Interviews & Reviews
AND NOW IT’S TIME FOR A COGNITIVE EMPATHY BROADCAST: AN INTERVIEW WITH PAUL RIEDL FROM BLOOD INCANTATION by Chris Kelso
Music is the shorthand of emotion. There is something intrinsic to the structure of it - with its overtures, rising crescendos, and authentic cadences - which seem to mirror our temporal patterns so effectively. Ethnomusicologists have divided the empathic processes of listening to (and creating) music into two categories - low-level emotional contagion (the unconscious mimicry of nonverbal cues that leads to synchronised emotional states) and high-level affective empathy (the ability to share in the emotions of other). Often the former ‘low-level’ state is achieved through listening to catchy pop music, or music which feeds the brain’s natural desire to locate patterns and familiarity (which is primarily why simple, repetitive, and predictable musical structures are so effective in provoking this reaction). This low-level emotional contagion is considered a primitive response to music. It takes more to elicit the latter ‘high-level’ response. With the recent Blood Incantation album, Absolute Elsewhere, something has certainly resonated with a much wider audience. This is a metal album which has a thesis statement: to actively communicate high-level affective empathy to the listener. It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly how it is achieved, but there does seem to be something indisputably vital in the energy of this record. It’s an objectively brilliant piece of work, seminal, but people who don’t even like death metal are engaging with it, which suggests it has a unique prosocial resonance. Absolute Elsewhere is a new type of cognitive transmission, and the world seems ready and receptive to its frequency. I spoke to frontman, Paul Reidl about the album’s thesis. Chris Kelso - Was it your intention to extend the frequency of your satellite to reach more people, or has that just been a nice bonus?Paul Reidl - Greetings, Chris, and thanks for your interest. I believe that Absolute Elsewhere is indeed full of vitality; borne from a genuine love for life and brimming with as much artistic power as we could personally muster. We put everything - and I do mean absolutely everything - we had into its creation and were completely immersed in its production process, spending years of our lives working towards creating the most potent and succinct artifact that we were physically capable of at that time. One of the greatest motivating factors during that whole process was hope; not just hope for a better result or hope for a better music (specifically in Metal), but also all music & art beyond our niche, as well as hope for a better world. A world where the externally-imposed boundaries and limitations thrust upon artists and human emotions are a bit more absolved, and the human mind, our hearts as well as the universal consciousness at large are more free to roam the infinite worlds of both micro- and macro-cosmos, enjoying their myriad intersections, whether they be creative or interpersonal. CK – And you see Absolute Elsewhere as a tool to achieve this…PR – Why not? In my opinion, it is precisely this openness and resolute hopefulness felt throughout the album which resonates with so many people outside of the Death Metal scene, since art, music & hope are ultimately universal. Our intention for the album was to make something which moved the needle. It was not our goal to make a “good album”, which is a fine enough goal, of course - Absolute Elsewhere was always required to document an attempt to genuinely impact the human soul. Which, naturally, is a much wider playing field than the various schisms of Death Metal’s myriad sub-genres, or the clique-based “insider only” mentality of much Underground music. Of course, one cannot create something with such ambitions without incurring the rote accusations of pretension or bombast. But, BLOOD INCANTATION is merely an ongoing collective expression of four individuals’ evolving creative dreams, which does happen to utilize Death Metal as one critical vehicle (or tool) among the many in order to reach our sonic aspirations - but it is not the destination in and of itself.CK – Do you think it’s this willingness to blur genre and form that gives it a unique resonance? You’re breaking out of the ‘externally-imposed boundaries and limitations’ you mentioned earlier, and as a result you bring your listener to a new state of freedom.PR - Even at a cursory glance, our music has always been a bit outside of “just” Death Metal - whether this means long-form songs with so many clean guitars and dynamic shifts, our ambient records Timewave Zero and All Gates Open, or even the instrumental songs “Inner Paths (to Outer Space), “Luminescent Bridge” & “Meticulous Soul Devourment.” Add to this our pronounced eschewing of machismo’s stereotypical tough-guy-isms - which perhaps too much of Metal is predicated on - the repeated demystification of our human (and thus, flawed) personalities in the greater social perception, and a genuine willingness to interact with new people/outlets beyond what is considered “cool” or acceptable to many of the Underground’s most insular tropes, I think the average person coming to our music can simply detect this openness towards themselves, feeling unfettered by a need to impress or vet anyone. This is something I think contributes to the general sense of excitement around our band; specifically, the fans’ eagerness to share their appreciation of the music. While our music is first and foremost made for ourselves - meaning we seek the sounds we most want to hear, for our own enjoyment - we are also mirrors of others, and all persons willing to enter the Stargate are likewise welcomed and encouraged to listen as much as we ourselves want to enjoy the music.CK - Victor Hugo described music as an expression of ‘that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.’ I get the sense that you sincerely believe music to be a vital transmission device. In this epoch of ultranationalism, authoritarianism, populism, and xenophobia, how might music be harnessed as armament against the rise of neo-fascism?PR - Music is art, and art is inherently transgressive to the concepts you mention. Hence the freedom of art is so heavily stifled under authoritarianism, and why corporate art is so dehumanizingly bland and faceless. Meaningful art represents meaningful ideas, which are intangible and cannot be killed by force, trends or even time. Great (or even just new) ideas are dangerous to those in power because their origin in the “nothingness” of thought becoming manifest through the imperfect human vehicle has a natural tendency for grassroots expansion in the collective hearts & minds of the people. This is exactly where a better world will grow from, which the rich and powerful have understood since time immemorial. But truly, it is their arts which moves civilizations throughout history, bringing ages of enlightenment and progress into our reach - it is not political power, religion or nations which accomplishes this. Human consciousness grows and expands in order to reflect/adapt to compelling art, which reaches back through time and stretches far into the future in ways that even the greatest dictators could only dream of. Art - meaningful art - is considered dangerous to the status quo specifically because of its ability to transcend societal limitations of class since there is, ultimately, no war but class war throughout all ages. It has always been a select few against the many, the greedy against the impoverished, the powerful against the defenceless, and so on. That is where the blood which greases the wheels of history is always culled from: the people. I might be misanthropic, but I nonetheless will forever believe in humanity’s innate capacity for spiritual change, and that a better world is indeed possible, if only the common person can awaken to the light of their true nature - which is Oneness. Art can help people open their minds to the universal consciousness, and aide them in recognizing themselves in others, dissolving the alienating tribalism of Otherness: The “us vs. them” mentality (AKA the illusion of separateness) which is the root of all prejudice, paranoia and the majority of various -isms which plague both human