Interviews & Reviews

DAVID KUHNLEIN RECOMMENDS: Seven Books

September 26, 2024

David Kuhnlein's books include Bloodletter (Amphetamine Sulphate, 2024), Die Closer to Me (Merigold Independent, 2023), Decay Never Came (Maximus Books, 2023), and his movie reviews are collected in the zine Six Six Six. He co-edited the horror anthology Lizard Brain (tragickal, 2024) and his book of stories Ezra's Head (tragickal) is forthcoming. David is online @princessbl00d and his website is davidkuhnlein.com Mikita Brottman, Thirteen Girls (Nine-Banded Books, 2012)Instead of focusing on the criminal act itself, Thirteen Girls steeps us in its aftermath, in the endless expanse that opens up only after the shock wears off. In an expository essay accompanying the book, Brottman acknowledges that her thirst for true crime is not due to the promise of violence but “the lure of peripheral details.” Small black and white polaroids act as portals into each chapter, shuttling us into the absence left behind by the dead girls: A messy bedroom, a white-sheeted figure atop a gurney, a winding country road surrounded by deciduous trees. These blurry figures behave like Proust’s transportive cookies, a couple details are enough to unfurl entire worlds. These vignettes are not told from the perspectives of infamous killers, but from their adjacent, often ignored, survivors: A grieving mother, a nosy neighbor, a child whose father was dating one of the victims. These stories are told in the comedown, after the blood’s been scrubbed. Voices gathered from the shadowed periphery. If a crack in a teacup opens a lane to the land of the dead, as W.H. Auden’s epigraph suggests, imagine where a fatal wound in a young girl might lead. I enjoy a book that pieces itself together slowly, makes me do a bit of work. Books are best when playful, flirtatious. No one wants everything straight away. One publisher who rejected the manuscript said, “these stories are just too stark and unforthcoming to be satisfying…You are left with a sense of ugly contingency and meaninglessness.” In response, Brottman writes the best lines in the book: “In real life there is no payoff, no closure. The truth about dead girls is this: In the end, they are all forgotten.”Joseph McElroy, Hind’s Kidnap (Republished by Dzanc Books, 2021)The first section of Hind’s Kidnap follows Jack Hind, a six foot seven inch man who forgoes his most intimate relationships in order to rekindle the long cooled kidnap of a boy named Hershey Laurel who went missing six or seven years prior. Hind moves nimbly through New York City in a deceptively straightforward narrative. Deceptive because the deeper into the novel we travel, the more beautiful and strange McElroy’s sentences become. Dig deep enough and phrases become fossils — their beauty evoking impressions left behind from previous sentences, phrases, words.You, like Jack, will find clues glimmering everywhere. In the names of characters, for example: Beecher, Ash, Ivy, Laurel, and Wood, it’s easy to read into the organic growth that these names denote. “There was this constant danger of letting things lure you off course just by being themselves.” Statements spoken to Hind double as leads for the reader. Long-legged phrases spider out with multiplicities of meaning. The figure of the “stand-in” is a common thread weaved throughout, the main insistence of this is that Hind was adopted and was raised by his guardian (a replacement of sorts) as opposed to his birth parents. As readers we grapple for a way in, or a way back, as Hind does: “Hind had again found an opening through the now slag-thick, sea-dense, reverend mugginess of the August heat, toward the case’s last, inner darkness where he could prove…he wasn’t nuts and Hershey Laurel existed trapped.”This book is both the pointing finger and the moon, even if sometimes we’re stuck looking at the finger. Try to swivel your head before all that beauty bleeds into the background. If instead this book were made of water, I might submerge my head in it and open my eyes to see every tributary at once, its every bank and tide, rather than stay stranded on the island of a particular passage. Alas. At 600 pages, it might seem as if everything has been said, and yet. Hind’s height, the guardian’s obsessive grammar, sometimes it’s a bit over my head, not unlike a pullup bar that, over time, page by page, I work myself up to. And soon I’ll not only be able to see it, but I’ll be stronger for it. Even if there was never anything there to see, or if this complex way of seeing is impossible. The means, an end in itself. The clue, a reason to keep going.Jimmy Doom, That Fountain Ain’t Gonna Grant Your Wish (Independently Published, 2023)Detroit legend Jimmy Doom graced my very humble reading series at Cafe 1923 a few months back. I met him at the Hamtramck Labor Day festival. He asked about my Misery Tourism T-shirt and we talked about writing. He told me about his Substack, which has been going for nearly three years straight, the only daily fiction Substack in existence. At last count he has over 1300 original stories. Over an NA beer Jimmy tells me that kids these days worry too much about editing, that stories should be written like Ramones songs, fast and hard, you might miss a few notes but so be it. And sure, out of the thousands of stories he’s written some don’t hit as hard. But honestly, most of them hit. And besides, this book is a collection of his best. One page I’m crying, the next laughing. And that was what it was like listening to him read at the cafe. People tearing up at the end of one story, laughing at the beginning of the next. These are powerful character-driven stories about everyday people. Even better, they all take place in Detroit.Jesse Hilson, The Tattletales (Prism Thread Books, 2023)Jesse Hilson’s newest book The Tattletales takes the shape of a western noir. We follow Darryl Winter, a private detective estranged from his kin who unconvincingly says he wants to quit the booze and return to them. He seems content using his job as an excuse to do what he wants, which includes getting a tug job involving a block of wood and some burlap, and spying on his boss’s hot Swedish wife. At the end of both of Hilson’s novels (The Tattletales and Blood Trip), ambiguity abounds. His last pages break bodies past their word count. As cold and satisfying as being on the right end of a gun. Headlights glimmer across the smoking piece. Open roads beckon the shooter. Thankfully, Hilson has hidden a few pieces of the puzzle. Hilson not only publishes genre fiction, but beautiful poetry and delectable criticism. It takes a strong work ethic to read great literature but write genre fiction. The world is just as grateful for Sara Gran and Josh Malerman as it is for their more demanding and difficult counterparts. Sometimes I crave a mental movie. The Tattletales flows clean and easy as a two stroke motor boat on a freshwater river. Hilson’s narrative guides us gently. He’s packed your lunch, but left a couple of bones in the fish. Chew slowly.Babak Lakghomi, South (Dundurn Press, 2023)I finished reading South on an airplane traveling to California last weekend for a friend’s wedding. Reading a book while suspended in the clouds, in that dreamy and tenuous space, can amplify novelistic elements in surprising ways. The main character of South is known as B, who willingly takes a journalistic assignment in the south of an unnamed country. He arrives on a hostile oil rig where no one is forthcoming with information except for one character known as the Assistant Cook, although that title doesn’t correspond to his job. No matter, he quickly goes missing. Several people are possibly executed by the State. If any are lucky enough to resurface, they appear fundamentally changed. In one of B’s dreams, the only witnesses to atrocities have nothing where their mouths should be, and their bowl-shaped heads accumulate soup that they can’t eat until it rots. Lakghomi strikes a match between humor and horror. His stark, surreal language illuminates the mysterious peripheries of our earthly lives. “The leaves of the trees were made of ash and the sun rays were grey.” I enjoyed the parallel of B willingly driving to a place where “everyone is always thirsty” and me vacationing in a state that was actually on fire. When my friend and I crossed the Golden Gate Bridge and pointed out the beauty of the fog as it rolled off the hills, that was when we smelled that the fog was not fog but smoke, and we laughed. Riddled with bureaucratic strangleholds and miscommunications, South is indebted to Kafka in the best of ways.Michael Salu, Red Earth (Calamari Archive, 2023)“Let us go home/ where no pain can live.” These are the opening lines of what reveals itself to be an experimental talk show. The creative portion of the text can be read in one sitting. The last section is a process essay in which Salu discusses his Red Earth project, a multimodal experiment. A QR code on the back leads us to its digital components: photography, video, et cetera. His essay traces the feedback loops that tangle themselves between culture, language, and art. Salu also links early AI tech back to Asia and Africa and questions the Western insistence on progress and truth (whatever those things might be). For example, Hollywood, AI, or porn might digitally represent humans without scars, striation, or feelings, which not only has the potential to become a horrifying ideal for ourselves, but also “what we covet (or think we covet).” Red Earth is a page-turner, but not in the typical way of a plot-driven narrative. I honestly felt like I was listening to a talk show, not reading a book, so it came naturally to let the rhythm of Salu’s voice wash over me like sound, the way I do when listening to my non-rewindable radio. I’m a fan of Calamari Archive and its corresponding 5cense blog and Sleepingfish magazine (this is me recommending the press as a whole, other recent favs include Math Class, Marsupial, Divorcer…in addition to this, they’re putting Kenji Siratori’s Blood Electric back into print). But with other Calamari titles, I’ve spent more time savoring sentences or pages. Garielle Lutz has labeled the ends of this spectrum as “page-turning” and “page-hugging.” Of course, these are ends of an imaginary spectrum, but Salu has taken a step away from this spectrum entirely. Red Earth is propelled by strong voices (Salu himself says he’s influenced by Dante and epic poetry), rather than by narrative or with a focus on language. We’re haunted by talkative ghosts, who call in to the show to discuss death, history, and violence. “Someone said we live in words,/ but yet with words we chase the indescribable.” Self-annihilating sentences like this mimic the truth-seeking theme of Red Earth, allowing us to momentarily “witness unlit corners of our world ever-present within us.”G. Matthew Mapes, Denaturing Sonnets for Souls Loved by Electricity (Independently Published, 2024)G. Matthew Mapes book of poems Denaturing Sonnets for Souls Loved by Electricity doubles as a grimoire in which enchantment is an end in itself. Like any decent occult knowledge, these poems should be experienced firsthand — do yourself a favor and read them aloud, or even better, find Mapes reading them himself on YouTube. The book’s title is a playful reversal of George Russell’s album Electronic Sonata for Souls Loved by Nature. Russell was a music theorist and composer who, according to Mapes, “had a huge influence on 20th century music and music theory.” Alliteration and repetition in Mapes’s work functions similar to the inner voice of Russell’s piano, dashing itself into the hour-long live album. In Mapes’s poem “abandoning the body” he writes, “kneel on a pillow as you portray your accelerant,” the word pour sonically hidden in the word portray. Not once is fire mentioned in the poem, and yet flames are evoked with words such as “extinguished,” “raspberries,” and the phrase “brighter than 1000 vanities.” I feel commanded by this poem, as its adhering recipient, to both pour and portray my accelerant — I’ve always loved the smell of gasoline. Visualizing myself pre self-immolation, Mapes’s spell is cast. Every word haunts hermetically: “I cloud reaction, cryptically.” His poems strike like matches, one after another, in the dark, in devotional renouncement: “I will not community. I limbo.” Yes, we use words to communicate, but Mapes’s art reminds us of language’s darker, more mysterious nature — that of incantation.You can find G. Matthew Mapes on social media to obtain a copy of his book. He is not accepting payment.

