly for wealth or happiness, as is bad times and sadness. In Buddhism too, which originated in India, ‘anicca’ is the same doctrine of impermanence, evanescence, transience. Just as life changes in empirically observable states of childhood, youth and death, so do mental events as they come into being and get dissolved. Friends and foes appear and fuse into the mind’s horizon when their job is done. I find this deeply profound. I realize that the recognition of impermanence alleviates the stress of modern living. I seem to course around the theme of transience quite often in my prose and poetry and somehow that has touched a chord with my readers. Simultaneously, I am a great believer of fluidity and interchangeability. These preferences, I understand, gain ground in my writing in a natural manner.RG: Your language is rich, sensual, often concentrated in its descriptions. You make extensive and poetic use of simile and layered meaning. How much of the style you’ve chosen for Glass/Fire is a conscious decision?MP: Thank you so much for saying so. I’m grateful for all the praise that my use of language gathers, given that I am not a native English speaker. Also, I am not a trained writer in any sense—no degrees or writing workshops, and nothing to do with writing in my family, so it amuses me when Granta, denying me a bursary that I had applied for, compares my sample piece’s style to that of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It also propels me to search for what is my true calling, but then I realize that, having had no training is a blessing as I have all the liberty in the world to use my natural style the way I wish to. I have often been appreciated as a lyrical and sensual writer, which of course, is gratefully received. As often happens, one is not prepared to hear anything about one’s writing—I feel so inadequate as an outsider, untrained, writer from the global south. And then one does get more comfortable. It kind of grows on you, and one starts believing in one’s writing—which I guess happened to me. It was never conscious. I am happy I am allowed my lyrical style, without the imposed regulations that academia might have suggested, or which formal training might have eroded.RG: Let’s imagine pure mechanics. Not fire. Instead of glass, let’s talk attraction and repulsion. What is to be stirred with two scoops of isinglass so courses of molecules change, or solidify like glue, or say, become viscous?It’s tempting to see a tension between the scientific and materialist language used in the book and the lyrical and artful, but the impulse to adhere to distinct categorizations on those terms is made moot early on. While you talk of the chemistry that makes us, the stuff of life, the novella interweaves aspects more broadly to present a holistic view. How do you view the scientific when it comes to Glass/Fire? Do you have a personal interest in the sciences?MP: It's really difficult to place science and art in two watertight compartments, isn’t it? There’s a constant osmosis taking place, and even one feeding on the other to enrich and enhance each other. I like this interplay. I tend to incorporate this tension between science and art amply in my writing. When it comes to Glass/Fire, the very basis of the work, starting at its title, is heavily drawn from various branches of science. I like to think of myself as a scientific and rational individual who also recognizes the limitations of science, both theoretically and practically. I have a background in science, yes, but I also graduated in economics and worked in accounts and audit—so these are all related and interwoven into my writing now. I’m also a big advocate of science explained and used in everyday life, as should the arts be. Instead of classrooms and seminars, science and arts should be part of life for the masses, not just the elite few.RG: But being suspicious in a relationship cemented with trust, is really cruel, it eats away the insides like termites.The novella addresses heavy themes such as adultery, marital breakdown and family strife. Your characters face the undermining of their foundations. How did you go about incorporating these aspects within Glass/Fire?MP: In opting for exploring certain issues, or the choices of themes we make as writers, I am not much interested in topics that essentially affect an individual or family, such as the themes above. I’d rather explore issues that affect society more broadly, such as hunger, civil unrest or apartheid. Having said that, themes of a domestic nature are no lesser in my mind, just a matter of what I am keener on examining as a writer. To me, issues of adultery or marital breakdown are simply manifestations of other problems in families and societies, and as you very importantly point out, in surviving these, the characters in Glass/Fire face the undermining of the very foundations on which their existence depends. These are ways in which the characters are forced to reevaluate the very basis of their being—and they undoubtedly fight back. I wanted to address how fragile existence sometimes becomes, when the truths and relationships you hold dear to yourself are shaken. I believe this kind of tangential approach to characterization requires more involvement and engagement. Instead of examining the said intensely domestic themes directly, or thinking about these issues as specific to one group or category, I asked myself if I could get to the core of their sadness or unfulfillment, and if there were several minor issues that were responsible for the situations the characters found themselves in.RG: There was a man dwelt by a churchyard. His wife was the enormous yew tree that shielded him from all. His children came by as autumn leaves, or as some say, they were the cattle that died grazing upon the yew. Sometimes the man coughed so hard, he’d want to be taken out to sea. But they’d trick him—his wife and his cattle-children—saying, the season’s changed and Christmas is here, when nothing ever changed at all.When it comes to narrative, the novella constantly highlights the meaning to be found in the everyday, that symbolic significance not only exists in a wider cultural manner but is amplified and changed by the personal stories we tell ourselves and are reinforced by family rituals. What was your approach to narrative for Glass/Fire?MP: I find the symbolism in ordinariness haunting me everywhere. It is like there are things on display, in nature and in people, waiting to be observed and newness discovered, until one realizes that it is only the form that has changed, and nothing ever changes permanently. I think I am going back to the theme of impermanence I discussed earlier. There is a lot of anguish, sense of betrayal, and a sense of forced mental captivity in Glass/Fire, and the only way out of it, at least momentarily, was to search for symbolic outlets for that feeling. I think the undercurrent of anguish is somewhat redeemed through the pursuit of, what I term as, ‘extraordinary ordinariness’. I’m attracted to natural, accessible objects' magnetic qualities, things and sights easily missed by the unobservant, which are significant in the way they enhance the beauty of the everyday and what is considered the regular or mundane. In that reference, my approach in Glass/Fire was to find that ray of hope in ordinariness as a signifier of extraordinariness.RG: How does the concept of freedom impact the book?MP: Ah, now that’s somewhat muddy territory for me—I mean, this concept of freedom. What is even freedom—how free are we? What is the freedom of mind? Is being free in the body enough? There are so many questions, and I can hardly begin to comprehend even if I knew the answers. But yes, I am very much an independent thinking individual and the concept of being free, or at least, feeling free is very important to me as a writer. I routinely turn down offers to write according to a certain theme or plan I’m not enthusiastic about. I respect others’ freedom, and in that context, I think it is very essential that we can be tolerant towards the ‘other’, whatever that may encompass. In this book, the narrator, Lily, their mother, Jo, and Heena—they are all seeking some degree of freedom. Some manage to achieve that ‘limited’ freedom they had been dreaming of, others don’t. So that again becomes slippery territory and I’ll leave readers to decide for themselves.RG: Gaze at the archipelago around, like it were the pores of a humungous indigo skin. Pass the tiny island where the market still spills with cheap wares people buy. Not you fancying something anymore, though—glass bangles and silk scarves and colored beads mean nothing today. Ceased to have any merit long ago.At a point in the novella you address the psychological consequences and emotionally disruptive impact of a devastating event. What struck me as particularly perceptive was the observation that in the aftermath of such an event meaning is drained from the world, rearranged or lost. Do you have a philosophical approach to meaning that is expressed in Glass/Fire?MP: I am not sure I am consciously incorporating the ‘meaninglessness’ of certain things in the aftermath of a particularly traumatic or psychologically draining event, but I think it follows as a universal truth of the human condition. When a relationship is thriving, there are several associated memories, and the lovers hold on to those as proxies of the ‘feeling of being in love’. But when there’s a disruption, the equations change, and the same things have no significance.The stories I’m interested in and truly invested in, and want to produce, are about finding the truer meaning underneath our superficial lives and delving into the raw, untouched material underneath. That is where the root is—the origin and consequence. After Where We Set Our Easel, my debut novella, I found myself thinking, What is the consequence? In my debut, I was particularly favorable to seeking a hopeful resolution. But in this one, because of its length which allowed me more space, I wanted to approach the questions of origin and consequence with more elaboration, and not necessarily a peaceful resolution.RG: Looking back, but with an eye on the future, how do you feel about Glass/Fire now? What is next for you?MP: I feel content with how Glass/Fire has been received by readers. I can perceive that it has generated critical interest and is being seen as a book that stands out from the crowd. This is extremely encouraging because I write about characters and settings that are not very common—especially because they belong to South Asia and the novella almost entirely happens in a coastal region of India. I am also happy that this means I can continue to be as original and faithful to my style as I want to. Following this, I have a collection of short stories that I hope will find publication soon. I am also excited about my debut novel that I am currently working on.

Robin Zlotnick

THE HAUNTED MEMORY OF A DEAD PLACE: An Interview with Derek Fisher by Rebecca Gransden