consciousness and civilization. I also want to clarify that by my repeated utilization of the word “art” I am not referring to solely its applications through Death Metal, music in general, or even just the Fine Arts at large - I am referring to humanity’s inherent belief in the power of symbolism; to the aesthetic beauty behind mathematic proportions; to the intersections of science and the occult wherein all forms of quantum mechanics, theoretical physics, and millennia of esoteric philosophy are converging over the nexus of Mind itself; and yes, to vibrations’ and frequencies’ musical abilities in regards to healing, warfare & the manipulation or expansion of human consciousness. This greater mysticism, which surrounds and permeates every aspect of earthly life (and beyond), is precisely what I am most interested in when contemplating the purpose and concept of most art. In my experience, that ineffable feeling of witnessing truly powerful, transcendent art is very much present in one’s emotional experience of a truly astounding riff or profoundly remarkable atmosphere. Just one riff, a simple melody (regardless of genre), can change a person’s entire life - even impacting whole generations. This is exactly why the abhorrent and regressive ideologies you mention are so fearful of great art.CK- Do you believe all art is political?PR – No. My art is simply the result of the will to create. I do believe human politics are morbidly superficial, and that no political party anywhere actually believes in genuine peace on earth - it’s always “peace for me, but not for thee” in some form or another. Materialism will override spirituality in every political or economic scenario until humanity understands we are all connected and acknowledges the many other worlds around (and within) us. While I regret temporarily bogging your interview down with eco-transcendentalism, it is apparent that so long as humans continue to brutally enslave animals & subjugate the natural world for profit, we will continue to do so to each other. This is because speciesism is one of the first prejudices all infants are taught, regardless of culture: “This animal is OK to kill, this one is not”; In the same way, each culture eventually develops their own versions of “this human is OK to hate, this one is not”, and it spirals from there. Just as individuals are taught to perceive ourselves as utterly separate from other humans, we are likewise taught to believe in humanity as being completely removed from nature itself. Unfortunately, until humanity recognizes the universal consciousness present in all beings to varying degrees, there will never be peace on earth, no matter what political party or religion is in charge, nor how much money is being spent on whatever cause. While this might appear nihilistic, it actually reveals one of the simplest (yet most malignant) axioms underpinning much of earth’s suffering. However, since this thought current initially begs more questions than it provides answers, and we’re short on time, I’ll just say: It is understood that one cannot create peaceful energy in this world until they are able to truly cultivate it within themselves. Thus, I wish it were more understood that mass-industrialized violence against defenseless souls is not exactly benevolent behavior. CK - You seem to live the ‘art monster’ lifestyle, by which I mean you are totally devoted to your craft. Have you made a lot of sacrifices along the way to preserve this lifestyle? I’m a writer, but also a toddler-dad with a full-time teaching gig in a public school – the art monster way of life is a frequent fantasy, but not one that’s ever likely to materialise for me at this stage. That said, it must be incredibly freeing to set your own parameters.PR - For better or worse, I’ve always been motivated most by art and had difficulty participating in regular society. Even as a kid, I was more concerned by mysterious artifacts and compelling sonic atmospheres than I was any schoolwork or social obligations. I casually performed music in school in both band & orchestra, but when I was 15 I was finally exposed to the DIY world in the flesh; realizing that contemporary bands were printing their own shirts, dubbing their own tapes, pressing their own records, and booking their own tours, all the stuff like that - from that moment on, it’s the only thing I’ve wanted to do with my life. I'm extremely motivated by the archival continuum of ephemera and how we can both chronicle/collect things but also actively contribute to the context which shaped everything around various music or art scenes. As far as your question, I’ve sacrificed countless things meaningful to me: relationships, friendships, and family life, as well as practical things like reliable income and social safety nets, in order to follow my dreams of living for my music and dedicating my life completely to my art. I can’t recommend it to everyone, but for me, there was never any other option. Some of the best jobs I’ve ever had, I had to quit simply because they couldn’t afford to let me tour; Stable relationships which unintentionally held me back from manifesting another reality had to be let go, despite no fatal issues. I uprooted my entire life 15 years ago to move across the country to join a band I’d only known for a few tours, just to quit after 4 years in order to focus on my own ideas like BLOOD INCANTATION, SPECTRAL VOICE and more. This perpetual building/collapsing of various creative ecosystems has been one of the great, consistent struggles of my life, and at least ten years of it were truly wasted just partying and being a chaotic dickhead. I didn’t start taking things, or even playing guitar, truly seriously until I was at least 25, and it took another decade for things to truly get rolling.CK – It’s quite a commitment to devote yourself to art and to communicating this message of prosociality. I suppose the ultimate gift you can offer people is a similar experience for the people who engage with your art – a freedom to commit to one’s own calling. PR - While it’s definitely “freeing” to set my own parameters, I’ve also lived paycheck to paycheck since I was a teenager. In fact, only since the release of Absolute Elsewhere (6 months ago…) has been the first time I’ve ever been able to have any savings set aside, for which I’m incredibly grateful. Considering that my first bands were from 2002, and I’ve been working since 2005, touring since 2007 etc, I’ve more or less always been extremely broke. Even when I was working regular jobs, I was still touring with multiple bands several times per year - I’d work the latenight before the first drive of tour, and slam right back into the schedule the day after we got back, for years and years. I was juggling 2-3 jobs 6 days per week from 2011-2016, still practicing 3-5 nights per week with 2-3 bands in 2-3 different cities. It was honestly just too much, and I eventually did get burnt out, despite my bands’ continued growth. When I finally quit my last regular job (in late 2019, right after Hidden History…), I just figured if I’m going to be living paycheck to paycheck regardless, at least I can be doing so on my own terms, for my own ends. I took a touch of bitter solace from the fact that 60% of the country, however professional they might appear, also lives so precariously. In the meantime, I’ve continued to release experimental solo music, which is something I used to invest nearly all of my spare time in during the late 2000s/early 2010s, but had to step away from roughly 2014-2020, when SV/BI were really building up steam and required a lot of extracurricular focus. Since the bands have become more sustainable, I’ve been able to finally get back into those modes and just enjoy my own private creative process again. I believe the ranges I was able to explore in my solo work 2020-2023 really helped my mind and heart get into the wavelengths necessary to help create Absolute Elsewhere, which is so different and more expansive than our past albums. Coming up next is a double album of what I believe is my best solo material I’ve ever made, along with a split release with one of my most influential inspirations for my solo work, and I really can’t wait to share them with the world. Of course, the Stargate is always open in the rehearsal studio, and BI have much on the