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

September 24, 2024

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

DAVE FITZGERALD RECOMMENDS: Mike Corrao’s ‘Smut-Maker’ and Mike Kleine’s ‘Third World Magicks’

September 12, 2024

I was cruising down I-70 aimed at Lawrence, Kansas when I got the email offering me a regular feature here at X-R-A-Y – part of a new “Recommends” series inviting me to draw on the deep backlog of reviews I’d already contributed to Goodreads, and pair them with new pieces exclusive to this site. Naturally I was flattered, and accepted right away from my fake-fancy hotel in the heart of the KU campus, already thinking about the pleasant symmetry of the timing. That is, I was in Kansas for the Inside the Castle 10th anniversary celebration, and as fate would have it, the inaugural title I’d attempted to write about back when I first started doing this some three years ago, was none other than Mike Corrao’s Smut-Maker from that very same small press. And as you’ll see from the next two paragraphs, which comprise that original review in its entirety, I do very much mean “attempted to.”I can't say with certainty that I read every single word of Smut-Maker, but it wasn't for lack of trying. This is not a work that you absorb so much as one that you defeat. With text that squirms across the page in constantly shifting sizes, configurations, and directions, against power-clashing, technicolored background combinations that often seem chosen intentionally to make the eyes bleed, this psychotic, psychedelic drama demands you fight for every page turn. Though it bills itself as a play in 72 acts, and all of the dialogue is dutifully bracketed by quotation marks, it's hard to imagine how it would be performed save by a group of maybe a half-dozen or so actors on a bare stage talking over each other all at once (just to be clear, I would absolutely go see this play). The best I can do for potential touchstones would be to liken it to the nauseating, spiraling, stream-of-altered-consciousness passages in Hubert Selby, tossed into a centrifuge with some of Mark Z. Danielewski's wilder formalist notions – but even that description feels forced.There are characters – I'm pretty sure – or at least references to names that could be characters. The titular Smut-Maker, for one, as well as a number of "Boys" who seem to be involved in various violent and/or sexual relations with one another. Wittgenstein, Bolaño, Sun Ra, detectives, and the author himself come in and out of focus as well. It's pretty much impossible to parse, but parsing it's not really the point. If you swim around in it long enough, little snippets of comedy and pathos, absurdity and wisdom, will start to bob to the surface around you, and by the time you're done, you may well want to flip right back to the beginning and start again. For this is also a work you could read 100 times and still never read the same way twice – like a Choose Your Own Adventure through Hell, where no matter what page you keep your finger on, you’re never getting out alive.I don’t mind telling you, I had no idea what I was getting into with this book. If memory serves, I bought it because it sounded sexy and it was on some kind of sale – but looking back now, I’m not sure I could have chosen a more perfect entrée into both the Inside the Castle oeuvre, or to my review practice in general. Smut-Maker was so emphatically different from any other book I’d read up to that point (that House of Leaves comp is downright mortifying to me now), that I might well mark it as a personal milestone – an indelible leap forward in my understanding of what books can do and be. Inside the Castle honcho John Trefry talks a lot about the importance of texts as physical objects, and as I reread Smut-Maker last week by the light of my office window, watching the garish ombré of each page ripple and morph between hues whenever the sun slipped in or out of a passing cloud, listening to my own brain chemistry crackle and fizz as it interacted with Corrao’s bubbling phraseological soup – “the rhizomatic labyrinth of mirrored buildings”; “subways looped into a Mobius strip”; “the world is not the same as it was a month ago”; “I’d rather just not know what I’m looking at” – I felt like I was finally starting to understand what that means.Of course, Trefry and Corrao would both be quick to affirm what I surmised three years ago – that “understanding” is not the point of reading Smut-Maker, or most any of the now-50-strong corpus published under Inside the Castle’s black diamond sigil; that anyone who does the work of engaging with such “experimental” texts (a reductive catchall term they both find frustrating and tend to avoid) will inevitably end up reading and interpreting them differently, and that the very premise of “understanding” them is a wrongheaded approach (indeed, they both said as much during a roundtable discussion on Joe Bielecki’s indispensable indie lit podcast Writing the Rapids, which I listened to en route to the event). These books are decidedly not puzzles to be solved, but rather environments in which to play.Also part of that illuminating episode was Inside the Castle regular Mike Kleine, who I had the pleasure of meeting in Lawrence, and whose short novel Third World Magicks acts as something of an ideal counterweight to Corrao’s psychochromatics. It’s easily the most straightforward narrative I’ve encountered among the now-ten Inside the Castle titles I’ve read, and yet every bit as much in tune with the press’s enigmatic ethos.Third World Magicks is what you might call deceptively simple. Kleine’s prose zips along with the matter-of-fact ratatat of technical writing or court reporting, whether he’s describing the work lives of indie music journalists in part one, or island-dwelling construction cultists in part two (these two parts are, somewhat mysteriously, separated by an author-mandated two-week waiting period). Without giving too much away – and truly, much of the pleasure of reading Third World Magicks is derived from its inveigling sense of mystery – I think it’s fair to describe it as being about both the conversation, and the conflict between language and art, and the perhaps inherent impossibility of expressing either one via the other. It evokes nothing quite so much as that old, unsourceable quotation – “writing about music is like dancing about architecture” – stretching that adage to its outermost shores from one end, before stranding it atop its innermost promontory at the other.Speaking as someone who put in a solid and committed three years as a music journalist for my local alt-weekly (shouts to Athens’ Flagpole Magazine), regularly attending two and three shows a week, transcribing dozens of staticky interviews conducted on my Motorola flip-phone, and reviewing countless albums for what worked out to, on average, about $25 a week plus cover charges and the occasional free drink, believe me when I say that Kleine’s depiction of the gig is hilariously well-realized. From working on “an exhaustive 100 songs