January 14, 2025 · Interviews & Reviews

Is there something up with modern dread? Derek Fisher’s enigmatic collection Container (With an X Books, 2024) strokes the lid of contemporary malaise, and teases the release on stories that simmer like a broiling pressure cooker. This is writing cast adrift on strange currents, Fisher’s domain that of diseased architecture, where dark impulses meet bad vibes. I talked to Derek about this unsettling and dynamic collection. Rebecca Gransden: When did you write your first short story? Has your approach to the short story form evolved over time?Derek Fisher: Yooo. Hi Rebecca, my fellow Lizard Brain!My first short story, like ever? Uhhhh, I think I was in high school. I remember submitting little weird things to my high school’s annual short story publication. A couple of them got in. Then I was supposed to join everyone that got tapped and do a reading at a nearby bookstore and I most definitely did not show up. No way I was reading in front of people back then.For a while I wrote stories based on what I thought readers might want, based on what kind of style and voice trends you’d see in literature. Don’t do this. It’s the ultimate bad move. Over time I think I stopped caring about what the work would look like to others, and just wrote the stories I wanted to write. I found myself writing in a handful of approaches to voice and style that started to feel like my own. There are a few stories in here where the paragraphs are all blocks of text, no indentation. I write with this format more and more, as I find it tends to drive this ominous tone that I’m usually gunning for. Something about the fragmentation helps conjure the spooky vibe. I also think nowadays my stories are getting shorter. Soon they’ll just be two sentences long. “Jim went to the store to buy a bag of Milk. The severed fist was still in his ass. The end.” RG: The collection shares its title with one of the stories included in the book. What led you to select Container as the title for the collection as a whole?DF: For the longest time I wanted to name the collection I’ll Only be Happy Once Everything is Gone, and had submitted previous versions of it with that title to other presses. But I hadn’t written the story “Container” at that point. Then one day that story spewed out and it was obvious that it would be the title track. I love that goddamn story. The way it grips tight like having your whole body wrapped violently in duct tape. That’s the feeling I get when I think of that story, so it seemed like alright why not just call the book that and hope the whole collection feels that way? Try to convince the reader that the whole thing carries that same tightness through the title, haha. Gotcha. That story deals with desire on the verge of rupture. It takes place in constricted spaces. Cars, elevators, storage rooms. And maybe more than anywhere else, inside the obsessed brains of these two characters. Their thing threatens to rip open at the seams. I think the story itself feels that way, like it’s just barely contained. I really like this story. I think it constricts us into these spaces. Confronts us with the lust or obsession or self-erasure or whatever flood these characters find themselves in. RG: How old is the oldest story you’ve included in Container, and how new is the newest?DF: The oldest is “Scorch Earth.” I probably wrote that in late 2019, early 2020. The newest is “Rhino.” I wrote that like two seconds before I sent the collection to Jon at With an X. It came out in La Piccioletta Barca after the collection had been accepted. RG: The stories featured in the collection have appeared at a wide variety of literary venues. How did you go about selecting which pieces to include?DF: I went back and forth forever on what to include and where to stick ’em. The stories “David Lunch” and “Rhino” were last minute additions. The title story came fairly late in the game too. “Scorch Earth” and “Bird Eating Glass” and “I’ll Only be Happy…” had been around in the hard drive’s basement for a little while but I always knew those stories would be part of the deal. Whether or not they had been previously published didn’t factor in too much. It took me a while to figure out the order. That’s a fun exercise. Rearranging the pieces until they feel right, or as right as they’re gonna feel. I wasn’t sure about including the flash pieces at first. But then I figured who doesn’t love a one-pager? Easy work. Throw them in! I’m always interested in how writers arrange a story collection. Feels similar to how the tracks come together on an album. Or a set list at a show. Sometimes you read a collection and you just know why the final track was picked to close the show. Two of my favorite collections in recent years are Maggie Siebert’s Bonding and Sara Lippmann’s Jerks. Two entirely different gems. In both cases, you get excellent collections all the way through. But then they both end on such strong notes that it changes the complexion of the whole thing. In both cases, these final stories (Siebert’s “Every Day for the Rest of Your Life” and Lippmann’s “The Polish Girl”) imprinted the joyous experience of reading the collection with a perfect, final sledgehammer to my ribs. You don’t forget a thing like that. Good curation can sew the feeling of a story collection to your skin. That’s what I want to feel when I’m done reading a book. That, or a feeling of “What the fuck did I just read?”RG: In “Bird Eating Glass” you present a character named Mantle, who is a musician swept up in the modern fame game. For them, sound brings renown, brings the noise, brings powerful recollections and associations. Are there particular sounds that flood you with memory?DF: I constantly hear the sounds of trains in my head; that braking screech, of the train pulling into a station, or possibly derailing. I don’t know what that’s about. Like I have a subway stop full of dead people living in my skull or maybe in my house behind the wall like in that Robert Munsch book Jonathan Cleaned Up and Then he Heard a Sound.At all times I feel like I am hearing dead static, or electric feedback. Should probably get that checked out, right? Like someone is holding a microphone to an amp. I don’t know if I literally hear this, but it’s there in my head. Probably just been to too many shows. I enjoy it. It tunes out the world for me, which I don’t mind at all. I have what I think is a problematic compulsion to repeat songs in my head all day long. But not necessarily because they are catchy. Lesser Care’s “Finally Bare” has been on constant repeat in my brain for three or four weeks. I’m totally haunted by this song and I am losing my mind. It’s a good song! I enjoy it very much. But sounds and music often turn compulsive as they repeat for me. Every song I’ve ever heard just gets added to the jumble of infinite repetition. When I stop to think about all this constant music in my head I think I must have a tumor or a serious neurological problem. It hasn’t killed me yet so I guess it’s probably fine but who knows. I always write with music on. Silence drives me crazy. Unless I’m beside someone I love. Then I can be ok with quiet. Their breathing is enough. Otherwise, I need sound. Mantle, in “Bird Eating Glass,” is the manifestation of this part of me. I’ve never played music, but I can’t live without it. Sound informs my ability to make stories. Mantle is what a character would look like if they were stripped of everything but sound-driven compulsions. An expression of pure noise, otherwise locked into the body and mind of a human. I think people can relate to the idea that our internalized noise not only has value to us, but is a reflection of all the sensory mania we absorb, and can be filtered into something quite lovely. The world is a fucked up place, right? Mantle’s noise is the meeting point between the world, and total sonic isolation forced outward. The conceit of the story is that harsh noise can become the world’s most popular art form. I am 100% confident that this is true. It’ll just take the right artist to deliver us. RG: The story “Scorch Earth” makes repeated reference to a purpose-driven life. What does a purpose-driven life look like to you, and how does that manifest in your writing life?DF: If you asked me this question four years ago I would have had a whole spiel about how writing is my purpose and how my life is driven by it and as long as I have writing goals I’ll be fulfilled or some blah blah blah like that. But I’ve calmed down a lot with that shit. I don’t know if life (mine or anyone else’s) is purpose driven. I just do things I guess. Write, eat, work. I really like eating. Sometimes I watch these competitive eater YouTubers and think I should do that. That can be my purpose. To eat. Consuuuuume. Lily in “Scorch Earth” is a smart cookie but at the start of that story she’s still too young to understand what life means as something separate from her parents. She believes in a “purpose-driven life” but doesn’t fully appreciate the fact that this idea has been dictated to her from birth. I think there’s an undercurrent of spirituality in that story, where her parents probably believe that by killing, by devoting their lives to the pursuit of taking life, they are somehow closer to god, or the devil, or whatever nasty thing they worship. We don’t see this translate into Lily. She does not show signs of spiritual belief in pursuing her victim. She lives this purpose-driven life because that’s what she’s been taught to do. Sometimes this is how I feel about the rhetoric around this idea of purpose, that we are being fed a pseudo-spiritual concept and that if we live with purpose, we will be complete. But the more I think about this as something dictated to me, in YouTube videos or podcasts or whatever, the more it feels like snake oil, and just fodder for boot-strap narratives that exist only to feed the machine of capital. My true belief is that people just do things. We just do things. We will always do those things. Whether we like it or not. They are coded into us, and/or the influences around us lead us to do things. Eat, drink, lie, steal, kill, love, donate, write, play, serve, worship, make annoying sounds for no reason, travel, do drugs, smash our teeth out with a hammer, whatever. RG: I found many of your stories to be governed by strong undercurrents, as if the crux is brimming beneath the surface. This gives the pieces an enigmatic quality. Is this element one of conscious intent?DF: Oh, thank you! I like hearing this. It is conscious yes, but I never know if I’m doing it well. I am a giant fan of subtext in fiction, and so I prefer to try to work with undercurrents as opposed to surfaces, but I also like to write stories that are more vibe-driven than plot-driven, so I think these undercurrents you identify are part of my attempt to encourage certain vibes more than anything else. I’m a big fan of dread. Apocalyptic nothingness and the haunted memory of a dead place. Memory is the motif I’m obsessed with most. Almost all my stories are about memory. Humans are made of memory. I think these undercurrents are all attempts to explore the memory of a place, relationship, moment, etc. Often memories are haunted and uncanny. I like to try to get at these feelings in the subtext.I think about how this applies in the story “Progress.” The meat of the story is the dialogue between TurtlePhone and Positively Pete! It seems like such goofy shit. A smart-ass talking toy turtle with the mind of an up-his-own-ass PhD student and who also believes he’s a special ops super-killer. It’s probably obvious that I had a lot of fun writing this. But the part of the story I’m most drawn to is the abandoned, scorched shell of the town of Baker, California at the end. What happened here? Why this apocalyptic graffiti? What haunted hell is this? In some ways I see all the dialogue and silliness of the story as a colorful vehicle to get us to this apocalyptic end, this haunted memory of a place that existed until recently. As a reader I just love seeing and thinking about undercurrents. Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day is one of my absolute favorite books, because of how it tells a rich story entirely in the subtext. Laura Van Den Berg’s collection What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves us (I just typed that whole thing without Googling it) is a goddamn masterclass on subtext. Both of these books deal with subject matter that isn’t of high interest to me; both are books I stumbled on, but quickly came to love because of how strikingly they channel what’s below the surface. I don’t care so much about craft. Sure I like to see talented writers throwing down some nice moves, like watching elite athletes do their thing, but that’s relatively low on the list of things I look for in writing. But with subtext, different story. When I see a writer do subtext well, I get the full body shiver. I think Hemingway said a good writer doesn’t say what’s happening on the surface, but they have to know those details, and like, by knowing, the reader will get some kind of a sense of truth, a conveyance, even if they aren’t made explicitly aware of the details. I say, fuck off Hemingway. Don’t tell me what I have to know. I don’t know what TurtlePhone is up to when he’s sitting on the can. That’s his business. RG: “Does Anyone Care How the Vegetable Oil Feels?” describes a technique you call method writing. Any examples of this in your own writing life?DF: Haha, no way. I used to think this idea was attractive as hell. To live the shit hard, as the narrator in the story says. But that sounds like a goddamn nightmare to me to be honest. I guess some nightmares produce some good writing. But it’s never been that way for me. I just have ideas and write them down and hope they work well enough. I think the idea of the artist living their art as authentically as possible is sexy to us, but it has problems. If we exoticize and romanticize all the violence, addiction, desperation, and evil that we see in our literary heroes, that forces us into a confrontation with our own values that I don’t think we particularly want to have. As someone who loves wretched characters, it’s a place I hesitate to go. I think of Al Swearingen in Deadwood, a magnificent TV character. To come up with a character like that I might have to become a murdering, deceiving, totally self-interested pimp? Well, shit. That sounds like a lot of work. I remember reading Knut Hamsun’s Hunger, about a literal starving artist, a favorite book of mine, thinking God damn! this poor bastard. Someone shoot his ass and put him out of his misery. Hamsun really lived off fumes, nearly starving to death in his early days. I guess Norway wasn’t so rich back then. Then he got big and famous and won a Nobel Prize and eventually became a Nazi sympathizing maniac. A bunch of them went this way. Celine. Eliot. I just want to write stories.I will say, I do gush at some examples I hear about of writers doing insane shit in order to conjure their art. Like Gary Shipley watching Begotten on repeat in a dark room for two straight weeks to write You With Your Memory Are Dead. That is the most batshit thing I’ve ever heard. Or, sticking with Inside the Castle books, their Castle Freak projects, where the writer has five days to write 100,000 words. These feel like experiments in what we might call method writing, putting our minds and bodies through extreme ordeals in order to test our creative limits and access the most unhinged, terrifying depths we got. I wish I had the discipline to attempt maniac stuff like this. I’d probably produce 75 words about stoned beavers wandering around the forest looking for wood. RG: The office building is the tallest, thinnest in the city’s history. A man plummets to his death on the first day it is occupied, the day after completion. The sounds of children screaming are heard in the elevators, in the stairwells. On several of the floors. Throughout meetings. It’s much worse when the wind hits the building. A feeling of nonstop vertigo defines daily office life. The above quote from “Rhino” is a prime example of the ominous quality you can inject into environments. How do you use location when it comes to building atmosphere?DF: I think I’m obsessed with the haunted potential of a space, interior or exterior. I want to feel the imprint of a place, I want others to feel it. We might not know what happened in an empty room. Maybe nothing. Maybe somebody was tortured. Maybe a plot to commit a mass atrocity was concocted in that space, in a basement, over tuna sandwiches and old moldy coffee. Maybe all kinds of unthinkable things happened in this little desert town that used to function well enough, but is now burnt to the ground. I like trying to think about what a place feels like to someone stepping into it, and they know bad things have happened there, but they don’t necessarily know what or how or why. I think “Rhino” is about the design of haunted places, as if their hauntedness was intentional, built into the space, rather than the space becoming haunted after the fact. The story seems to connect this spooky business to Lorna, the architect who designs them, as if she is the haunted one, and everything she touches turns to death. But we don’t know why. Is she plagued by this herself, or is she some kind of a demonic figure sewing chaos, getting off on diabolic design? I enjoy trading in uncertainty with these kinds of questions, and letting the reader decide. My first job outta undergrad I worked in a big ad agency. Way up on the 32nd floor. Could see the whole city. I had a meeting with one of my bosses and I can’t remember why but I started spouting off the heights of all the tallest buildings in Toronto. She said, “Uh, Are you… into buildings?” I said no, all embarrassed. But the truth was hell yes, I am. I am into buildings. All their vertical pathways and tunnels, elevator shafts, unseen dark corners, crawl spaces. I’m afraid of heights. But I lived on the 25th floor for years. All tall buildings are haunted spaces to me. The wind sounds like a screaming animal up there. All day, life accented by constant screaming. RG: Your exploration of unconventional romance, featured in “Container” and “For Whom I Bare My Teeth”, presents an intense and, I found, cinematic take on sensuality. What is your approach to erotism in your work?DF: Hmmm, I don’t think I have an approach exactly. These stories are about desire. I think desire is dark, by its nature. I wanted to find ways to show that, but without being too on the nose. “For Whom I Bare My Teeth” is a bit more straightforward about it, but I do find that story to be funny, and maybe less serious about the darkness of desire. At least that’s how I felt writing it. I suppose cannibalism stories will always be funny to me. I really enjoyed writing both these stories, but they came from very different places. “Container” feels more serious, like it’s reflecting on something where for the characters the stakes are sky high. I don’t know if in other stories dealing with erotism I would use similar approaches. I just recently finished writing something about a couple so obsessed with each other that they begin to literally eat each other. There I go with the cannibals again. But the approach there is different from these other ones. I guess I just try to channel a question about what these characters’ desires look like, and what would happen if they took those desires to extreme, unreasonable places. I’m interested in making the unreasonable feel real, necessary. Unreasonable but necessary. Unavoidable. Impossible for them to avoid going there. Maybe that’s the approach. RG: I remember when the terminally ill artist Anastasia Pelon brought her whole family to Neon for one last dinner together. We had been expecting a room full of eccentricity, full of chaos, full of the infusions that such a prominent artist would have inevitably left on her closest family members, especially in the shadow of her imminent death. But what we got was something much different; a room full of working-class, down-to-earth, polite people, who all happened to be this woman’s family. There was never an unsmiling face around the room. These parents, siblings, and cousins were so happy to be together. Anastasia’s sister helped her whenever she needed to use the bathroom or stretch her legs. Her sister would carry her oxygen tank as they walked together, holding each other’s arm. I remember the expectation that the whimsical and ferocious aesthetic that imbued her art would reveal itself in the room, but no. The bloody, bodily, confrontational, qualities of her work had no role here.The above quote is lifted from your story “Neon”. What has surprised you about the collection, either in the writing of it or in the process of releasing it to the world?DF: The fact that I have ever published one word of writing surprises me every day, let alone a whole collection. RG: The elevator appears as a recurring motif in the collection, frequently as an uncanny space. Do you have any insights into why the elevator is attractive to you?DF: You caught that eh? I hadn’t anticipated a question about elevators, but I am happy to see this. I do think about them a lot. These steel boxes in which we spend a significant amount of cumulative time, those of us that live or work in tall buildings. The elevator is removed from the rest of the world. Such uncomfortable little moments can happen there. Yet such significant moments too. They test our humanity. Small talk. Claustrophobia. Fantasizing about the terror of being stuck in one. I’ve met people in elevators that became significant in my life. I’ve watched dogs piss and shit in them. In the height of the pandemic, the elevator became this place of mania, paranoia, and uncertainty. And total crushing awkwardness. Infection. All of these things factor into how I think about the floating steel box that hides us from the world for a couple minutes.I think elevators are crazy places. Intense, crazy places. Have you ever ridden in an elevator and had someone you don’t know stare at you the whole time? I picture the cables being cut, and the box plummeting. Everyone crushed inside. Impaled with shards of splintered steel the size of swords. I don’t think about this kind of thing when I’m in cars or trains. Something about this closed box brings these thoughts. No windows. Closed off from the world. I picture people in the elevator unable to control themselves. Strangers so attracted to each other at first sight that they tear each other apart. They know they are on camera but they don’t care. They know they only have a minute. That others might enter. But they don’t care. Elevators are crazy places. We can think these thoughts, for a minute or two, and then we get off on our floor and it’s over. The thoughts are gone. RG: An undertow of dread and unease permeates your fiction. What attracts you to exploring this area with your writing? What do you dread?DF: I always think back on that Clive Barker story “Dread”, from Books of Blood. The character Quaid is obsessed with dread and experiments on people, forcing them to confront their worst fears. Great story. He leaves that poor vegetarian girl starving in a room with only rotten beef until she’s forced to eat it.There are some great vibes to be mined from dread. The well of dread is endless. The world is a dreadful place. We all are forced to confront dread in our own ways. I don’t always plan to write with dread in mind, but some stories just take on this tone. The undercurrents we spoke of earlier, the feeling of spaces being haunted with memory, this can be a dreadful feeling. Sometimes I do dread by accident because I write a character that is too flat or one-dimensional and in their flat silences there can appear to be things dreadful about them. Whoops, haha. I think the dread in my work tends to come from feelings of insularity, containment. Some of these characters are so locked in their own heads. We only see what they think. The rest is a mystery. I think this can be dread-inducing. They are containers; all we know of them is how they perceive a dying world, experience a violent sexual relationship, look down at the gun in their hand. Sometimes I think of dread as a feeling elicited by the knowledge that the world is filled with monsters that we don’t see. We know they’re there, but they live in the shadows. It’s the knowledge that they exist that breeds dread in us. We know terrible things happen. Murder, torture, human trafficking, genocide. And sure, we see these things on the news. But most of us don’t confront them for real. Most of us. This is of course a good thing, not to have to know these horrible realities first hand. The dread lives in the space between us and the shadow. I sometimes try to write as if considering the monstrous, even if I’m not describing it or writing about it directly. The writing is the empty space between us and the horrible thing. What’s uncanny about it is that we all recognize the smell, the sound of the empty space. We see a recognizable horror in it despite it being empty. That’s why that “Backrooms” picture is so scary. I think this is the driving force behind stories like “Bird Eating Glass.” A character who is plagued by the unfathomable knowledge of the world. This character is a mystery to us. We don’t know what they’ve seen. We just see some whisp of it reflected in their intolerable music, in the scars on their face, in their severed voice. The fact that their music happens to be popular in spite of itself is the signal that we all recognize the terror in this empty space. You ever read Grace Krilanovich’s The Orange Eats Creeps? I think that is the best book ever written about dread. RG: “Reasons to Stay” addresses the vagaries and vacillating tensions of a relationship forced to factor terminal illness. How did you decide upon the approach to structure for this story?DF: This story is pretty much entirely based on a true story. I don’t love to admit this, because doing so interferes with the pretense of fiction from which I feel we must always approach books billed as such, but in this case I make an exception. I’d been trying for a couple years to find a way to write about the person that “Reasons” is about and I kept coming up flat. I tried much longer works that were more formally conventional, but hated all of them. Then one day I sat down and wrote this and it just felt true. I like to think of this story as being pretty good at expressing what memory feels like – all broken up and fragmentary and mixed up between the good and the painful. I didn’t exactly set out to write the story in this fractured way, it just came out like this, and I knew that it was the real story as it was coming out. It ended up being much shorter than any of the previous versions, which also felt correct. My memory of this relationship feels compressed and frenetic, hard to pin down yet clear as day in some parts. My memory is engraved with ambivalence and longing, but as time goes by, those elements are further compressed and reordered, slotted into this larger chaos that is the sum of all memories. I wasn’t thinking any of this as I wrote it, I just wrote. And then after the fact, it just made sense that my mind was processing these feelings and memories through this fragmented ambivalence. I don’t know if any of that shit makes any sense but I think it makes sense to me. RG: Container is released by With an X Books. Why have you chosen to work with them for this collection? In a wider sense, how do you view the small press scene?DF: It has been a total pleasure to work with Jon and Traci at With an X. They are so diligent, generous, and professional, I could not have asked for a better experience. I had an intuitive sense that With an X might be a good fit for a couple reasons. I felt that the vibe of some of their books of photography connected with the tone of the title story “Container,” in an abstract but not insignificant way. As it happened Jon had read that story previously when it was first published in Maudlin House, and said he was taken by it, so I think there was already a seed planted there, unbeknownst to me at first. I also felt that a previous collection they’d published, Drew Buxton’s So Much Heart, had some similar sensibilities to my work, the mixing of the real and the hyperreal, some darker stuff but not lacking in heart, that the vibe felt right. Far as I’m concerned, small presses drive literature. A few weeks ago I drove to Portland from Vancouver just to go to Powell’s. I spent like three hours in the small press section, examining every single book. Anyone watching me woulda thought I was a lunatic. Dennis Cooper always says that all the best writing in the world comes from small presses and he’s ten thousand percent right. I love the small press scene. I couldn’t live without it. I do have favorite books that were published by big publishers, we all do. But the vast majority of the work that interests me as I grow as a reader is from small presses. I get an explosion of joy every time I think about some small presses, just knowing they exist. It’s like, I know that the true, raw, unfiltered voices will find their place in the world. The most uncompromising writing is available to us because some of these small presses exist. I am eternally grateful.RG: “Do I fear for the future? Hell fucking no I don’t. Hell no. You know why? Because fear is dumb wasted pussy shit that serves no purpose. That’s why. We’ll figure this out like we figure everything.”Do you think about the future? If so, what does the future look like to you, with regard to your writing, or anything else?DF: Oh ya, I think about the future. I think about it all the time. I think about burnt buildings penetrated by hollow winds. I think about cities washed away by floods. I think about vast landscapes marked by emptiness, with little fossilized remnants buried beneath the surface, hidden signs that we were once here. I love thinking about the time beyond the end of us. It gives me a blissful chill. I don’t care if that’s a cliché. I don’t like being told not to be cynical. I embrace feelings of cynicism and nihilism. I don’t care if they absolve me of having to work for a better future or not. I don’t care if it is a privileged position to think like this. It’s just the way it is for me. I get creative fuel from thinking about what the world looks like when we’re gone. I also think about all kinds of nice things, future-wise. But I keep that shit to myself.

