Interviews & Reviews

MEMOIRS IN THE MORAL MUD: DAVID LEBRUN AND JOSHUA MOHR TALK SHOP

December 30, 2025
My debut memoir, Delirium Vitae (Tortoise Books, 2025), recounts five months of hitchhiking and street busking I did from Costa Rica to Phoenix Arizona, in 2001, when I was broke and struggling with addiction and mental health issues.In 2020, I was halfway through editing my memoir, when the pandemic left me happily unemployed. I read Joshua Mohr’s Sirens and discovered he offered editorial service through his Decant Editorial. We worked hard on my manuscript for three months, but what stuck with me most was his encouragement and certainty that the book would find a publisher. Four years later, when I was done tinkering, Delirium Vitae found a home with Tortoise Books and Joshua Mohr’s generous blurb landed on the cover.Josh and I recently talked about my long road to finishing the memoir. What followed was a conversation about grief, spiritual blind spots, voice, benefits and hazards of beta readers, and our characters’ moral mud. Joshua Mohr: Of the many things I love about your book, it's the quest/road trip angle that makes the work feel so utterly alive. Can you walk us through how you calibrated the book's kinetic energy to speak to the main character's arc?David LeBrun: It's an interesting question because it started the other way around—where I first had to calibrate the character's arc to speak to the kinetic energy. Some of my early readers sensed something missing in my character's emotional arc—something to justify his behaviour. To dig deeper, I saw a therapist, attended a trauma workshop, even ate a hero-dose of mushrooms with a shaman. Eventually, I understood I had been carrying some unspoken grief for most of my life, and it was that silence around loss that had propelled my character into chaos and self-destruction. With that realization, it was easy to keep the pace moving—to know what mattered to the story and what didn't, as I shaped the book's emotional pacing around a character who thinks he's running toward something, but gradually awakens to see he's running from something.JM: Ah yes, the ol' “hero-dose of mushrooms with a shaman.” I've been there! What you're describing—the unspoken grief—is such a potent driver for the book. I'm curious about how you calibrated that balancing act between what your character knows about this grief and what exists in a kind of spiritual blind spot. Did it take a couple drafts to get that “yin yang” properly aligned?DL: I worked on the book for eight years, so there were countless drafts. At some point, I decided I didn’t want to drag the reader through another fifty pages for the sake of chronologically. Instead, I folded some post-journey realizations—and other scenes—back into the road narrative. I shuffled those into every possible configuration, wanting to embed them in places where they’d feel natural and rewarding for the reader (to sense the character's blind spots before he does) but also emotionally true for me—moments when memories would have been triggered, where the unconscious would have come knocking.JM: I super dig that! It makes the juxtapositions between past and present so dynamic on the page. You're also telling this story with such a strong voice, an evocative cadence. Did the “sound” change much as you wrote across all those drafts? If so, how?DL: Thanks for the compliment. I started writing this version of Delirium Vitae in 2016 and I found myself writing with different authors’ voices. But I didn’t want to write something derivative. I wanted to record the sound of the voice in my head—that lifelong inner monologue. In the middle drafts, I leaned on critique partners, and some of them were great at pointing out when I strayed from that voice. Once a solid draft was finished, I read the manuscript out loud many times, and relentlessly combed through it, like rewatching a movie. I mean, if someone told me I’ve read through my book two hundred times, I’d believe them. So, I'd say I came to that voice thanks to obsessive compulsion.JM: I sure feel that! I must've read my memoir MODEL CITIZEN aloud hundreds of times, too. There is no better way to dial in cadence and time signature than hearing the sonic potential. Your answer is making me wonder about the other ways your beta readers helped you get closer to your book's intentions. Are there other ways that they helped you zero in on the project? Or maybe the other way, as well? Did they make any suggestions that you had to disregard in order to write the book you felt called to create?DL: I learned to spot and pull away from those who would try to steer me toward a safe, cookie-cutter story. But, sometimes, those folks would give me a reaction so pointed that I just had to play with it.There’s a scene early in Delirium Vitae where my boss reprimands me for an inappropriate conversation with his daughter. A beta reader commented, “This scene doesn’t reflect well on you.” And I thought, Of course not, that’s the point! I’m showing the protagonist’s flaw here! That reader’s comment stuck with me, and their specific concern would improve the scene’s tension when I gave my boss the line: “That conversation (with my daughter) does not reflect well on you.”So, in my quest to make sense of myself and my character, the resistance often helped me anticipate: I know what you’re thinking—here’s why it still stands.JM: “This scene doesn’t reflect well on you” is basically my whole career on the page! LOL. I love writing characters who have no idea how to get out of their own way. Since I've written a lot of autofiction, I know what you mean by “myself” and “my character” in your answer. Every author will approach those two “identities” differently. How did you balance that? And are there any solid examples of when “you” the character surprised You the author?DL: I guess I sometimes refer to my character as someone separate from me, because I no longer identify with who I was at 25. I know I couldn’t have written as openly if I’d imposed my maturity onto him. That split gave me permission to lean into his flaws and needs. It helped that I was working from notes and recordings I’d made back then, and from a very rough draft I’d written at 26.As I gained distance from that period of my life, I'd have moments of objectivity where I was shocked that the lifestyle and situations the younger me had put himself through—eating very little, hitchhiking over 5500 kilometers (3400 miles), refusing to call someone for help, sleeping on the streets—somehow, felt safer than going home. It still amazes me how the pain we choose is sometimes so much worse than the pain we’re hoping to avoid.JM: Pain! I love that you're answering this through the mud of suffering. I often tell my grad students that characters need to exist in the moral mud, as that's where true, nude, human complexity lives. What are you able to see now, through the perch of remove, about that suffering that you admire/appreciate, and which aspects of that ache are you glad to leave in the past?DL: I admire the young me for his hunger—for thriving in chaos. While I wouldn’t stomach it now, I’m grateful he did, because all that raw chasing of experience left behind a lot of material.But I’ve outgrown the type of suffering that hinges on self-destruction. Back then, I thought there was meaning in throwing everything and everyone away. Now I don't romanticize that anymore. When I think of how many artists drank themselves to death, I’m glad to have left it behind.JM: Does that relief mean that you're ready to turn your attention to the next book? What's been kicking around your imagination?DL: Stepping away from Delirium Vitae was too easy 'cause that book really took a lot out of me. I’m nearing the obsessive read-through stage of a novel based on some... turbulent relationships I had in my late-twenties and early-thirties while I worked overnight at a ketchup factory and later the film industry. I’m also finishing up three feature screenplays and have another on the backburner. So, I'm kicking tires on some agents now, 'cause I've got more stories than time.Purchase 'Delirium Vitae' here.
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STUFF YOUR FACE WITH SCOTT LAUDATI by Scott Laudati

December 9, 2025
A special offshoot of our Recommends series, where Scott Laudati enjoys the planet’s best foodstuffs and eateries. 

The Title Fight: Frank Pepe’s VS. Sally’s. New Haven, CT

Once upon a time, back in the closed society that was 1990’s Staten Island, there was a wholesome order. Our fathers grew up in our houses before us and so we ate the same pizza on Friday nights they’d always eaten, because we were still Catholics then, and we didn’t consume meat on Fridays to honor Jesus’ sacrifice of his own flesh. You knew your local pizza guys by name, and if you’d done good in school they’d send you home with a ball of dough to play with, and when it was time for a birthday party you’d order ten pies from them, not the new place down the street with coupons, and you’d sign your tab with a handshake, because trust maintains loyalty, and that kind of thing was really important in those days. But sometimes you had basketball practice across town. And if another father was driving you home you’d stop at his favorite joint, which he’d swear was the best on earth, and you’d be introduced to something totally new. If you went northeast (where the Brooklyn escapees landed), you might end up with a Sicilian pie. If you went closer to Bayonne (Denino’s), no matter who you were with you got the garbage pie (this was an Island favorite). Each neighborhood had something they specialized in, from stromboli to rice balls. There was one constant no matter where you went, though: it was always good. It had to be. The law of the land demanded it.Our fathers were all cops, firefighters, or sanitation workers. Each morning and night they would leave their Alamos and venture to the alien worlds of the other boroughs. I didn’t understand them as separate entities back then, and they were as relevant to me as Nicaragua and Ohio. My dad, like the other dads, had gone to battle in New York City in the ’70s and ’80s, so there was no way they were bringing their families there for a day trip. But, like archeologists going out into the jungle, sometimes they’d return with artifacts. My father was stationed in Little Italy, and every now and then he’d come home with a Lombardi’s pie. Or Tommy The Tank down the street, his dad was up on 125th in East Harlem, and he’d bring home Patsy’s three days a week. So I was always curious about the pizza world beyond my own, because those ovens they used out there in the foreign lands of the City, they were already ancient by 1990, and they did something to a sheet of mozzarella and a thin crust of dough no modern ovens could. I wanted to find the best. And in a world before the internet, word of mouth was the only way to map a trail.

Pizza is one of those things that can immediately bond two people that otherwise have nothing in common. More so than even a sports team, because you both know you’re part of the smallest fraternity on earth. I got invited to the birthday party of a painter my age who lived in the backroom of a third story art gallery above a Crown Fried Chicken on the worst block in Newark, NJ. We’d never met before. His girlfriend’s dad was smoking crack out the window and his cat had just stolen one of my cousin’s chicken wings and was growling at anyone who got close. The painter put on a Spumoni Gardens hat, which is like throwing up a gang sign to the right person, and then we teleported to the roof and geeked out about all the legendary slices we’d had over a pack of cigarettes. I had a BA in pizza but this dude was a Doctor. He knew where the basil came from that Di Fara’s used. He had the secret Spumoni Gardens recipe many had died for. And he said something I’d never heard before. He said, “The best pizza comes from New Haven.”

 FRANK PEPE PIZZERIA NAPOLETANA New Haven, CTThe lists get longer every year, but the top spots never change. Frank Pepe’s is always first or second. Frank and his wife, Filomena, came to New Haven from Italy in 1920. They spent a few years walking around the Little Italy of Wooster Street selling tomato pies until they could afford a store. In 1925, history was made as Frank Pepe Pizzeria Napoletana opened its doors. It’s hopped back and forth a few times between its current 163 Wooster Street location and the place next door (157 Wooster Street), but the same oven’s been used since 1925. And it’s a beauty. It’s a white tiled coal oven that stretches almost wall to wall, making it more than double what a New York oven could ever be. The original pies didn’t have cheese because there was no refrigeration, so you either got a tomato pie or tomato pie with anchovies. In the 1960s Frank Pepe secured his name in the history books when he invented the clam pie. When I was a kid this specialty was only found in a few restaurants, but now the clam pie is available everywhere, and exists in the cannon up there with pepperoni as one of the few acceptable toppings. The same guy’s been shucking the clams for 40 years. The turnover rate is small. Most of the staff shares the family name.  SALLY’S APIZZA New Haven, CTSally’s is the other top spot and they jockey back and forth with Pepe’s. They’re only a few feet away from each other and I guess Sally’s main advantage is that on the one-way street you pass it first. The sign that greets you hanging above the front door immediately pulls you into the family-style tavern. Where Frank Pepe’s clean white pizza oven and kitchen make you feel like you’re going to your Grandparents’ house for a Sunday dinner, Sally’s reminds you of the local bar you’d stop at when you go back to your hometown. The walls are the wood panel of your childhood basement. The floor is a dull brown tile like your friend’s house whose parents still smoked inside. It’s almost as old as Frank Pepe’s but it doesn’t look classic. And it’s still lit by the same stained glass lampshades that hang above pool tables in midwest bars. You can’t ask for a better setting to melt the roof of your mouth and extinguish it with a fountain soda. No one who’s ever sat there has asked for more. There is no more.  

The Verdict

It would be stupid to declare a winner here. The two best pies on earth exist within half-a-block of each other. They have the same oblong oval shape. They have the same thin crust—well charred but not burnt. The interior of each restaurant feels like two sides of the same home. And the same family is behind both of them (sisters, daughters, and sons bleed through both family trees)! It’s like deciding between your favorite dog or your favorite band. I like Sally’s better, but only by the smallest margin in voting history. And it could just be the novelty. The first few times I went to New Haven, Sally’s had weird hours and it was never open, so I ate a lot of Frank Pepe’s, which blew everything else I’d ever eaten out of the water. But when I finally got ahold of a Sally’s tomato and cheese pie, I felt like I’d bitten into the main conductor of the Universe. It was almost spiritual, a realization that as men we didn't deserve something this good, and yet, whatever’s in charge still decided to give it to us. It was The Holy Grail. Now that you know you’re in good hands at either Pepe’s or Sally’s, I’ll give you some advice. Back when I started going to New Haven you could get a table and eat inside. If you attempt to do this now you will ruin the experience, because you’ll be waiting and starving for hours. Call ahead and order your pie at least an hour early. You’ll see the word APIZZA everywhere, it’s pronounced “ah-beetz,” but if like me, you feel stupid saying that, you can tell the nice lady on the phone you want a “Large tomato and cheese pie.” When you arrive you’ll see a line in front (this goes for both Sally’s and Pepe’s). These are the people waiting to dine inside and they’ll be there forever. Walk right past them (they’ll be mad), and enter. A kid will be sitting at a table. Tell him you want to pay cash. He’ll send you inside the restaurant and you’ll have a minute or two to look around, take a quick picture, marvel at that ancient wonder of a pizza oven, and then you’ll get your pizza. On the way out that kid who sent you in will have a bucket of plates, cutlery, and napkins. Give him a small tip, take what you need, and then head back out. There’s a great little park in-between Sally’s and Pepe’s with a bench you can sit and eat. Or, you can go one block north to Wooster Square Park, a beautiful brownstone-lined patch of grass no one is ever at and eat your pizza in peace, looking up between bites at some of the only original architecture left in a city that used to be known for its elegance and gentry. The real winner of the pizza wars is New Haven. My head still shakes every time I say that.  Follow Scott’s international adventures, food-based and otherwise, on his YouTube channel.
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AND NOW IT’S TIME FOR A COGNITIVE EMPATHY BROADCAST: AN INTERVIEW WITH PAUL RIEDL FROM BLOOD INCANTATION by Chris Kelso