of the decade list” and describing an artist’s live set as “truly something to experience before you die,” to the competitive name-dropping and the militant resistance to being impressed, or even surprised by new music for fear of being seen as not in the know, the trials and tribulations of blank zizou hit as hard as an Abul Mogard Farfisa drone, such that by the time she finds herself having a full-on, out-of-body, psychedelic experience, transcending time and space deep in the balm of that (phenomenal, look him up) artist’s “loud and enormous” sound, the idea of her translating her thoughts to paper feels completely absurd – an absurdity that is, necessarily, mirrored in Kleine’s own ekphrastic rendering of her mind’s ear.It’s that interior disconnect that Third World Magicks gets at most effectively, with regards to both its music writers in part one, and the dedicated, communal followers of black magician in part two (I’ve made a conscious decision to say as little about part two as possible here – much like the white cube at its center, it’s not particularly useful to describe – but rest assured it is worth that two-week wait). I recalled strongly my own eventual burnout with music writing – the creeping dissatisfaction I felt as I tried to bridge that last sliver of impassable distance between the art made by others, and my own latent creative impulse; to close the gap between all our lonely, disparate consciousnesses and somehow express my true self. blank zizou goes so far as to imagine making her own impossible music whilst drifting spaghettified inside of Abul Mogard’s, but no matter how many shows you write about, it’s still not the same as being in the band. And no matter how much brilliant art you make, it’s still not the same as telling people exactly how you feel. I could sit here and write whole essays about similar experiences I’ve had, standing in a packed house for hours with my eyes closed while fiery pillars of Fennesz or cosmic waves of Sunn O))) swept me up into the great beyond. But until you hear it yourself, you won’t know. And even when you do, it won’t be the same. Not for you. Not for anyone.I would estimate that for most people, each half of Third World Magicks could be read comfortably in under an hour, but fighting that impulse at the sentence level are a number of typographical tics (no capital letters, the use of ampersands in place of the letters “and” even when they appear within other words, a book-long commitment to vestigial k’s like the one in the titular Magicks) as well as a parade of ludicrous character names and a handful of science terms that, even upon looking them up, you may still not possess the tools to fully grasp (I certainly didn’t). With all these deliberately cryptic artistic choices pinging your brain like a cell tower, conspiring in their refusal to let you settle into complacency, the resultant sensation is akin to one of those NBA drills where a player attempts to get to his spots and get up his shots while two or three coaches throw extra basketballs at him without warning. Every time you think you’re in a rhythm with Third World Magicks, Kleine tosses a reverse footnote at your head or a sheet of pointillist punctuation at your ribs and makes you readjust on the fly. He keeps you moving, and it’s a joy to be moved.The Inside the Castle 10th anniversary was an oft-indescribable joy as well. Twenty-some-odd people from all walks of literary life – writers, reviewers, teachers, translators, booksellers, avid fans, local friends, and a couple of very cute cats – gathered in an unfinished little barn on the prairie for two days of readings and electronic noise. I expected to be the furthest traveler, coming all the way from Georgia, but visitors from Massachusetts, and Idaho at least gave me a run for my money – a testament to the cult-like, summoning gravity of Trefry’s vision. The chiggers were fierce. The lightning was multipronged and cycloramic. The breakfast-for-dinner was better than anything I saw at my fake-fancy hotel. But more than that, everyone was simply lovely – kind, and open, and thrilled to be there meeting other weirdos like themselves – putting names to faces – bridging our gaps. I wouldn’t claim to “understand” everything I heard across that magical weekend - from the warpfield poetics of Candace Wuehle and Madison McCartha to the generative philosophical would-you-rathers of Kyle Booten to the bleeding edged linguistic produnovas of Grant Maierhofer and Trefry himself - but I felt honored and privileged to hear every bit of it, and to carry it home with me, and to now pass it along to you. Compared to my time in the music writing trenches, I definitely felt like I’d found some of that connection that evaded me during all those mind-blowing shows I’d covered alone. When enough writers get together to share in their work, you all start to feel like part of the band. Even criticism can elevate toward the realms of art.Trefry himself is an ardent supporter of book reviewing as not only a service to the small press community, but as a vital part of any writing practice, as evidenced by quotes like “nothing has clarified my intentions and expectations about literature more,” “everyone should do it,” and my personal favorite, “if you’re writing a book review as though it’s not your work, you’re doing it wrong.” I’ve tried to approach my reviews with this level of care since that first, labored attempt to describe Mike Corrao’s Smut-Maker to the world, and Trefry and Kleine have likewise put their money where their mouths are with Third World Magicks, going so far as to include several reviews of the book at the end of the narrative proper, almost as a kind of ellipsis – a nod to the ongoing discourse in which Inside the Castle and its readers are mindfully participating. Take it from someone who knows. Indie rock is doing just fine. But indie lit still needs all the reviews it can get.In wrapping up this edition of X-R-A-Y Recommends, allow me to paraphrase a popular conceit from my music writing days: these guys are your favorite writer’s favorite writers. Corrao, Kleine, and Trefry may never be bestsellers, but they’ve got cred coming out of their ears. They write pareidolic. They write klangfarbenmelodie. And I love their work for the same reasons I still seek out strange and unfamiliar music every day – for the pleasure of new words, new ideas, new ways of feeling and being surprised. As strange and beguiling as Inside the Castle texts can be, they are, in fact, for everyone. Enjoying them is not about being smart enough to figure them out, but rather finding curiosity and excitement in the incomplete spaces of your own unknowing; letting them live, and breathe, and work on you, quite possibly for the rest of your life; coming back to them again and again, with the understanding that they’re no more static than you are; that they’ll change right along with you, and the chemicals in your brain, and the light outside your window; that no matter how many times you read them, they’ll still be different every time.