horizon, so there’s always more music on the way.CK - You are connected to so many different genres of music – from Black Metal, Speed Metal, Krautrock/Psychedelic, Technical/Progressive/Death Metal, Funeral Doom, to Ambient, and Experimental/World Music. Does this mirror or reveal an empathetic side of your character? You’re non-judgmental and open to all forms of auditory experience.PR - I just believe music, like all art, is ultimately infinite in its variable iterations. Speaking as a former record store employee, music genres are most beneficial for marketing/consumerism, ie. I need to know where to stock it, and you need to know where to find it. But they’re not genuinely real, in my opinion. But at the end of the day, I’m simply a guitar player with an affinity for strong atmospheres, so I’ve always prioritized that in whatever band I’m in. As a rather limited player, most of my early bands were much easier to play, guitar-wise; Black Metal, Funeral Doom, Drone/Sludge, Noise etc are less demanding than Technical or Progressive forms of extreme music. However, once I started getting a little better at guitar, these elements were finally able to be incorporated into my music, which happened around 2009 - coincidentally, when my first Death Metal band (TOTAL DARKNESS) sprung forth. One of the most fascinating things about the ancient underground of Metal and Punk is its swirling endlessness - you truly have never heard it all, no matter how deep you go. To that end, your greatest inspiration may be waiting just underneath the next tape you don’t turn over at a Goodwill or random record store in a small town somewhere on tour. As for Krautrock/Prog, this well is exponentially deeper, not least of which is due to the financial state of even the tiniest labels from the 1970s-80s: Vinyl was so much cheaper to produce back then, even a guaranteed “chart failure” of an experimental album could be pressed in 10,000 copies for less than half as many dollars - a small loan in business terms. This actually goes for many early Death and Black Metal releases as well; labels like Earache, Roadrunner, Combat and Metal Blade were pressing literally tens of thousands of copies of classic bands’ debut albums for pennies on the dollar, so, for instance, a first pressing of Altars of Madness is significantly less rare than people might perceive.But to your question, I’ve never really believed in puritanical genre conformity. Even as a youth, I was always enjoying Metal riffing in my Punk, Psychedelic elements in my Crust, Folk melodies in my Black Metal, Ambient textures in my Doom, and so on. Some of my favorite and most inspirational bands 20 years ago were groups like DYSTOPIA, CORRUPTED, TARANTULA HAWK, ULVER, diSEMBOWELMENT, SUBHUMANS etc, all of whom experimented with textures or soundscapes beyond the realm of their initial subgenre. I always read liner notes on records, which is where I first saw names like BRIAN ENO (thanked by diSEMBOWELMENT), SWANS (thanked by NAPALM DEATH), or DEAD CAN DANCE (thanked by MORBID ANGEL). So, it just seemed very natural to me that Metal and Non-Metal were fine to listen to at the same time. Also, and not for nothing, the average “Metal Only”/“Punk Only”-type personalities I seemed to meet growing up were always some of the least interesting people I knew… so I was very turned off by such attitudes and consequently gravitated more towards individuals who would share a wide range of new sounds with me, rather than chastise me for liking one style or another. In regard to BLOOD INCANTATION, we are of the opinion that there are still worthwhile combinations of new sounds yet to be heard, and we are actively searching.
December 3, 2025
Fiction
LET’S TALK ABOUT DESIRE by Dana Jean Rider
The woman in the window doesn’t know I’m watching her. Or, if she does, she’s fine with it, having assessed me as nonthreatening. I’m just the skinny white girl raking leaves outside her first-floor apartment patio. Hired-by-the-landlord equals vetted-as-safe. And she’s right, I don’t mean any harm—but it’s probably still weird how many times I’ve raked these particular leaves, which are now effectively mulch. She’s doing yoga in the middle of her living room. Not especially good at it, but she’s giving it her all, and when I rake really softly, I can hear her faint, vocal sighs of satisfaction as she sinks into each pose. The skin on her thighs ripples like waves. I imagine running my tongue over it. She rises into warrior. Her stomach is a smooth, lovely hill flowing into the elastic of her tight pink shorts—the same pair she wore when I first saw her weeks ago. She tucks long, dark braids behind her ears and extends her arms upward. A car alarm sounds, and I duck outside her potential line of sight. I do other chores. Scoop abandoned dog shit. Tag vehicles parked in the lot without permits. Wipe down the sweaty equipment in the shared gym. This is how I’ve been making ends meet since P left: My regular job at the stationery store doesn’t pay much, but caretaking—for another apartment complex my landlord owns—knocks a couple hundred off rent in exchange for about an hour of grounds cleaning twice a week. The complex is called SCENE, always in all caps, no “the.” SCENE is outside the city, in a first-ring suburb, surrounded by grassy boulevards and well-maintained public parks. After I first saw the yoga woman, I looked up prices at SCENE and immediately set aside any dreams of lifestyle equivalence. My apartment is about fifty minutes away by bus, just outside downtown, above a laundromat. This new life of mine smells pleasantly of detergent and dryer sheets. I practice slow-motion falling into my sheets like I’m in a TV commercial about soft fabric and soothing scents. When I don’t get it quite right, I try another take.
***
The stationery store is an image of satisfied vacancy. Blank pages of specialty paper pads, notebooks, envelopes, and planners stare down from the shelves. Down the middle of the room, a long table of pens organized into little glass cups. Full ink chambers and empty pages are a promise—someday, they will carry meaning. Behind the counter, font displays for monogramming and a locked glass case of fountain pens, a couple of which cost more than my rent. I hunch over the cash register, waiting to be asked about prices or cardstock weight or ink flow or line width. The owner of the store is named Connie. She is a tiny woman with hair so long it brushes the backs of her knees. On my first day of work, she told me she had hired me because I looked scholarly. Like a poet, she said, but the kind who still wrote on paper instead of on a computer screen. Microsoft Word isn’t poetic, she said, and my glasses-plus-turtleneck-plus-haughtiness look would be good for business. I asked her if she really thought I looked haughty. She said it was a compliment. Connie is obsessed with love letters. She carefully copies loving lines of famous authors onto expensive floral paper. When she finishes, she frames the pages and pins them to the walls. Right now, she’s working on transcribing a collection of letters between two Victorian poets who have very complicated ways of saying they’d like to touch each other. Behind my head at the register: “What I do and what I dream include thee, as the wine must taste of its own grapes.”I fill orders of monogrammed stationery for all kinds of people. Businessmen prefer plain colors and typesets and pay with company cards. English lit majors prefer gilded edges and offer torn coupons from advertisements Connie places in the college newspaper. Connie looks at the empty store and says, Get ready, a group of customers just got off the train. Connie is also a psychic. Once, she suggested that she could offer me a reading in exchange for two hours’ pay and looked genuinely sad when I declined. I nod and straighten piles of journals. The rest of the shift is quiet.***