December 3, 2025
Music is the shorthand of emotion. There is something intrinsic to the structure of it - with its overtures, rising crescendos, and authentic cadences - which seem to mirror our temporal patterns so effectively. Ethnomusicologists have divided the empathic processes of listening to (and creating) music into two categories - low-level emotional contagion (the unconscious mimicry of nonverbal cues that leads to synchronised emotional states) and high-level affective empathy (the ability to share in the emotions of other). Often the former ‘low-level’ state is achieved through listening to catchy pop music, or music which feeds the brain’s natural desire to locate patterns and familiarity (which is primarily why simple, repetitive, and predictable musical structures are so effective in provoking this reaction). This low-level emotional contagion is considered a primitive response to music. It takes more to elicit the latter ‘high-level’ response. With the recent Blood Incantation album, Absolute Elsewhere, something has certainly resonated with a much wider audience. This is a metal album which has a thesis statement: to actively communicate high-level affective empathy to the listener. It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly how it is achieved, but there does seem to be something indisputably vital in the energy of this record. It’s an objectively brilliant piece of work, seminal, but people who don’t even like death metal are engaging with it, which suggests it has a unique prosocial resonance. Absolute Elsewhere is a new type of cognitive transmission, and the world seems ready and receptive to its frequency. I spoke to frontman, Paul Reidl about the album’s thesis.  Chris Kelso - Was it your intention to extend the frequency of your satellite to reach more people, or has that just been a nice bonus?Paul Reidl - Greetings, Chris, and thanks for your interest. I believe that Absolute Elsewhere is indeed full of vitality; borne from a genuine love for life and brimming with as much artistic power as we could personally muster. We put everything - and I do mean absolutely everything - we had into its creation and were completely immersed in its production process, spending years of our lives working towards creating the most potent and succinct artifact that we were physically capable of at that time. One of the greatest motivating factors during that whole process was hope; not just hope for a better result or hope for a better music (specifically in Metal), but also all music & art beyond our niche, as well as hope for a better world. A world where the externally-imposed boundaries and limitations thrust upon artists and human emotions are a bit more absolved, and the human mind, our hearts as well as the universal consciousness at large are more free to roam the infinite worlds of both micro- and macro-cosmos, enjoying their myriad intersections, whether they be creative or interpersonal. CK – And you see Absolute Elsewhere as a tool to achieve this…PR – Why not? In my opinion, it is precisely this openness and resolute hopefulness felt throughout the album which resonates with so many people outside of the Death Metal scene, since art, music & hope are ultimately universal. Our intention for the album was to make something which moved the needle. It was not our goal to make a “good album”, which is a fine enough goal, of course - Absolute Elsewhere was always required to document an attempt to genuinely impact the human soul. Which, naturally, is a much wider playing field than the various schisms of Death Metal’s myriad sub-genres, or the clique-based “insider only” mentality of much Underground music. Of course, one cannot create something with such ambitions without incurring the rote accusations of pretension or bombast. But, BLOOD INCANTATION is merely an ongoing collective expression of four individuals’ evolving creative dreams, which does happen to utilize Death Metal as one critical vehicle (or tool) among the many in order to reach our sonic aspirations - but it is not the destination in and of itself.CK – Do you think it’s this willingness to blur genre and form that gives it a unique resonance? You’re breaking out of the ‘externally-imposed boundaries and limitations’ you mentioned earlier, and as a result you bring your listener to a new state of freedom.PR - Even at a cursory glance, our music has always been a bit outside of “just” Death Metal - whether this means long-form songs with so many clean guitars and dynamic shifts, our ambient records Timewave Zero and All Gates Open, or even the instrumental songs “Inner Paths (to Outer Space), “Luminescent Bridge” & “Meticulous Soul Devourment.” Add to this our pronounced eschewing of machismo’s stereotypical tough-guy-isms - which perhaps too much of Metal is predicated on - the repeated demystification of our human (and thus, flawed) personalities in the greater social perception, and a genuine willingness to interact with new people/outlets beyond what is considered “cool” or acceptable to many of the Underground’s most insular tropes, I think the average person coming to our music can simply detect this openness towards themselves, feeling unfettered by a need to impress or vet anyone. This is something I think contributes to the general sense of excitement around our band; specifically, the fans’ eagerness to share their appreciation of the music. While our music is first and foremost made for ourselves - meaning we seek the sounds we most want to hear, for our own enjoyment - we are also mirrors of others, and all persons willing to enter the Stargate are likewise welcomed and encouraged to listen as much as we ourselves want to enjoy the music.CK - Victor Hugo described music as an expression of ‘that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.’ I get the sense that you sincerely believe music to be a vital transmission device. In this epoch of ultranationalism, authoritarianism, populism, and xenophobia, how might music be harnessed as armament against the rise of neo-fascism?PR - Music is art, and art is inherently transgressive to the concepts you mention. Hence the freedom of art is so heavily stifled under authoritarianism, and why corporate art is so dehumanizingly bland and faceless. Meaningful art represents meaningful ideas, which are intangible and cannot be killed by force, trends or even time. Great (or even just new) ideas are dangerous to those in power because their origin in the “nothingness” of thought becoming manifest through the imperfect human vehicle has a natural tendency for grassroots expansion in the collective hearts & minds of the people. This is exactly where a better world will grow from, which the rich and powerful have understood since time immemorial. But truly, it is their arts which moves civilizations throughout history, bringing ages of enlightenment and progress into our reach - it is not political power, religion or nations which accomplishes this. Human consciousness grows and expands in order to reflect/adapt to compelling art, which reaches back through time and stretches far into the future in ways that even the greatest dictators could only dream of. Art - meaningful art - is considered dangerous to the status quo specifically because of its ability to transcend societal limitations of class since there is, ultimately, no war but class war throughout all ages. It has always been a select few against the many, the greedy against the impoverished, the powerful against the defenceless, and so on. That is where the blood which greases the wheels of history is always culled from: the people. I might be misanthropic, but I nonetheless will forever believe in humanity’s innate capacity for spiritual change, and that a better world is indeed possible, if only the common person can awaken to the light of their true nature - which is Oneness. Art can help people open their minds to the universal consciousness, and aide them in recognizing themselves in others, dissolving the alienating tribalism of Otherness: The “us vs. them” mentality (AKA the illusion of separateness) which is the root of all prejudice, paranoia and the majority of various -isms which plague both human consciousness and civilization. I also want to clarify that by my repeated utilization of the word “art” I am not referring to solely its applications through Death Metal, music in general, or even just the Fine Arts at large - I am referring to humanity’s inherent belief in the power of symbolism; to the aesthetic beauty behind mathematic proportions; to the intersections of science and the occult wherein all forms of quantum mechanics, theoretical physics, and millennia of esoteric philosophy are converging over the nexus of Mind itself; and yes, to vibrations’ and frequencies’ musical abilities in regards to healing, warfare & the manipulation or expansion of human consciousness. This greater mysticism, which surrounds and permeates every aspect of earthly life (and beyond), is precisely what I am most interested in when contemplating the purpose and concept of most art. In my experience, that ineffable feeling of witnessing truly powerful, transcendent art is very much present in one’s emotional experience of a truly astounding riff or profoundly remarkable atmosphere. Just one riff, a simple melody (regardless of genre), can change a person’s entire life - even impacting whole generations. This is exactly why the abhorrent and regressive ideologies you mention are so fearful of great art.CK- Do you believe all art is political?PR – No. My art is simply the result of the will to create. I do believe human politics are morbidly superficial, and that no political party anywhere actually believes in genuine peace on earth - it’s always “peace for me, but not for thee” in some form or another. Materialism will override spirituality in every political or economic scenario until humanity understands we are all connected and acknowledges the many other worlds around (and within) us. While I regret temporarily bogging your interview down with eco-transcendentalism, it is apparent that so long as humans continue to brutally enslave animals & subjugate the natural world for profit, we will continue to do so to each other. This is because speciesism is one of the first prejudices all infants are taught, regardless of culture: “This animal is OK to kill, this one is not”; In the same way, each culture eventually develops their own versions of “this human is OK to hate, this one is not”, and it spirals from there. Just as individuals are taught to perceive ourselves as utterly separate from other humans, we are likewise taught to believe in humanity as being completely removed from nature itself. Unfortunately, until humanity recognizes the universal consciousness present in all beings to varying degrees, there will never be peace on earth, no matter what political party or religion is in charge, nor how much money is being spent on whatever cause. While this might appear nihilistic, it actually reveals one of the simplest (yet most malignant) axioms underpinning much of earth’s suffering. However, since this thought current initially begs more questions than it provides answers, and we’re short on time, I’ll just say: It is understood that one cannot create peaceful energy in this world until they are able to truly cultivate it within themselves. Thus, I wish it were more understood that mass-industrialized violence against defenseless souls is not exactly benevolent behavior. CK - You seem to live the ‘art monster’ lifestyle, by which I mean you are totally devoted to your craft. Have you made a lot of sacrifices along the way to preserve this lifestyle? I’m a writer, but also a toddler-dad with a full-time teaching gig in a public school – the art monster way of life is a frequent fantasy, but not one that’s ever likely to materialise for me at this stage. That said, it must be incredibly freeing to set your own parameters.PR - For better or worse, I’ve always been motivated most by art and had difficulty participating in regular society. Even as a kid, I was more concerned by mysterious artifacts and compelling sonic atmospheres than I was any schoolwork or social obligations. I casually performed music in school in both band & orchestra, but when I was 15 I was finally exposed to the DIY world in the flesh; realizing that contemporary bands were printing their own shirts, dubbing their own tapes, pressing their own records, and booking their own tours, all the stuff like that - from that moment on, it’s the only thing I’ve wanted to do with my life. I'm extremely motivated by the archival continuum of ephemera and how we can both chronicle/collect things but also actively contribute to the context which shaped everything around various music or art scenes. As far as your question, I’ve sacrificed countless things meaningful to me: relationships, friendships, and family life, as well as practical things like reliable income and social safety nets, in order to follow my dreams of living for my music and dedicating my life completely to my art. I can’t recommend it to everyone, but for me, there was never any other option. Some of the best jobs I’ve ever had, I had to quit simply because they couldn’t afford to let me tour; Stable relationships which unintentionally held me back from manifesting another reality had to be let go, despite no fatal issues. I uprooted my entire life 15 years ago to move across the country to join a band I’d only known for a few tours, just to quit after 4 years in order to focus on my own ideas like BLOOD INCANTATION, SPECTRAL VOICE and more. This perpetual building/collapsing of various creative ecosystems has been one of the great, consistent struggles of my life, and at least ten years of it were truly wasted just partying and being a chaotic dickhead. I didn’t start taking things, or even playing guitar, truly seriously until I was at least 25, and it took another decade for things to truly get rolling.CK – It’s quite a commitment to devote yourself to art and to communicating this message of prosociality. I suppose the ultimate gift you can offer people is a similar experience for the people who engage with your art – a freedom to commit to one’s own calling. PR - While it’s definitely “freeing” to set my own parameters, I’ve also lived paycheck to paycheck since I was a teenager. In fact, only since the release of Absolute Elsewhere (6 months ago…) has been the first time I’ve ever been able to have any savings set aside, for which I’m incredibly grateful. Considering that my first bands were from 2002, and I’ve been working since 2005, touring since 2007 etc, I’ve more or less always been extremely broke. Even when I was working regular jobs, I was still touring with multiple bands several times per year - I’d work the latenight before the first drive of tour, and slam right back into the schedule the day after we got back, for years and years. I was juggling 2-3 jobs 6 days per week from 2011-2016, still practicing 3-5 nights per week with 2-3 bands in 2-3 different cities. It was honestly just too much, and I eventually did get burnt out, despite my bands’ continued growth. When I finally quit my last regular job (in late 2019, right after Hidden History…), I just figured if I’m going to be living paycheck to paycheck regardless, at least I can be doing so on my own terms, for my own ends. I took a touch of bitter solace from the fact that 60% of the country, however professional they might appear, also lives so precariously. In the meantime, I’ve continued to release experimental solo music, which is something I used to invest nearly all of my spare time in during the late 2000s/early 2010s, but had to step away from roughly 2014-2020, when SV/BI were really building up steam and required a lot of extracurricular focus. Since the bands have become more sustainable, I’ve been able to finally get back into those modes and just enjoy my own private creative process again. I believe the ranges I was able to explore in my solo work 2020-2023 really helped my mind and heart get into the wavelengths necessary to help create Absolute Elsewhere, which is so different and more expansive than our past albums. Coming up next is a double album of what I believe is my best solo material I’ve ever made, along with a split release with one of my most influential inspirations for my solo work, and I really can’t wait to share them with the world. Of course, the Stargate is always open in the rehearsal studio, and BI have much on the horizon, so there’s always more music on the way.CK - You are connected to so many different genres of music – from Black Metal, Speed Metal, Krautrock/Psychedelic, Technical/Progressive/Death Metal, Funeral Doom, to Ambient, and Experimental/World Music. Does this mirror or reveal an empathetic side of your character? You’re non-judgmental and open to all forms of auditory experience.PR - I just believe music, like all art, is ultimately infinite in its variable iterations. Speaking as a former record store employee, music genres are most beneficial for marketing/consumerism, ie. I need to know where to stock it, and you need to know where to find it. But they’re not genuinely real, in my opinion. But at the end of the day, I’m simply a guitar player with an affinity for strong atmospheres, so I’ve always prioritized that in whatever band I’m in. As a rather limited player, most of my early bands were much easier to play, guitar-wise; Black Metal, Funeral Doom, Drone/Sludge, Noise etc are less demanding than Technical or Progressive forms of extreme music. However, once I started getting a little better at guitar, these elements were finally able to be incorporated into my music, which happened around 2009 - coincidentally, when my first Death Metal band (TOTAL DARKNESS) sprung forth. One of the most fascinating things about the ancient underground of Metal and Punk is its swirling endlessness - you truly have never heard it all, no matter how deep you go. To that end, your greatest inspiration may be waiting just underneath the next tape you don’t turn over at a Goodwill or random record store in a small town somewhere on tour. As for Krautrock/Prog, this well is exponentially deeper, not least of which is due to the financial state of even the tiniest labels from the 1970s-80s: Vinyl was so much cheaper to produce back then, even a guaranteed “chart failure” of an experimental album could be pressed in 10,000 copies for less than half as many dollars - a small loan in business terms. This actually goes for many early Death and Black Metal releases as well; labels like Earache, Roadrunner, Combat and Metal Blade were pressing literally tens of thousands of copies of classic bands’ debut albums for pennies on the dollar, so, for instance, a first pressing of Altars of Madness is significantly less rare than people might perceive.But to your question, I’ve never really believed in puritanical genre conformity. Even as a youth, I was always enjoying Metal riffing in my Punk, Psychedelic elements in my Crust, Folk melodies in my Black Metal, Ambient textures in my Doom, and so on. Some of my favorite and most inspirational bands 20 years ago were groups like DYSTOPIA, CORRUPTED, TARANTULA HAWK, ULVER, diSEMBOWELMENT, SUBHUMANS etc, all of whom experimented with textures or soundscapes beyond the realm of their initial subgenre. I always read liner notes on records, which is where I first saw names like BRIAN ENO (thanked by diSEMBOWELMENT), SWANS (thanked by NAPALM DEATH), or DEAD CAN DANCE (thanked by MORBID ANGEL). So, it just seemed very natural to me that Metal and Non-Metal were fine to listen to at the same time. Also, and not for nothing, the average “Metal Only”/“Punk Only”-type personalities I seemed to meet growing up were always some of the least interesting people I knew… so I was very turned off by such attitudes and consequently gravitated more towards individuals who would share a wide range of new sounds with me, rather than chastise me for liking one style or another. In regard to BLOOD INCANTATION, we are of the opinion that there are still worthwhile combinations of new sounds yet to be heard, and we are actively searching. 
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FAULKNER DIDN’T GIVE A SHIT ABOUT TEMPORAL INCONSISTENCIES, SO WHY SHOULD I?: AN INTERVIEW WITH JOHN WADDY BULLION by Kirsti MacKenzie