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

September 10, 2024

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

JESSE HILSON RECOMMENDS: David Kuhnlein

September 5, 2024

Jesse Hilson recommends...David Kuhnlein Decay Never Came (Maximus Books, 2023)The text of this chapbook is less than forty pages long but it can’t be read in a hurry. It can’t be gobbled up like a small package of black licorice. Slow down and take in each line one by one. You are now reading at the slowest setting of the necro-metronome. The book’s title is Decay Never Came, suggesting that a jump into a different, longer timescale is required to get what the poems are doing, with the risk that even then this could not be possible. A strong atmosphere of aesthetic death exists throughout the collection: the beauty in death, or maybe more accurately, the beauty of a body’s biological trajectory plus inevitable time. “Herniated before I was biology, in decay that never came,” Kuhnlein writes in the titular poem. And maybe it didn’t come, but was perhaps expected to, since we have passed into the empirical envelope of death. Bodies, in Kuhnlein’s world, are sites for exhibiting value-neutral damage, illness, injury. In “Wooden Spoon,” the speaker of the poem likens bruises suffered in BDSM encounters to stars, saying “I’d let you whack an entire history of / hot white stars // the galaxies in me! & isn’t it funny / how pleasure w/in pain / & not the other way around surrounds / me // w/ pieces of the everyday”In “Bloodborne” we seem to eavesdrop on a corpse asking “is this a body bag or a river I’m in”: My fingerprints dehisce their perimeterLike psychotropics darting through bloodRed ants bite me in swells of cursiveRelatives’ prayers teem, gleaning as they flayI’m stuffed into a burlap sack…The weak taxidermy of my surname thawsAshes melt up my knuckles without me A morbid tone pervades the collection, which is nothing new, but what tends toward the original about Kuhnlein’s writing is the spectacular variety of phraseology about bodies in extremity, the chorus of voices singing about rot, abuse, or even just some other living morphology. Several poems describe sea lifeforms with a fascination that is not as gothic as the rest of the productions might be (to resort to idiotic shorthand: “gothic” is a term prone to some of the worst misprision and I apologize for using it here—and yet Kuhnlein is unquestionably macabre). Starfish, sand dollars, and seahorses have dreams shaped by anatomy known to science but alien to human creatures. “Pacific townsfolk crave my cross-shaped uteri,” the sand dollar apostrophizes. It isn’t clear whether the speaker in “Starfish” is a starfish or is addressing a starfish, but some form of relationship is being referenced: My bag of blotted capillaries eversible inside my oral diskI scarf your milk teeth, suction cup shoes, and pillowcase tonguesMy weeping thirst carves a singular graveFor us in this ruin of beach sans melodyAs the cackling sun crisps your tendons to mine, alphabetically Kuhnlein’s vocab choices have just enough clarity to make meaningful reference to his subjects but just enough reverb to put you under a cloak. A somnolent gel floods all spaces, like that seen in the surreal cover photography for old 4AD records or Brothers Quay animations. You’re having a nightmare but it’s hypnotizing in its beauty, and the really bad part hasn’t happened yet. It’s an atmospheric buildup.Kuhnlein recently wrote a short zine’s worth of film reviews, horror movies, called Six Six Six, and his facility for coming up with fresh, engaging language was as much on display there as it is here. But the poetry is perhaps hazier because the goals are more abstract than “communicating to you about some more or less fixed popular culture.” Writing that can swerve into the territory of spooky phantasmagoria and still come back out as original is not so easy to come by. Decay Never Came does manage to have the lineaments of that. My main criticism of the collection is that it might have had too much the lifespan of a gentle moth as opposed to some organism that was more robust and sustained over time. Chapbooks are like micro-ghosts trying to scare up a living room, when what Kuhnlein needs is to unleash a poltergeist, something destructive that breaks doors, shatters mirrors, melts fireplaces, inspires more elemental fears. Die Closer to Me (Merigold Independent, 2023)Die Closer To Me is a slim novella but a considerably large jigsaw puzzle that needs to be reread in greater detail in order to see where the pieces interlock. A novella-in-stories, as the back cover reads, the book is a literary sci-fi tale comprised of thirteen short stories that have tantalizing overlaps. Blink and you might miss the slivers of the Venn diagrams where one story interfaces with another. This is not to suggest this is a design flaw; rather, it is a spring-loaded mechanism which unleashes its potential energy and sends the reader back to the beginning of the book to put it all back together again.Plot-wise, it’s a little unclear — chopped into chunks as it is — but the central mass of the story seems to concern another planet named Süskind, which has existed unseen in our solar system and become a vast experimental home base for people with disabilities. Indeed, medical ailments and their treatments form the background scrim against which the story is told. Or untold. Narrative canvases are painted and arranged into triptychs or tetraptychs (?) that may not be delivered in sequential order, like an artwork not meant to be taken in a linear fashion. The stories allude to one another through revealed names, bags of drugs, Buddhist texts, hyper-developed senses of smell, photographs, motorized wheelchairs, and other incidental details and clues with interrelated matrices that don’t vex the reader (at least they did not vex me) but give a pleasurable teasing sensation. It’s a book to be reread and taken apart and fitted back together for fun.The prose style of the book should be mentioned, as on first reading (there will be more than one) it upstages everything else, including plot and character. Not that those are lacking. Kuhnlein has shown himself to be a poet and skilled weaver of lyrical, surprising linguistic units. Much care has been put into crafting paragraphs, such as this description of an Earth-bound psyop to re-scramble domesticated dogs for nefarious purposes (it has to do with Süskind, I promise):“Spontaneity is regarded with suspicion. The result of a universal love based on abstract principles is meaningless since any extreme contains its opposite. Too much love becomes hate. Project House Dog didn’t anticipate that dogs would become cognizant of what they’d lost, or what might happen when they did. After a while, eunuchs thank those who sever them from time-consuming and pointless arousal. Imagine the potency of a reverse orgasm spilling backwards against the sense organs, bittersweetness increasing by the bite. Lying with a proper muse can rebuild an inner banquet in minutes. By way of encrypted audio files hidden in DOG TV videos on YouTube, dogs were reprogrammed with their original fertility and virility, as well as their predatory instincts. These dog-friendly messages slipped under the radar, unheard by human ears, spraying across a sky of satellites, scrambling themselves into domesticated tissue.”Dogs activated by YouTube videos as if Manchurian candidates or sentient masks in Halloween III: Season of the Witch are just some of the fiendish creations in Kuhnlein’s novel. Homicidal bounty hunters, psychopathic anesthesiologists aboard interplanetary spacecraft making jaunts to the disability planet, dangerous insects, Buddhist cults — all are found there, yet they seem to transcend genre fetters as we might imagine them and are instead written about with delicacy and inner penetration. The literary/genre divide is straddled and, in many instances, smashed as thoroughly as a marble bust by an iconoclast, if only to have the pieces reconfigured into some new pattern that retains allusive hints of the old: it is sci-fi, with the trappings and atmospherics, but the speculation and imagination are taken in fresh directions.It’s dark, it’s cyberpunk, it’s as fleshy as Cronenberg’s most outlandish charcuterie board. It’s alive, it’s menacing, but, in addition to that, it’s sensitive and human writing. It’s a spiritual act to go among these broken people and glitching relationships, and to reflect that in the distant future Buddhist concerns — the freeing of the material from disappointment and suffering — will still be on people’s lips. The natural order of things is probed, lanced, massaged, and bombarded with mutagens under Kuhnlein’s pen. Bloodletter (Amphetamine Sulphate, 2024)David Kuhnlein’s Bloodletter, at 112 pages, would be a quick read, if the brakes weren’t everywhere applied by the enigmatic, impressionist prose that requires extra consideration, damn near divination, on the part of the reader. Each carefully toned and balanced sentence could contain a shelf full of poetry volumes. A lot of people call themselves writers, but few can lay claim to the title of “prose stylist.” Kuhnlein easily fulfills those requirements in Bloodletter. The only question is: Is the reader ready to stomach two historical true crime novellas written at high pitch which feature some of the most ghastly descriptions of serial murder you’ve ever seen?The novellas were undoubtedly based on a formidable amount of research on Kuhnlein’s part into; 1) the Narcosatanicos, which was a Santeria-practicing cult of homicidal drug smugglers in Mexico in the 1980s, and; 2) Bela Kiss, a prolific Hungarian serial killer in the early 20th century who fought in World War One and kept dead bodies in barrels. Maybe you didn’t understand when I said “formidable amount of research.” These narrators of Bloodletter are lived in, to the extent that you may as well be reading the transcriptions of their fevered, inward-most dreams filtered through a finely etched aesthetic prism.Kuhnlein’s murders are not presented coldly and clinically, which would seem to be a preferred method in true crime when it indulges in its aspirations to journalism. In contrast, and happily from an artistic standpoint if not a moral one, he writes murder from a heated, lush, rococo perspective, full of nooks and crannies for the reader’s mind to catch on. It’s gorgeous but it’s so so evil.“Downwards,” the first novella, takes place in Mexico, where “cops, lawyers, actors, border patrol, gang members, doctors — everyone pissed their soul away for protection.” A female member of the Narcosatanicos gives this description of the ritual preparations she goes through:“At the end of the week, I break into a cemetery, carrying a set of clothes, exhume a criminal, and dress the corpse. During the next twenty-one days, I follow a rigid schedule of baths that consist of mint, basil, camphor, and other purifying herbs. I return to the cemetery, dig the corpse up again, and put the clothes back on. By the time I’m back at the ranch, I only smell death when the sleeve is placed against my nose. Tan splotches cover the rags, which feel breezily ethereal. The sky is lit by oil. Adolfo says spirits flood me, but I feel emptier than ever. I’m given a white candle on a dish, a human tibia, my scepter.”Kuhnlein’s catalogs of ritual objects and ingredients — the macabre set design of the cult’s headquarters in Mexico strewn with dead body parts and dead animals — are described with evocative, wild squalor. “The federales who serve my warrant will puke up a squirrel,” cult leader Adolfo Constanzo foretells, out of narrative time-flow. “Once their eyes adjust to the dark, what they see within my walls will live inside them forever. No one who works this case will be long for the force.”The second novella, “Backwards,” follows the killer Bela Kiss into World War One, where he hides in plain sight as a cannibalistic monster. The historical war scenes were the strongest part of the second half, I found on my first reread of Bloodletter. Bela Kiss recounts a foraging excursion:“Raiding the pantry of a house on the outskirts, a dog finds us well, competing for victuals. We slice an ear off first. When it runs, yipping, another of us claims a paw, saber-spearing with accuracy…The ribs are stomped dislocated, exposed and everted, a wet integument of fur snipped to dry in the sun…Freedom fighters come to avenge their dog…We skewer their Belgian bellies, plop them on the spit out back.”“Backwards” was perhaps more difficult to read, harder to track exactly what was occurring plot-wise. Kuhnlein’s fiction, I have learned, is not particularly meant to be read as pedestrian, suburbanite “stories,” with a narrative edge clearly coming across, but as sibylline recitations more akin to intoxicating prose poetry. It’s a high artistic accomplishment and seems to fit with publisher Amphetamine Sulphate’s coterie status as purveyors of refined, skin-crawling, cursed Sadean literature for the 21st century.