After P left me, I found a therapist named Belle. She has uncomfortably large eyes. Uncomfortable for me, I mean, as the object of her gaze. In my first session, she asked me why I wanted to try therapy and I told her that my boyfriend of many years had broken up with me. She asked why we broke up. I told her that we didn’t have sex anymore. She asked, was that really the reason, and I said, yes, we hadn’t had sex for months before he left. Her: How many months? Me: At least twelve. So, a year. Yes. What changed? I don’t know. Except. When we had fucked, he would get all misty-eyed and wholly consumed, and I would be thinking hard about anything else. I wanted to be into it like he was, but mostly I was impatient, as if I were waiting for a bus. For him, it came easily—he came easily. But my orgasm still feels unsolved and private. Also. Sometimes I get stressed when I have to eat a large sandwich. That’s not a euphemism for anything, exactly. An enormous, unwieldy sandwich with no obvious entry point for biting. I’m relieved when it’s over, without once accomplishing enjoyment during the eating process. Chewing as a structured, mechanical action—just: I have to clean up this mess. The only satisfaction comes from the task being complete. So, that’s how sex was, and why I stopped having it. I thought we had reached the perfect equilibrium. P did not. Belle didn’t have much to say about the sandwich. She said instead, Let’s talk about desire. I said okay, so we did. My task, she said, was to recognize desire when I saw it in others.***
A text arrives from my friend Amanda, who lives far away and is very into fitness. If I let her talk about herself, she will tell me about things like personal records and her favorite athleisure brands. Once every few months Amanda texts me to check in about my life and hers. We were friends in college, and every interaction since then has been perfunctory. I can see my last response in our text thread from a few months ago when P and I were still together. There, I’ve gushed about a new sofa we had recently purchased. I told her I had found a nice seafood restaurant that I went to alone because P was allergic to fish. In response, she said that she had recently run a charity 10K for drug addicts. I hadn’t replied. I draft a reply to her most recent text. I say as little as I can while still being honest: I work two jobs and live alone. My apartment is covered entirely in linoleum and it usually smells like dryer sheets. Recently, I have developed a fondness for canned fish. It is most of what I eat.***
I’m picking up a particularly large dog shit at SCENE when I see the yoga woman walking toward me. She’s wearing a velvety beige tracksuit that looks a size too small and a golden necklace that says Bianca. I look at the place where the brown skin of her midriff sticks out, then at her eyes, which are crinkly with a smile. She says that she’s glad she doesn’t have a dog. I nod and say, Me too. She frowns for a moment then recovers and says, See ya. I wave to her with the hand holding the poop bag. Damn it.***
Connie likes to interpret dreams. Specifically, my dreams. Specifically, as soon as I arrive at the store in the morning. Instead of “Good morning” or “Hello, employee,” she says, What did you dream about last night? Admittedly, I am the sort of person to consider all of those things fake. But with Connie, that certainty lets me revel, safely, in the idea that they might be real. I tell her that I dreamed about a hotel. Hotels, she exclaims, clasping her hands together as though she has been gifted something marvelous. Hotels are spaces of transition. You don’t arrive in them to stay forever—you stay briefly, then leave. Probably you never return. You stay in other hotels, but you never come back to this one, or that one. You’re in a room mimicking a home, but you are not home. There’s no food in the fridge except leftovers that you will inevitably throw out. There’s cable TV, which you don’t have at home. You’re a different person in this different place. Impermanent. But if I say anymore, I’ll have to charge you for a reading, ha ha. Just promise you’ll still be available on Saturdays after your grand change!***
In the dream, I’m in a room with two crisp, white beds. P is in the bathtub. He asks me to get him a disposable razor from the front desk, even though in reality he’s a near-entirely hairless man—one of the reasons I was attracted to him. When I go into the hallway to look for the lobby, I can’t find anything. The carpet goes on endless, impossible. The doors I pass open at random and I see people inside. They’re watching TV with gaping mouths. They’re crying and pulling their hair. They’re fucking in weird positions I suspect P had wanted to try. I eventually reach the end of the hallway, where ornate, imposing doors open at my touch. Inside, Bianca is executing a perfect king pigeon pose. She is naked, breasts facing the ceiling. I try to go inside the room. Then I wake up feeling unoriginal.***
I tell Belle about the desire I’ve seen in others. I see the glimmering eyes of customers who wish they were a different kind of person—maybe someone who writes letters by hand to send to estranged friends, or maybe just someone who spends hundreds of dollars on stationery. I see Connie’s desire to tell the future and maybe her desire to find her own love hidden in the letters of others. I see the stern desire of tenants at SCENE to not be like me, the girl working off rent money by collecting others’ various wastes. It’s interesting to me, Belle says, that most of the desires you observe are nonsexual in nature. Sometimes, I say, I see men’s desire for me or for other women. They make it very obvious. Does that ever frighten you? Only the normal amount, I think. Do you want to talk about fear? No, not really. I think I’m really getting somewhere with desire. And where do you see desire in yourself?***
Bianca isn’t doing yoga when I arrive at the regular time. The drapes to her apartment are partially closed, but I can see her absence in the living room. No yoga video, no downward-facing dog, no pink shorts. For the first time, I examine the room itself, nose pressed to the glass: expensive-looking furniture, a large, wall-mounted television, a stack of books on the end table that all have to do with personal improvement: diet, exercise, self-esteem, finances. Beyond the living room, a well-stocked kitchen with open cabinets that reveal a series of identical, clear plastic containers with various granolas and crackers. Even the hand soap has been decanted into a clear plastic dispenser. The apartment is organized, intentional. I think of my own linoleum box. My fresh-linen air and cans of fish. No books to be seen, because P took them all, but slanting piles of celebrity magazines encircle my unmade bed. I sweep leaves from around the mailboxes. SCENE trusts enough in its own gates and safety that they are just boxes, no locks—so I look. Of course I look! Bianca Williams, apartment 124. She has a subscription to a magazine full of high-end business attire. The models look nothing like her—in that they are all white and draped in stringy muscle—but also nothing like me. They have bulges and caverns in all the right places. They shoot lusty looks at the camera that has plastered them onto glossy pages. I ask myself about my own desire.I waste time checking parking permits, and soon Bianca comes home—drives up in a small, blue BMW and emerges with a friend in tow. They have an aura about them like they’re drunk. They smell like brunch. I hover nearby with my clipboard of license plate numbers and she doesn’t see me or doesn’t care. When they are inside, I hear overlapping voices and rising laughter. I chance a look through the window and see them sipping wine at her kitchen table. I leave them like that, vague, giggling outlines in the background of the room where Bianca does her yoga.***
Canned fish can range in price from ninety-nine-cent tuna—the kind from companies that have been accused of using dolphin meat—to pricey tins of swordfish or anchovy that can only be purchased at specialty stores. These expensive versions usually have an old-world, art nouveau design to them, muted colors and complex line art that evokes church architecture. It’s like I’m meant to think I’m royalty from a country that doesn’t exist anymore—an Eastern European countess feasting on caviar at teatime, instead of a thirty-something sitting on a rug she bought to hide some of the linoleum, eating canned fish she can’t quite afford with the tiny fork that she used to use to crush up pâté for her cat. The cat is dead now. “Tin fish” is a luxury good. I sink the fork into the pale fish flesh and try to connect to decadence.***