Robin Zlotnick

MY HEART BELONGS IN AN EMPTY BIG MAC CONTAINER BURIED BENEATH THE OCEAN FLOOR: AN INTERVIEW WITH HOMELESS by Rebecca Gransden

November 19, 2024 · Fiction

Have you ever found yourself adrift, without a clue on how you got there? The blue whale is the largest mammal to have existed on our planet. A small person can fit inside a blue whale heart. In My Heart Belongs in an Empty Big Mac Container Buried Beneath the Ocean Floor (Clash Books, 2024) Homeless contemplates the messiness of a heart ready to overspill with sadness, a sadness drawn from fathomless wells, deep and lightless as the bottom of the sea. How many fast food containers have already made it to that desolate ocean floor? I spoke with Homeless about the novel. Rebecca Gransden: The novel opens with the memorable scene of a trio of characters in an orange boat adrift in what appears to be the middle of a wide ocean. When did this cast of characters occur to you? Did they and the scenario appear simultaneously or did aspects arise over time?Homeless: It occurred to me very early on. Probably one of the first ideas I had. The image of Daniel (the main character), the sad-looking blue whale & the empty Big Mac container floating in the ocean, lost. Everything was gradually built off that. That kind of sad, hopeless tableau.RG: “Your heart... you want to bury it, right?”Daniel nods.“Beneath the ocean floor?”Daniel nods again.“Okay. And I’m going to help you do that. Well, I mean we. We’re going to help you do that. Me and the sad-looking blue whales back home.” Daniel, the focus of the book, is a character beset by profound troubles. In many ways the book can be viewed as a quest, one taken by Daniel, whether he’s a totally willing participant or not. Did you have a plan for Daniel upon undertaking the novel, and if so, to what degree did you end up adhering to the plan?H: All I knew at the beginning was Daniel was going to be stranded in the ocean & that he was going to use this ultimate misfortune as an opportunity to really examine himself & his choices. The places he “goes” while lost, the things he sees, those were inspired by his past with the sad-looking blue whales, as well as his tumultuous relationship with his ex-girlfriend. RG: My Heart Belongs in an Empty Big Mac Container Buried Beneath the Ocean Floor. Daniel experiences his own moment of creative inspiration with the book’s title. How did the sentence reveal itself to you, and when did you know it should be the title of the book?H: The title came to me from a song. “The Samurai Code” by Motion City Soundtrack. The lyric was My heart belongs beneath the ocean floor. I remember hearing it for the first time &, like the sappy fat ass I am, immediately thinking, My heart belongs in an Empty Big Mac container buried beneath the ocean floor. That one line was it. It set up a ton for what the book would eventually become—the concept of Daniel lost in the ocean, his mission, the sad-looking blue whales who stalk him. So much came from that one line. Once I knew it’d be his mantra, there was really nothing else the book could be titled.RG: The book is set into parts, with its main threads separated into chapters with recurring titles. What led you to pursue this structure?H: For a book about depression, I wanted people to get a glimpse of what it’s like for people who have to deal with it. Only then did I think readers would kind of understand why Daniel is making such an absurd & drastic choice. I wanted readers to see how it affected his self-esteem. His relationships. So I decided to give some background as to how depression can insidiously work. How it alters your way of thinking. I think—I hope—it makes his journey more justified in a way.RG: The role of McDonald’s is important to Daniel. Throughout the book he views it as a special place, one of respite and comfort. One particular McDonald’s is regarded by him with near ecstatic reverence. What made you select McDonald’s to play this part in the book?H: About half of this book was written in a McDonald’s in Bridgeport, CT. Daniel’s safe place is essentially my safe place. The people who eat there, the slightly chaotic ambiance at times, the dirty tables, the trips there with my father when I was younger. It all feels like home to me, so I feel comfortable working there. When I’m in McDonald’s, it’s like I’m with “my people.” Lower class working stiffs just like me, trying to get a cheap, albeit highly unhealthy, meal. There’s a silent camaraderie there.RG: Daniel is painfully aware of how he is perceived by others. The novel repeatedly makes reference to a look Daniel has possessed for most, if not all, of his life. How do you describe this look and what does it say about Daniel’s interaction with the world?H: Daniel’s “look” in the book is a despondent face he’s not usually aware he’s wearing. It’s the neutral face of a person worn down by years of depression. A co-worker once told me I had a “red light face,” meaning a kind of disgruntled, “keep away from me” look, haha. When you’re depressed, you’re drained, both physically & mentally. So it’s kind of instinctual. You’re going through a lot & you need to protect your energy, what little you have, so you keep people at distance maybe. For their benefit & for yours. It’s an accidental coping mechanism. One that keeps you sane but also, unfortunately at times, pushes people away even when you don’t mean to.RG: They controlled Daniel, the sad-looking blue whales, and as much as it killed him to admit it, although over the years he had gotten used to doing so (not that that made it sting any less), the sad-looking blue whales dictated almost everything he did.Central to the book is Daniel’s relationship to the sad-looking blue whales that accompany him through life. He is caught in a shifting power dynamic, with his interactions moving through a spectrum of emotions and tensions. How do you view the sad-looking blue whales?H: The sad-looking blue whales are depression. Sometimes—a lot of the time—it can feel like depression runs the show. It keeps you from doing things you want to do, it helps you remain stuck in bad patterns. You want more than anything to be “normal,” but you have this really strong outside force constantly fucking with you & your good intentions, your attempts to change. This malevolent energy that drains your battery without your consent, that’s the sad-looking blue whales.RG: But often, scrolling through social media sites and reading posts or status updates, or messaging back and forth with strangers online, Daniel would find that the vast majority of people out there felt scared and hopeless and alone just like him. People, most people, including Daniel, led coddled easy lives. They lived in warm houses with indoor plumbing and went to grocery stores filled with food they didn't have to harvest or kill. If they got sick, modern medicine was usually able to cure it, and if not, at the very least put up a fight. And yet, somehow, everyone was still unhappy or stressed or, most of the time, both. Twenty-one centuries of technological evolution and things had become so much easier yet no one was any happier. But the expectancy to be happy had become greater, and when people couldn’t live up to it, when they couldn’t be as happy as the world and its technology demanded them to, it was damn near fucking lethal. It was no wonder sad-looking blue whales ran the world, although now it made more sense than ever to Daniel why they did.The book reflects a generational ennui, an ambiance difficult to articulate. Daniel’s self-awareness only seems to amplify the acuteness of his difficulties. Has the writing of the book brought any insights to you on this era’s specific challenges?H: I think it just made me more aware that our focus & priorities are askew. Technology seems to be speeding everything up when it seems, to me, more people (myself included) need to be slowing down. The pace of life for a lot of people seems to be accelerating to a breakneck speed, where we’re just focused on destination after destination, goal after goal, without ever appreciating where we currently are. Normally, when Daniel chills out in the book & visits “his McDonald’s,” what happens? The sad-looking blue whales leave him alone. He’s at peace. He’s allowed to just be.RG: Daniel is struggling to write. Are there parallels between Daniel’s experience within the book and your own time writing it? How much, if at all, is your past writerly life reflected in the novel?H: I gave up on this book a third of the way through. Then a kind word from a writer I greatly admire about another book I’d written made me believe in myself enough to maybe give this book another go. I think I used to put too much pressure on my writing in general. How much I did. How good it was. How important it was. Now I’m at a peaceful place where I just do my best & don’t stress over my output. I just show up somewhat consistently & the rest is out of my hands. And with this newer, more laid back approach, I also do get stuck a lot less, creatively speaking.RG: If the sad-looking blue whales can be viewed as a symbolic manifestation of Daniel’s depression, outside of the novel are there animals that represent other emotions or states for you?H: Cats represent nirvana for me. The transcendent state. Not the kick ass band. RG: Flipping through censored page after censored page, Daniel comes across nothing even remotely happy. Nothing hopeful or lighthearted. Just more of the same heartbreak, anxiety, shame, dread and self-hate. Daniel’s heart begins racing. He can feel it panicking as a wave of heat that begins in his head quickly sweeps throughout the entirety of his body, a sensation that instantly forces him to begin sweating, and all of a sudden, it’s like Daniel’s right back outside underneath the blistering sun. What is the role of hope in the book?H: Hope is there. In bits & pieces. Because when you’re depressed that feels like all the hope you’re allowed. Just miserly shards of it. In a way that’s all you need though. Just some kind of small hold to hang onto. So in that way it’s important. I wanted the book, as heavy as the topic was, to still be hopeful & light hearted. I wanted anyone who finishes it to have just that, a shred of hope. If not more.RG: At one point in the book a Basquiat artwork is transformed into a sail for the boat. A theme you address is the nature of art, here raising the question of whether there needs to be a ‘living’ or kinetic component to art in opposition to the emphasis on preservation in a type of hermetically sealed, stagnant state. Later, Daniel exhibits mixed feelings on the matter of sharing his writing with the world. Have you arrived at any conclusions regarding art, or have any new questions arisen on the matter, either inside or outside of your experience writing My Heart Belongs in an Empty Big Mac Container Buried Beneath the Ocean Floor?H: I think if anything, this book just reaffirmed to me that art is a necessary compulsion. A way for creative people to grow & learn. Some people just have to create, for better & for worse. The thing people can get caught up in, which I still get caught up in, is how your work is received, how many people have read it, & letting the commercial aspect of art taint or ruin this passion you have. Or worse, you begin to devalue yourself or what you created because it doesn’t sell. When I think the more healthy approach is just doing it because you love it, sharing it if you want to, & then wiping your hands clean of whatever those results may be. Because, again, art for many people is a compulsion & they’re going to do it & keep doing it regardless of acclaim or glory, so why let a lack of those things ruin doing something you love, something you need.RG: Could you explain the significance of the concept of appreciation, to Daniel and to the novel as a whole? What do you appreciate about the book?H: There’s always something to appreciate. No matter how shitty things are. The thing you’re appreciating can be big or small, from past, present or future, it doesn’t matter. It’s the act of appreciating that’s important. Finding something good & focusing on it until the crushing fist of sadness lightens its force. The opportunity is always there & readily available. A kind of short cut through a shitty neighborhood that gets you someplace safer. What I appreciate about the book is that it tackles a heavy topic such a depression with levity & humor. I wanted to write a book about depression that wasn’t depressing to read, & I think I did that.RG: Have you ever seen a lightning bug? H: I’m lucky enough to have two beautiful sons. So yes.