EIGHT QUESTIONS FOR MIKE TOPP by Sabrina Small

September 3, 2024

A memory of my interview with Mike Topp, which I forgot to record, and then turned into a pseudo-transcript, at which point I solicited interjections from the artist.The first thing I tell Mike Topp is that I didn’t realize who he was. That I hadn’t done any homework beyond reading his tweets and a few poems on Hobart. I tell him his name is so gay it approaches drag, so I was picturing a young gay dude who had watched a lot of Warhol films and revered Peter Sellers in Being There, a practicing naif, a retro naif even. It was the poet Tyler Burn from the Lo-fi Lit podcast that alerted me to Topp’s legendary status. In the few hours leading up to the interview, I learned about his age (late 60s), his status as a poet, and his wife. I read about his stint managing Artforum and the numerous books that he created with William Wegman and Tao Lin. His interviews are full of a steady drop of luminary art names that sounded famous and important and filled me with a shocking amount of adrenaline, which I wasn’t planning to feel before our interview. I told myself, Maybe this is cool? Maybe it’s cool to be so purely attracted to someone’s writing on Twitter that you seek them out for an interview? This is how the interview begins. I tell Mike Topp that I think it’s a good thing I believed he was young, fresh, and gay. It means your voice is young and fresh and gay.Mike Topp Interjects: I think so too.I tell Mike Topp that I can’t believe he agreed to this interview. I think specifically about a DM I wrote asking if he wanted to discuss The Curse and my budding concept of “Punishment TV” which he responded to briskly and positively, though it must have looked like a fool’s scribblings to him. Winging it now, faced with our reality, I try to approach the interview as hasty performance art. I bring him my list of questions, prepared over the last hour, scribbled on torn journal paper in silver marker.Question 1: Who is the most beautiful person you’ve ever been around?I ask this question because I have conflated Mike Topp with Warhol and I want Warhol’s answer to this question. But I learn very quickly that Mike Topp is not Warhol because he can’t answer. No one comes to mind. And when he finally succumbs to the interview rules I’ve imposed, he totally subverts my expectations and tells me sweetly, my wife.Question 2: Have you ever met Warhol?I was sure there would be at least a brief meeting between Mike Topp and Andy Warhol but I was wrong. The artists that hung around Warhol in the 80s were in his orbit, but Mike Topp is careful not to make too much of their associations. He says he saw Keith Haring working or ran into Basquiat during that time. It’s a common trap to fall into, this idea that if people existed in the same city at the same time in a similar milieu, they must have met.Mike Topp interjects: When I moved to New York City in the 1980s, Andy Warhol’s studio was on Union Square–just a few blocks from where I live now-–but I never saw him. But the beauty of New York City is you can so easily meet people in such a random manner. I’d work as a messenger and meet the producer David Merrick, or I’d go to pick up a book from someone and the person who comes out and hands it to me is the literary critic Harold Bloom. Or I’m at a party and I’m like, is that Matt Dillon? Hey, there’s David Berman from the Silver Jews. Or look, there’s David Byrne browsing in Tower Records. (I am a little star-struck–my wife always makes fun of me for this.) I remember when I started working at Artforum, they sent me to interview Sonic Youth. I was not listening to music at the time and I had no idea who Thurston Moore or Kim Gordon were–I just thought to myself, “Wow, they sure have a big apartment.”Question 2: Would you prefer a sudden death or do you want some warning?At this point, maybe 5 minutes in, I’m nervous and flooding with a sensation that it’s over, I’ve failed. It’s gonna be a bad interview and it will prove something about both of us. That Mike Topp was out of my interviewee league and that I am a joke that no one laughs at. Sudden...that’s his first answer. I start explaining that I would choose the opposite. My mouth is just moving and keeping the conversation going, mostly out of polite duty. I have asked him to talk and so I must do some of the talking. But a different interview could have emerged here, one where I say very little and it becomes a slightly Dada-esque audio poem that lasts 2 minutes and Mike Topp lays down tight staccato answers that have a sharp or mystical edge to them and we set it to music and release it as such. And it’s a perfect little diamond that gets tossed around the indie-lit world and someone DMs me and says, That was cool. If I have some awareness that my death is imminent, I will write a will and make sure my kids are covered and then I will move all of us somewhere with natural hot springs.Mike Topp Interjects: Sproing.Question 3: You’re a writer that comes from the art world. Your art world includes writing but now we have such distinct categories. Are you annoyed by this? This segmenting?Poets are either artists or they’re the most unpopular writers. When I think about Mike Topp’s place in the world of literature and art, I’m envious. He is old and his life has been defined by artistic impulse. He creates books with his art friends. He gets turned on by new writers and new artists and creates projects with them. He is guided by this pursuit. It’s how he spends his days. I’m envious of what I perceive to be his lack of introspection on this question and when he answers, it is as if he hasn’t understood the question at all. He talks about his early days in the city, where he hung around galleries and was invited to quietly look at drawings in a back room.Mike Topp interjects: When I first started writing poetry, I aspired to be someone like Dylan Thomas, or Georg Trakl or Federico Garcia Lorca. Unfortunately, I had no talent in that arena. I wrote really terrible poetry. I remember one line I wrote: “Banana rites on metal beds.” And I thought that was good! I was so blind.I had no money at all in my twenties and so I’d see a lot of art, and meet a lot of artists. During the 1980s and 1990s I published many people and everyone was very friendly and super encouraging. I loved guest-editing art and literary magazines because that gave me an excuse to write to some of my favorite writers and artists. I published, among others, John Cage, Ida Applebroog, John Baldessari, Eileen Myles, William Wegman, Joe Brainard, Sue Williams, Jean Michel Basquiat, Ron Padgett, James Schuyler, Paul Violi, Jessica Diamond, Raymond Pettibon, Gregory Crewdson, Hal Siorwitz, Dominique Dibbell, David Lynch, Richard Prince, Amy Yamada, and Sherrie Levine (Oh no! name dropping!).The inspiration behind all this publishing activity was the poet Ted Berrigan, who said if you lived in New York City, you should grab a phone book and write to people you admire and want to publish. Incidentally, using this same strategy, Berrigan did publish Andy Warhol in the 1960s in Berrigan’s C Magazine.Question 4: Tell me about William Wegman?When I was 14 and growing up in Los Angeles, I learned who William Wegman was. I saw that art could be something funny and easy to digest. It seemed so easy to me at that moment, so easy to be an artist. You find a muse and you create. But William Wegman’s fame also made me the most nervous about talking to Mike Topp. The two of them make books together. Mike Topp’s words and William Wegman’s drawings. I expected to uncover the story of a long robust friendship but after decades they are still two shy artists who discovered they enjoy working together and building little monuments out of their collaboration.Mike Topp interjects: I’ve never met Bill Wegman, although he has written me, called me, texted me, and emailed me (and vice-versa). The poet Sparrow and I have known each other for thirty years, but we didn’t meet in person for the first five years we knew each other–we just sent each other postcards, even though we lived five blocks apart. Raymond Pettibon and I have collaborated practically every day for the last two or three years, but we collaborate online. I might occasionally visit Ray if we work on some art together. I think in the last ten years Ray and I have written about 300-400 pages and collaborated on about 70 pieces of art.Question 5: When you’re in your house upstate, do you feel like landed gentry?Mike Topp likes to talk about his life outside the city. He lives in a town where an annual Scrabble tournament takes place. It is the town where Albert Butts, the inventor of Scrabble, was born. Mike Topp was the 2023 Scrabble tournament champion. He told me that he gives himself little challenges. He’s not a numerologist but he selects a number and tries to create within the constraints of that number when he is writing. He looks for the perfect amount of letters to satisfy both the expression and the exercise of staying under a word or character limit. Someone who writes like this is certainly building Scrabble muscles. I love this recognition. It’s perfect for an eccentric poet and I hope he wins again in 2024.Mike Topp Interjects: I came in fifth place this year, but I beat this year’s champion in a pickup game after the tournament. I am unhealthily competitive. I’d like to remind everyone that I used to play pool every week with Grove Press publisher Barney Rosset (that name-dropping again!), and my nickname was “Money.”Question 6: Are you comfortable being vulnerable with people? Have you ever tried to quit your persona? Have you ever been in therapy?This collection of questions was my attempt to investigate Mike Topp’s awareness of himself. Was it a shtick? He is a poet when he writes anything. His words are hard to categorize but they are not confessional. Sometimes they have an ascetic naivete to them. Sometimes they are acerbic and witty and playful. Sometimes they’re almost purely cynical, though not often. But it’s hard to know where Mike Topp the writer ends and Mike Topp the person begins. Steve Martin came up, organically, while we were talking. One of his poet friends was compared to Steve Martin and didn’t like it. Earlier–on the day we spoke–I had tweeted that I found Mike Topp fascinating and unknowable in a Steve Martin sort of way. In the interview, I mention this comparison to Steve Martin and he is not insulted. He sees it as a compliment.Mike Topp interjects: Sure, I’ve been in therapy. I don’t think of myself having a persona, except when I read. I never get nervous reading. I’m not really “me” when I’m reading. Some might say it’s a pose.Question 7: Do you like the vulnerable position open swimming puts you in?Open swimming is a big part of the life Mike Topp and his wife lead. They are swimmers. It’s an identity. They swim long and cold and it requires stamina. I find that people who are in their heads a lot like swimming. I think it has something to do with a disconnection between mind and body. Swimming is an instantaneous submersion into the body and it’s another plane. Neither earth nor air but water. Humans are among the select few who can swim. What a wondrous place to exist. I think everyone, even the swimmers, will lie on their deathbed and wish they’d done more swimming.Mike Topp interjects: Swimming is terrific because it teaches you not to panic.Question 8: What did you like about writing while high?In a couple of the interviews I read, Mike Topp refers to his “junkie friends” and mentions that he used to get high before writing. The word junkie is inextricably linked to heroin, so I assume that’s the drug he’s talking about but it seems too rough for Topp. Maybe it was heroin at one point and it’s something else now. I don’t gravitate to this question with everyone but certain writers include it in their own writing, and when they do I feel a member-of-the-tribe duty to investigate. It’s also an attempt, only lightly veiled from myself, to figure out if I’m allowed to see myself as above board. I get high to write. It usually starts that way. I smoke a little pot and read with the intent to get inspired and then once it hits and my brain starts doing that beautiful manic thought dance, I leave the book and write my own shit.Mike Topp interjects: I’ve never tried heroin–I have too addictive a personality.The final thing I wrote in silver marker is not a question but I say it anyway because I want him to know what I think:Your boxing title would be Featherweight Champion. You’re the Featherweight champion of the writing world.