I tell Belle that I think I have found my desire and she nods in encouragement. I tell her about Bianca and she asks how we met. I tell her, she talked to me about dog poop. And? No, that’s all, except I see her doing yoga through her window. Belle is quiet for a long time. Her face goes taut around the mouth. She explains to me why it is inappropriate to watch someone through their window. No, no, I know. I know that. So why did you do it? My turn for silence. If you are going to put desire into practice, it must be able to be reciprocated. You can’t just watch someone through a window.No, no, I know. Belle, frowning now: This is a good moment to practice empathy. How do you think she would feel if she knew you were watching her? I try to consider this, but as I’m forming an answer Belle continues speaking, so I guess the question is rhetorical. Is this the first time you’ve had feelings for a woman? Yes. Or, no. I had friendships when I was younger where I thought I felt differently than the friends. But it wasn’t a distinct, oh-please-let’s-touch thing. Just an ache in the back of my throat that only appeared on occasion. And anyway, how do you tell the difference between loving how someone exists and loving them? Are you trying to find the difference between love and envy? I would say, picture yourself with them, then picture yourself as them, and see which is better. We talk a little more about Bianca, but nothing very helpful. I stop seeing Belle after this session.***
When I finally let Connie do a reading in exchange for half of my Friday wages, she has this to say: I’m getting the sense that you place a great deal of value on being liked. Which is good, as a sales associate! But maybe bad for a regular person. You will have people who like you in the longer term, but you’ve entered a dry spell of camaraderie right now. You are on your way to other things—interesting how this lines up with your hotel dreams! Think of this time as your space of transition—not this job of course, which you’ve told me you’ll be at for a long time. While you wait for a change, find a practice ground for feeling the connection you seek. Yes, we all need practice, not in feeling our feelings, but in making them known and meaningful for others. It is good that your biggest hurdle is figuring out what you want—what an interesting phrase, to “figure out.” I’ve done other readings where the biggest hurdle is avoiding a looming and painful death. So, you probably won’t die! But if you start to feel sick, tell me and we can try again. Listen, have you ever tried yoga? It may help with any number of your problems and paths and potentials. You will soon come into a small amount of wealth—not money, necessarily. You will have a slight headache for the next three Thursdays. Oh, and you’ll make a big sale this afternoon! Custom “from the desk of” stationery order.***
For a while I stop showing up to my job at SCENE and no one notices. Eventually my landlord calls, I assume to fire me, but actually he just tells me there’s a dead raccoon near the SCENE dumpster that he’d like me to deal with. I mostly go because I’ve run out of things to do at home besides paging through the magazine I took from Bianca’s mailbox. I tried television and scrolling the internet and I even found a yoga video online. I made it about five minutes before the instructor said to lay down on the floor, then I watched the rest of the class from that position. I tried a yoga class once, years ago. I went with Amanda, my fitness friend, when she still lived in town. The class was more advanced than I was ready for. I tried for an hour to keep up with a room full of sweaty investment bankers and political advisors in colorful polyester. The instructor, in an apparent effort of pity, lurked near me to push in my spine or straighten my knees as necessary. When we left the class, Amanda said, Wasn’t that fun? My problem is that I’ve only ever known for certain what I don’t want. I don’t want to do yoga or have my fortune told. I don’t care about stationery or athletic clothing. I don’t need a therapist to tell me what I should be doing. I don’t want to have sex. But I do want.***
The next time I see Bianca, she is naked with the curtain pulled nearly shut. She pulls her heel up against her thigh into tree pose and sighs. Her breasts and stomach hang heavy toward the floor. No line on her body runs straight, all flowing, like waves or poetic shifts in a love letter. Oh, how I love thee, let me count the ways—let me count your limbs, each mark and crevice, every hair on your head and body. She radiates light. She outshines the blinding midday sun. I’m aware of the rake in my hand and the mulched leaves at my feet. Looking at her, I see myself.When she has finished being a tree, she hangs loose in a forward fold. When she rises, our eyes meet and hers go wide. December 1, 2025
Interviews & Reviews
FAULKNER DIDN’T GIVE A SHIT ABOUT TEMPORAL INCONSISTENCIES, SO WHY SHOULD I?: AN INTERVIEW WITH JOHN WADDY BULLION by Kirsti MacKenzie
John Waddy Bullion is as versatile a writer as they come. His loosely-linked collection This World Will Never Run Out of Strangers follows coming-of-age tales of Midwestern sons and the fraught relationships they have with role models: fathers, grandfathers, uncles, peers, sports heroes. It’s also a showcase of Bullion at his best: forever balancing humor with pathos, mastering pop culture and sports references, commanding attention from first page to last. It’s a collection that’s quick to devour and demands re-reading; Cowboy Jamboree Press was smart to pick it up, and you can grab your copy here. Ahead of its November 18 release, I had the pleasure of being able to pick John’s brain about the collection. I’ve been a big fan of John’s work for a long time, so excuse me as I nerd out. MacKenzie: Talk to me about structure. How did you arrive at the final collection? Bullion: I've always viewed the collection’s last story (“Two Bibson Geefeaters”) as a natural end point. But there were times where I felt completely stumped about how to order the other eight, all of which employ varying lengths and stylistic approaches. There are at least three stories that I believed could function as a “first story,” but ultimately, it became clear that if the collection was going to end with Gaylord, it probably needed to begin with him, too. “Up n’ Comers” isn’t the first chronological story (that would actually be “Aristotle’s Afterthought”), but placing it first helped put enough distance between that story and “Two Bibson Geefeaters,” half of which which essentially retells the events of “Up n’ Comers.” Please understand that I never would’ve arrived at these realizations about structure on my own. I had considerable help from Kirsten Reneau, who is a master at structuring collections (she played a huge role in helping Kyle Seibel sequence Hey You Assholes). Kirsten helped me see a path forward in terms of order, and I would recommend her services as an editor (and an orderer) to anyone. MacKenzie: Many of these stories are preoccupied with male role models. There is a tender, flawed masculinity on display in your sons, fathers, uncles, grandfathers, and peers. The relationships between them are keenly drawn. Was that influence consciously on your mind as you were writing? Bullion: The disintegration of Gaylord’s parents’ marriage is basically a funhouse mirror version of my own childhood, which was abnormally happy, and my parents, who were supportive, present, and only separated in age by six months, not a couple of decades. But I had friends whose parents were a lot like mine (professors, librarians, grad students, librarians, etc.), and in many of those marriages between academics, the fault lines were a lot more apparent, especially with the way husbands/fathers in those unions sometimes conducted themselves in a college town environment. Maybe it has something to do with the whole academic tenure thing, where it doesn’t matter what you say or do, if you have tenure, you’re protected. There’s also that Latin term, in loco parentis—literally, in place of parents. Bearing that kind of dual responsibility while operating in a space where you are told that you can say or do whatever you want produces a strange kind of tension, and that tension has a tendency to seep into and warp the domestic relationships within the “gown” elements of