Robin Zlotnick

AN INTERVIEW WITH WES BLAKE ABOUT HIS BOOK ‘PINEVILLE TRACE’ by Rebecca Gransden

September 24, 2024 · Interviews & Reviews

Wes Blake’s elegiac novella Pineville Trace (The University of Indianapolis’ Etchings Press, 2024) visits the wild places, those untouched stretches of land that somehow survive intact while progress lays out its encroachment in steel and concrete. In short, lyrical chapters the book travels inner and outer byways, gracefully tracking a spiritual road trip. In the pines the sun may not shine, but specters in memory shiver in broken light. I spoke to Wes about the book. Rebecca Gransden: How did the initial idea for Pineville Trace materialize? Wes Blake: The initial idea for Pineville Trace materialized in the summer of 2014 when I was just beginning my MFA at the Bluegrass Writers Studio and was in Lisbon, Portugal for the Disquiet International Literary Program. One of the speakers said to “write about what obsesses you”. And that struck me. I walked along the cobblestone streets of the Barrio Alto neighborhood thinking about what did obsess me. I remembered stories I’d heard about my friend’s great-uncle—a southern revival preacher who started out traveling with an old circus tent from town to town. And hearing firsthand stories from people that knew him about how genuine he could be, how much he impacted the people that knew him, how charismatic he could be, and how fondly they remembered him, stuck with me. There were also allegations of fraud. My idea for the character of Frank Russet was inspired by this type of character. I wanted to write about a character like that, whose real self was a mystery, to find out who they really are. So, over the next three years, I wrote a novel named Antenna about Frank Russet and how he built his life and made a name for himself. I wrote the book to find out who he really was. And I thought his story was done. But in February 2022, I was in Pineville, KY and realized that Frank’s story was not finished. I drove by the city of Pineville and was struck by it: a small town whose quaint houses wound and coiled up along the side of the mountain in an unreal way that looked right out of a dream. I’d never seen another place like it. Then, after seeing a sign for Bell County Forestry Camp—the minimum-security prison I’d researched and written about where Frank Russet had been sentenced for fraud—I found myself following the signs towards it. The signs led me up Pine Mountain. It’s a striking place with so many pine trees that it looks more like the Pacific Northwest than Kentucky. As I approached the minimum-security prison, a car passed by on the other side of the road. It was an old late fifties/early sixties model Buick LeSabre—the same car that Frank Russet drove. It was eerie seeing such a rare car in such an isolated place. In the first novel, Frank had briefly befriended a stray cat that visited the prison. It was only a passing scene. But that would be the beginning of Pineville Trace. RG: Who is Frank Russet, the main focus of the book, to you?WB: I’ve been writing about Frank Russet, off and on, for the last ten years. He started off as a mystery, and in some ways, he remains one. How much of his intention was pure and how much was ambition? Did he start off with good intentions and lose his way? Did he have some measure of real healing power or was it all an act? Frank Russet is torn between the world of the body and the world of the spirit. Like all of us, there are parts of him that are authentic and parts of him that he puts on like a mask in order to make his way in the world. Only, because of his line of work as a revival preacher, this conflict is more dramatic. He’s capable of soaring highs and crushing lows. A person going up on the mountain to find the truth is an old story. For Frank Russet, who he becomes on the mountain reveals who he really is. And who he becomes when he comes down from the mountain, back down into the world, also reveals who he is. I’ve been writing and thinking about Frank Russet for so long that he feels like a real person to me. He feels like a friend.RG: When driving east, before reaching Bell County Forestry Camp, you pass Pineville. The name of the town was what led me to the place. Both in fiction and in real life. I had imagined the house from the first sentence. And I wanted to find a house like it in the real world. I felt it must exist.Place is an essential component of the novella. How do you use invention when it comes to location? What is Frank’s relationship to the environments he travels through?WB: I read this article on Leonardo da Vinci a few years ago that was illuminating. Essentially, da Vinci believed that observation plus imagination equals creativity. You can see how he put this into action with both his “Studies of Water” (astute observation) and his sketches of angels and demons (pure imagination). Both da Vinci’s observation and imagination are so precise, committed, and detailed. So realistic. This combination of observation and imagination is true for how I use invention when it comes to location. I strive to closely observe places and get a sense of their tone. How does a place make you feel? And what aspects of the place make you feel that way and why? We can’t separate ourselves from our environments, and they affect our outer and inner worlds. Our inner landscapes color how we perceive our outer world. I strive to capture this reality in Pineville Trace. Frank is particularly sensitive to environment. He’s more in tune than most people are with how time affects place and how environment is both a mirror and a prophecy for self. RG: Nature and the wild is an important aspect of the book, but central above all imagery is that of the pine trees themselves. A constant presence, whether it be close by or on the periphery, these trees frame the landscape of the novella. How do you view the pines of Pineville Trace?WB: I followed the credo of Donald Barthelme’s essay “Not Knowing” when writing Pineville Trace. I let my subconscious lead the way. I allowed my intuition and what I had previously written lay the groundwork for what came next. And when I read the book over and again when polishing/editing I realized that many of my obsessions wound up in the book. Leonardo da Vinci was obsessed with water. I’ve always been obsessed with pines. I’m not sure why. I was close with my grandmother—my mom’s mom who we called Nanny—and, growing up, I would often stay at her house in Mt. Sterling, Kentucky. We even lived with her for six months between our move from Rowan County in eastern Kentucky to Lexington. There was a row of pine trees at the back of Nanny’s yard, and as a kid I was always drawn to these pines. Their dark green color, their coolness in summer, their smell, the way they hid you from the world. They made me feel relaxed and safe. I spent a lot of time around those pines when I was young, and I still spend a lot of time around pines. My wife and I have planted thirty-two pines on our rural property in Woodford County, Kentucky. I’m researching mystics, psychics, and energy healers for my new book, and I just read about how someone who can see auras described how all living things have an aura, but trees, in particular, have a large aura—sometimes two feet wide or more—that she can see from far distances. I wonder how she would describe the aura of pines?Frank is haunted by pines and drawn to them. They represent a stubborn resistance to change, refusing to lose their needles while other trees shed their leaves when the seasons change. When the wind blows, a pine’s stillness and quiet contrasts with the sound of other trees whose rustling leaves make louder sounds. Frank seems drawn to the pines in Pineville Trace for reasons he doesn’t fully understand. Their dark green and stoic stance may remind him of the peaceful reality he seeks that has always eluded him.RG: “We’re all gravediggers.”Frank describes, and acts out, a deep emptiness. As his travels progress, this only becomes more pronounced, as echoes of the past catch up to him, however adept he is at staying in motion. The book carries a tension, where it is unclear in which way Frank is pulled; away from the hauntings of his past or towards a daydream of a future. How do you see Frank’s path? WB: Frank has spent a lot of his life as a southern revival preacher charged with providing salvation and healing for many people. His job was to assuage people of their emptiness, to show them the magic of life and its larger meaning and purpose. To revive them. To bring them back to life. And this seems to have taken a toll on him over time. He sought distractions and ways to escape his own feeling of emptiness that remained, and his human flaws only made him feel more empty and false. In his past, Frank spent most of his life moving. Constantly traveling from one town to the next. In Pineville Trace, for the first time, Frank must finally stop moving and face the emptiness in himself that he’s been running from. He must face the guilt over his flawed nature. He gets rid of the shackles of who he needed to be in the past, and all the weight of falling short of that. Anything short of moral perfection and performing miracles would be a failure in his former life. And he happens to be quite a flawed human being. Escaping from a minimum-security prison—in the way that Frank Russet does and in the circumstances that he does—is an existential act. He walks away because he doesn’t want to be the person he had been before. This escape allows him to have a chance at a future with real peace, but it is not an easy escape. His past, his emptiness, his guilt over all the harm he’s caused, plague him. They are deeply carved into his nature. I see Frank Russet’s path as a perilous one because while he is striving to free himself from his past and who he’s been, the ghosts that have always haunted him do not want to release him. RG: A key presence in the book is that of a cat named Buffalo. Animal companions often come to us when most needed, or are associated with a particular time of life. Have there been significant animal bonds in your own history, and, if so, did that feed into Pineville Trace? How do you view the connection between Frank and Buffalo?WB: I’ve always been obsessed with cats. When I was a little kid, I wanted a cat more than anything else. As a small child, I had both a teddy bear and a small Pound Puppy kitten that I slept with. My brother and I always tried to earn the affection of Nanny’s and my aunt Charlotte’s cats. But they were slow to trust us because we were kids chasing them around without much understanding or gentleness. I remember when I was about six, another cat of Nanny’s—a white Persian kitten named Tinker—warmed to me and would jump up in the bed to see me and attack my watch band. It was one of my greatest achievements in life up to that point. My brother wound up being allergic to cats, so we couldn’t get one of our own, but many years later, as an adult, my wife and I have had several cats. We have a calico cat named Pig, and she’s been my nearly constant companion for the last seventeen years. She sleeps in the crook of my left arm most every night, after trying to bite my nose several times. Her Christian name is Lilly, but her personality earned her the name Pig. When I was a little kid, we had a Cairn Terrier named Daisy that I was close with. I had read too many Jack London books, so I tried to have her pull me around on my skateboard while holding her leash like she was a sled-dog and imagining we were in the Klondike. This obviously wasn’t a smart idea, especially on hills. Animals are completely loyal when they choose you. They really do offer unconditional love and friendship in ways that humans often fall short of. All they want is your time and attention, which is such a pure intention. There is something mysterious about cats, and they must be won over. But once you earn their trust, they are reliable. Buffalo is a guide for Frank, and she is a true friend. She is there for him, accepts him for who he is, and Frank doesn’t have to be anything special for her. He only has to be himself. For a lot of his life, he’s been expected to perform miracles, heal people, and live a perfectly moral life. No human being could meet these standards. So, Buffalo, is such a welcome presence for Frank. She has no expectations for him, and she reminds him of the simpleness of life and what really matters. And, in return, Frank is a loyal and dedicated friend to Buffalo.RG: You display the natural elements and the seasons as signifying incremental change, a signpost to an unknown future or destination. I took this to be in strong parallel to Frank’s inner movement, not only his compulsion to keep running, but also his wider struggles. There is a blurring of lines between the exterior and interior that gives the book a dreamlike quality. In terms of character development, what was your approach to Frank and his relationship to the passing of time?WB: The seasons are a reminder for Frank of nature and time’s passing. The seasons remind him of reality and connect him to the nature of time, change, and impermanence. He’s been disconnected from nature, following his own ambition—and the expectations that accompany that—for most of his life, and connecting with the concrete reality of impermanence and change that the seasons reveal can sometimes be terrifying. Like Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle, Frank Russet has awoken from a dream of his own ambition, his own movement, and his own escape.RG: Signs, exits, fields, forests passed. The sun stayed behind clouds. Kentucky became Ohio. The light became gentler. Then headlights. Ohio became Michigan. Frank kept his speed right at the limit.Frank’s actions at first seem illogical and as if he’s possessed by a waking dream. As the story unfolds it slowly surfaces that his chosen path is one that makes emotional sense. His travels take him to liminal environments, where he exists as someone passing through. How does the wider concept of agency and Frank’s relationship with personal autonomy come into play in the book?WB: When Frank walks away from the minimum-security prison on Pine Mountain in eastern Kentucky, he claims his own personal autonomy for the first time. As many people do, Frank has become trapped in the role he’s created for himself. His role just happened to be that of a revival preacher. This role was necessary for him to make a living and place for himself in the world. We all take on these roles and as we age, we may find that the roles don’t align with our true nature, and the nature of Frank’s role as God’s messenger carries more weight than most. So, his experience dramatizes something that many people go through. As an old man in his last days, Leo Tolstoy had a similar epiphany as Frank when he left his home and family. Tolstoy’s letter to his wife explained his decision in words that would ring true for Frank: “I feel that I must retire from the trouble of life. . . I want to recover from the trouble of the world. It is necessary for my soul and my body.” In Pineville Trace Frank, too, is taking control of his life and throwing off the chains of what people expect of him because it is necessary for his soul. Like Tolstoy, he takes control of his life to “recover from the trouble of the world.” Ironically, the trouble of the world from which Frank must recover was also largely created by himself.RG: Frank’s past involvement with organized religion adds extra dimension to the spiritual aspect of his travels. Do you regard Frank’s story as a pilgrimage? What do you view as the role of religion and spirituality in the book?WB: I do feel that Frank’s story is a pilgrimage. He seeks a sacred place, a vision—a dream cabin surrounded by pines—that at first, he only imagines in his mind. Frank wants to experience the reality of the life of the spirit. He wants to break down the false separation between things. As a healer, Frank was always drawn to the raw and true spiritual elements that are often, sadly, on the fringes of organized religion. And in Pineville Trace, he abandons religion entirely to understand and directly experience the spiritual world. Scott Laughlin, writer and co-founder of Disquiet International, talks about how his friend, the poet, Alberto de Lacerda would often say, “This is what I live for: friendship and the things of the spirit.” These are the things that Frank Russet has always wanted to live for, but his obligations from society and organized religion got in the way. Frank’s biblical ancestor would be David. King David, sometimes referred to as God’s favorite, also lived for friendship and the things of the spirit. His close friendship with Jonathan shaped his identity. He was a poet and a musician. As a child, he was a shepherd and felt a close kinship with animals and nature. He was a deeply flawed human being that valued connection, lust, and love, as his relationship with Bathsheba shows. Religious stories are often parables that illustrate spiritual truth. In Pineville Trace, Frank wants to throw off the organized religious framework entirely and experience spiritual truth directly. His journey is as much an inner spiritual journey as it is a physical one. As Frank proceeds on his journey, the illusion of separation between the physical and spiritual world disappears. RG:. He had to look tough. Serious. He considered his khakis, boots, flannel. He wished he had his old suit: pressed black slacks, black suit coat, fine black silk socks, polished black shoes, a bright, starched white button-up shirt, and his silk black tie. In that suit he could convince anyone of anything. Even himself. At least he used to be able to.Clothing is a recurring theme throughout the book. From Frank’s orange prison jumpsuit to later changes of attire, the clothes are more than something to wear but take on the quality of costume, sending out a specific signal or impression. What do these costume changes mean to Frank, and what, if any, significance do they have on a narrative level?WB: In Frank’s previous life as a southern revival preacher, appearances were important. His smart black suit and appearance helped sway his audience into belief. For him, clothes represent both identity and a mask. When he trades out his suit for an orange jumpsuit, he’s made even more aware of the shallowness and unreality of identity and how we present ourselves to the world. But he still struggles to separate himself from his ego. He still longs for the past and that suit represents his peak in life. Even as he struggles to move beyond his ambition and ego, they still hold sway over him. Macbeth’s identity is also represented outwardly by his change from a soldier’s costume to that of a king’s robes. After Macbeth has murdered the former king to secure his place as king, Angus says that Macbeth must feel his “title hang loosely about him, like a giant’s robe upon a dwarfish thief.” Clothing does represent our identity to the outer world, and Frank, like Macbeth, must feel ill at ease in some of the costumes he’s presented to the world. At one point in the book, Frank finds a secondhand suit, a tattered approximation of his former costume. It is a fair representation of his inner state in that moment. RG: Pineville Trace is rich with symbolism. Buffalo shares her name with animals associated with great meaning, the buffalo a ghostly presence in a landscape in which they were once abundant. Later in the book the myth of Spirit Rock is recounted, and water seems to represent psychic as well as physical boundaries to be crossed. Do you regard Frank’s story as in the tradition of the mystic quest? Why does he feel the pull to the outskirts and the fringes?WB: I do see Frank’s story as a mystic quest. Frank is seeking spiritual realities and truths and wants to shatter the illusory barrier between the physical and spiritual world. He’s always been connected to healing and that is what led him to his role in organized religion more than anything else. I’m fascinated by Native American literature and have been influenced by several books over recent years. A book called Black Elk Speaks tells the story of the Oglala Lakota visionary and healer Nicholas Black Elk and how he struggles to manifest his vision in the physical world to help warn, guide, and protect his people from harm. Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko is another fascinating book that haunted me and tells a story of real healing. Larry Brown wrote a concise biography that I loved about a more famous Sioux warrior and visionary Native American mystic, the son of a medicine man, called Crazy Horse: A Life. Crazy Horse was an enigma, and his own family didn’t even understand him. The book describes how Crazy Horse went off in the wilderness alone on his vision quest—a rite of passage for the Lakota called a Hanbleceya (translated as “to pray for a spiritual experience”). It seems that people who seek deeper truths, or have a capacity to sense them, often are pulled to the outskirts and fringes. Even though Frank has lived much of his life in the spotlight, he’s always felt like an outsider and feels most comfortable on the fringes. He stood in the spotlight for years because he felt he must do it to survive. And I feel that he did have a real desire to help people. But that life became hollow, and he felt the need to explore deeper spiritual truths and escape from the expectations of society. On the fringes, he feels free. He feels a kinship with ghostly presences, birds, cats, trees, and wild, forgotten things. For thousands of years the buffalo crossed the Cumberland Gap and humans just followed in their steps, and Frank feels it is a great injustice that they have been largely forgotten. On the fringes, the buffalo are remembered always, and Frank feels most comfortable there.RG: Communication is a theme you return to. Frank’s previous life involved radio, and many of Frank’s concerns involve the signals he sends and receives. Memories appear as if broadcast from a past he is disconnected from but unable to avoid. Figures manifest as ghostly reruns in memory. What was your approach to memory for Pineville Trace?WB: Like Kurt Vonnegut’s Billy Pilgrim, Frank Russet seems unstuck in time. When we think of the reality of time, it seems like it is always linear: past, present, and future. But when you think of how our minds experience time, it is not separate at all. We have thoughts of the past and reactions to them like judgment, desire, sadness, guilt, or joy; observations of the present and the way we feel and think about those observations; and plans, hopes, and fears of the future—along with all the emotions and judgments that come with them. And all of this is happening in the present moment in our minds. All the time. Fiction can illuminate the inner experience more fully than any other medium, and I wanted to explore that reality of the experience of time and how memories function in Frank Russet. I wanted the past and memory to be just as real as the present because that is how our minds often perceive memories. We don’t choose our memories. Our memories choose us. Marcel Proust’s narrator of In Remembrance of Things Past dips a cookie into some tea, takes a bite, and he is transported into the past as his memories overcome him. And that is how we experience memory. I wanted to capture that reality.RG: Do you think about how a reader of Pineville Trace might react to it? WB: Some of the books, stories, and poems that have most impacted me, like Flannery O’ Connor’s Wiseblood, Leonard Gardner’s Fat City, Denis Johnson’s Angels, Christopher Chambers’ Delta 88, Ezra Pound’s translation of Li Po’s “Exile’s Letter,” Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, Barry Hannah’s Ray, Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo”, James Still’s River of Earth, Phillip Roth’s The Dying Animal, Richard Brautigan’s An Unfortunate Woman, Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf, Marguerite Duras’ The Lover, Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift, James Baker Hall’s Mother on the Other Side of the World, and Franz Kafka’s “The Hunger Artist” haunted me long after I read them, for mysterious reasons. They made me recognize and remember important experiences from my own inner and emotional life. The recognition was palpable. They made me feel something. They stayed with me. My goal is for readers to have that kind of experience and reaction with Pineville Trace.RG:. After I drive past the woman smoking in the Range Rover, at the edge of the forestry camp on Pine Mountain, I think about Frank. Think about his life. And his story. About what it adds up to. What it’s about. I say into the recorder: “I always tell the same story. Over and over. It’s the story about getting what you want. And the story about not getting what you want. It’s the only story I know.”In reflection, did Pineville Trace give you what you want? WB: From the conception of the idea for Pineville Trace, through its first draft, multiple drafts of polishing, and final edits, I’ve had a sense of excitement. The experience of creation was charged. The challenge of marrying this weird story to this odd novella-in-flash form was riveting. I loved being able to spend the time with Buffalo and Frank Russet. I got to learn more about who Frank Russet really is. And, even now, it’s exciting for me to introduce Buffalo and Frank to readers. If even one reader experiences a deep recognition of their own inner experience or is haunted by Frank and Buffalo’s journey, then Pineville Trace has given me what I want.