TRANSMISSIONS: The Collidescope Podcast

August 30, 2024

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

Rebecca Gransden: Does the podcast have a mission or manifesto?George Salis: The Collidescope Podcast has the same mission as my online literary publication The Collidescope. The goal is to shine a light on neglected literature and celebrate uninhibited creativity. Art for art’s sake rather than something commodified and packaged for mass consumption. To quote from my site, “We love to see the mental fireworks of a writer wrestling with their imagination, with language itself.” A good deal of the stories, books, and authors on the show are those that most people probably have never heard of. I hope listeners can find new favorites and feel inspired to do some deep digging into neglected literature on their own.RG: Where did the idea for the podcast come from?GS: I loved listening to Levar Burton’s podcast in which he reads short stories accompanied by music/ambience and some other effects. His reading of Ken Lui’s “The Paper Menagerie” is one of my favorite episodes and it tugged some tears out of me. However, Burton’s podcast features commercial authors and popular short stories. I wanted to create a podcast that also features short stories but focuses on the lost or forgotten ones.RG: How long has the podcast been in existence, and how have you seen it grow over that time?GS: I started in late 2021 with Joseph McElroy’s soft and somber “Night Soul,” then read Alexander Theroux’s hilarious and mean “A Woman With Sauce,” and finally the snowily Borgesian “Oono” by Patricia Eakins. I then did an episode with Alan Singer, which is the first-ever audio interview with this author. We talked about his new book at the time, Play, A Novel, violence in literature and film, his failed attempt to visit Djuna Barnes, and much more. After this, the podcast went on an unannounced hiatus for a little over a year as I continued working on my second novel, Morphological Echoes, almost a decade in the making and now practically finished aside from a few narrative off-shoots. This means I’ll have extra free time to do more episodes, and have already released two, with others currently scheduled. The show has come back with a new segment called Invisible Book Buddies, a title based on my Collidescope column, Invisible Books. The concept is simple: I read a neglected book in tandem with a friend and we discuss it on the show, but I try to have some sort of angle to the episodes. In the first episode, I discussed the surreal Hollywood novel Movieland by Ramón Gómez de la Serna with filmmaker Matthew Taylor Blais, and the second episode was with Jewish filmmaker/writer Jacob Pascoe, and we discussed the Jewish author Mark Jay Mirsky’s debut novel, Thou Worm Jacob. Some near-future episodes include an ostensibly comic novel, Donald Newlove’s Sweet Adversity, featuring the stand-up comedian Henry Gelinas as a guest, and the lost Brazilian masterpiece Devil to Pay in the Backlands by João Guimarães Rosa will be discussed with my Brazilian friend, the doctor Ulisses Brandão.RG: If you are a writer, has the podcast impacted your writing life? and conversely, has a writerly disposition influenced the podcast?GS: Had I not gone on the hiatus, the podcast would have impacted my writing life by getting in the way of it. Although, the truth is that recording episodes with friends is a great way to take a break from writing while still doing something creative, and also collaborative.RG: Do you listen to podcasts?GS: I was never fanatical about podcasts but I’m slowly getting into it more during my walks in the woods. I love the A24 podcast because I’m a raving cinephile. Depending on which episode you pick, it’s a great way to learn some things about filmmaking. One of my favorites is the episode with Willem Dafoe and Isabella Rossellini.RG: Who is your dream guest?GS: Although far from neglected authors, it would be a dream to interview Salman Rushdie and Don DeLillo, two authors whom I’ve loved for as long as I can remember.RG: Is there a podcast that doesn’t exist, but you wish did?GS: I had an idea for a podcast in which I read childhood favorites with guests and indulge in nostalgia while seeing how one’s perceptions of the books have changed over time. My personal pick would be the Deltora Quest books. It could be a fun project but it’s far from a priority for me mostly because it doesn’t seem as important as the other work I’m doing.RG: What are your plans for the future?GS: It’s been great doing these book buddy chats and I have a long list of potential guests, but I also want to do more author interviews and short story readings. The next author I’m hoping to have on the show is my friend Michael Brodsky. I just facilitated the publication of his hefty magnum opus, Invidicum. As for short stories, I’ve been meaning to read William H. Gass’ “Order of Insects” for the longest time after receiving kind permission from Mary Gass. I would also like to read a couple of spiritually disturbing stories by Garielle Lutz. My ideas and passion for projects far outreaches what’s actually possible, but I do as much as I can while also working a measly-paying day job.