town-and-gown. MacKenzie: Similarly, many of these stories are preoccupied with the razor's edge between youth and adulthood, and how that gap is collapsed in the presence of adults unable to act safely, sanely, or selflessly. Tell me your thoughts around coming of age in these stories, particularly at this specific moment in history (the 80s and 90s)?Bullion: It’s interesting to consider specificity surrounding a certain time period because I will be the first to admit that I play pretty fast and loose with time in these stories. Although it’s never explicitly stated in the narrative, the events of “Aristotle’s Afterthought” take place on August 22nd, 1986. (I know this because I matched the beats of this exact baseball game to the events of the story. It was simultaneously a really fun challenge and something I will never, ever put myself through again.). Gaylord would’ve been roughly 8 years old in “Aristotle’s Afterthought,” but in “How to Ask a Stranger to Buy You Beer,” which takes place on Thanksgiving weekend, 1998, he’s about 13 or 14. One of my favorite William Faulkner stories, “That Evening Sun,” is narrated by an adult Quentin Compson, presumably aged twenty-four—the same Quentin Compson who leapt to his death off the Great Bridge as a nineteen-year-old Harvard student in The Sound and the Fury. Faulkner didn’t give a shit about temporal inconsistencies, so why should I? That was all the permission I needed. More practically, however, I wanted these stories to be able to stand on their own and not be dragged down by the weight of linkage. My view of linked stories is that they should absolutely amplify and echo each other, but they cannot depend on each other. That’s a huge part of the reason that the version of the events presented in “Up n’ Comers” is re-told in a slightly different way in flashback in “Two Bibson Geefeaters.” But to return to the coming-of-age aspect of your question, I see Gaylord as a superhero. He can come of age in the ‘80’s, 90’s, and even the 00’s. He can also fall in love with his father’s mistress Daphne as a ten-year-old and then fall in love with a different Daphne as a college student. Or is it actually a different Daphne? Did Gaylord steal his father’s girlfriend, run off with her to Texas, and concoct a wild cover story as a stab at normalcy? Is there a thumb drive somewhere in my office with an aborted novella where this exact thing happens? I guess we’ll never know. MacKenzie: One hallmark of a John Waddy Bullion story is a good pop culture or sports reference. Specifically, in these stories, you ground the reader in time with quarterbacks, pitchers, and play-by-play announcers. You are so goddamned good at having a light touch when it comes to these references; they never feel like the focal point, and yet they carry as much narrative weight as any other detail. How did you see the relationship between time, and memory, and sports for these characters?Bullion: Around 2017, there was a meme format that spread through sports Twitter like wildfire called “let’s remember some guys.” Basically, this meme involves throwing out the names of obscure, retired athletes lost to the ravages of time. The more average or unremarkable these guys are, the better. John Tudor (baseball) and Elvis Grbac (football) are, to me, the absolute ne plus ultra of “let’s remember some guys” for Missouri professional sports, and they are practically main characters in “Aristotle’s Afterthought” and “How to Ask a Stranger to Buy You Beer,” respectively. John Tudor had a reputation as a hothead and was most notorious for his electric fan-punching incident after he bungled Game 7 of the 1985 World Series. But the little biographical anecdote I found about the adjustment Tudor made to his pitching mechanics earlier that season fit perfectly with that story’s examination of afterthoughts as something ignored, elided, skimmed over, and neglected (consciously or unconsciously). Elvis Grbac’s main claim to fame is that People magazine accidentally named him the Sexiest Athlete Alive in 1998 and everyone just kinda rolled with it. But when I came across that info-nugget about the speaker in his helmet malfunctioning in the divisional playoffs (the moment Grbac lost his “how-to” manual), I knew I had to use it in “How to Ask a Stranger to Buy You Beer.” Did I have to go to these lengths? Absolutely not. But maybe—and this might be where time and memory come in--my nightmare fear was that some sports-nerd pedant like me would stumble across either of these stories and point out where I’d gotten some detail wrong. If I was going to use those references, they had to have that extra resonance to be able to withstand the Google stress-test. MacKenzie: One thing you're also particularly adept at is playing with form. How does versatility of form allow you to stretch your legs and challenge yourself, narratively?Bullion: For a while there, it felt like 7,000 word stories were all I was capable of writing. Here’s the thing about 7,000 word stories: they take forever to write, and they are insanely difficult to publish. The shorter form is something I’d been really challenging myself to really experiment with, but first I had to overcome my mental block of not being able to write more flash-length stuff. I think the shorter interstitial pieces in This World Will Never Run Out of Strangers are me finding an approach that clicked. These shorter pieces are heavily premise-based, and flirt as much with being straight humor pieces as they do literary flash. And while I’m not a big fan of the term “hermit crab,” it does help me to work within the shell of a form, whether that’s a rejection letter (“Dear Entrepreneur”), a press conference (“Star Quarterback Addresses Media after Fiction Workshop”), or a list of contributor biographies (“Contributor Bios”). In the end, though, it’s all about having a sense of which stories need to be short, and which ones need more room to spread out. For me, it comes down to a certain kind of trust, that whatever you’re working on is going to tell you exactly how long it should be. And yeah, maybe I’m a little more adept at writing shorter stuff now, but that has also presented me with a new problem: lately I can’t seem to write anything over 2,500 words. Kirsti: Given that you're in Texas, I was surprised to see the Midwest featured so prominently as a setting in the linked stories. Walk me through the choice to place most of the stories in Missouri, in a college town of Montessori schools and "the Midwestern Ivy". Bullion: I grew up in Columbia, Missouri, but my parents were both Texas expats. (My mom missed San Antonio so much during her first winter up north that she placed a long-distance call to her favorite taqueria and somehow strong-armed them into sending her frozen tamales through the US mail.). Growing up with a foot in both worlds meant I never felt like I fully belonged to either place, which in its way proved useful. The Missouri city where most of the Gaylord stories are set is never named. (I couldn’t very well set it in Columbia, because Stoner beat me to it.). But I wanted to give myself the leeway to make it an amalgam of several different places I’ve lived or worked. The one Texas story in the collection (“Two Bibson Geefeaters”) is explicitly set in San Marcos, which is my favorite city in Texas, and I happily threw in as many specific places and things and local quirks as I could remember from my time there. People, too: Gaylord’s grandfather’s first appearance (as a shirtless man throwing a Frisbee around San Marcos’s notorious “Bikini Hill”) is based directly on Frisbee Dan, one of the many marvelous “San Martians” who make that place so unique. Eat that, Stoner. MacKenzie: Gaylord's stories felt to me like the germination of a novel—were they originally written with that aim in mind? What was it about his story that tugged you to develop a linked collection? Bullion: “Up n’ Comers,” the first story in the book, was the first story I wrote with this set of characters, and with Gaylord at the center. Writing a novel-in-stories was (and in a lot of ways, still is) way more appealing to me than writing an actual novel. One of my favorite writers, George Singleton, has said in interviews that he prefers to write linked stories because they’re easy to re-package as a novel, and thus easier to sell. While