November 21, 2025
John Waddy Bullion is as versatile a writer as they come. His loosely-linked collection This World Will Never Run Out of Strangers follows coming-of-age tales of Midwestern sons and the fraught relationships they have with role models: fathers, grandfathers, uncles, peers, sports heroes. It’s also a showcase of Bullion at his best: forever balancing humor with pathos, mastering pop culture and sports references, commanding attention from first page to last. It’s a collection that’s quick to devour and demands re-reading; Cowboy Jamboree Press was smart to pick it up, and you can grab your copy here. Ahead of its November 18 release, I had the pleasure of being able to pick John’s brain about the collection. I’ve been a big fan of John’s work for a long time, so excuse me as I nerd out. MacKenzie: Talk to me about structure. How did you arrive at the final collection? Bullion: I've always viewed the collection’s last story (“Two Bibson Geefeaters”) as a natural end point. But there were times where I felt completely stumped about how to order the other eight, all of which employ varying lengths and stylistic approaches. There are at least three stories that I believed could function as a “first story,” but ultimately, it became clear that if the collection was going to end with Gaylord, it probably needed to begin with him, too. “Up n’ Comers” isn’t the first chronological story (that would actually be “Aristotle’s Afterthought”), but placing it first helped put enough distance between that story and “Two Bibson Geefeaters,” half of which which essentially retells the events of “Up n’ Comers.” Please understand that I never would’ve arrived at these realizations about structure on my own. I had considerable help from Kirsten Reneau, who is a master at structuring collections (she played a huge role in helping Kyle Seibel sequence Hey You Assholes). Kirsten helped me see a path forward in terms of order, and I would recommend her services as an editor (and an orderer) to anyone.  MacKenzie: Many of these stories are preoccupied with male role models. There is a tender, flawed masculinity on display in your sons, fathers, uncles, grandfathers, and peers. The relationships between them are keenly drawn. Was that influence consciously on your mind as you were writing? Bullion: The disintegration of Gaylord’s parents’ marriage is basically a funhouse mirror version of my own childhood, which was abnormally happy, and my parents, who were supportive, present, and only separated in age by six months, not a couple of decades. But I had friends whose parents were a lot like mine (professors, librarians, grad students, librarians, etc.), and in many of those marriages between academics, the fault lines were a lot more apparent, especially with the way husbands/fathers in those unions sometimes conducted themselves in a college town environment. Maybe it has something to do with the whole academic tenure thing, where it doesn’t matter what you say or do, if you have tenure, you’re protected. There’s also that Latin term, in loco parentis—literally, in place of parents. Bearing that kind of dual responsibility while operating in a space where you are told that you can say or do whatever you want produces a strange kind of tension, and that tension has a tendency to seep into and warp the domestic relationships within the “gown” elements of town-and-gown.  MacKenzie: Similarly, many of these stories are preoccupied with the razor's edge between youth and adulthood, and how that gap is collapsed in the presence of adults unable to act safely, sanely, or selflessly. Tell me your thoughts around coming of age in these stories, particularly at this specific moment in history (the 80s and 90s)?Bullion: It’s interesting to consider specificity surrounding a certain time period because I will be the first to admit that I play pretty fast and loose with time in these stories. Although it’s never explicitly stated in the narrative, the events of “Aristotle’s Afterthought” take place on August 22nd, 1986. (I know this because I matched the beats of this exact baseball game to the events of the story. It was simultaneously a really fun challenge and something I will never, ever put myself through again.). Gaylord would’ve been roughly 8 years old in “Aristotle’s Afterthought,” but in “How to Ask a Stranger to Buy You Beer,” which takes place on Thanksgiving weekend, 1998, he’s about 13 or 14.  One of my favorite William Faulkner stories, “That Evening Sun,” is narrated by an adult Quentin Compson, presumably aged twenty-four—the same Quentin Compson who leapt to his death off the Great Bridge as a nineteen-year-old Harvard student in The Sound and the Fury. Faulkner didn’t give a shit about temporal inconsistencies, so why should I? That was all the permission I needed. More practically, however, I wanted these stories to be able to stand on their own and not be dragged down by the weight of linkage. My view of linked stories is that they should absolutely amplify and echo each other, but they cannot depend on each other. That’s a huge part of the reason that the version of the events presented in “Up n’ Comers” is re-told in a slightly different way in flashback in “Two Bibson Geefeaters.” But to return to the coming-of-age aspect of your question, I see Gaylord as a superhero. He can come of age in the ‘80’s, 90’s, and even the 00’s. He can also fall in love with his father’s mistress Daphne as a ten-year-old and then fall in love with a different Daphne as a college student. Or is it actually a different Daphne? Did Gaylord steal his father’s girlfriend, run off with her to Texas, and concoct a wild cover story as a stab at normalcy? Is there a thumb drive somewhere in my office with an aborted novella where this exact thing happens? I guess we’ll never know.  MacKenzie: One hallmark of a John Waddy Bullion story is a good pop culture or sports reference. Specifically, in these stories, you ground the reader in time with quarterbacks, pitchers, and play-by-play announcers. You are so goddamned good at having a light touch when it comes to these references; they never feel like the focal point, and yet they carry as much narrative weight as any other detail. How did you see the relationship between time, and memory, and sports for these characters?Bullion: Around 2017, there was a meme format that spread through sports Twitter like wildfire called “let’s remember some guys.” Basically, this meme involves throwing out the names of obscure, retired athletes lost to the ravages of time. The more average or unremarkable these guys are, the better. John Tudor (baseball) and Elvis Grbac (football) are, to me, the absolute ne plus ultra of “let’s remember some guys” for Missouri professional sports, and they are practically main characters in “Aristotle’s Afterthought” and “How to Ask a Stranger to Buy You Beer,” respectively. John Tudor had a reputation as a hothead and was most notorious for his electric fan-punching incident after he bungled Game 7 of the 1985 World Series. But the little biographical anecdote I found about the adjustment Tudor made to his pitching mechanics earlier that season fit perfectly with that story’s examination of afterthoughts as something ignored, elided, skimmed over, and neglected (consciously or unconsciously). Elvis Grbac’s main claim to fame is that People magazine accidentally named him the Sexiest Athlete Alive in 1998 and everyone just kinda rolled with it. But when I came across that info-nugget about the speaker in his helmet malfunctioning in the divisional playoffs (the moment Grbac lost his “how-to” manual), I knew I had to use it in “How to Ask a Stranger to Buy You Beer.” Did I have to go to these lengths? Absolutely not. But maybe—and this might be where time and memory come in--my nightmare fear was that some sports-nerd pedant like me would stumble across either of these stories and point out where I’d gotten some detail wrong. If I was going to use those references, they had to have that extra resonance to be able to withstand the Google stress-test. MacKenzie: One thing you're also particularly adept at is playing with form. How does versatility of form allow you to stretch your legs and challenge yourself, narratively?Bullion: For a while there, it felt like 7,000 word stories were all I was capable of writing. Here’s the thing about 7,000 word stories: they take forever to write, and they are insanely difficult to publish. The shorter form is something I’d been really challenging myself to really experiment with, but first I had to overcome my mental block of not being able to write more flash-length stuff. I think the shorter interstitial pieces in This World Will Never Run Out of Strangers are me finding an approach that clicked. These shorter pieces are heavily premise-based, and flirt as much with being straight humor pieces as they do literary flash. And while I’m not a big fan of the term “hermit crab,” it does help me to work within the shell of a form, whether that’s a rejection letter (“Dear Entrepreneur”), a press conference (“Star Quarterback Addresses Media after Fiction Workshop”), or a list of contributor biographies (“Contributor Bios”). In the end, though, it’s all about having a sense of which stories need to be short, and which ones need more room to spread out. For me, it comes down to a certain kind of trust, that whatever you’re working on is going to tell you exactly how long it should be. And yeah, maybe I’m a little more adept at writing shorter stuff now, but that has also presented me with a new problem: lately I can’t seem to write anything over 2,500 words.  Kirsti: Given that you're in Texas, I was surprised to see the Midwest featured so prominently as a setting in the linked stories. Walk me through the choice to place most of the stories in Missouri, in a college town of Montessori schools and "the Midwestern Ivy". Bullion: I grew up in Columbia, Missouri, but my parents were both Texas expats. (My mom missed San Antonio so much during her first winter up north that she placed a long-distance call to her favorite taqueria and somehow strong-armed them into sending her frozen tamales through the US mail.). Growing up with a foot in both worlds meant I never felt like I fully belonged to either place, which in its way proved useful. The Missouri city where most of the Gaylord stories are set is never named. (I couldn’t very well set it in Columbia, because Stoner beat me to it.). But I wanted to give myself the leeway to make it an amalgam of several different places I’ve lived or worked. The one Texas story in the collection (“Two Bibson Geefeaters”) is explicitly set in San Marcos, which is my favorite city in Texas, and I happily threw in as many specific places and things and local quirks as I could remember from my time there. People, too: Gaylord’s grandfather’s first appearance (as a shirtless man throwing a Frisbee around San Marcos’s notorious “Bikini Hill”) is based directly on Frisbee Dan, one of the many marvelous “San Martians” who make that place so unique. Eat that, Stoner.  MacKenzie: Gaylord's stories felt to me like the germination of a novel—were they originally written with that aim in mind? What was it about his story that tugged you to develop a linked collection?  Bullion: “Up n’ Comers,” the first story in the book, was the first story I wrote with this set of characters, and with Gaylord at the center. Writing a novel-in-stories was (and in a lot of ways, still is) way more appealing to me than writing an actual novel. One of my favorite writers, George Singleton, has said in interviews that he prefers to write linked stories because they’re easy to re-package as a novel, and thus easier to sell. While that wasn’t necessarily my goal, the Gaylord stories were never part of a larger “novel”—I just saw them as individual stories that happened to feature the same characters. I believe that the linked stories in this collection tell a complete story, but they resonate across the collection, even in the works where they may only share a setting, or even something as tenuous as a shared feeling.   MacKenzie: There is a trick you often pull with humor. It's so dry and so quick in your stories that if you are not paying attention, you might miss a punch line, or a bit. It demands more from the reader, and rewards rereading. Like with your pop culture and sports references, it's a lighter touch. I am an audience member in front of a magician, demanding to know his trick. How do you manage it?Bullion: This is gonna sound weird, but I often forget that my stories are funny. I read an excerpt from “How to Ask a Stranger to Buy You Beer” at the Little Engines “Morning, Fuckers” reading in Dallas this past year and I remember being honestly startled by the amount of laughter it got. That story feels almost unbearably heavy to me--in a lot of ways, I consider it to be the most tragic story in the book. But while I don’t set out trying to be funny, I do want to write in a voice that’s natural and authentic--it just so happens that humor is a big part of that naturalism and authenticity. George Singleton, as I’ve mentioned, is a huge influence on my writing—he was one of the first writers I encountered whose writing sounded like I wanted mine to sound. Singleton’s stories are hilarious, but he also writes these wonderfully complicated, information-packed sentences, which allows him not only to layer in a lot of humor and absurdity, but also to sneak in emotional gut punches. I want my writing to have all of that, but I don’t want any one feeling to override or unbalance the other, hence the lighter touch. MacKenzie: When Gaylord's grandfather saves him from dropping a loaded barbell on his windpipe in the final story, he questions whether the man is real, or an apparition. The grandfather then invites him to throw a haymaker, which Gaylord can't: "I knew that knowing would be the end of me." Tell me about the need to cling to an idealized version of a father, instead of the reality. Bullion: I think the male figures in Gaylord’s life are two poles of masculinity: Gaylord’s father (“the Professor”) represents intellect, while his Grandpa is an avatar for physical strength. Both of those masculine identities have been destructive, but they’re also areas where Gaylord feels this constant need to prove himself, only to keep falling short. By the end of the book, I think he does start to sense a possible third path opening up for him, although it’s a path that he isn’t quite able to articulate or act upon. After the final line of “Two Bibson Geefeaters,” I confess that I have no idea what Gaylord is about to do next. He seems primed to do something stupid and irreversible, but he also seems just as likely to do nothing at all. But I’m comfortable with that ambiguity. Not-knowing can be the start of something, too. 
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THE ANSWER HAS TO BE YES: AN INTERVIEW WITH KIRSTI MACKENZIE by John Waddy Bullion