Robin Zlotnick

MIRACULOUS AND UNPREDICTABLE AND PERVERSE AND UNKNOWABLE: An Interview with Shannon Robinson by Rebecca Gransden

September 10, 2024 · Interviews & Reviews

Primeval forces threaten to invade the worlds of Shannon Robinson’s short stories. Wild presences haunt suburbia, and folkloric figures surface as manifestations of deep-seated anxieties. For the collection The Ill-Fitting Skin (Press 53, 2024) Robinson presents normal life in all its complexity and confusion, where Mother Nature shows her claws and mythic creatures bare their teeth. This skin is pregnant with dread, imbued with the surreal, and, like a serpent, ready to shed and transform. I spoke to Shannon about the book. Rebecca Gransden: What is the story behind The Ill-Fitting Skin? When did you conceive the collection and how long has it been in gestation?Shannon Robinson: I love your choice of verb – “gestation”: it feels very apt, since many of my stories are concerned with motherhood and nurturing. I’ve been working on these stories for about twelve years, beginning with my MFA at Washington University in St. Louis. Over the years, I’ve placed work in literary magazines, but the more recent stories are exclusive to this collection. RG: The collection opens with “Origin Story,” an unsettling tale that deals with parenthood, childhood, and dark, primeval forces. The house featured in the story begins to experience a type of invasion, initially by something unknown. Why did you choose an ordinary family home for the setting of this story?SR: “Origin Story” is about a boy who turns into a wolf, and while lycanthropy is a fantastical phenomenon, I wanted there to be an underpinning of emotional authenticity. I think the best monster stories hit close to home: the darkness is scary because it’s inside us, or right beside us, implicating us. As parents, it can be so difficult for us to separate ourselves from our children, and this is especially fraught if the child is challenging or troubled or non-conforming. And sometimes the distance itself is the issue—that is, the parents’ anger and alienation. The original title for the story was “This Thing of Darkness I Acknowledge Mine,” which is something Prospero says of Caliban in The Tempest, but I eventually settled on “Origin Story,” because it had more directness, more punch … less lah-di-dah. RG: Several of the stories address the meeting point of superstition and science. Lycanthropy is presented as possible metaphor for a medical diagnosis, and unusually fantastical births suggest underlying psychological unease. Yet, there is the impression that neither pathway leads to a comprehensive or satisfactory answer. What is your approach to the rational and the paranormal when it comes to your fiction?SR: I trust the rational, but that’s not to say I don’t think there are times when we recruit the rational to justify the non-rational, or that the non-rational does not leak in around the edges. The medical advancements of the past fifty years alone have been astonishing, and yet there’s still room to get it wrong because we’re dealing with the incredible complexity of the human body and mind, and we can’t help but be human along the way. Are we still drilling holes in people’s heads to let out the evil spirits? No. But are we sometimes misdiagnosing and overmedicating? I’d say, yes. And here’s the thing: despite the fact that we carry our bodies and brains around, despite their quotidian normalcy, there are times when they seem so odd—miraculous and unpredictable and perverse and unknowable—that they are like magic, for good or for ill. RG: I’m wearing purple socks with teddy bears on them in a raised, rubberized pattern. The hospital provided them. These I will keep. I will wear them around the apartment for the next few days until the soles get dirty and I begin to worry about the state of the unswept floors. In “Miscarriages” ordinary items meant to soothe accentuate the sense of disquiet. These objects suggest the search for a type of material grounding in the face of events that evoke much confusion. From Feng Shui, origami cranes and unsettling gynecological crafts, objects in their juxtaposition inhabit a surreal and unsettling space within the story. What part do these objects play? SR: As you suggest, we seek comfort in the material. Our personal possessions, our daily objects, our souvenirs… our STUFF! We seek the concrete because so much of what surrounds us is nebulous and fleeting, and we do this despite knowing there’s no real remedy, hence our chronic dissatisfaction with our stuff. “Purchase”: there’s a lovely doubleness to that word, suggesting something we buy but also the act of trying to find a hold. Many of the objects from the story are artistic items—and art is a special kind of container for our anxiety. The story is written in sections, which I think of as containers, which in turn feature containers of one kind or another (lists, ultrasounds, a medical model …) along with that most profound of containers, the womb. RG: “The Rabbits” makes reference to the 18th century case of Mary Toft, a woman who claimed to have given birth to a brood of rabbits. There is a fairytale-like quality to the sequence of events. What led you to take on your own version of the story?SR: I came across the historical material after falling down a Google rabbit hole, appropriately enough: I must have been researching something related to maternity, and I somehow came across this hoaxster, Mary Toft. She really did fool people for a time, including the king’s physician; granted, she was very committed to the act, which involved some gruesome props. I was interested in writing a version where Mary experiences her rabbit births as authentic and miraculous—and yet she is perceived as a fraud and a trouble-maker. I like your comparison to fairytales, because their form suggests dream-like exploration rather than settled conclusions. I was interested in writing about the strangeness of conception, pregnancy, and childbirth… about its uncanny aspects and also about how, during these experiences, women can feel their agency is compromised, or at least, complicated. RG: Several of the stories address the idea of lost children. What draws you to this theme?SR: I have lost a child, through miscarriage, so I have that personal connection to the theme. And even though I now have a child, I still feel terror at the prospect of losing him. Which is not to say that I’m white-knuckling it minute by minute, but it’s there in the background (as I imagine it is for every parent). I’m also interested in what we lose as children—the phrase “loss of childhood innocence” comes to mind, but I hope to capture something less corny, or at least, more complex in its presentation. For instance, even children who do not experience an emotional loss directly can have survivor’s guilt, which is its own kind of trauma, and you see that at play in some of my stories. RG: Animals are presented as substitutes for human children, from a womb-dwelling bird and rabbits, to pets. The nature of attachment, of judgment, of maternal need, is a theme common to the collection. How do you view your use of animals, and the animalistic, for The Ill-Fitting Skin?SR: I love animals… but I also eat and wear them, so I deal with that daily paradox. I think animals occupy such a fascinating category: they are us, and yet they are not us; essential and yet alien. They make for uncanny comparisons, hence the power of fables. And Art Spiegelman’s Maus. With animals, the metaphorical doesn’t want to stay metaphorical, and I suppose I’m drawn to that sense of uncomfortable proximity. And that vulnerability. Animals are fierce and self-sufficient, and yet (increasingly) we see how their existence is fragile. RG: Truth be told, I had the kind of cleverness that readily alchemizes into stupidity by way of vanity. Five years in a PhD program and nothing to show for it except a box of rambling notes. So this is indeed my penance for being so ineffectual, I’d tell myself as I scrubbed, wiped, scoured. The idea was that it was a temporary gig, a stopgap, and soon a real job would surface. Like a magical island. Or a dead body. One of the characters that has stayed with me since reading the collection is the uncommunicative and off-putting householder Hartley, featured in “Dirt.” How did you go about creating him? There is a sophisticated progression in the dynamic between the two characters central to this story. What was your approach to characterisation in this case?SR: In “Dirt,” the narrator doesn’t sign up to be a “sexy” cleaning lady, but she finds herself playing that role for her new client, Hartley. When the story was first published in Joyland magazine, I was so surprised to find that some people—some women—found Hartley to be “endearing”! I see him as quietly menacing and highly manipulative. Granted, the narrator’s first impression of him is that he’s a dork, and so when he pushes her boundaries, she keeps trying to convince herself that she’s in charge. Or at least, that she’s okay with this, that she’s willing to be a good sport for the paycheck, that making these accommodations isn’t shaming and infuriating. Ultimately, his dorkiness is just a red herring, and she sees he has no qualms about pursuing his desires at her emotional expense. In writing this story, I very much had gender dynamics in mind, but I was also influenced by my time as an office worker, which in retrospect, had shades of the Stanford Prison Experiment.RG: If you decide to hate boys forever and ever, turn to page 92.If you decide to just hate this boy, turn to page 98.For “A Doom of Your Own” you take on the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure form in a way that is psychologically revealing. What attracted you to use this structure? Later in the collection D&D plays a significant role in the story “You Are Now in a Dark Chamber,” and a zombie parade is the backdrop for the interpersonal strifes of “Zombies.” What role do these games and niche cultures play in the collection?SR: I grew up reading Choose Your Own Adventure books in the ’80s, and I loved the way they allowed me to participate in the story, how “you” got to choose where the story went next. At the same time, as a fan of the genre, I became aware that choice was an illusion, and even when you think you’re doing everything right, you get trapped in loops, or end up lost in the dungeon or eaten by the ant people or whatever. I thought that sense of frustration (and gaslighting and self-sabotage…) would lend itself well to a story about a toxic romantic relationship. You don’t have to be a child of the ’80s to appreciate “Doom of Her Own,” but I have found that Gen X readers particularly enjoy its nostalgia element. As for games and niche cultures, there’s an underdog feel to them, which I find appealing. In “Zombies,” the narrator berates another character for referring to zombie cosplay as “hipster”; she says that “it’s full-on Renaissance Fair, Dungeons & Dragons, no irony.” In other words, not “cool”—which I think is a good thing (even if my narrator doesn’t). I also like the fantasy aspect of these activities. There’s often a certain amount of gothic inflection… as well as humor. And horniness. It’s very story-friendly. RG: A theme that is returned to throughout the collection is that of transformation. Sometimes your characters are in a place of denial, at other points led by unconscious impulses, or have transformation foisted upon them. What use do you make of transformation in the collection? Have any transformative experiences of your own influenced these stories?SR: As I recall, in Charles Baxter’s Burning Down the House, he disparages the notion of epiphany in fiction: he finds it all very phony baloney. My characters don’t exactly have epiphanies—there is no big, “And then I realized…” moment, no definitive pivot into clarity. But the characters come close, and I hope that I leave them (or at least most of them) in a place where they can move towards some positive transformation—that is, towards some greater understanding, strength, or happiness.As for transformative experiences of my own that have influenced these stories… they’re all what you’d expect: motherhood, my MFA, and marriage to a fellow writer who loves me and really cares about my writing. Aging in general has been good for me: less vanity-selfishness-insecurity, more wisdom-kindness-confidence. All that has helped me to become a better writer. A better person, with crappier knees. Fine. RG: There are many references to myths, legends, and folklore dotted throughout The Ill-Fitting Skin. Is this an area of inspiration?SR: Absolutely! Since childhood, I’ve been interested in fairytales (the Grimm versions; Disney’s versions are fun, but the originals are where the truly fascinating weirdness lies) and Greek mythology. I have a copy of D’Auliares’ Book of Greek Myths, which I won as a Creative Writing prize in sixth grade and have treasured ever since. I had its beautiful illustration of Demeter reunited with Persephone in mind as I wrote the ending of “Miscarriages.” RG: How did you decide upon the title for the collection?SR: The original title was No Good Will Come of This, which felt like a minor tribute to Alice Munro’s Who Do You Think You Are? (the Canadian title of The Beggar Maid)… but I ran it by a test audience, and it did not fare well. So I went through the stories and made a list of images and phrases that popped out at me. The phrase “an ill-fitting skin” occurs in the last paragraph of the story “Dirt” in reference to a garment that the narrator is throwing in the trash—a dress that she wore with great ambivalence for a male audience. I thought that phrase really spoke to externally imposed expectations and confining notions of identity: so many of the stories’ characters struggle with these. And I liked the fairytale feel of that phrase, “ill-fitting skin”—like it’s an enchantment, a curse… a prison, but also possibly a chrysalis, ready to be shed. RG: Looking back on the stories, and the time in which they were written, how do you feel about the collection now? What lies next for Shannon Robinson?SR: I feel very proud of these stories, and it’s always wonderful to hear that people have been moved by them. As for what lies ahead… more writing and more readings. I love giving readings! It’s the theater kid in me. Right now, I’m working on a novel about a Victorian baby killer. There’s a love story in there, so it’s not quite as grim as it sounds. Tenderness: I can promise you that.