that wasn’t necessarily my goal, the Gaylord stories were never part of a larger “novel”—I just saw them as individual stories that happened to feature the same characters. I believe that the linked stories in this collection tell a complete story, but they resonate across the collection, even in the works where they may only share a setting, or even something as tenuous as a shared feeling. MacKenzie: There is a trick you often pull with humor. It's so dry and so quick in your stories that if you are not paying attention, you might miss a punch line, or a bit. It demands more from the reader, and rewards rereading. Like with your pop culture and sports references, it's a lighter touch. I am an audience member in front of a magician, demanding to know his trick. How do you manage it?Bullion: This is gonna sound weird, but I often forget that my stories are funny. I read an excerpt from “How to Ask a Stranger to Buy You Beer” at the Little Engines “Morning, Fuckers” reading in Dallas this past year and I remember being honestly startled by the amount of laughter it got. That story feels almost unbearably heavy to me--in a lot of ways, I consider it to be the most tragic story in the book. But while I don’t set out trying to be funny, I do want to write in a voice that’s natural and authentic--it just so happens that humor is a big part of that naturalism and authenticity. George Singleton, as I’ve mentioned, is a huge influence on my writing—he was one of the first writers I encountered whose writing sounded like I wanted mine to sound. Singleton’s stories are hilarious, but he also writes these wonderfully complicated, information-packed sentences, which allows him not only to layer in a lot of humor and absurdity, but also to sneak in emotional gut punches. I want my writing to have all of that, but I don’t want any one feeling to override or unbalance the other, hence the lighter touch. MacKenzie: When Gaylord's grandfather saves him from dropping a loaded barbell on his windpipe in the final story, he questions whether the man is real, or an apparition. The grandfather then invites him to throw a haymaker, which Gaylord can't: "I knew that knowing would be the end of me." Tell me about the need to cling to an idealized version of a father, instead of the reality. Bullion: I think the male figures in Gaylord’s life are two poles of masculinity: Gaylord’s father (“the Professor”) represents intellect, while his Grandpa is an avatar for physical strength. Both of those masculine identities have been destructive, but they’re also areas where Gaylord feels this constant need to prove himself, only to keep falling short. By the end of the book, I think he does start to sense a possible third path opening up for him, although it’s a path that he isn’t quite able to articulate or act upon. After the final line of “Two Bibson Geefeaters,” I confess that I have no idea what Gaylord is about to do next. He seems primed to do something stupid and irreversible, but he also seems just as likely to do nothing at all. But I’m comfortable with that ambiguity. Not-knowing can be the start of something, too.
November 21, 2025
Interviews & Reviews
THE ANSWER HAS TO BE YES: AN INTERVIEW WITH KIRSTI MACKENZIE by John Waddy Bullion
Kirsti MacKenzie’s debut Better to Beg (Sweet Trash Press, 2025) is a rock ’n’ roll novel set against the backdrop (and at the tail end) of the Meet Me in the Bathroom-era New York indie boomlet, told in the vivid alternating voices of the Deserters—driven, determined Viv and drug-addled but transparently striving Hux—as they tumble across post-9/11 America’s cramped venues, wild house parties, and downtrodden motel rooms, forever arriving but never quite arriving. In MacKenzie’s deft hands, what emerges is not only a lean, mean, and surprisingly lyrical story of music and ambition, but also a sly exploration of the myths America sells to the world and to itself, as well as a moving defense of art’s ability to sustain us—even when it seems like the gig is already over.In advance of Better to Beg’s release date, I exchanged emails with Kirsti to ask her about her writing process, developing her characters’ voices, and the role that music plays in her work. Our conversation has been lightly edited for clarity. Bullion: My first question (perhaps obviously) is about music and how it informs your writing process. Did you put together a playlist to situate yourself in the world of the book, or was it more utilitarian (i.e., do you work best with certain types of music in the background)?MacKenzie: Depends on what I'm writing, I suppose. I wrote the book so long ago that my memory’s fuzzy, but it went like this: I started paying more attention to The Kills’ discography after hearing Keep on Your Mean Side. As a result, I read Meet Me in the Bathroom, Lizzy Goodman’s exhaustive oral history of early aughts indie rock. I collected a bunch of songs from bands referenced in the book — bands I was passingly familiar with, but not heavily into — The Strokes, Interpol, The National, TV on the Radio, The White Stripes, and so on. Jamie and Alison fascinated me so I sort of began writing these two characters loosely based on them around the same time, so it wasn’t really a chicken or egg situation with the playlist — the more I listened, the more fascinated I became, and the more I wrote, the more I sought anything that might inform the feeling of the book. I kept a loose record of all the things I “took in” at the time — film, tv, books, albums, podcasts. I also sought things that invoked an “on the road” type feeling – Captain Beefheart, Colter Wall, Townes Van Zandt.One thing I can’t fucking stand is when novelists try to write about music performance — the energy of it very rarely translates to the page, and it becomes self indulgent. It was very important to me to write the in-between. To capture the energy between these two that might translate to the stage. I remember very vividly hearing The Kills song “No Wow” – how dangerous and runaway it felt, how violent — and thinking, that. That exact thing. How many hours of fucking and fighting were channeled into those 3 minutes? Now make it 80,000 words. Bullion: What drove your decision to set the novel during such a specific time period (2003) in the midst of such a specific musical scene?MacKenzie: I guess I was thinking about scenes, and the kind of revisionist history that goes into defining them. There was a spate of debut albums around 2001-2003 that created this early aughts NY indie influence that echoed for a long time. Lizzy Goodman was the first to really create a ‘history’ of it, to label and define its impact — I’m sure the bands involved in it weren’t really aware they were creating a scene. Mostly I imagine they were just people creating art in reaction to the times they were living through. No artist should start making art to create a ‘scene’. Certainly you can respond to the energy of what’s around you, to be inspired by your environment, by your peers — but the second you label something a scene, you’re engaged in its consumption, in its perception, in molding your art to fit it. You stop innovating. The other consideration was, quite simply, how the fuck can I relate to these characters? I’m not a musician. How can I write them in a meaningful way? I was a kid watching the towers come down on a television in my high school library. I remember what it was like to wonder, okay, what now? It was this generation-defining event that impacted so many millennials, and late Xers. The epigraph speaks to that — Who is keeping score now? You might die tomorrow. Make what you want. Forget labelling it. Possibly it matters, possibly it doesn’t. What matters is making it to survive, you know. The horrors. Bullion: Better to Beg is a rock n’ roll novel, but (I would argue) it’s also a road novel preoccupied with destinations, not journeys. In what sense did you want to consciously portray Hix and Viv as captives of the open road, instead of being set free by it? MacKenzie: There is a part of me that, like many other people tethered to one location for prolonged periods of time, romanticizes life on the road that musicians have. We envy them their “freedom.” Freedom, or the notion of it, comes around a lot in the book. It’s very preoccupied with notions of freedom being exploded again and again. What