JUSTIN ISIS RECOMMENDS – Neo-Decadence: A Wardrobe Tour

August 28, 2024

Relax, for the moment.Your enduring boredom with contemporary art, writing and poetry results not from the sirenic tug of allegedly competing media, but from the soporific stupidity/sincerity to which most artists, writers and poets have willingly reduced themselves. Is there a solution?One often wishes to fall at the foot of AI and implore: “PLEASE, dear statistical large language model, with saintly expeditiousness, render these arriviste mediocrities obsolete, financially and culturally! We’re sick of hearing their ‘raw’ and ‘authentic’ thoughts as they froth themselves into a lather of cliché over representation, compassion, empathy and all other vanities worshiped by fundamentally uncreative and constipated types. Can’t you, the fairy of technology, simply exile them to abject poverty, to the extent that they will either lapse into total silence, or do something useful—such as manual labor?”A cesspit of craftsmanship. A memoir and autofiction culture. A “reality hunger” (pure fraudulence). An inverted Christianity of the stylistic spleen. And the flipside?The dismal mallcore playpen of “transgressive” adults who are really nothing more than overgrown teenagers. A predictable fondness for film and music—of the unwatchable, unlistenable kind. And MINIMALISM, the first retreat of the inept. Tossing around buckets of fake filth. What to make of these antiquated children? It feels, at best, unhygienic. The scab-picking of the small presses. The remedial grammar. One sometimes observes the “transgressive academic,” a sort of mongrel hybrid who believes that Deleuzianal jargon combined with tenure combined with a subscription to Weird Tales must result in something like an avant-garde. Instead they are about as threatening as a diabetic lapdog. When reading their prose, one is reminded of an enervated chihuahua forcing itself upon a particularly degenerate pug to sire something which cannot really move, cannot really breathe, and cannot really perceive anything around it. It simply sits there, stultified by its own self-reference. Is this excess? Of a kind, but one quickly wearing out its welcome. The tortuous trained tricks of academic pets merely make you feel sorry for them…when you remember in whose lap they are sitting. And their complete extirpation would inspire the same sense of satisfaction one feels when removing an isolated bloom of mold which has formed on the underside of a toilet seat. The pristine surface SHOULD be restored, shouldn’t it? Can’t technology help us destroy the livelihood of all professional artists and writers?The technology, unfortunately, is not that sophisticated yet. So, regrettably, we must take up the burden ourselves.After all, perhaps things simply haven’t gotten bad ENOUGH. Why not push the tendency further and see what the creatures will do next? There probably can’t be a truly appealing Post-Naturalism, a truly modern art, until Neo-Decadence, that sybaritic-saprophytic decomposer on the dead log of culture, has finished its work. We hope that it concludes within the next few decades, but who knows? The Future-Passéists are there at the end of the century, waiting to enact their moral panics, their redemption arcs, their transcendence over enjoyment. Monastic life beckons, but try to resist that too. It’s been done. In the meantime, here are some fun books which have been written purely in service of style. They’re full of monstrous, ignorant and unlikable characters. Their language is fervid, ornate, excessive. Often they are unironically mystical. They effortlessly skate past the tired binary of “real, blue collar, ‘authentic,’” and “referential, academic, ‘maximalist’” that holds back most writing from America and other less artistically-developed pseudo-countries. You may find your “empathy” decreasing as you read. You may find yourself growing tired of the gang warfare primates known as human beings and wishing for a decisive nuclear conflict to scour the Earth of the species that created UNIQLO and Amazon Prime. You won’t, however, be bored. Since declaring Neo-Decadence in 2005, Brendan Connell has done his best to present it in its most concentrated form. Works like Miss Homicide Plays the Flute (Eibonvale Press, 2013) and The Metapheromenoi (Snuggly Books, 2020) push into genuinely avant-garde prose territory while uniting classical Decadent themes of ennui and social decline with modern settings and recent, recognizably grotesque characters. Heqet (Egaeus Press, 2022) stands as the purest distillation yet of this aesthetic. Protagonist Félix traverses the gutters of Switzerland, his consciousness deliquescing as he willingly offers himself to frauds, dilettantes and ersatz Spiritualists. In this book we see the human animal admirably reduced in physical, mental and spiritual circumstances. At one point, there is a giant dead frog.I have worn out iron boots wandering the streets after dark, looking for fresh vices, aromatic gums, some place where I might relax on the skins of leopards as I lick at divine dews, my flesh being kneaded by nudities. Where are the festal halls? Where have they imprisoned the dreamers and fanatics? The sacred courts have been erased. All the glories have been mutilated; the vaults pillaged; splendor ransacked; glory corrupted. Giant heads lie in the piazzas; the dead stares of bankers and businessmen pollute the valleys; the heroes have emasculated themselves with logic and degenerated themselves with electrical apparatuses; the horizons have been painted with an ugly brush; the windows of houses and apartments are blind eyes; fatidic fish with vampire mouths lurk in the lakes; extended hands become a quin of vipers that sweat poison.The book can be read in a few hours, and with its brief, impressionistic chapters, often no longer than a page or two, could plausibly be taken as poetry (without falling into the standard “prose poetry” traps). Reading Heqet feels like tuning into crackly mental illness, individual words throwing off glints that barely illuminate the vast surrounding shadows. The deliriant vibes match the milieu, highlighting the detritus of a rapidly-decaying Europe. Damian Murphy, a heretical apostate of the G∴D∴ magickal system, has for most of this decade been releasing several books a year of technically rigorous and stylistically-immersive Post-Naturalist fiction. Unlike the majority of those claiming to write occult fiction, Murphy is as serious about his practical occult work as he is about his prose style. If you’ve been wondering where the real Arthur Machen or Aleister Crowley of the present day is, Murphy has completed the same systematic work they did, and applies the resultant visionary faculties to his narratives—which, despite their esoteric concerns, are always executed with an architect’s sense of precision and structural integrity. And unlike the earlier writers, Murphy’s prose is closer to