November 20, 2025
Kirsti MacKenzie’s debut Better to Beg (Sweet Trash Press, 2025) is a rock ’n’ roll novel set against the backdrop (and at the tail end) of the Meet Me in the Bathroom-era New York indie boomlet, told in the vivid alternating voices of the Deserters—driven, determined Viv and drug-addled but transparently striving Hux—as they tumble across post-9/11 America’s cramped venues, wild house parties, and downtrodden motel rooms, forever arriving but never quite arriving. In MacKenzie’s deft hands, what emerges is not only a lean, mean, and surprisingly lyrical story of music and ambition, but also a sly exploration of the myths America sells to the world and to itself, as well as a moving defense of art’s ability to sustain us—even when it seems like the gig is already over.In advance of Better to Beg’s release date, I exchanged emails with Kirsti to ask her about her writing process, developing her characters’ voices, and the role that music plays in her work. Our conversation has been lightly edited for clarity. Bullion: My first question (perhaps obviously) is about music and how it informs your writing process. Did you put together a playlist to situate yourself in the world of the book, or was it more utilitarian (i.e., do you work best with certain types of music in the background)?MacKenzie: Depends on what I'm writing, I suppose. I wrote the book so long ago that my memory’s fuzzy, but it went like this: I started paying more attention to The Kills’ discography after hearing Keep on Your Mean Side. As a result, I read Meet Me in the Bathroom, Lizzy Goodman’s exhaustive oral history of early aughts indie rock. I collected a bunch of songs from bands referenced in the book — bands I was passingly familiar with, but not heavily into — The Strokes, Interpol, The National, TV on the Radio, The White Stripes, and so on. Jamie and Alison fascinated me so I sort of began writing these two characters loosely based on them around the same time, so it wasn’t really a chicken or egg situation with the playlist — the more I listened, the more fascinated I became, and the more I wrote, the more I sought anything that might inform the feeling of the book. I kept a loose record of all the things I “took in” at the time — film, tv, books, albums, podcasts. I also sought things that invoked an “on the road” type feeling – Captain Beefheart, Colter Wall, Townes Van Zandt.One thing I can’t fucking stand is when novelists try to write about music performance — the energy of it very rarely translates to the page, and it becomes self indulgent. It was very important to me to write the in-between. To capture the energy between these two that might translate to the stage. I remember very vividly hearing The Kills song “No Wow” – how dangerous and runaway it felt, how violent — and thinking, that. That exact thing. How many hours of fucking and fighting were channeled into those 3 minutes? Now make it 80,000 words.  Bullion: What drove your decision to set the novel during such a specific time period (2003) in the midst of such a specific musical scene?MacKenzie: I guess I was thinking about scenes, and the kind of revisionist history that goes into defining them. There was a spate of debut albums around 2001-2003 that created this early aughts NY indie influence that echoed for a long time. Lizzy Goodman was the first to really create a ‘history’ of it, to label and define its impact — I’m sure the bands involved in it weren’t really aware they were creating a scene. Mostly I imagine they were just people creating art in reaction to the times they were living through. No artist should start making art to create a ‘scene’. Certainly you can respond to the energy of what’s around you, to be inspired by your environment, by your peers — but the second you label something a scene, you’re engaged in its consumption, in its perception, in molding your art to fit it. You stop innovating. The other consideration was, quite simply, how the fuck can I relate to these characters? I’m not a musician. How can I write them in a meaningful way? I was a kid watching the towers come down on a television in my high school library. I remember what it was like to wonder, okay, what now? It was this generation-defining event that impacted so many millennials, and late Xers. The epigraph speaks to that — Who is keeping score now? You might die tomorrow. Make what you want. Forget labelling it. Possibly it matters, possibly it doesn’t. What matters is making it to survive, you know. The horrors.  Bullion: Better to Beg is a rock n’ roll novel, but (I would argue) it’s also a road novel preoccupied with destinations, not journeys. In what sense did you want to consciously portray Hix and Viv as captives of the open road, instead of being set free by it? MacKenzie: There is a part of me that, like many other people tethered to one location for prolonged periods of time, romanticizes life on the road that musicians have. We envy them their “freedom.” Freedom, or the notion of it, comes around a lot in the book. It’s very preoccupied with notions of freedom being exploded again and again. What we miss in these rock star narratives is that road life is on a schedule, is a series of hotel rooms; it is not vacation. There is a reason people go nuts in hotel rooms, in airport bars. No sense of grounding, of normalcy. I am fascinated with liminal spaces, with travellers, with the in-between. Without anything fixed to ground our identities, who do we become? Your identity collapses a bit. So I imagined these characters as two people trying to carve their identity — as a band, and as individuals — while being constantly in motion, in flux. Both emotionally, and physically. I imagine touring is a kind of productive outlet for messy personalities, for their creative energy. You can outrun things, but only for so long. Everywhere you go, there you are.   Bullion: Voice has always been a central component of your writing, and the dual narrators’ voices are particularly vivid and also markedly distinct from one another. Was there ever any concern on your part that one narrator’s voice would overwhelm the other? And how did you decide that it needed to be Viv, not Hux, who got to have the last word?MacKenzie: Both voices came naturally, and distinctly. Both are two sides of me at war always — the scowling, practical realist, and the sweet, hopeful clown. Viv is a lot closer to my natural voice, and Hux came completely unbidden and fully formed. That sounds like precious writer bullshit, but it’s true. Sometimes the characters just show up, and you’re along for the ride. They balanced each other perfectly, which lent itself well to my aim; to hold both sides of the creative argument without prioritizing one over the other. In the original iteration of the book, Hux has a fucking unhinged prologue. I wrote it to hook the reader, but it was a cheap trick; it had to be cut. So Viv always had the last word. For all his guilelessness and naïveté, Hux holds the book’s thesis. Viv is the one who had to be convinced.  Bullion: Speaking of that unhinged prologue, I had the pleasure of reading an earlier version of this book and it included one of the most hilarious, shocking, and astounding first sentences I’d ever read. Imagine my surprise when I received this latest advance copy and discovered that this incredible opening line had been cut, along with around 40-50 other pages. And yet, this book is inarguably better for it. How did you locate this sleeker, leaner, meaner story in the editing process? MacKenzie: Chopping that opening line — and the opening chapter that accompanied it — was a change I insisted on. It worked well as a hook, but it did not sit well with me. It felt like a cheap trick and I wanted it gone. So now it lives in early copies of the book. I’m grateful to anyone who has a copy and takes a chance on the new version. I like it better.  Editing with Brian Alan Ellis and Jillian Luft was an interesting process — I received edits from both, and both had different aims. Jill wanted to keep my voice intact. Brian wanted the book to be shorter, more palatable for an indie release. We came to an agreement — where it made sense to strip pretense and sharpen, I accepted all changes. Where it didn’t feel true to character voice (and subsequently, mine) I put my foot down. They respected every returned edit. It was a great experience, and the book is better for it.   Bullion: The narrative focus you take in each alternating Viv and Hux chapter is intriguing to me. Sometimes Viv/Hux is driving the action, while at other times they’re bystanders, reacting to something the other is doing. How did you decide what scenes needed to be presented from a specific narrator’s point of view? MacKenzie: I don’t know that it was a specific decision so much as trying to put them in ridiculous situations. Dumpster diving? College parties? High on a motel floor? Line dancing? I honestly don’t know where half of it came from except to say that I wanted them to have as much fun as possible, to be as messy as possible. What I will say is that I followed story beats to keep everything moving, to keep momentum, because it is a fucking sin to have someone’s attention and then lose it. And those story beats were structured in threes. Action/decision, reaction, subsequent action/decision, so on and so forth. There were Pepe Silvia-style plot notes littering my walls when I wrote it. So that could be why it alternates.   Bullion: Better to Beg is an extremely propulsive, forward-leaning novel with a breakneck pace. And yet you manage to make room for these moments of high lyricism, such as when Hux—who throughout the novel is hilariously bad at taking drugs—gets high on ketamine in Atlanta and is assaulted by images of his previous band's failure. Even Viv’s narration, which is relatively straightforward in comparison, makes room for lovely little detours. Why was it important to allow your two narrators to have the room to monologue, to take these flights of fancy? MacKenzie: Oh, yikes. Here is a little secret: I thought that’s what novels were for. Space to stretch, to be interior. I wrote this originally to be a Big-Five type release (HA!), a standard 300-page novel. I am a different writer now than when I drafted the book; I wrote it prior to publishing in this microfiction environment, and present-me would not have taken those flights of fancy. Back story is important; characterization is important; being masturbatory in prose is not. Brian Alan Ellis cut a lot of the fat while retaining the book’s spirit, which was a miracle. I’m grateful for it.   Bullion: In a previous interview, you’ve talked about a trip you took to Death Valley and the Chateau Marmont, well after you’d finished an early draft of this book, and how delighted you were that you’d gotten the several key details right without ever having been to either place. I’m curious, would anything have changed if you’d gotten the details even the slightest bit wrong? MacKenzie: Not a single thing.   Bullion: In the same interview, you candidly admitted to being very calculated about wanting to set this book in America because you knew that would make it more marketable. But in reading the finished product, it feels to me like somewhere along the way, you stumbled onto an extraordinarily profound truth about America and the myths it sells to the world, and especially the myths it sells to itself. What role do you see America, the home of (as a side character memorably puts it to Hux) “the freest motherfuckers on the planet,” playing in your future projects, if any? MacKenzie: Incredibly embarrassing pull quote, I have no memory of writing that. I’m Canadian, and I wrote the book at a time where I was growing really irritated with CanLit. There is lots that’s good and respectable about CanLit as this sort of project to foster national identity through storytelling. There is also a lot about CanLit — and the industries and funding that surround it — that stifles innovation for Canadian writers. I found more of that innovative spirit in American indie lit spaces. I drifted into it after getting on Twitter and becoming acquainted with American writers operating in that space. No one was getting paid, and everyone was having fun. Perfect grounds for innovation, for evolution.I could not envision a rock novel set in Canada, with a Canadian band. You’re talking the same little circuit between Southern Ontario and east coast US; boring. So America became the setting. I don’t know how much or how little it’ll factor into future writing except that America is to me, as it is to billions, an empire which is nothing if not relentlessly innovative and creative and self-destructive. Bullion: The novel ends with this unexpectedly gorgeous, moving, and frankly kick-ass sentence that serves as a validation of the role that artistic expression and creative pursuits can and should play in our lives. I couldn’t help but wonder, to what degree is Better to Beg also about writing, and in particular, our own indie-lit scene?MacKenzie: I guess this goes back to the question about scenes. I was present for a conversation among writers at AWP Kansas City about how to label the present literary energy we find ourselves in. How to capture it, how to express that to people. Michael Wheaton very astutely observed that it doesn’t matter what we call ourselves, how we label it. He said something like, “If it becomes anything to anyone, they’ll be the ones to label it, to define what it meant. We’re not in control of that.” And he’s right. The only thing we can do is show up, have fun, make things, share them. Do it or don’t. No one but you gives one single fuck if you do it, and that’s freeing. The process of writing BTB was just me coaching myself through writing a novel. It was the gradual realization that you have to get up, every day, and engage in creating for its own sake. For survival, for joy. You can’t control anything about the outcome — if you get paid for it, if you get accolades, if anyone sees or hears or reads the end result. If nobody else gives a fuck about this but me, is it still worth doing? The answer has to be yes. The act itself has to matter. Some people have told me they see the end as sad; some see it as hopeful. I think their perspective speaks volumes to their outlook on creativity, and on life. I cried when I wrote that last line. I know exactly how I feel about it — where I land on sad or hopeful — but it’s not for me to decide for you. The book doesn’t belong to me anymore, and that’s a beautiful thing. 
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WORD HORNY: JACK SKELLEY RECOMMENDS