Robin Zlotnick

THROUGH DISRUPTION AND DISSOLUTION: An Interview with Daisuke Shen

August 26, 2024 · Interviews & Reviews

The burden of foresight. With Vague Predictions & Prophecies (CLASH Books, 2024) Daisuke Shen mainlines a generation’s insecurities into fiction that is at once ephemeral and psychically probing. These are stories that present longing, whether that be for a sense of solidity, a chance at connection, or a reprieve from aimlessness. Daydreams of lost days and nightmares of days lost. Shen explores how technology melds with the human, and speculates on where consciousness might reside. I spoke with Daisuke about the book. Rebecca Gransden: The book shares its title with one of the short stories you’ve included, “Vague Predictions & Prophecies.” What led you to use this as the title for the collection as a whole?Daisuke Shen: Almost all of these stories, or at least the ones I can think of off the top of my head, feature characters who are awaiting some kind of inevitable doom, or who are searching for something or someone to save them. In times of extreme desperation and terror there is a tendency to anticipate/fantasize about the best and the worst outcomes; rarely is there ever a gray area. While I think it’s human to look for patterns or systems in order to make sense of the world, you can become narrow-scoped, only seeing the things you want to. You forget that the world isn’t as focused on you as you might think. I do believe that there exists the supernatural or spiritual, whichever you’d like to term it, but I also know that the human mind is good at tricking itself. But figuring out where that line begins and ends is impossible at times.RG: A mood of ennui and melancholia runs through the collection, with many of your characters unsure of themselves, rudderless or disappointed with life. A sense of yearning pervades the book. When did you write these stories? Do they remind you of a particular time in your life?DS: All of these stories feel a little distant from me now. The last ones were written around two-three years ago, I think, and are reflective of very difficult times, when I was living day-to-day in fight or flight mode. It’s hard to read some of them, to be quite honest. It’s interesting that you mention yearning as a constant throughout the collection. Yearning is a safe place for people to be, even while it’s miserable. It provides us with the ability to maintain a fantasy, to protect yourself from the potential disappointment of realizing your desire is misplaced. We romanticize destinations, thinking that when we reach a certain place within our lives or relationships, we’ll be saved. But how many people truly want to reach the finish line, where nothing comes afterward? There is a healthy kind of yearning, wherein it allows for us to carry forward in life — we call this hope. The unhealthy kind is the one that renders us sedentary, and we call this fantasy. Much of the collection was written with the attitude of the latter. RG: He wiped the sweat from his nose and looked at us with his granite black eyes, a thin smile spreading across his face. The one he had when he was fighting. I realized in that moment why his momma was so convinced he was a monster. She’d beaten him every night as a kid, trying to get the demons out. The welts on his body were everywhere.For “The Pasture” you address the idea of rules, the way in which the rules of the adult world and those that are the province of childhood can create friction or contradict one another. For your characters, rules present themselves as situational, whether it be school rules, religious guidance, or the social dynamics of a friend group. There is a sense that the rules on display exist to tentatively combat the invasion of the more chaotic forces that threaten the equilibrium of everyday life, imperfect as it is. How do your characters deal with rules? Do you impose rules upon yourself in your writing life?DS: Every day, from the time when we wake up to when we go to sleep, we enter into a negotiation with power. Control and order are needed to some degree or else entire systems devolve. And it is human to break rules even as we try to hold to them. Maybe especially when we try to hold onto them stringently, which is how new foundations are created — through disruption and dissolution. In writing I am drawn to restraint, which is why I am drawn to short stories and novellas. You have to be creative when working with a very short amount of pages, and it’s often when your best writing comes out — under pressure. When someone provides me with a restraint/specific form, I like to see how far I can take it, how I can bend it from its original expectations. I had a lot of external rules imposed on me growing up, which led to this immense terror inside of me of ever messing up or making a mistake. I still have this fear, but not as strongly as I used to. I now know there’s dignity in imperfection though it’s hard to internalize. I think my characters operate much in the same way — terrified of disrupting the order of things but also knowing that transformation is inevitable. This is the only option afforded to us in life. But apart from the above, my rules for myself in writing tend to be subconscious and uncontrollable. Most of what I’m finding difficult these days is how to recreate the same intensity, movement, and emotion in a long-form work that I would in short stories. I don’t like the idea of any one sentence feeling unpurposeful. Thus I will agonize over one sentence for a long time and wonder about its intent. It is painful and annoying. RG: I can’t stop staring. Staring, and laughing, and scared. I want to join our consciousnesses, join my body with its, forever. I feel the urge to kill for it. I would do anything it wanted me to.The story “Vague Predictions & Prophesies” deals with the angelic, a theme that recurs throughout the collection. In this case you make reference to the Binding of Isaac and the archangel connected with the Biblical account. For angels come down to earth, a complicated grounding awaits, where the human element must be taken into account, with its troubles and flaws, and the relationship with God gains new dimensions, sometimes resentful, often with baggage. The angelic can be as terrifying and awe-inspiring as much as it is comforting or guiding. What drew you to explore the figure of the angel, and to the story of Isaac in particular? What is God’s plan for His angels?DS: I think a lot about the story of Isaac. I was introduced first to the story as a young child in church and Christian school, and it was a rather simplistic sort of explanation that God never meant to kill Isaac and was simply testing Abraham to see if he would prove that his love for him was stronger — Abraham knew that God would never truly make him go through with it. Then I was re-introduced to the story from Kierkegaard’s viewpoint, which is that Abraham both fully accepted the fact of Isaac’s death while at the same time maintaining nonetheless that Isaac would be brought back to him somehow, even as he brings the knife down to perform the act.It is postulated by some scholars that Zedkiel is the referenced angel who intervenes before Isaac is killed. Zedkiel is the angel of mercy, yet some people mistake mercy for kindness. But I think mercy can also be cruelty and necessarily so — in that it forces people to keep going, which is another kind of suffering altogether. But there is also the hope of a better life. In the video game Nier: Automata, there is a point in which you learn that everyone in the character Pascal’s village, including the children, have been slaughtered. He begs for you to kill him, after which you are presented with three choices: You can kill him, or take his memories, or walk away. If you choose to take his memories, you come back later and find him selling his dead children’s body parts, as he thinks they’re just machine parts. If you kill him, he thanks you. But if you walk away, he yells out to you that you’ve betrayed him. And you never see him again in the game after that.I chose to kill him, but a better option in my opinion would have been to walk away and leave him with a weapon. I am always anticipating the impossible to happen. For some this is termed magical thinking, but I call it faith. RG: Many of the stories deal with the nature of consciousness and perception. When thinking about theme, what part does exploration of these areas play in your work?DS: The fact that there are so many different ways to perceive any given situation is something that really messes with me. “Home Video” grapples with this some. A conscious being is one that is afflicted with the terrible awareness of its own existence and its limitations. And if you live through too much, rationality and logical perception can be overtaken by instinct, the necessity of survival. How much do we truly know about ourselves and what keeps us alive? What parts of ourselves do we expose to others that we aren’t fully aware of? People always say they know themselves best but I don’t know how true that is. But at the same time, you have to build enough mental fortitude so that your general perception, as well as your understanding of who you are, is not easily swayed by anyone who comes along. I am not always great at trusting my own judgment, and neither are my characters.RG: “Damien and Melissa” explores the potential of technology when applied to human relationships. The story poses many questions, and led me to muse on issues of intrusion and the boundaries it is necessary for us to set for ourselves. When it comes to your work, what areas of technology are you drawn to investigate?DS: I was not allowed to have boundaries as a child. Technology is not healthy for us in many ways because it encourages a kind of enmeshment, I think, an erosion of the self as we are encouraged to be in constant conversation with others and to absorb as much information as possible in a limited amount of time. Of course it is good to have friends and to learn as much as we can, but how comfortable are we nowadays at being by ourselves for more than a couple of hours? Discipline is lacking nowadays. Strong relationships, becoming an expert in a specific area of study, are things that are built over a very long period of time, with intense concentration. I don’t want to engage with anything or anyone in a shallow way.Loneliness and the way technology has been created to aid people in their isolation is of great fascination to me. Also the way people use technology to take advantage of others’ loneliness, too. Pig-slaughtering scams, for instance, wherein scammers either text numbers at random or create fake dating profiles on apps, and then slowly begin to drain victims of their money by asking them to invest in cryptocurrency online, then taking it and disappearing forever. There were two stories in the news I remember, which was a guy who worked in cybersecurity for a university and then a woman who worked in finance. Both people were victims of this scam, which seems unbelievable until you learn that both of them had lost their spouses right beforehand. In times of insurmountable grief we can see a trap clear as day and still walk inside of it. RG: The presence of God recurs in various ways throughout the collection. Whether it be the Abrahamic God, a personal God, or something less concrete is, for the most part, dependent upon how your characters interact with the divine. Do you have a spiritual belief, and if so, how is that reflected in the collection?DS: I believe to one degree or another in the following: Ghosts; different lives and realities outside of this one; angels; karma; hexes; divine protection; spirits evil and good and neutral; gods; God; messengers; fate; altering the course of fate; some type of afterlife; prophetic dreams. Reincarnation, too, maybe. RG: It was darker than I’d expected. Shirts fluttered on metal racks, like ghosts without frames. Every time I shined the flashlight into a room, I imagined that now would be when I’d see them: the lovers, their bodies forming into one another’s; a man with a vendetta who would plunge a knife into my back. Humidity clung to my face as I searched for them. But there was never anything but my own shadow, grotesque and overgrown, hunting me through the corridors.The story “The Rabbit God” features a security guard who is haunted as much by imagined phantoms as he is inner ghosts. Many of your stories deal with the ghosts we carry with us. What is the nature of the ghostly in your work, and how do spirits manifest in Vague Predictions & Prophesies?DS: In Chinese and Japanese culture ghosts are very real and serious business. So too in the South. They manifest because of the fact they are wronged in life, because their deaths were painful or tragic. There are so many different types of ghosts across cultures, within our bloodlines, inside of the soil. They are reminders that history follows you. The cruelty and destruction of humanity or the human soul is remembered and resistant to our attempts to stifle it. RG: “Duckling” raises the issue of privacy, and what it is reasonable to share with another. Passwords become a measure of trust, passcodes a signal of access and connection. The story presents a character willing to sacrifice identity and personal autonomy, to relinquish oneself. Many of your stories deal with the nature of the self. How do you approach your work on a philosophical level?DS: Questions I wrestle with often include how much sacrifice one should make in love. The constitution of a self is primarily one made in relations to others. But a core is so easily suffocated at times. A self is a taught line that is at times pliant. Moldable. Some foundational aspects will remain despite anything else but it’s also silly to think that selves are unmovable objects. RG: What relationship does the past have to the present in your stories?DS: The past and the present are in a very codependent situationship in my work. Neither party wants to let go despite knowing it’s not going to work out. It’s decades long at this point and may very well never end.RG: The story “Machine Translation” addresses themes of appearances, metamorphosis, and the use of technology to deliver fundamental needs, such as the emotional and spiritual. How can data be a measure for life? How do you approach the use of dream logic in your work?DS: In terms of the things that we buy or watch or eat, the places we go, the people we contact, patterns begin to emerge. Data surveillance is used for really evil purposes, for instance, racial profiling. I don't think data is a measurement of life. I think that you could probably make some assumptions, or make new ones about me if I told you what I bought at the grocery store today, what my search history is like, who I’ve spoken to on the phone. But it cannot serve as a reflection of a whole human being, can’t replace an actual connection, which is part of why the mother in that story loses her mind — she wants for the world to fit into compact facts in order for her to overcome her past traumas but it won’t stay shut. RG: How do you view the collection as a whole entity? When looking back, what stands out to you most about writing it?DS: If I’m being honest? I want it as far away from me as possible. I want to pretend it’s not coming out. But I also want people to know that I did work really hard on these stories. And it took a very long time. And I was unhappy with almost all of the stories after long periods of not hearing back, and I kept wanting to include different ones. I begged my agent to pull it many times. But he believed in my stories.That’s all to say that if you’re reading this and you want to write a short story collection don’t be fooled by people who give you a formula for success. I often tell my students I am pessimistic about publishing. It makes me sad, to be honest, that there’s such a huge need for writers to become businesspeople nowadays. I am just not good at it, and I don’t think it comes naturally to artists. We are committed to our work most of all and that’s how it should be, not spent having to sell ourselves on whatever platform it might be. But I also tell them there are presses that will love your work and take good care of it. Long story short if you have a story inside of you, get it out. You owe it to yourself.