Robbe-Grillet or a more phallically-endowed Fleur Jaeggy: clean, sinuous sentences wresting clear sense from perilous astral explorations, invocations of planetary spirits, and divinations based on everyday forms of trespass and subversion. His stories and novels take the forms of extended descriptions of nonexistent retro video games, psychogeographic assaults on foreign cities, and corporate workplace sabotage in service to theurgic experiments. Murphy offers a truly 21st century take on his subject matter that’s backed up by a wealth of personal experience, placing his work far beyond the pop shallowness of “Occulture,” the banalities of the worthless “horror scene,” etc. The Exalted and the Abased (Snuggly Books, 2021), his most recent full length collection, is also his most varied and compelling. Stories like “The Ivory Sovereign” and “The Hieromantic Mirror” present microcosms of occult experience that reward multiple close rereadings, while the complex novella-length “A Night of Amethyst” unfolds entirely as a description of gameplay in an occult-themed text adventure from the early 1980s. Quentin S. Crisp’s forays into darkly Romantic and morbid, neurasthenic fiction have won him a small but devoted worldwide following of obsessives who seek out his every story, essay and obscure blog post. The luxuriant syntactic tangle of his immediately recognizable prose and his distinctive take on the downbeat abysses of Modernity form a necessary contrast to our stifled era of techno-utopianism and moralistic Scientism. Graves (Snuggly Books, 2018) is on the surface billed as a “gothic novel,” although it breaks nearly every rule one would expect to find upheld, given the tag. Taking place firmly in the present reality of smartphones, therapy speak and advertising hype, it nevertheless portrays a modern necrophile, a true antihero seeking liberation through an elusive superposition of life and death. He is still young, but already he has followed the skittish beam of an attendant’s electric torch along the grid of pathways between graves one summer night in Zôshigaya, seen the stone angels and broken columns among the mist-exhaling, ivied trees of Highgate, wandered forgetful of all time the citadel-park of winged hourglasses at Père Lachaise where the narrow houses of the dead stand like streets of dovecotes in which nest only shadow and silence, listened to the homely tones of the volunteer guide, explaining with familiarity the distinguishing traits of the stacked skulls of St. Leonard’s ossuary, been witness to the tribute paid by autumn, in fresh reds and yellows, to the spirit of human continuity where the slopes of Kensico are a neat, endless now of monuments and epitaphs, felt warm peace in the scent of pine resin and paraffin as he watched an ant crawl over the marble of a grave in a well-tended site overlooking the Sea of Crete, and already his instincts have been gloriously confirmed by the ten decorated skeletons of the Basilica of Waldsassen, posed and made opulent by Adalbart Eder the goldsmith for whom death was no barrier to speech—the dazzling encrustations of pearls, rubies and other myriad jewels on the bones with which this craftsman communed, impressing Damien as the ultimate efflorescence of decay. The long fifth chapter, in which the protagonist goes on a nighttime odyssey to exhume a child’s corpse while evading discovery in urban London, has more sustained realistic tension than anything Crisp has written to date, and thoroughly gelds all more self-conscious works of “genre horror” from the untalented and unambitious scene types.Elytron Frass’s MOIETIES (Subtle Body Press, 2024) combines High Modernist extravagance with intertwined narrative braids of trauma, ritual, and self-exploration. Five separate text threads physically surround and impinge on each other, sustained by two main opposing yet interlinked stories that mirror both the interaction of cerebral hemispheres and the divided dance of a primal couple—sister-brother, wife-husband, savior-destroyer. This ergodic assault of a novel is a Gnostic parable of the “ultimate completeness of incompletion” and a physical marvel of typographic-pictorial provocation. Frass updates classic esoterica with an appropriate level of technical frenzy for our current epoch, and in the process renders most other occult fiction irrelevant.Shifting to poetry, Golnoosh Nour’s collections Impure Thoughts (Verve Poetry Press, 2022) and Rocksong (Verve Poetry Press, 2021) are a catalog of languorous yet often violent eroticism, truly peacock-plumed constructions of consumptive immodesty and internal fire. Paul Cunningham’s Fall Garment (Schism Neuronics, 2022) is an elegiac examination of fashion and destruction, compressed with rural post-industrial history: as if a beautiful dress had become entangled with the corpse of a pregnant doe in a trash compactor, creating a sort of stillborn animal nativity jerked into a semblance of life by Cunningham’s extreme stylistic rigor. Industrial wastelands, paleontology and camp humor illuminate this collection. Magdalena Zurawski has described it, accurately, as “hot, wounded and reptilian.”Colby Smith’s poetry, united with the artwork of Josh Bayer in the recent Fish Turn Colors Then Break in My Hands (Stone Church Press, 2023), is a dissonant and lyrical look at the life of musician Jeffrey Lee Pierce.Shifting again to graphic novels and visual art, the author of the Neo-Decadent Manifesto of Comix, Aaron Lange, is worth investigating for his ongoing project Peppermint Werewolf (Stone Church Press), which functions as a nonlinear take on advertising hype, alongside classical Decadent references to Huysmans and others; the black and white artwork presents the dissected, laminated beauty of recontextualized fashion ephemera. In zines like Venomous Feathers, artists like Fergus NM, Ila Pop, Callum Leckie and Sailor Stephens advance a corresponding visual aesthetic. Try out Elytron Frass and Charles N.’s collaborative work Vitiators (Expat Press, 2022) too. Finally, Seth Wang is a writer to watch, who, in stories like “Mirror for Princes (A Perfume Ad)” unites synaesthetic and hyper detailed approaches to consumerist obscurities with a terminally online sensibility and insight into the darker corners of the mind. Seth stands poised to abacinate readers with the incinerating brilliance which is really everyone’s right and due after enduring the sincerity of much uglier, uglier, uglier, uglier and clumsier writers who publicly worry about world events that don’t personally concern them.

THROUGH DISRUPTION AND DISSOLUTION: An Interview with Daisuke Shen

August 26, 2024

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

I WOULD LIKE TO STARTLE THE READER: An Interview with Mike Topp

August 20, 2024

I was reading my bad poems and in between bad poems I was telling some stories and Steve said I should quit writing poems and instead tell funny stories. So I followed his advice.