November 4, 2025
writer Nastya Valentine with books reviewed by Jack Skelley  Nastya Valentine – Cyberhorny: Navigating a Sexual Dystopia, and The Cyberhorny Dream Diaries: In Defense of e-Subjectivity (cyber-horny.com)Earlier this year, a writer friend said to me, “You and Nastya should talk. Her new book is kind-of Myth Lab-adjacent.” This was in reference to my novel (subtitled Theories of Plastic Love, Far West press). Sure enough, both Cyberhorny and its Jungian appendix The Cyberhorny Dream Diaries orbit with my art obsessions in “the clitoverse” – the eroto-celestial plane where forces of pleasure defeat the denial of desire and warping of libido amid or despite algorithmically administered market controls. Cyberhorny and Myth Lab (which also share a purple/pink palette) overlap with influences high and low, esoteric and sticky, Lacanian and Lynchian. On one level, Cyberhorny is an online sex primer. You’ll learn a shit-ton about Only Fans. But watch it extrapolate through space and time. Scoff if you must, but Cyberhorny compares to the encyclopedic scope of Moby Dick or Urn Burial by Sir Thomas Browne – that free-range, 17th century compendium of paradoxical thought. Valentine exceeds limits of logic to glory in eromantic flights of consciousness. Erin Robinson, XXX Machina Not a book but an ongoing art/research project by Erin Robinson . XXX Machina disentangles then reknots the naughty algorithmic dimensions of porn and digital bodies. It matches up with fave theorists in this zone (Bataille, Baudrillard, Lacan, Deleuze) plus of course the seminal cyborg feminism of Donna Haraway (also Myth Lab-adjacent). Robinson and XXX Machina have upcoming exhibitions in Denmark and Northern Ireland.        Philippa Snow, Snow Business (Isolarii, 2025), and It’s Terrible the Thing I Have to do to Be Me (Virago, 2025)Philippa Snow is our top, post-everything, pop-culture appraiser with super-empath powers, lovely hair and two new books. I discovered Snow’s writing in an essay about my dear friend Bob Flanagan. Although Bob, who died in 1996, is legendary for his severe SM performances, Snow discerned in Bob the hilarious poet I knew. Bam! I was hooked on Snow’s insights into icons. (The Flanagan piece appears in her 2022 collection, Which As You Know Means Violence.)This year the author released two volumes from UK presses: Snow Business and It's Terrible The Things I Have To Do To Be Me: On Femininity and Fame (I plan to nick her idea of long-ass titles for my next novel!). Snow’s empathy animates something we all experience but few articulate: We’re stuck in a love/hate relationship with mass media. In Snow Business, her bemusement meter even evolves into mini-fictions, inhabiting the psyches of stars in all their tawdry grandeur. This summer I interviewed Snow for Interview magazine: She in London, me in L.A. Lotte Latham, Maternal Potential (Carrion Press, 2025)Latham, like Snow, is based in London. Linguistically gifted, Latham caught attention with her 2023 memoir (Dear Mr. Andrews, Guts Publishing Ltd.) It charted the ins-and-outs of sugar dating across the hotels of Europe: the joys and the sads. In Maternal Potential, narrative gives way to wordplay bursts that verge on verse with this theme: losing a pregnancy… and the resulting disharmonious hormonal emotions. Plus, it links astute class awareness with dirty talk: “He counts to ten, spanking me for all the rent I didn’t pay. Then fucks my face quite roughly and I vomit red wine up. I took a photo of the red sick on the sheets – a menstrual stain.” The touching/funny tone makes you fall in love with Latham’s voice. Maternal Potential delivers mourning (sickness), wisdom and tart humor. It ponders motherhood in a world where love is commodified yet persists.  Chris Kraus, The Four Spent the Day Together (Scribner, 2025)Speaking of loving dick, Chris Kraus has a new one. The Four Spent the Day Together takes a stab at true-crime. The murder doesn’t come until the book’s final third, but it shoots new juice into Kraus’ customary veiled memoir. Catt (a stand-in for Chris) consumes evidence surrounding a teen meth death in rural Minnesota where she has a home. The details are chilling. They would also be inexplicable except for Kraus’ deft – almost invisible – picture of the economic realities at play: These teens have no financial future. The wheels of capitalism also grind silently through the book’s other two sections: reflections on young Catt’s Connecticut roots and radicalization; and on the period when Kraus was a victim of canceling. Supporting the book, Bel Ami gallery in Los Angeles created “Civil Commitment.” This is a vast collage of investigative material compiled by Kraus. I’ve seen it. It’s like one of those conspiracy theory memes, with interlocking photos and documents. Author/artist Juliana Halpert compellingly cross-references the Kraus research with photographs of Halpert’s mother’s work as a public defender. It’s another lens for uncomfortable conflicts rendered in the book. Danielle Chelosky, Female Loneliness Epidemic (Far West, 2025)Speaking of Chris Kraus, Danielle Chelosky entered my world with a request to forward her early chapbook to Kraus… who enjoyed it. Me too. Since then, Chelosky’s books have buffed-up into (Mary) Gaitskillian or (Lynn) Tillmanian tales of wayward fucking/romance. She even titled her recent series of NYC readings Weird Fucks, after Tillman’s early collection (which I devoured at the time I was writing Fear of Kathy Acker). The charm of Female Loneliness Epidemic is not in the stories per se, but the details and tone of angsty pleasure and compulsion. One line I circled: “He thought it was silly I liked to keep my underwear on during sex, pushed to the side. I didn’t want him to think it was silly. I wanted it to be sexy.” This tracks with a bolded, pleasure-dom line that climaxes the first paragraph of Fear of Kathy Acker: “Just leave your underwear on!” While Chelosky hits rich veins, she cultivates a personal iconography of White Claws, schoolgirl skirts and fishnets.  L Scully, Self-Romancing (Dopamine Books, 2025)Step 1: Read Self-Romancing. Step 2: follow L Scully’s Insta for their near-daily sonnets. Step 3: Get inspired to make your own. Writing can be a self-cringing, existential quest: “Is this any good? Will anyone read it? I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” But L is fearless, banging out declamatory affirmations drenched in emotion and quotidian mini-dramas: “The love I fell in yesterday will carry me through a lonely evening.” Or “You didn’t say the sex addiction thing was either hot or even a red flag and that made me feel like a person.” To clarify: Self-Romancing is not sonnets, but page-length paragraphs. Still, many of the lines would transplant well to sonnets. Maybe I’ll steal the ones I quoted. Jerome Sala, Glop (BlazeVOX, 2025)It still mystifies me: Poetry, whose job is to train the weapons of language upon itself, often neglects pop culture. I mean, this is the air we breathe: movies, music, memes, news, sex, celebs, algorithms. And all of these – let’s face it: even our own personalities – are tools of advertising. That’s why the gods of commerce created the droll Jerome Sala: America’s premier pop poet. It took this Madison Avenue copywriter (now retired) to rebrand verse via the love/hate bonds of commodification. To see profundity in stupidity:
Which is why I stand before you nowproof of boththe glories of capitalismand the truthof dialectical materialism
Get Glop today! Amy Gerstler, Is This My Final Form? (Penguin Poets, 2025)Amy Gerstler is America’s greatest living lyric poet. There, I said it. A perfect example is this book’s “Night Herons,” which appeared also in The New Yorker and represents Gerstler’s specialty: the dramatic (comic) monolog. So, no surprise this volume also veers into dramatic works. (“Siren Island.”) I’ve seen her miraculous/weird plays rendered on stage. They’re a corollary pleasure on the page.  Rosie Stockton, Fuel (Nightboat, 2025)There are (they say) two parts of a metaphor: The “tenor” (meaning) and the “vehicle” (the image that carries it). The verse of Fuel drives the vehicle of desire – literal and symbolic, internal and societal. In a Lit Hub essay Stockton compresses the book’s rich power poetics: “According to Lacan’s update to Freudian psychoanalysis, all drives operate at the speed of the death drive. The death drive is a mistaken longing for pre-Oedipal harmony that fuels the coherence of our symbolic order, mediating between life and death. But as every Orphic driver knows, this has more to do with our quest to cohere meaning in our symbolic worlds than biological instincts. For better or for worse, the drive is a series of detours that lets us speed toward and circle around the enjoyments of life that we, in a world that is literally running out of gas, don’t have the energy for. Not literally death, but the deadness we intercept driving close to the guardrails. The drive circuits around what keeps us alive, beyond mere self-preservation. The proof is in the poetry: the death drive, actually, is on the side of life.” Olivia Kan-Sperling, Little Pink Book: A Bad Bad Novel (Archway Editions, 2025)What is it? A meditation on a color. A bilingual fable. A confection of cuteness. A yummy gummy romance. A takedown of Asian girl-pop machinations. Little Pink Book is also something impossible: an exaltation of the power of “sentimental” melodies/lyrics. (Have you ever had a sappy song trigger a deep cry?) Pretty word-worlds cuddle you weirdly: “Having been injected into this bubble-gum bubble, Limei felt cold, slow, sticky. This usually sweet and nice shade – the color of girls and fun – felt, suddenly, claustrophobic. Pink was also the color of insides, and this was too much, too much inside.” Amid the mash of forms is narrative, complete with horny/porny parts. Is it all in little Limei’s mind? Kan-Sperling is a virtuosa of multiple styles. Cum PunkA gorgeously gooey online anthology, Cum Punk proclaims: “Cum is in-your-face life energy. We are here to blow loads and do big juicy squirts in the faces of sex neurosis, prudish pretension, and desire-dementing repression. Gone are the days of self-leaving, disembodied cums. Now is the time of fully embodied, self-arriving cums! We bust through fear and shame as hard as we bust our finest, most violent nuts.”  Ashley D. Escobar, GLIB (Changes Press)The NY School of Poetry is in good hands... and mouths. Validating generational elasticity, Escobar’s Glib references Frank O'Hara, but instead of “i do this, i do that” it’s “i fuck this, i snort that.” Laffs and schemes and senses and dreams, and sexuationships, thick with references... totally IN THE MOMENT. Poetry is not ABOUT something; it IS that thing. “Thingness,” as Eileen Myles posits in the intro. Plus, any book that rags on Sally Rooney & includes lines like, “your dick is my favorite toy” gets extra points.
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CONTROL AND THE FUCKTOPUS: A CONVERSATION WITH CHRIS KELSO ABOUT ŻUŁAWSKI’S ‘POSSESSION’ by Alice