Robin Zlotnick

CHASING THE MONSTER: An Interview with Matt Lee

August 13, 2024 · Interviews & Reviews

Where lives the creature? The Backwards Hand: A Memoir (Curbstone Books, 2024) chronicles Matt Lee’s experience of growing up and into adulthood. Matt’s hand marked him out as different, and it is the nature of this difference, where it resides, that comes to the fore. Out from the unconscious arises the monster, but once unleashed, even a monster must live in the world. As the monster is seen, is reflected, perhaps even reconciled with, it remains powerful but also hard to pin down. In whose eyes, in what skin, does the monster live? I asked Matt if he’s any closer to finding out.Rebecca Gransden: Fear THE CLAW! Near the start of the book you describe a game of The Claw that you played with your dad. This obviously put me in mind of the Jim Carey film Liar Liar, where Jim’s character uses The Claw as a way to jokily terrify and bond with his son. What prompted you to venture into the domain of memoir?Matt Lee: You just unearthed a long-buried childhood memory of renting that movie and watching it with my father. We’ve been estranged for many years, but I will give him credit for letting me check out all sorts of bawdy, violent films when I was (probably) too young.I consider myself a failed poet. Writing creative nonfiction, much less a memoir, had never crossed my mind. I wanted to be a teacher, so I went to grad school (add failed professor to the list). My adviser suggested I enroll in a creative nonfiction course, and I figured it would allow me to get outside my creative wheelhouse. I was soon so enamored that I repeated the class.One of my assignments was to write the first chapter of a memoir, which became the genesis of The Backwards Hand. At that stage of my life, I was cagey about discussing my disability, and I wanted to figure out why, so the memoir served as a vessel of self-interrogation. When I began framing my story within the larger tapestry of disability studies, I felt even more compelled to share it, to move beyond mere solipsism and invite others along for the ride, a collective investigation into a topic which many prefer to sweep under the rug—our attitudes surrounding the disabled body. RG: Facts From Hell! You intercut passages on films with factual historical accounts. Your personal history and experience is recounted alongside cold, hard statistics. How did you go about choosing the structure for the book?ML: The “literary collage” style is something I adopted and developed while working on my first book, Crisis Actor. The subject of disability is so vast and mercurial that a fragmentary approach felt natural, and it formally mimics the organized chaos of my mind. Throwing this onslaught of information at the reader likewise invokes one of the book’s central concerns: abjection. My intention is for the book to overload one’s sense of being, the same way you might react to seeing a corpse (or a cripple). I use the personal narrative as a ballast—I tell my story in a linear fashion to help ground the erratic miasma of references surrounding it.RG: You Won’t Believe Your Eyes! The book draws from many sources. What did the research process look like? Were there discoveries that made an impact on you, or the direction of the book itself?ML: I started with a few key touchstones. Tod Browning’s Freaks, Diane Arbus, Julia Kristeva, etc. Once I went looking for it, though, I began seeing representations of disability everywhere, and the research started to balloon. I had to be diligent about what outside references best complemented the autobiographical portions. The final bibliography includes more than two hundred sources, and there were loads of other “unofficial” sources not directly referenced in the book. What’s ironic is that, despite having been born disabled, I was grossly ignorant about the history of disability, so the journey was rife with discovery, much of which turned my stomach. Learning about eugenics and the mass killing of disabled people in Nazi Germany, for instance, was much more frightening than any horror film and presented opportunities to juxtapose real-world monsters with their fictitious counterparts. It was important to keep the process organic. I let the research lead me.RG: Behold, the Monster! The book confronts and examines the concept of the monster head on. Physical deformities and abnormalities are understood via the lens of the fantastical, the mythic, Hollywood monsters. The tension of the book lies in the point at which the monster exists in the eye of the beholder and as a universal idea. Did your view of the monster morph over your time spent writing the book?ML: The monster is a strange conundrum because it is a universal concept, as you mention, but everyone’s criteria of what constitutes a monster is unique. A central question from the book is What makes a monster? The more I considered this question, the less confident I felt in my answer. Ultimately, I think the only fair way to define the monster is by action (the Latin root of the word means “to show,” but do we show by doing or purely by the facade we display?). After all, you can look perfectly ordinary on the surface and still be capable of committing a heinous act. What I most struggled with were notions of culpability and condemnation. Does a single monstrous deed classify someone as a monster in perpetuity? When does the scale of monstrosity remit any chance of redemption? Does even the foulest monster deserve forgiveness, whether or not they ask for it? I continue to wrestle with these questions.RG: You’ll Die Laughing!People I know have told me they attempted to go a day without turning their hands and found it utterly impossible. They cannot help themselves. Neither can I.Humor, sometimes wry, often dark, plays a large part in the memoir. How did you decide upon the tone for the book? ML: When cripples aren’t an object of fear, they are often instead the butt of a joke, so it felt right to mix comedy and horror. I can also personally attest that many disabled people develop gallows humor simply from existing within a society that is frequently keen on our exclusion (or demise). Laughing in the face of ableism is a form of resistance. Humor is also an excellent tool for disarming the reader. It lulls you into a false sense of security. One line might have you chuckling, the next recoiling in shock. It’s my way of saying, Don’t get too comfortable.RG: Don’t Look in the Mirror! A recurring theme is that of the mirror. Mirrors are sometimes absent, a source of discomfort, of not wanting to see the reflection. There is projection onto deformity, that a person with a physical disability reflects ideas of decay and disease, uselessness: a mirror showing uncomfortable truths or imagined futures filled with aging or incapacity. Film is also a type of mirror, potentially a cracked or funhouse one. Is The Backwards Hand a mirror?ML: There’s a strong argument to be made that all art is a mirror, and The Backwards Hand is no exception. My intention is to force the reader to examine their own capacity for monstrosity, to wrestle with their prejudices and biases. That’s certainly what I was doing while writing the book, and I think it’s a healthy exercise to confront the monster within us all. Disability itself is like a window into the realm of possibility—it reveals the human body’s potential, the limits of mortality, which is why it triggers such a strong response. It simultaneously attracts and repels. I hope my book has a similar effect.RG: Movie Mayhem! One of the great joys of the book is the impressive array of films you cover. Are there films that stand out to you? Any discoveries you made in the gatheration of titles that you’d recommend? ML: Many of these films surprised me upon revisiting them after a number of years, namely Cronenberg’s The Brood, Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, Medak’s The Changeling, and Cohen’s It’s Alive. Their emotional intensity profoundly resonates with me—I actually found myself crying at the end of It’s Alive during my rewatch. I realized, of course, all these films deal with parenthood and children, so with my being a new father, I was especially sensitive.In terms of discoveries, I would point to Browning’s The Unknown, a silent-era precursor to Freaks, which boasts an astonishing performance by Lon Chaney. For horror fans, I’d recommend Eric Red’s Body Parts. It’s one I don’t see discussed too often. There’s an incredible sequence of on-screen vehicular carnage, and the whole movie is a lot of fun, with Brad Dourif in peak, deranged form.RG: A Stage Set for Damnation! Make a choice. Is the cripple an object of pity or a source of inspiration? Shall you exploit or glorify the invalid? Are you entertained? Disgusted? Amused? You have a history in the acting world, and have taken on the parts of disabled characters, as unflinchingly implied in the book, a cripple playing a cripple. How is the concept of the mask addressed in The Backwards Hand?ML: Drama is a philosophically compelling medium because of its paradoxical nature. The actor strives to behave truthfully under imaginary circumstances, but a genuine performance is still a performance, the illusion of something real. I’ve known many actors who say that they “come alive” onstage, as if the artifice gives license to tap into ways of being we might otherwise suppress. Masks can have a similar effect—when the outer self is hidden, the inner self seeps to the surface. The monster, like the actor, often adopts a mask, and this new face gives him courage to act in a new light, typically with grisly consequences. I’m reminded of a character like Leatherface, who dons different masks (in his case, literal faces) for certain occasions.Is the memoir itself a type of mask? Nonfiction is only a representation of reality and, being limited to the author’s memories and point of view, is inherently fallible. Still, this layer of removal, this distillation of experience into a form, gave me a certain level of courage to be explicit in the way I try to portray myself. Perhaps wearing a “literary mask” can reveal something authentic. In the end, The Backwards Hand is my attempt to strip bare, an unmasking.RG: The Nightmare of Reality! The stats you include are at once hair-raising and bleakly illuminating. Looking back at the book, at some of the hard truths it presents, what is your personal relationship to these generalized facts?ML: The scope of something like 300,000 people with disabilities were executed in Nazi Germany is almost incomprehensible, which is why I tend to give statistics in the book a standalone line. Unadorned, they are quite staggering, but I also want the information to not just be numbers on a page. The individual stories illustrate the examples and, most importantly, humanize the cold, hard facts. One of those 300,000 was a little boy named Richard Jenne, whose photograph appears toward the book’s end. It’s a painful reminder that we mustn’t reduce people to data, to abstractions, especially within the context of disability, when logic and science are often used as tools to dehumanize people, and thus provide justification for atrocities.RG: You Won’t See Them Coming! Invisible disabilities are those that are not immediately apparent. An estimated 10 percent of Americans fall into this category, myself included. One area I found compelling is the book’s attempt to grapple with the idea of categorisation. Where does condition end and anomaly or disability start? Where do the terms cripple and invalid come into play? How did you set out to approach language for The Backwards Hand?ML: This fits into the debate of essentialism versus constructivism, the former arguing that disability is a diagnosed, medical condition, the latter positing that disability is a social construct. Some theorists might suggest that disability does not exist, others that everyone is disabled. And the spectrum is so wide and multifaceted that it resists easy categorization. I do think it’s important to remember that disability imposes very real material conditions on a person, but that no two people experience a disability the same way.Co-opting outdated and offensive terms like “cripple” and “invalid,” for me at least, is a way to reclaim these hateful words and flip the script. I choose to wear “cripple” as a badge of pride. At the same time, it’s a way to challenge readers to consider the implications of ableist language, much of which is bandied about in everyday conversation without a second thought.I use pretty plain and straightforward language in The Backwards Hand. The approach I’m going for is understatement. I try to employ an even-keeled tone that belies the often disturbing nature of the subject matter, so the prose sneaks up on you.RG: Pity the Freak! The American artist John Callahan was twenty-one when he became a quadriplegic. He’d spent the day barhopping with a buddy, who was driving Callahan’s car when they wrecked. After the accident, Callahan decided to become a cartoonist, gripping a pen between both hands to produce crude but clever one-panel gags. His macabre sense of humor and his tendency to deal in taboo subjects, most frequently disability and disease, landed him a fair share of critics, who decried Callahan’s work as tasteless.Callahan said his only compass was the reaction from people in wheelchairs or those who have hooks for hands, people like himself who were sick of being pitied and patronized. The truly detestable ones, he said, presume to speak for the freaks themselves. Assholery is a recurring theme. At the extreme end is assholery of the homicidal and genocidal variety, and at its most mundane it manifests in everyday thoughtlessness and casual bigotry. You don’t spare yourself when it comes to assholery. What place does the asshole have in The Backwards Hand?ML: Anyone can be an asshole, just like anyone can become disabled. I write about both able-bodied and disabled people who have done bad things, some of which are minor transgressions, others unspeakable acts of evil. I do believe that disabled people have to put up with an immense amount of assholery in our day-to-day lives. There is so much open hostility toward people with disabilities. And what is our crime? Spoiling the scenery. Needing accommodation. Requiring care and time and effort and money. How dare we have the gall to demand such resources without lifting a finger to contribute to the altar of capital! What is most sinister is when bigotry masquerades as mercy. The Nazi doctors described their extermination campaign as an act of benevolence.But of all the assholes in the book, and there are many, I’m chief among them. If I draw the conclusion that actions define the monster, it would be hypocritical not to put my own bad behavior on full display. There’s a tendency to deny and deflect accusations of wrongdoing, especially with men, and I wanted to take ownership of all the times in my life that have made me feel like a monster. I’m attempting to reconcile with my regrets—a reformation of the asshole, if you will.RG: The Monster Must Die! The eternal truth that death is the great leveler visits the book in myriad ways, and this concept seems especially pertinent to The Backwards Hand. As you put the book to rest, the writing of it behind you, what is your view of the project as a whole?ML: Progress has been made, and I believe there are more people than ever fighting for a just, equitable world, but disability advocacy still seems somewhat relegated to the sidelines. There are so many misconceptions, so much discomfort surrounding disability, despite it being a phenomenon that we are all guaranteed to experience at some point. Disability is not something we must overcome or erase. If The Backwards Hand achieves anything, I hope it offers a new perspective and provides space to broaden conversations about disability. I encourage readers to lean into their discomfort and work through it to find acceptance, just as I have done.RG: Back From the Dead! A monster with charm is the most frightening of all.Does the icon of the monster dazzle with its own mythology? What does the future hold for the monster? Where does Matt Lee go next?ML: Monsters are an inextricable aspect of mythology, and people will always be drawn to their stories—there’s a reason horror is such a beloved genre. The monster will continue to evolve with the times, reflecting contemporary ills and anxieties. Monster as AI. Monster as microplastics. Monster as ecological collapse. Monster as militarized cop.As for me, I’m still deciding on my next move. I’m mulling over a couple concepts for novels, or I might put together an essay collection. The ideas need to marinate. A few long walks and several months of late night writing sessions ought to do it. If I can find the time, I’d love to get back onstage or do some film work. Maybe I’ll direct a horror movie!

Robin Zlotnick

TRANSMISSIONS: Writing The Rapids

August 6, 2024 · Interviews & Reviews

Welcome to Transmissions, an interview feature in which X-R-A-Y profiles podcasts.Joe bielecki is the host of the podcast Writing the Rapids, the author of the novel Tired from Alien Buddha Press, as well as several pieces of flash fiction that may or may not still be on the internet. He currently lives with his family in Grand Rapids, Michigan.Writing the Rapids can be found at the website, Spotify, Patreon, Instagram, Youtube and X.Rebecca Gransden: How would you describe the podcast to someone who is unfamiliar with what you do?Joe bielecki: Writing the Rapids is a podcast where I talk to writers about writing. I’m not really clear from one day to another exactly what that means, however. I try to have conversations rather than interviews. I tend to warn my guests that I may simply muse about their writing without asking a question, for example. RG: Does the podcast have a mission or manifesto? JB: Not particularly a manifesto. I pick my guests based on the recommendations of past guests. Some of my goals when starting the show was to read more indie lit, meet new people, and see how people are connected. RG: How long has the podcast been in existence, and how have you seen it grow over that time?JB: My first episode was posted on February 13, 2018. I went from being a guy with a few pieces of flash fiction floating around, to a guy with a podcast. It is clear there are people who are capital F Fans of the show. Based on my Spotify metrics, the show is growing pretty steadily. When I tell people at work my follower count, how many average listens an episode gets, they seem impressed. It’s a niche subject, so I don’t expect it to get huge, but I’d like to think that I’ve helped a few books get sold.RG: Where did the idea for the podcast come from?JB: I wanted to talk to some of the indie writers I was reading that didn’t have lots of interviews available. I’m pretty shy, but wanted to make friends in a so-called scene that I enjoyed reading from. I wanted to explore publishers putting out books I like, etc. It’s hard for me to walk into a room of people, so to speak, and insert myself into a conversation. Creating a podcast seemed like a good way to give people a reason to talk to me.RG: How did you decide upon a title for the podcast?JB: The name came from a segment I did a few times for the morning show of the local NPR member station, I work for. I live in Grand Rapids, Writing the Rapids sounds like Riding the Rapids. When I decided to do the show on my own, and in a different way, I kept the name. Thinking of names is hard.RG: Are there any podcasts that influenced or encouraged you to start the project?JB: Not particularly. I’m a long time fan of Scott Johnson and the Frogpants Studios family of podcasts. I started listening to The Instance back in middle school or so and found the podcast format fascinating. Beyond that, I spent a lot of time in college watching late night talk show interviews with writers like David Foster Wallace and Harlan Ellison. RG: What episode of the podcast would you recommend to someone who is new to what you do?JB: My most listened to episodes are with B. R. Yeager, Sam Pink, and Jackie Ess, so probably one of those. RG: How do you go about selecting what to feature on each episode? If your podcast features guests, how do you go about finding them?JB: As noted above, I have a list of people provided by previous guests. From that list I look for someone who seems like they would say yes, and is writing something that seems immediately interesting to me at the time.RG: If you are a writer, has the podcast impacted your writing life? and conversely, has a writerly disposition influenced the podcast? JB: Having a writerly disposition is kind of the whole reason the podcast exists as it does. I wasn’t even sending my novel, Tired, out when I started. You hear me on the show mention my writing, ask about editing, ask about the publishing process. I ask this not only because I think it’s interesting inside baseball that people might want to hear, but because I largely still feel like an outsider as a writer and am trying to figure out how to get inside.RG: Do you listen to podcasts?JB: Not as much these days as I’d like. My listening time in general is lower than ever due to life circumstances, and what time I do have has largely been spent listening to the Horus Heresy audio books and music.RG: What is the best podcast out there at the moment, the one you are excited for when each new episode drops?JB: When I was listening to podcasts more regularly my favorite was Film Sack, by the aforementioned Scott Johnson. RG: What do you dislike about podcasts?JB: The low barrier to entry allows for a lot of saturation, so a lot of bad podcasts, which seems to have caused a lot of people to write off the medium entirely, which is a shame.RG: Who is your dream guest?JB: Someone very famous who would make the show blow up. Beyond that I’ve had a lot of people say yes who I thought would say no. I’m actually very content.RG: Is there a theme or subject you are burning to cover?JB: More ARGs, more Hypertext Lit, that type of thing. TTRPG guide as literature seems to be a creeping idea, I should look into that more.RG: Is there a podcast that doesn’t exist, but you wish did?JB: I have a couple ideas I’ve wanted to do for a while. That’s not in the spirit of the question, I understand. But it is my most honest answer.RG: Is there a podcast that exists, but you wish didn’t?JB: Yes, for sure. I won’t name them because I don’t want to draw people to them.RG: For techheads, which single item of kit do you consider essential for the production of the podcast, and what would you say are the basics needed for those new to podcasting?JB: Get a decent mic, get one with an XLR connection, not a USB. Get a mixer and learn signal chains. It’s much better to have more control rather than less. Maybe google meeting or zoom will record for you, I’d rather take the sound coming out of my mic and computer, and mix it myself. I also record into a Zoom H4N rather than my computer. That feels safer. RG: If someone would like to support independent podcasts, what are the best ways to do this?JB: As I say every intro, Patreon, Paypal, buy the host’s book. Or just talk about it. Spend more time talking about the things you love rather than hate. People remember what you talk about, so talk about things you want people to pay attention to, please.RG: Looking back on the podcast, are there favorite episodes, episodes that stand out to you, or episodes that didn’t go as you would’ve liked?JB: I just did an episode with Stacy Hardy, she was amazing. Jackie Ess was such a great guest. M Kitchell was so patient with me and informative. I really love talking to guys like Mike Corrao, Mike Klein, B. R. Yeager, John Trefry. A few episodes are out there where I feel like I could have done a better job. That’s life.RG: What are your plans for the future?JB: I plan to just keep going. I really like the show the way it is, and I don’t plan to change it. I’ve been threatening to make a YouTube channel for a while, and I’m really close to actually doing that.RG: If you liked that, you may also like this. Are there any podcasts on a similar wavelength to your own that you would recommend to a listener who appreciates what you do?JB: Wake Island Pod seems to have a lot of crossover fans with me. I’m not sure if they’re making new episodes or not though. I was recently on the Not Worth Living podcast, and I really like the conceit of that one.Writing the Rapids can be found at the website, Spotify, Patreon, Instagram, Youtube and X.

Robin Zlotnick

TRANSMISSIONS: Art of Darkness

July 30, 2024 · Interviews & Reviews

Welcome to Transmissions, an interview feature in which X-R-A-Y profiles podcasts.