October 21, 2025
Chris Kelso is a Scottish writer of dark, weird fiction. I came to his work through Voidheads (Schism), and he’s since published Metampsychosis with Feral Dove, and most recently, a monograph on the film Possession with PS Publishing’s Midnight Movie Monographs.Possession, as it happens, is a long-time mutual obsession of ours, so when I freaked out in Chris’ Instagram comments about this monograph he very kindly sent me a copy. So I decided to interview him about it. He’s a great sport. Didn’t even get annoyed at my stupidly long ‘questions’, which are at times more monologuing than questions, honestly. ALICE: I think you said your research into Possession was a natural consequence of feeling reflected in the film, is that right? What was the impetus to write a monograph specifically?CHRIS: Yes, I think that’s often what happens. Writing is a response to overarousal. I have an emotional response to something and then I untangle it by writing it down. I can’t approach much in a purely intellectual way, and I’m certainly not an expert on, well, anything really, but I do know grief, insecurity, and grave self-loathing. I suppose addressing those intrinsic traits both motivated me and qualified me for the job of writing a monograph. And Possession is such a unique film, one which most people have an intense reaction to. So, I’m not special. I don’t think I have a particularly groundbreaking take on the film from an analytical perspective—that said, I didn’t really have much of a say in the matter. The reaction was authentic and part of my processing was to write this thesis. Żuławski’s  Possession was merely a lens filter to modify the light before it hit the sensor.ALICE: “Writing is a response to overarousal” seems like one of those big truths I’m going to chew on for a long time. Because you’re right! Art in general is a response to overarousal. Yes, there’s the drudgery of it, and yes, you need a skill set to execute anything, but art seems like, at an essential level, where we put everything which overflows. Like a drip tray. What effluence you get depends on what’s overflowing: emotions or thought or images or whatever is too much.CHRIS: I agree. And I do feel really self-aware that these (intensely personal) artistic projects I've been involved with lately are serving that exact purpose: to contain that industrial run-off, but also to prevent further infection or contamination. The imagination should be drained like a cyst, because left untapped it’ll bleed out of your pores and make you do questionable things. This process is also good if you use emotional memory as a funnel. Lots of spill-prevention imagery here.ALICE: You might be able to tell I don’t like romanticising this process, at least not in public. I also think the best work comes from filth. (Well-tidied, precisely-described filth, but still.) Which is why I adore this film. Filth, as I’ve always thought of it, seems to be a similar idea to Julia Kristeva’s abjection. You mention Kristeva, and I’ve only recently started to parse Powers of Horror thanks to our mutual friend Elle Nash. How did you come across Kristeva’s work?CHRIS: Like you, I first came to Kristeva through Powers of Horror, but back in my university days. I was also looking for meticulous filth and all its acolytes. I find her to be a really fascinating thinker (most French feminists are), but also someone who is empowering as a female voice. Interestingly, she has a novel called ‘Possessions’.ALICE: I wanted to ask you about your feeling of possession over the film itself: you say it feels like it was meant for you somehow, that you dreamed about it before you’d ever seen it. I felt so much kinship with you there: I have dreamed about things, and the dreams carried the weight of meaning, even though I couldn’t understand that meaning at the time, and then I’ve later found out that not only did the dream have specific meaning, it was a clear and precise reference to something extant in the world, and so reflective of it that the dream seemed almost like precognition. I grew up in a very—how do I put this—post-Enlightenment household, and have been a soft sceptic all my life, and the process of developing true doubt is recent and unsettling, because belief itself was abject in my upbringing. How did this feeling of precognition change your experience of the world? Has Possession become something of a sacred object for you?CHRIS: That’s really interesting. I’d describe myself in similar terms, although in truth I tend not to think too deeply about it. The only thing I know for certain is that I know absolutely fuck all. I remain sceptical; like you I’m loosely aware of the roiling unpredictable energy of the universe. All I know is how I felt at that time, and how I chose to express that probably doesn’t do the phenomenon justice—because these things should not be defined by the limiting parameters of language. That said, I’ve gone along with it all. I’ve never tried to rationalise something so formative and emotional. Possession is totemic for so many people. It could just be the transcendent quality the film has, but to me the film is important in a way that’s difficult to define. ALICE: It feels right for you to be another Mark doppelgänger. I feel like there are uncomfortable lines connecting me to Anna like cobwebs. I wonder if the film taps into something universal when it comes to our shadow selves and dark sided emotions, and turns most of us into Anna and Mark doppelgängers. Do you think Żuławski intended that, or did he intend to say something about his own toxic relationship and tapped into common fears and insecurities while he was doing it? Reading your monograph, I thought there might be arguments for both: he seems to disregard the internal lives of other people (his actors in particular) in pursuit of his art, but the film does deal with several socially-relevant emotions like the toxic relationship between East and West Berlin, spying as a metaphor for observing our significant other, etc.CHRIS: Absolutely. I think it’s reasonable to assume Mark and Anna express an archetype of domestic insecurity and psychological fragility. I’m not sure about Żuławski. He was a very complex artist, a genius by most accounts, yet I’m still not sure he was consciously aware of his own intent. Granted, he was going through a devastating break up at the time and Possession was certainly a communication of his pain. Whether or not he had it all worked out, I’m not so sure. As you know, there is a latent or instinctive force at play when  producing any kind of art. We’re subtly coerced towards certain themes and often that attraction will have something to do with where we’re at in our personal lives. Then again, he was a genius, so maybe he was consciously working through these themes with a kind of ordered methodology—planning dialogue that was pertinent and rich with subtext, forming deliberate metaphors, etc.ALICE: I rarely like high concepts which explore wordplay, but Possession is one of them. The film discusses possession in the demonic sense and possession as ownership, and what counts as possessing/being possessed. Your monograph mostly addresses possession as object. I've always been curious about why, given this, there are minimal references to Christianity in the film. In fact the only one I can think of is Anna's wordless discussion with a wooden Jesus mounted on a crucifix, immediately before her flashback miscarriage in the subway. I've always taken this as her rejection of religion: she says to Mark that she “miscarried faith.” In your monograph you discuss the miscarriage as a form of abjection: rejecting her married life with Mark, expunging it from her body, which would make it a form of self-interest, i.e. Kristeva's jouissance. Jesus fucking christ, this question is getting long (bear with me)... CHRIS: Long questions are always welcome! I’m so glad this book worked for you. It means a lot, because I was utterly terrified of what people would think.ALICE: I can only speak for myself, of course, but I appreciate anything which is carefully and deeply considered, especially if it gets me to think deeply in turn (especially especially when I’m allowed to pester the author with questions about it).Okay, so, first, do you think the ideas of Anna expunging her marriage and her religious beliefs can co-exist as interpretations? And secondly, if Anna's fucktopus is the larval form of the Mark doppelgänger, do you think it'd be fair to say that Anna is miscarrying her traditional marriage and the real Mark, in favour of the idealised, perfected version of Mark she needs?CHRIS: I think these two ideas can co-exist, absolutely. I was interested in finding an interpretation that would empower Anna, because I’m not entirely sure the director had that in mind when he was making the film. I think it’s likely Żuławski wanted Anna to simply be a bit of a mental she-devil who shagged a monster in an act of unbridled female promiscuity. I’m also not interested in Anna being a victim: she deserves better than that. I think you’re right, though. I think it's healthy and intelligent to project emboldening ideas to Anna’s character. I believe the miscarriage is a physical excretion of her old life to a man she never truly loved. In truth, the message and intention of the film is very muddy—and I suppose that’s why we love it!ALICE: This really speaks to the power of interpretation, because I find it impossible not to relate to Anna, and if the director really did intend her to just be an insane villain who fucked a monster, then my whole experience of the film is a simulacrum. But it’s a useful and beneficial one, right? Because otherwise I’d lose one of my favourite pieces of media. Anna being exclusively a she-devil in my head would make the film far less progressive to me, and therefore unwatchable. CHRIS: Me too. I think the audience has power here, though. We do have the ability to reclaim and reinterpret, to imbue and elevate. The film is more than just Żuławski; it’s also Adjani’s performance and the raw paranormal energy she brought to it. It’s the softer, more nuanced hand of Frederic Tuten. Art can take on many new faces the more people who look at it. I don’t think any of the truly ‘great’ pieces of art have one true interpretation anyway, despite what the creator intended. ALICE: This is why monographs like yours are so relevant and useful: they open new avenues of interpretation to an audience who might not otherwise connect with a piece of art. I don’t fully ascribe to “death of the author,” but maybe a soft version of it, like “the author should shut up and let us interpret their work on our own, thank you very much,” simply because these interpretations allow art to say more than it was probably intended to say. Of course we can and should consider the author’s interpretation of their own work, and the author’s situation and environment during its creation, but other interpretations have inherent value as useful simulacra. CHRIS: Hear hear! And I also think masterpieces can happen by accident sometimes, almost willed into existence by certain forces (the audience in particular would count as one of these extant contributing forces). Not to get all spiritual on you!ALICE: Why do you think Anna dies? Every time I watch this film I'm left with the impression that this was what she wanted: the two of them to die together. But I can't decide why I think that is.CHRIS: I’m going to give a bit of a cop-out answer to this one. Anna dies because she is the hero. And I believe all truly great things should end. Great TV shows should have a finale. Epic books should have a last page. Your favourite bands should disband. People should die. There is nothing more unnatural than ‘going on’. Our end is what gives our lives meaning in the snapshot of time we get to be here. If we kept going for hundreds of years we would become exhausted pain-camels made evil with boredom and apathy. Anna is the feminist hero we’ve needed for a while. She had to die to become a legend.ALICE: I don’t think that’s a cop-out at all! It’s an observation on the demands of narrative, and completely correct. I’m gonna pin you down with a different question, though: what do you think happens at the end of the film? I’ll tell you what I think happens: Mark’s incompetence at his spy job (i.e., not noticing that one of his bosses is in fact pink socks man), because of his divided attention due to the destruction of his marriage, has led to some international incident, and this results in the destruction of Berlin with an atom bomb. That’s what I see in the ending, like, this marriage was so fucking toxic it ended in nuclear war.CHRIS: Jesus Christ, that’s better than anything I could come up with. I think I’ll just glom on to your evaluation. ‘When you’re beat, you’re beat’, as they say. tips hatALICE: I'm talking a lot about Anna because your monograph was uncomfortable, which I think you intended, and one of the reasons it was uncomfortable for me is that it's an inevitably male point of view. I'm aligned with Anna, so a lot of your personal observations and interpretations of Possession are those which would have never occurred to me. It feels like we're standing on opposite sides of a sculpture and can't really imagine the sculpture from the other side. Which is kinda, you know, the point. And what it must have been like in Berlin at the time. Until reading your monograph. I never even thought Mark could be a pathetic character, an impotent one, or powerless—but of course he is. Your version of Mark was so convincing to me, I'm rethinking some of my past relationships. But still, Mark, for me, is the aggressor: I assume Anna's behaviour is in response to aggression Mark has no knowledge he's committing, or limited consciousness of, because Anna's behaviour has a desperate escapism about it which I recognise in myself, in my own desperation to escape, despite still loving my partner. There's a liminal emotional state where all you can think about is your toxic partner, and you don't want to end the relationship, but you want to pull away however you can, and you end up in completely nonsensical behavioural patterns as a means of escape without escape (Anna emptying cabinets, putting clothes in the fridge, preparing a cut of raw meat for nobody). CHRIS: I agree that Mark is the aggressor. He is also pathetic. Most aggressive, controlling, and insecure men are pathetic. That’s how they convince themselves and other people that they’re victims, and probably how they justify awful behaviour. Their patheticness is weaponised. Something I shamefully know about all too well.ALICE: In contrast to how your Mark tries everything to possess Anna and fails, I see Anna trying everything to satisfy Mark except the things she absolutely cannot do, or risk complete loss of her Self. She says, desperately, that she's failing him, she's a slut, she's a monster—she admits to all his accusations. She is willing to accept his accusation that she is not a socially palatable woman. You struggle with Mark's desire to control in your monograph, and you admit to feeling the same desire to contain and control a woman from your past. I noticed something, and I wonder if you know this: the monograph itself seemed (to me) to be a species of control. You want to get ahead of our opinions of you; you want to reassure us that you're okay now, you're cognisant of what you did—but you want us to feel a certain way about you, and even attempt to regulate our emotions through chapter-specific song suggestions. What's it like to grapple with this tendency to want to control? I deeply empathise with it: I experience a lot of obsessive thinking. Does thinking about Possession help you control the difficulty of controlling your desire for control? I don't have control over this question anymore. I think I'm asking: how are you now? Did you write this with the idea of reaching out to other people struggling with the issue of control?CHRIS: Yes, that’s a very astute observation. First, it’s interesting you mention Mark committing these small atrocities without even being aware of what he’s doing. I find that’s a common vice among young men, including me way back when. I think men can be so driven by lust that it genuinely clouds empathy. That’s not an excuse, but I think it rings true in most cases. I look back at my own failings as a human being and I can’t undo any of it. I am desperate to talk about it, though, and to improve myself. If I need to overcorrect laterally then that’s what I’ll have to do. That’s kind of what I’m doing with this book. It’s an acknowledgment of past transgressions and an untangling of a knotty ego. Control is a big problem for people who are profoundly insecure. At the best of times it feels like life is always slipping away from you, ultimately because of what you lack. You cannot control because you don’t deserve control. That’s your punishment. Yet you keep trying to insidiously impose your dominion over other vessels-of-consciousness, and if you’re a man you can feel entitled to those vessels. When these vessels-of-consciousness demonstrate agency you’re left reeling in a whole new spiralling vortex of uncontrollability. When you grow and realise you cannot control much of your own life, and nothing of other people, you go about seeking to impose it in more positive ways – like being an obsessive ‘fixer’ or giving too much of yourself to too many people. Or becoming a public authority figure like a teacher in my case. If this book connects with anyone then I’ll feel good about it, but the main impetus was really a selfish self-therapy. Maybe the book is voyeuristic in that sense. I think when my wife went through her pregnancy I realised my relationship to control had to change in a big way. The terror of watching my wife give birth. The terror of watching my newborn become a toddler. The terror of a new love that engulfs you in its fist, deeper and more agonising than any love you have ever experienced before or thought possible. You cannot live a life of control under those circumstances, so you need to recalibrate. I think I have a better grasp of it all now. I’m doing well – thank you for asking! I think I need to be ‘checked in’ with every now and again, lol. ALICE: Your research, speaking of, is impeccable. I especially enjoyed the final dialogue between Jörg Buttgereit and Graham Rae. What was it like, transcribing that? Getting to know two artists of that calibre?CHRIS: I owe that interview to Graham who is a close friend of Jörg. Jörg is obviously a wonderful director and it was a privilege to have him involved, reaffirming my belief that literature and discussion is the closest we get to true magic. ALICE: Ah, right! So let’s scrap that question, and ask another: have you had any interesting conversations about the film as a result of researching this monograph, which you didn’t write about (for whatever reason, like narrative flow or length)?Also, I couldn’t agree more: I feed on theory. I’m one of those annoying participants of a destination workshop who never wants to talk about anything but theory, haha.CHRIS: I actually have fairly regular interesting conversations about this film with my friend Rachel, who might love Possession more than we do. She would’ve written a much more interesting monograph, in truth, but all our conjecture and theories have wound up in the book. There is something about this film which brings people together in a weird, very specific way. I’m looking forward to chatting with you in person about Possession - and I’ll bring Rachel with me!ALICE: Looking forward to it!
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‘DOOM IS THE HOUSE WITHOUT A DOOR’ BY LOGAN BERRY: AN INTRODUCTION by Kathleen Rooney

October 14, 2025
Introduction for Logan for his Reading from 'Doom Is the House Without a Door' at Comfort Station on Saturday, August 16, 2025–Kathleen RooneyBook launch playlist: DOOM UNLEASHED Logan Berry’s latest book gets its title from the Emily Dickinson poem “Doom is the House without the Door—” whose first stanza says: 

Doom is the House without the Door—‘Tis entered from the Sun—And then the Ladder's thrown away,Because Escape—is done—

Logan Berry’s literary house also has no door, but not in the sense that one is trapped inside by walls lacking egress. Rather, nothing blocks this house’s threshold because the builder wants us to walk in and snoop. 

Logan Berry’s literary house is an M.C. Escher-style mansion with infinite rooms stocked with impossible objects, warped perspectives, twisted geometries, and funhouse reflections.His literary house is a Piranesi drawing come to life, rife with endless staircases, akin to that artist’s Imaginary Prisons, full of subterranean vaults and extreme machines and round towers and men being stretched on the rack and grand piazzas lit with smoldering fires and connected with drawbridges and gothic arches, hung with rusty chains and scented with fetid wells and decorated with monsters in bas-relief.Logan Berry’s literary house is in every sense of the word a capriccio; in English a caprice—an architectural fantasy that puts new buildings and archaeological ruins and other artifacts and detritus in fantastical combinations that gratify the artist and intrigue the viewer with their dreamlike juxtapositions and liberty of imagination. One etymology for capriccio is that it derives from the Italian for the unpredictable movements and behaviors characteristic of a juvenile goat, suggesting that the work should be as freakish and mercurial as the artist can make it.Logan Berry’s literary house is a structure only partly built, but currently without end, an edifice that will keep growing until he either stops (perish that thought) or dies (perish that too, but everyone perishes).The oldest email exchange between myself and Logan that I could find is from January of 2014. He was a student in my intro to Creative Writing class at DePaul. Everyone had to write an elegy and Logan’s, addressed to his sister and called, “I Will Die Lex,” was so promising that I asked his permission to share it with the class and I’ve been a fan ever since. It ended: 

Death staked His claimLike Columbus and his flag España.Fingers trace the entry,Sting sings.

Hand thrown aside.My body, a stepping-stone in the slush.Soot Sunset. 

That was the open door I walked through to commence my tour of Logan Berry’s literary house. I feel lucky that I’ve got Transmissions to Artaud (Selffuck, 2020), Run-off Sugar Crystal Lake (11:11 Press, 2021), Casket Flare (Inside the Castle, 2023), Ultratheatre: Volume 1 (11:11 Press, 2024) and now Doom. About this room of the building, I have written: “A visual and verbal fantasia of money, meat, and misery, Logan Berry’s Doom Is the House Without a Door dances to the demonic, infernal rhythms of the 21st century. To look into this book’s gargoyle face is to risk allowing it to reap your soul. Its phantasmagoria of fucked-up fatherhood makes voyeuristic perverts of us all.” Logan Berry’s literary house is perpetually under construction, a kind of Winchester Mystery House, never-ending and mystifying: why did the creator do this? His literary house is above all a memory palace of things he cannot forget. Once we visit, we cannot forget them either.“Nature is a haunted house—but Art—a house that tries to be haunted.” Emily Dickinson wrote that in a letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson in 1876.Logan Berry’s literary house is haunted. Long may he haunt. 
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THE SURRENDER OF MAN: A CONVERSATION WITH NAOMI FALK by Rebecca Gransden

October 8, 2025
With The Surrender of Man (Inside the Castle, 2025), Naomi Falk examines twenty works of art, using each as both touchstone and springboard for scrutiny of modernity. An exhibition of the psychic space inhabited by the intersection of time, memory and art itself, the book unravels as a stream of commingling impulses. Falk’s often febrile interrogations display a hunger to get to grips with the interior world as it probes contemporary existence. At times raw, inspirited, raging, and contemplative, the volume acts as a catalyst for the author’s questioning nature, and stridently asks what the hell is art for anyway? I spoke to Naomi about the book.  Rebecca Gransden: What led you to The Surrender of Man for the title?Naomi Falk: The title had been in place before the book was anywhere near being finished. My attraction to it is a little complicated. There’s an obvious element of gendered language that goes hand-in-hand with the biblical proportions of the phrase, and it felt interesting to me to have a title of the book that was pretty deeply conflicted with the text itself. The sentence within which the title is housed is a significant turning point in the text, at least for me. RG: When reading the book it’s immediately clear that a great deal of care has gone into visual presentation. Was this a collaborative process with the publisher, known for their attention to the aesthetic experience of a book, or did you make strong stylistic choices from the book’s early inception?NF: John Trefry designed the cover and then Mike Corrao designed the interiors, and I am woefully indebted to them both for giving such a gorgeous body to the text. John and I already had such a strong overlapping aesthetic impulse, which was part of the reason I was so intent on working with him. He designed the emblem of my name at the bottom left of the book, which speaks to our mutual love for metal…. We actually did an hour-long set for Montez Radio together a few months back.RG: Objects possess transformative potential when you look closely, fastened by their makers—both human and otherwise—and cracked into the world.When considering the book’s formation, how much thought was given to its status as an object, an artwork, in its own right?NF: I am extremely invested in the book as object; I’ve worked in art book publishing for years; I’m an editor but also a designer and producer and publisher. Of course I’m going to care about those things; this isn’t an assembly line. Hundreds and hundreds of years of bookmaking history behind us. So much to draw from; so much at our fingertips. A text deserves a beautiful vessel! And a book doesn’t have to be expensive to make. I’m not going to waste my time making something that looks and feels like shit, even if I’m fine with buying things that look and feel like shit. RG: You’ll see how arbitrarily I’ve come across most of these works of art.An obvious question concerns how each work of art is chosen for inclusion in the book. You cover this aspect at length and I was struck by how the contemplation you offer becomes part of the book’s quality as a whole. When you reflect on the selection process, what stands out to you now? photo credit: Andy ZalkinNF: A lot of the younger artists in the book are folks I met through the passages of my daily life (which is outlined in the text). The lasting creative ramifications that someone’s work can have on you become most pronounced once you’re no longer in continuous contact with the artist: people move, new lifestyles emerge, we grow away from each other and become variants of ourselves that might not be compatible with the people we once knew. But the essence of their art and their ideas linger and entwine with your own work. Those hazy tethers come up again and again. Friendly spirits.It was also important to me that this not be a book of my favorite artworks. We have lived through such an intensity of listicles and “favorite things” in the past fifteen years, I worry we confuse the artist with the artwork they love…RG: They are taking over.The above quote is referring to words, words taking over, and suggests a multitude of interpretations. The book’s language at once contains the potential for manifestation, a means to precision, but also intrusion and alienation, an occupying force. For The Surrender of Man, was a clear stylistic approach embarked upon from the start, or did this evolve over time?NF: My writing evolved a lot over the course of writing the book, which took quite a lot of time because of the research that went into it (and because of the necessity for me to continue experiencing art to finish it). I kept feeling a pull to abstract the writing more and more, to imbue it with less uninterrupted academicish-leaning research and more language. The art in the book IS the lifeblood of the text, so the feeling of the language really needed to reflect a relationship between me and the art, and not just my projections… It actually caused some problems for me on an artistic level, and I made several revisions to the entire manuscript, which probably made the book messier than it ought to be…RG: How does the idea of confession arise in the book? Do you view The Surrender of Man as belonging to the tradition of the confessional?NF: To the extent that I implicate myself in the book, yes I would say it could be shelved within a tradition of confessional writing. I certainly don’t have plans to do it again!RG: What parts do dreams play in the book? You recount a recurring dream, and many times your responses to art are infused with the rich, uncanny symbolism associated with dreams. How conscious were you of the unconscious when writing The Surrender of Man?NF: I was possibly even over-concerned with the unconscious when writing the book. My dreams, and the dreams of others, are the wellspring of my writing practice. Increasingly, increasingly, it feels as if life is just the dream’s interlude. RG: No other generation of writer had been inundated with disembodied—but verifiably real—other people and their thoughts and feelings during the writing process in this way. Felt special, cursed, fresh.I think it safe to say that we are at a point in history where a lone mind has never before been exposed to such a number of psyches outside of its own. When it came to the writing of the book, is this something you moderated, or, alternatively, encouraged?NF: To use a phrase received from said outside psyches, there is a fair amount of “whataboutism” that I experience as I write. A tendency to want to make things more and more universal or interpretable to the point where what I am writing becomes only thinly tethered to its original meaning. It’s a real problem, and I’m working on it.RG: The idea of transformation recurs throughout the book, approached from differing angles. When you set out on The Surrender of Man, did you know what you wanted from it? Has that perspective shifted since its completion and publication?NF: On a broad level, the yearning and satiation of creating and publishing your work is so bright and abstract; it’s really hard to put into words. At one point in past years it all felt quite far away…I am happy I had the chance to experiment with the format, and that everyone involved with bringing the book into the world was supportive of that. As I mentioned earlier, the opportunity for the text itself to go through a series of new iterations, because of the freedoms I was afforded by Inside the Castle, supported every other intention of the work. RG: The format of the book seems a natural one for you, and is potentially endlessly mineable. Would you consider a further book of a similar kind, or do you feel you’ve explored the format for as far as it can go?NF: I aim to keep working within the nonlinear, and mostly nonnarrative. Although my current project DOES have a “story,” the “story” could be condensed into a few sentences. So many other people are writing good “stories.” I’m not a good storyteller, so I can leave it to other people to bedazzle readers with twists and turns and enticing character development, for now.RG: What don’t you want the book to be?NF: A definitive guide to interpreting art. RG: You mention an early attraction to transgression and horror, particularly horror movies. Are there films you would consider as complimentary to The Surrender of Man? Any recommendations?NF: I’m not sure if any films—excluding, perhaps, film essays—are complimentary to the work, or at least I haven’t found them yet. This text is very much in the service of other mediums. But if we’re talking about spooky movies…I suppose that my impulse for theatrics and drama comes from the obvious blueprints: The Hands of Orlac, any number of Poe adaptations, the Universal Monsters. I am obsessed with giallo films, the Saw franchise, Herschell Gordon Lewis, anything with a fantastical edge, the original and remake of Candyman, Hard to Be a God, Woman in the Dunes, and everything that Anna Biller has ever done. Is this turning into a listicle? Importantly, my friends Chris Molnar and Amy Griffis and I just saw the New York premier of the new Quay Brothers movie, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. That one is on my required viewing list. No one does it like they do. RG: Are there notable works you almost included but left out of the book? Or works you’ve encountered since the writing of The Surrender of Man that you wish could have featured?NF: I mean, kind of yes, but I need to fight that impulse. The purpose of the book seems to be the happenstance nature of so many of the inclusions, and if I tried to think of the scope of art outside of the specific years during which it was written, I would be doing a disservice to my own project.RG: The messiness of my mind has only become more pronounced as years and their memories accumulate. My ability to thread a cohesive narrative or to focus on a singular topic can’t parallel so many other writers I admire and I’m sure you can tell by the writing here that I don’t really want to find harmony and cohesion anyway.To what degree is The Surrender of Man a response to internet culture?NF: I think that most of my work is steeped in my lifelong participation in internet culture. I love the Web; I still feel excited about it every day. It raised me, in many ways. Video games have been instrumental in my writing style. The sense of awe I felt watching my dad play Myst when I was a girl has never left me. The strange collapse of distance between me and friends and strangers in the early years of AIM. Roleplaying in the Neopets forums. Being on MySpace trains… I don’t think The Surrender of Man is a response to the internet insofar as it has a sense of fragmentation or perhaps a lack of “focus.” I am looking for connection (within myself and with others) through my work in the same way that my internet personalities are signals or offerings…RG: The book is released by Inside the Castle. What attracted you to work with them, and how have you found that process? NF: Chris had brought Inside the Castle to my attention years ago. I couldn’t believe I wasn’t already familiar with them at the time, because as mentioned previously, I have an existing foundation for appreciating the kinds of texts ITC publishes. Work that offers an unusual amount of experimentation, work that might even be unconcerned with being understood. It’s been the best experience; no notes; a true dream.RG: I’m screaming into the bathtub because it brings me clarity.What has The Surrender of Man brought to you? NF: Solace, quiet, a sense of heightened wonder in regards to others and the work they create.RG: Where next?NF: The closure of this portal opens a new one, so now I’m working on a book-length piece of fiction.
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DAVE FITZGERALD RECOMMENDS: Brandi Homan’s ‘Burn Fortune’, Kristin Garth’s ‘Daddy’, and Danielle Chelosky’s ‘Pregaming Grief’