Brad Kelly is a writer from Detroit, Michigan. In addition to AoD, he has recently published HOUSE OF SLEEP, a work of literary psy-fi, and is currently developing a novel to be released in 2024 and an experimental text investigating the Tarot card-by-card. He is a former Michener Fellow and has been widely published in literary magazines.Kevin Kautzman is a playwright living in St. Paul, Minnesota. His award-winning plays have appeared around the UK and US and are available in print at Broadway Play Publishing. His dark social media comedy MODERATION was adapted for an online release and can be found at moderationplay.com. A past fellow of the Michener Center for Writers and the Playwrights’ Center, he is a co-founder of Bad Mouth Theatre Company.Art of Darkness can be found here, on Patreon, and on Substack.Rebecca Gransden: How would you describe the podcast to someone who is unfamiliar with what you do?Brad Kelly: Art of Darkness is a podcast about the dark side of creativity, hosted by a couple of very online writers and featuring biographical profiles of dead artists. My co-host Kevin and I cover filmmakers, theater-makers, painters, musicians, architects, writers—anybody creative, influential, and dead for longer than a year and a day is our purview. In our Core Episodes, we go through a person’s life, work, and cultural context, taking as much time as we need to tell an artist’s story. Some episodes run over five hours, and we each take turns leading one another through an artist’s life. These thoroughly researched profiles, presented in a conversational way, are the heart of the show.We also host guests to talk further about one of the subjects we’ve covered in Dark Room Episodes, and we run a Zoom book club for our Patreon supporters called Bookends. Additionally, we record an “After Dark” bonus episode for Patreon, for every episode we do. These typically go for 20-30 minutes. If you’re interested in the arts, biography, and history, Art of Darkness might be your show.RG: Does the podcast have a mission or manifesto? BK: Our goal with every Core Episode is to create the go-to piece of online media about our subjects. Kevin Kautzman: One major meta-thread of the show is an interrogation of what drives creativity, and we hope to inspire living artists and creatives by reflecting on the great artists of the past, warts and all. There are a lot of warts.RG: How long has the podcast been in existence, and how have you seen it grow over that time?BK: We released our first episode in February 2021. The show has grown fairly rapidly since then and regularly appears in the Apple Podcasts charts around the world in the Books category. We knew we had something when people started asking to come on the show, which is why we host the Dark Room interview and discussion episodes.KK: Over the past few years, we’ve brought quite a few guests on to help us with our Core Episodes, but we’ve moved away from that as the Core Episodes have gotten longer. Guests can’t always commit four to six hours to a recording, and it’s a lot to ask of someone. So we have the Dark Room for guests who want to come on and discuss Aleister Crowley’s obscene poetry or all things Virginia Woolf.RG: Where did the idea for the podcast come from?BK: We conceived of Art of Darkness during the pandemic. We’d had other podcasts, together and apart, but we’d never quite found our “thing.” Kevin had an interview show called Get This, on which guests would share their enthusiasm about something—a movie, a writer, whatever. In hindsight, that show is not dissimilar from what we do with our Dark Room episodes. After I came on as a guest on one of these episodes—talking about Philip K. Dick or Harold Bloom—the wheels started turning and a few weeks later we had Art of Darkness, and I started to prepare my first episode, on Burroughs.KK: Brad is going to revisit Burroughs early in 2024, since that first episode is woefully short relative to our format now. If you go back and listen to the show from the beginning, you can see how the concept evolved and grew into what it is today.RG: How did you decide upon a title for the podcast?BK: We think people are desperate for earnestness and authenticity, especially online, and we believe there’s an audience for stories that perhaps tell us the most about what creativity actually is. This requires a complete picture of an artist’s life, including the darkness: abuse, drugs, mental illness, violence, war, betrayal, outright murder, sexual angst—the good stuff, in other words.KK: Sturm und Drang. We knew we wanted to explore that angle, thinking maybe we could answer the question “why do artists tend to be so screwed up?” The tortured artist is a cliché for a reason. It’s worth noting too that we don’t wallow in the “dark side,” or suggest living artists cultivate or surrender to theirs, but we give the darkness its fair due when it inevitably arises, and that sets our show apart and provides us with our driving theme.BK: After we had the show concept, we played around with title ideas. We’re both fans of Heart of Darkness, and we opened Season III (2023) with a Core Episode on Joseph Conrad. Just before landing on Art of Darkness, Kevin pitched the name “Heart of Artness,” which we laugh about because it’s so terrible. We have the receipts in WhatsApp.KK: Never go with your first idea. You gotta spitball.RG: Are there any podcasts that influenced or encouraged you to start the project?KK: It’s fair to say the show is influenced by Hardcore History and The Last Podcast on the Left, tho we’re tonally quite different from each of these. We’re both Rogan listeners from way back and dabbled with the idea of podcasting as early as 2011. It only took us a decade to figure it out and make something people seem to want more of. I’m also a big, three decade fan of Mystery Science Theatre 3000, which probably won’t surprise listeners. I’m almost always looking for the laugh as we record, because it’s fun and it leavens things. Each of these stories ends the same way: the subject dies, sometimes young, sometimes at their own hand. It gets heavy. On Art of Darkness, we laugh so we don’t cry.I think too we’ve been influenced by various biopics, not least Mishima: a Life in Four Chapters and even something like Walk the Line. Our show is a show, and we try to weave a narrative that’s entertaining and informative or at least not inaccurate. We also have to credit the many biographers whose work we lean on for the core episodes. Without their labor, we would not have a show, and we always note our sources on a given episode. We buy a lot of books.These days too, as the show has matured, we’re more influenced by the idea of “evergreen content” generally, and I know we’re both motivated by the growing catalog and feedback we get from listeners, who binge the show and take away motivation for their own creativity or just enjoy learning about all these great figures we cover. At this moment, we’ve covered 61 core subjects. Our dream is to continue doing this show as long as we can and to have 300 or more core subjects and a massive, high-quality trove of content as a free resource for our contemporaries and posterity. It’s a hell of a project.RG: What episode of the podcast would you recommend to someone who is new to what you do?BK: We take turns leading our core episodes. Kevin prepares to talk about a subject and presents it to me and then I take a turn. Here’s an episode on Edgar Allan Poe, which I led.KK: And here’s an episode I led, on Dante. RG: How do you go about selecting what to feature on each episode?BK: For Season IV, starting in January 2024, we had a retreat at my property in northern Michigan and hashed it out around the campfire. More directly, we come up with a list of subjects largely based on our own instincts about what will make a good subject. We try to cover the artists we love, the artists we think our audience wants to know more about, and sometimes we cover a subject—say Aleister Crowley or John Milton—because we think they are essential to understanding cultural history—they tie many currents together.KK: We’ve yet to argue even once about who would cover a given subject, or “called dibs” or whatever. It all just kind of comes together.RG: If your podcast features guests, how do you go about finding them?BK: Our Dark Room episodes are a shorter format, about an hour, in which we take a closer look at some aspect of a subject we’ve already covered. For a Dark Room episode on Franz Kafka, we hosted Ross Benjamin, the translator of a new English edition of Kafka’s Diaries.We find our guests by being very online, and we frequently reach out to people we want to talk to. Dark Room episodes are a fairly low commitment: ninety minutes between the main episode and the After Dark we do for Patreon, all done via Zoom.RG: If you are a writer, has the podcast impacted your writing life? and conversely, has a writerly disposition influenced the podcast?BK: Kevin is a playwright and I’m a fiction writer. Speaking for myself, I learn a lot about the process from studying a writer like, say, Edgar Allan Poe or Emily Dickinson. You learn that they’re human beings, even if tremendously talented. That they struggled. That they were unsure of themselves and imperfect, haunted sometimes. That their triumphs were simultaneous with tragedy. And you see how their talent develops. How they make use of their lives. Also, of course, as the podcast has grown, new opportunities have presented themselves.KK: Doing this podcast, I learned quickly from subjects like Kubrick and Woolf and Cash that you cannot and must not wait around for permission to make your art, or for some ex machina blessed anointing to fall upon your career. You really have to go and get it, make it happen, just do the thing you imagine, and try not to kill anybody or yourself or alienate too many people.Kubrick wrestled money together from a local dentist and neighbors and family, went to California with a small production crew, and nearly killed his actors with insecticide while making his first feature, Fear and Desire, which then helped propel him into a “real” career. If he’d sat around in New York griping about what a racket Hollywood is, he would have not been wrong and we wouldn’t have Barry Lyndon and the rest of his oeuvre. Impossible to imagine but plausible. Artists do the thing.The show directly inspired me to start our theater company here in St. Paul, called Bad Mouth. Through that, we now do an interview podcast and radio show for the Twin Cities arts’ scene, through which we’ve released a number of play readings online. As for Brad and my writerly dispositions affecting the show, I’d say it’s all over what we do. As writers, we’re both obsessed with narrative form and are earnestly interested in all our subjects. There’s a mysterious Venn diagram of interests, aesthetics, humor, sense of history, educational backgrounds, and approach between us that just seems to work. And the fact we both have our own artistic practices and projects prevents us from being passive observers of our subjects. We’re really invested in understanding what drives creative genius, and how it might be harnessed or cultivated.RG: Do you listen to podcasts?KK: Before Art of Darkness, I listened to far more hours of podcasts than I do today. Now, between regular working life, running a theater company, writing my own plays and screenplays, raising a family, and Art of Darkness, I don’t have as much downtime, and when I have it, I usually throw on music or a film.When I do listen to podcasts, it’s often after a search for one of our subjects, to saturate myself further in their life and see what media already exists about them, or I’ll listen to a show one of our guests is on or does. We have our own little heterodox podcast network through the show, which is a fun consequence of making Art of Darkness. I’m the resident extrovert, so I love it.RG: What is the best podcast out there at the moment, the one you are excited for when each new episode drops?KK: We like Weird Studies and were happy to have Phil Ford on to talk about MF DOOM in an episode.We’re also fans of author Aaron Gwyn, who is a frequent guest on our show and who has a notable Substack where he covers Blood Meridian in exhaustive and illuminating detail. Aaron is joining us for our book club this December to talk about that great novel, in light of McCarthy’s passing.RG: What do you dislike about podcasts?KK: We sometimes joke about “vibecasts,” which is our little term for shows that don’t really have a driving concept and consist of vain chit chat, gossip, and maybe some cul-de-sac politics. Who has time for these, and how many such shows can the Internet sustain? You can feel the series of tubes sag under the flab of all this chatter and pseudo-political kayfabe.Art of Darkness is vehemently not a vibecast. I also really dislike overproduced podcasts of the NPR style, where everything is squished together and there’s not a second of downtime, or any sustained authenticity. The beauty of the podcast format is that it doesn’t need to be heavily edited. It can be rough, and an antidote to overproduced, agenda-driven corporate media.There’s an audience for the real, raw thing. There’s an audience that wants to listen to six unedited hours about the life of Aleister Crowley, with all the umms and uhhs and occasional mispronunciations. That isn’t to say your audio quality should be garbage if you can help it. But you don’t need to labor over editing to stitch a “tight” Frankenstein episode in order to satisfy an audience, with perfect diction and all the verbal fumbles smoothed out.I also get annoyed at how astroturfed social media and the Internet writ large seem to be—a capricious nerd’s Hellraiser box that makes very little sense in terms of who the algorithm picks up and signal boosts and who stays in the digital dark. Little things, like Twitter/X deboosting threads with links, can be pretty aggravating, as can mysterious plateaus of reach on social media, never mind outright censorship. Those platforms are certainly not “organic,” and if they’re the “town square” the town square is a carnivalesque hall of mirrors. There is far more hands-on moderation happening on these platforms than I think most people imagine, as well as obvious pay-to-play, which we don’t do (in terms of advertising, paying for clicks, whatever). All that said, we’re thrilled with the audience we have and we’re sure it will grow over time as we press on and release more episodes.I also have to say that podcasts as a whole are a massive net positive for free expression and “the little guy.” We’re just two obscure Midwestern writers who had an idea and some consumer-grade equipment and computers, and now we have devoted listeners all around the world. We’ve made real friends and authentic connections through the show, both with guests and our audience. It’s genuinely pretty cool and would have been unthinkable twenty-five years ago. I suppose maybe we could have done this as a cable access show in the 90s, but it’s hard to imagine how that would look and sound. Party on, Brad.RG: Is there a podcast that doesn’t exist, but you wish did?KK: I wish David Lynch had a podcast, but I’m also glad he doesn’t. He needs to be making films and another season of Twin Peaks. Please, Lord, give us another season of Twin Peaks.RG: For techheads, which single item of kit do you consider essential for the production of the podcast, and what would you say are the basics needed for those new to podcasting?BK: A real microphone, not just whatever is on your computer. We use Blue Yetis, and there are a lot of good, reasonably-priced USB mics. You need a good internet connection, and you need audio editing software like Audacity.KK: I do the audio engineering for Art of Darkness. A proper mic is essential. Our formula is:1. Blue Yeti microphones with boom arms and pop screens.2. Ethernet connections, not WiFi.3. Zoom, which has an outstanding noise gate. We each record, so there’s a backup if there’s an issue.4. Audacity for post-production, with some special sauce.5. WordPress for hosting and distribution via RSS.6. A Mac Studio, which is optional really. You can do all this on a decent laptop, tho it’ll take you a bit longer to do the work in Audacity.7. Brad edits the punched-up audio into the video file and posts to YouTube.I typically post an episode within 20 minutes of recording. You really don’t need much to produce a professional-sounding podcast, which is part of the charm.I will say too: if you’re going on a podcast as a guest, do the bare minimum and get a Blue Yeti with a boom arm and a pop screen, and find a way to connect your computer directly to Ethernet. It’ll cost you maybe $150 and more or less last forever. The hosts and audience will thank you.RG: If someone would like to support independent podcasts, what are the best ways to do this?BK: The podcasts will usually tell you. For us, it’s our Patreon. Subscribers not only materially support the show, but they get a bunch of extras for the money, including the bonus “After Dark” episodes and book club access. Maybe the most important thing you can do to support an independent podcast you like is to simply tell people about it and share links. Don’t be shy. If you love an indie podcast, share it with the people in your life who you think might appreciate it. That’s how media spreads and gets more support. It costs nothing to share a show and consciously signal-boost truly independent media.RG: Looking back on the podcast, are there favorite episodes, episodes that stand out to you, or episodes that didn’t go as you would’ve liked?KK: The Kubrick episode was something of a breakthrough for us, when we realized we could stretch toward upwards of three hours and still not exhaust a biography, and our audience would come with us. As for episodes that had issues, I’d moved some cables around and mistakenly recorded into my webcam microphone when we did our Disney episode, which was extremely aggravating to discover after the fact. I punched up the audio as best I could, and it’s listenable, but that haunts me. Always triple check your settings before you record.RG: What are your plans for the future?BK: We’ll continue to release roughly two Core Episodes and two or three Dark Room episodes each month for the foreseeable future, and run our book club for Patreon. We also have a second live show in development, which will take place in Detroit sometime in the back half of 2024. We hope to do more live shows and more exclusive content for Patreon as that audience grows.KK: If the show grows enough to support it, I’d love to do a proper tour and really figure out our live show format. We’ll keep grinding and see how it goes. Art of Darkness could theoretically go on forever, because artists keep dying like everybody else. We’ve said on the air that if one of us dies unexpectedly, the other needs to find a new co-host and go on, after a respectful hiatus of a few months. And wait a full year and a day to do the episode about the unexpectedly dead co-host. BK: That’s the rule.Art of Darkness can be found here, on Patreon, and on Substack.

Robin Zlotnick

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