September 16, 2025
Paint Your Wagon, the 1969 Western musical starring Jean Seberg, Clint Eastwood, and Lee Marvin, was a historic commercial flop, by turns both mindbogglingly strange, and mind-numbingly dull in its depiction of an anonymous, gold rush era mining camp cycling through the increasingly corruptive stages of insular capitalism. While its atonally sing-songy, borderline nihilistic theme reprises (many, many times over, burrowing into your brain and simply refusing to resolve), we watch as some 400 men invest their lucky-struck earnings into six agreeably trafficked women until their No Name tent City grows into a hedonist boomtown—a collection of 20-some-odd saloons that never sleep, and through which the men’s money can change hot hands in closed-loop perpetuity. Why am I telling you all this, you ask? Well look no further than my 2021 review of Brandi Homan’s Burn Fortune, the first title I ever read from femcel/horror-centric small press darling CLASH Books.Burn Fortune is a small wonder; an exercise in concision that nonetheless contains worlds. Written in tight, punchy bursts of poetic wit and poignantly relatable teen angst, it reads like the highly curated diary of a precocious young woman in a hell of a spot. Through the sharp, tilt-shift lens of the smalltown 1990’s midwest—a place which author Brandi Homan renders painfully (and at times hilariously) authentic via deadpan descriptions of flag corps politics, beer runs to the Kum & Go, and hot summers spent detasseling corn—we get to know June, a girl with the kind of nebulous big dreams that only small-town teenagers know how to have; that sense that there has to be more of something, anything, somewhere out there, and that you’re surely destined for all of it if you could only figure out where to go. It’s not until the local librarian introduces her to the films of Jean Seberg (an Iowa native who escaped to France to become the iconic star of such films as Breathless and Saint Joan) that June begins to think more deeply about what she wants, and how to get it.The sections in which she watches Seberg’s films could almost pass for Live Tweeting sessions, and her by-turns entranced and exasperated commentary injects her increasingly desperate circumstances (abusive boyfriend, sexual assault, unwanted pregnancy) with a brilliant levity that will make you want to watch right along with her (I for one will be checking out Paint Your Wagon ASAP). And while the thing this book maybe does best is depict the ways in which even the smartest people can find themselves hemmed in on all sides by seemingly inescapable circumstance—by a town, or a house, or a family, or even a single destructive person—what June finds in Jean (and specifically in her portrayal of Joan of Arc) is the will to break free of it all. To defy fate, raise high her battle flag, and fly like the prairie wind, because small towns hold on the tightest—to young women most of all—and absolutely no one gets out without a fight.I wrote that short review nearly four years ago, in what now feels like a much simpler time, but upon revisiting Burn Fortune’s blighted, broken heartland for this piece, I found that it hit differently under our present banner of red, white, and blue. For all her determination, the thought of June actually breaking free of all that’s tying her to the stake of smalltown, USA feels like a deeply optimistic reading—an astronomical possibility on par with Seberg’s own selection by Otto Preminger out of 18,000 hopeful young actresses vying to play his Joan (a rescue which, by all accounts, still left her beholden to the whims of a tyrannical male authority). The East is sinking. The West is burning. The government is a kleptocracy, and the economy feels increasingly like a game of three-card monte. Maybe June had a chance back in the DIY riot grrrl ’90s, but the futility of the future we now know waits for her comes through in countless devilish details, from her boyfriend’s hours spent duct-taped to an exercycle, to a perfect, microcosmic chapter in which she and her friends cruise “The Loop” on a routine Saturday night, jockeying for position as they mindlessly circle the main drag of their go-nowhere town. “That’s what being a good American is, right?” June muses on their endless, aimless plight. “Be better! Be better all the time!”Homan’s ending is open to interpretation, and I was certainly feeling better about America in 2021 than I am today, so far be it for me to claim any certainty as to what June can or can’t hope to accomplish. But by the time she sequesters herself in an underground culvert to light candles and recite spells—pictures of Seberg taped to the walls—it’s fair to wonder if she’s built herself a chrysalis, or a tomb. It’ll take more than a still-legal-back-then abortion or a fresh start in the next town over to truly outrun her devastating lot. No matter where you go within the invisible borders of the American patriarchy, there you fucking are. Even Jean took her talents to Europe (and even that only helped for so long). “Around here the only way to speak is to leave and if you leave you burn.”For those looking to truly opt out, allow me to pivot to Kristin Garth’s Daddy (from the ever-pugnacious envelope pushers at Anxiety Press), a physically discomfiting collection liable to make any man who’s browsed PornHub in the last twenty years squirm in his boxer briefs. Wielding the second person voice like a VR empathy trainer, Garth slathers her readers in a child pageant’s-worth of Lolital signifiers—bows and hearts, glitter and gloss, plaid skirts and pigtails—corseting us inside the minds and behind the eyes of female bodies we are almost exclusively accustomed to ogling at a safe and powerful remove. Whether building exquisite, tangled poetry from the inner monologue of a babyfaced sex worker bought and stabled for her ability to cry on command (“The Cry Shot”), or avenging the trauma of twin rollerskating ingenues turned sister-act strippers (“Twinkles”), Daddy cannonballs into the fetishization of girlhood with the no-fucks flagrancy of a trenchcoated pervert crashing the ballpit at a Chuck-E-Cheese, outragedly demanding a deeper examination of the semiotics of smut; of what so many get away with when the lights are lowest, and why.Nowhere is this truer than in Plaything—the novella that makes up the book’s second half—which centers around Melinda, a nominally enslaved young woman who is kept in a state as close to that of a living sex doll as one man can arrange for her. Cloistered in the kind of princess bed, fast fashion, Hello Kitty-print prison one might associate with a “barely legal” OnlyFans feed, Melinda is monitored 24/7, and dresses, speaks, and behaves according to the exacting specifications of her misogynist malefactor, existing in a kind of infantilized stasis for his pleasure alone. It’s a chilling scenario to see spelled out, and the degree to which it mirrors so much familiar content on the X-rated web renders bold, lascivious text any remaining subtext regarding the 21st century porn-poisoned male brain—the desire for both absolute physical control over, and absolute emotional detachment from, the female body.Elsewhere, “The Plan” chronicles a daughter’s lifelong pursuit of physical beauty and runway fame in hopes of someday crossing paths with her deadbeat movie star dad, an unwitting, uncaring lothario who proves all too eager to fail her spectacularly anew. “Con Man” recounts in excruciating detail a Rubicon moment in which an aspiring screenwriter must decide exactly how much of herself she’s willing to give up for a shot at the bigtime, and reckon with the instantaneous, irreversible damage she’ll endure no matter which sliding door she chooses. And taking these casual violations into the spiritual realm, the title story unfolds through a series of e-mails sent by a rape victim from her LDS college to her devout Mormon father back in Florida (where most of the book’s stories take place), an evolution of increasingly unhinged reports which reveal her betrayal and exploitation at the hands of men at every turn. All of these stories take square aim at the impossible power dynamics baked into our socio-sexual bedrock—the master’s tools that will absolutely never dismantle the master’s house—and the thoughtless entitlement with which men at every rung of authority and success can and will view women as their rightful spoils, offering a leg up only if they get to cop a feel along the way.I’ve read Daddy twice now, and I don’t believe there’s a good man to be found anywhere among these cum- and tear-stained pages. Indeed, that Plaything’s Melinda ultimately escapes into a lesbian relationship seems to suggest the possibility that, as far as Garth is concerned, there may well be none left to be found. While we’ve undoubtedly made strides under 3rd wave feminism with the subversive reclamation of stripping and the rise of ethical porn, Daddy raises real and fair questions about the academic nature of this kind of empowerment, and the ways in which it can bounce back to bite real sex workers just trying to survive inside institutional sexism’s echo chamber. For so many of these women, the fact remains, men don’t really care why they sell their bodies, so long as they do it. We can always make it work to our advantage. This may sound like polemic, but I’m not even claiming to be above it. It’s a banal, pushbutton temptation the internet hucks at me every day. As Chuck Klosterman famously noted over a decade ago, “the biggest problem in my life is that my work machine is also my pornography delivery machine.”With all that said, Daddy feels like a true blow against the empire. What Garth has done here, brazenly and without compromise, is overload the whole damn system. Her ruthless commingling of adult and underage imagery, taboo and perversity, wanting to look and knowing you should look away, cumulates to effect a kind of autoerotic short-circuitry; a flaccid self-loathing. Her authorial voice is the literary equivalent of your girlfriend finding your browser history and screaming at you—“So this is what you like, you sick fuck?!”—until you die of shame. Even the book’s title and teenybop trapper-keeper cover art were enough to make me feel uncomfortable reading it in public. The fact is, none of this is new. Men have spent the past century building an objectification ecosystem that learns, commodifies, and enables our worst behaviors, and until we take responsibility for dismantling it (a prospect that looks less promising today than it has at any point in my lifetime) it will remain too big to fail. Considering everything that’s working against her, it’s a testament to Garth’s writing that she can still find ways to make us blush.As for those still looking to work within all that the patriarchy hath wrought, I’m not sure any writer has nailed the experience with as much honest, and self-aware precision as Danielle Chelosky, whose diaristic Pregaming Grief (my long-overdue first read from small press bellwether Short Flight/Long Drive) details her coming to terms, at the tender cusp of her twenties, with her own conflicted masochism. Torn between two older men—her manipulatively needy, hopelessly immature, yo-yoing heroin-addict first love (direct-addressed as “You” throughout), and an obdurately withholding, overtly condescending, all-too-familiar brand of “telling it like it is” aspiring comedian (Andrew)—Chelosky offers herself up as the sacrificial embodiment of Carson McCullers’s timeless relational paradigm—that of the lover and the beloved—and makes a strong case for the nature of human desire as little more than a pendular dialectic between the two. It’s strange to write about these presumably very real guys in such judgmental terms, but Chelosky is nothing if not cleareyed about exactly who and what they are, and her own complicated feelings for both of them. After centuries of men reducing all women to mothers and whores, she matter-of-factly flips that dichotomy on its head, making plain as day its unavoidable cognate: that all men must then be children or johns.Whilst ping-ponging back and forth between these two lunkheads, Chelosky forges a fledgling career in music journalism, tests the limits of her alcoholism, and does a lot of driving around with her bestie Quinn, at first trekking to well-known vistas like Joshua Tree and Death Valley (both places already being ravaged by climate change), and once the pandemic descends transitioning to shuttered prisons, defunct amusement parks, and even the faithless remnant of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker’s Heritage USA. The more of these long-distance interstate sojourns she takes, the more she starts to feel like a video game avatar butting up against the invisible boundaries of its world map, looking for some elsewhere that simply isn’t there. Though she has all the freedom she could want—all the practical freedom that June and Melinda long for—she still finds herself always and inevitably returning to the places and people from whence she came.“I felt suffocated by a nameless grief” she notes at one point. “This inexplicable feeling of ending,” and through her trespassing journeys into abandonment and decay, coupled with her dystopian descriptions of New York under Covid lockdown, and her dedicated attachment to outdated media formats, her tone begins to convey a palpable sense of lived-in doom—of an already-gone world that she somehow both misses, and never really knew. It’s in many ways the same grief we see in the black parade of album anniversaries (a trend for which, somewhat amusingly, Chelosky’s chief publisher Stereogum is directly responsible) and celebrity deaths that daily clog our interconnected plexus of screens—the collective, performative mourning of the past that feels communally engineered to continue into the future in perpetuity, like some hellish Oscars In Memoriam eternally regurgitating the nostalgia of how much cooler and realer everything used to be. But when everything becomes nostalgia, then soon enough all of life starts to feel like cosplay—a dissociating from our present reality for fear that there’s nothing left to achieve, or even hope for—that anything worth doing has all already been done.The same could be said for the numerous men she meets around the margins of her two bigtime loves—a string of largely interchangeable music industry bros and app swipes that only serve to reinforce her disinterest in her own generation’s algorithmic romantic compromise. ExPat Press honcho Manuel Marrero observed in his own phenomenal review of this book that “people used to like things in a way they don’t anymore” and in addition to the physical books and albums Chelosky so clearly treasures, those “things” very much include “each other.” While her peers often present as a shallow cavalcade of responsible(ish) drinkers curating themselves through detached, disposable hookups, she repeatedly, and belligerently disingratiates herself from their ranks, determined to chase a more permanent, transcendent attachment through the self-abnegation of submissive, rough sex and the consumptive void of blackout, like some questing, flagellant Mystic. “I writhed in never-ending hysterical fits” she laments, twisting at the ends of all her fraying ropes, “wishing to escape my body, this city, the whole world.”Something the book explores as well as any narrative work I know on the subject, is the necessary tradeoff between trust and danger within a mutual S&M arrangement. Chelosky is generous and fearless when it comes to sharing the details of hers and Andrew’s sex life—a thrilling, and occasionally frightening affair that hews much closer to the reckless violence of Año Bisiesto than the contractual fantasies of something like 50 Shades. Her acceptance of risk—her need for it, even—is part of what makes it work for her. “I regretted everything I did the minute I did it, I deserved a punishment for it, for just existing. I wanted to get perpetually drunk so I could be liberated from this prison of insecurity, no longer having to be aware of or responsible for myself and my inevitable mistakes” confesses one passage in this relentlessly quotable book (I must have copied down at least 50 while making notes for this article, often snapping pictures of whole pages for reference). “I felt ashamed of the videos I watched when I was alone. The degradation I desired felt so antithetical to the feminist beliefs I held” admits another. Where Daddy adamantly refuses to allow for this kind of counterintuitive ecstasy, Chelosky’s journey of abject self-discovery argues for a different kind of personal and ideological freedom. Andrew exhibits, pretty inarguably, an unapologetic chauvinism (I’ll never forget the anecdote in which he mansplains why her choice of favorite Beatles song is wrong), but he also proves capable of tenderness and affection and, most importantly, seems to get what it is she needs from him, even if he’s not always willing to give it. Regardless of all she ostensibly knows and feels to the contrary, for her “A place of pain [is] just another name for a home.”There is so much resignation here, for an author so young—so much hard-won truth and understanding of the limits of human relationships, and the very real possibility that to fully love anyone is to spend your whole life overcorrecting for how you first loved, or failed to love someone else. I’ve barely touched on “You” so far, but his presence in, and influence upon her worldview is pervasive, bordering on omnipresent. For anyone who’s ever held onto someone too hard, for too long—or conversely, had someone refuse to let them go—Pregaming Grief will carry a visceral weight. The neurotic ghosts of memory and regret. The constant replaying and reimagining and repenting of all that might have been. “I’d learned the hard way that getting older only made things worse” begins my favorite line in the book. “I was an expert at waiting out my problems until they ruined my life.” If you know, you know, and Danielle Chelosky knows.Indeed, for as much as I wanted to examine Pregaming Grief within the same feminist framework as the two books above, it ultimately forced me to expand my thinking. For as much as I kneejerk loathed Andrew and “You” and felt depressed by the tired, ubiquitous tropes of modern manhood they represent, I was also regularly mortified by moments of recognition in them both—in Andrew’s pop culture didacticism and dogged resistance to vulnerability, and in “You”’s willful naivete and cowardly, druggy self-sabotage. And for as much as I wanted better for Chelosky (whatever judgy, paternalistic vision for her that might entail—yet another blindspot writing this piece made me confront), even more relatable were her own patterns of rejection and subsumption—of the contradictory desires to be someone’s “nothing” and their “everything at the same time”—the lover, and the beloved. I can sit here wanting these guys to do better, but Chelosky herself might well contend that they’re both already doing their best (frustrating as it might be). In the end it’s clearly far more than just these two privileged, flawed men, or even the patriarchy under which they were forged, that’s hemming her in. It’s the pain of existence itself.So where do we go from here? What do we do with all this baggage piling up between us, and around us, and upon us—saturating our brains and our neural net of feeds—filling our country up to its glass ceiling, sandbagging its invisible walls, and spilling over its eroding edges from sea to shining sea? If Paint Your Wagon is any indicator, we may be out of good options; decamping from this No Name City and these rigged systemic structures may simply not be in those three Monte cards. For plucky Jean Seberg, after two hours of subpar musical numbers and chemistry-free love triangulations, the gold dries up, and the entire settlement literally sinks into the Earth—destabilized by an elaborate system of tunnels the male protagonists have dug in order to rob their fellow workers blind (how’s that for metacommentary?) Her cabin still stands, and Clint Eastwood sticks dutifully by, but as the rest of the prospectors pull up stakes and the principles bid their farewells, the film leaves an existential taste in the mouth—the nagging suspicion that, stay or go, there’s really nothing else to do but the same things they just did all over again—the master’s tools just waiting to rebuild in the next town over, and the next, and the next.So yes, it’s hard to feel as hopeful for June as I did four years ago. And yes, the U.S. is feeling more every day like a place we may need to escape (though Europe today is hardly the expat safe haven it once was). As she herself puts it, heartbreakingly, near the end of Burn Fortune, “It isn’t that I don’t want this it’s that what I want is something else and that is not this”—as shifty and vaguely tautological a summation as you’re likely to find of our National sexual politics in 2025. If she wriggles her way off the pyre, it’ll be a miracle deserving of Sainthood. I’d like to think she could find a friend like Melinda, someone to help her break free of men’s possessive, binary bindings. Or else one like Chelosky with whom she could roam the dying countryside, blasting cassettes and CD’s and chasing her own tortured version of peace; standing in the flames and “learn[ing] independence because [she] had no other choice.” 
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