we miss in these rock star narratives is that road life is on a schedule, is a series of hotel rooms; it is not vacation. There is a reason people go nuts in hotel rooms, in airport bars. No sense of grounding, of normalcy. I am fascinated with liminal spaces, with travellers, with the in-between. Without anything fixed to ground our identities, who do we become? Your identity collapses a bit. So I imagined these characters as two people trying to carve their identity — as a band, and as individuals — while being constantly in motion, in flux. Both emotionally, and physically. I imagine touring is a kind of productive outlet for messy personalities, for their creative energy. You can outrun things, but only for so long. Everywhere you go, there you are. Bullion: Voice has always been a central component of your writing, and the dual narrators’ voices are particularly vivid and also markedly distinct from one another. Was there ever any concern on your part that one narrator’s voice would overwhelm the other? And how did you decide that it needed to be Viv, not Hux, who got to have the last word?MacKenzie: Both voices came naturally, and distinctly. Both are two sides of me at war always — the scowling, practical realist, and the sweet, hopeful clown. Viv is a lot closer to my natural voice, and Hux came completely unbidden and fully formed. That sounds like precious writer bullshit, but it’s true. Sometimes the characters just show up, and you’re along for the ride. They balanced each other perfectly, which lent itself well to my aim; to hold both sides of the creative argument without prioritizing one over the other. In the original iteration of the book, Hux has a fucking unhinged prologue. I wrote it to hook the reader, but it was a cheap trick; it had to be cut. So Viv always had the last word. For all his guilelessness and naïveté, Hux holds the book’s thesis. Viv is the one who had to be convinced. Bullion: Speaking of that unhinged prologue, I had the pleasure of reading an earlier version of this book and it included one of the most hilarious, shocking, and astounding first sentences I’d ever read. Imagine my surprise when I received this latest advance copy and discovered that this incredible opening line had been cut, along with around 40-50 other pages. And yet, this book is inarguably better for it. How did you locate this sleeker, leaner, meaner story in the editing process? MacKenzie: Chopping that opening line — and the opening chapter that accompanied it — was a change I insisted on. It worked well as a hook, but it did not sit well with me. It felt like a cheap trick and I wanted it gone. So now it lives in early copies of the book. I’m grateful to anyone who has a copy and takes a chance on the new version. I like it better. Editing with Brian Alan Ellis and Jillian Luft was an interesting process — I received edits from both, and both had different aims. Jill wanted to keep my voice intact. Brian wanted the book to be shorter, more palatable for an indie release. We came to an agreement — where it made sense to strip pretense and sharpen, I accepted all changes. Where it didn’t feel true to character voice (and subsequently, mine) I put my foot down. They respected every returned edit. It was a great experience, and the book is better for it. Bullion: The narrative focus you take in each alternating Viv and Hux chapter is intriguing to me. Sometimes Viv/Hux is driving the action, while at other times they’re bystanders, reacting to something the other is doing. How did you decide what scenes needed to be presented from a specific narrator’s point of view? MacKenzie: I don’t know that it was a specific decision so much as trying to put them in ridiculous situations. Dumpster diving? College parties? High on a motel floor? Line dancing? I honestly don’t know where half of it came from except to say that I wanted them to have as much fun as possible, to be as messy as possible. What I will say is that I followed story beats to keep everything moving, to keep momentum, because it is a fucking sin to have someone’s attention and then lose it. And those story beats were structured in threes. Action/decision, reaction, subsequent action/decision, so on and so forth. There were Pepe Silvia-style plot notes littering my walls when I wrote it. So that could be why it alternates. Bullion: Better to Beg is an extremely propulsive, forward-leaning novel with a breakneck pace. And yet you manage to make room for these moments of high lyricism, such as when Hux—who throughout the novel is hilariously bad at taking drugs—gets high on ketamine in Atlanta and is assaulted by images of his previous band's failure. Even Viv’s narration, which is relatively straightforward in comparison, makes room for lovely little detours. Why was it important to allow your two narrators to have the room to monologue, to take these flights of fancy? MacKenzie: Oh, yikes. Here is a little secret: I thought that’s what novels were for. Space to stretch, to be interior. I wrote this originally to be a Big-Five type release (HA!), a standard 300-page novel. I am a different writer now than when I drafted the book; I wrote it prior to publishing in this microfiction environment, and present-me would not have taken those flights of fancy. Back story is important; characterization is important; being masturbatory in prose is not. Brian Alan Ellis cut a lot of the fat while retaining the book’s spirit, which was a miracle. I’m grateful for it. Bullion: In a previous interview, you’ve talked about a trip you took to Death Valley and the Chateau Marmont, well after you’d finished an early draft of this book, and how delighted you were that you’d gotten the several key details right without ever having been to either place. I’m curious, would anything have changed if you’d gotten the details even the slightest bit wrong? MacKenzie: Not a single thing. Bullion: In the same interview, you candidly admitted to being very calculated about wanting to set this book in America because you knew that would make it more marketable. But in reading the finished product, it feels to me like somewhere along the way, you stumbled onto an extraordinarily profound truth about America and the myths it sells to the world, and especially the myths it sells to itself. What role do you see America, the home of (as a side character memorably puts it to Hux) “the freest motherfuckers on the planet,” playing in your future projects, if any? MacKenzie: Incredibly embarrassing pull quote, I have no memory of writing that. I’m Canadian, and I wrote the book at a time where I was growing really irritated with CanLit. There is lots that’s good and respectable about CanLit as this sort of project to foster national identity through storytelling. There is also a lot about CanLit — and the industries and funding that surround it — that stifles innovation for Canadian writers. I found more of that innovative spirit in American indie lit spaces. I drifted into it after getting on Twitter and becoming acquainted with American writers operating in that space. No one was getting paid, and everyone was having fun. Perfect grounds for innovation, for evolution.I could not envision a rock novel set in Canada, with a Canadian band. You’re talking the same little circuit between Southern Ontario and east coast US; boring. So America became the setting. I don’t know how much or how little it’ll factor into future writing except that America is to me, as it is to billions, an empire which is nothing if not relentlessly innovative and creative and self-destructive. Bullion: The novel ends with this unexpectedly gorgeous, moving, and frankly kick-ass sentence that serves as a validation of the role that artistic expression and creative pursuits can and should play in our lives. I couldn’t help but wonder, to what degree is Better to Beg also about writing, and in particular, our own indie-lit scene?MacKenzie: I guess this goes back to the question about scenes. I was present for a conversation among writers at AWP Kansas City about how to label the present literary energy we find ourselves in. How to capture it, how to express that to people. Michael Wheaton very astutely observed that it doesn’t matter what we call ourselves, how we label it. He said something like, “If it becomes anything to anyone, they’ll be the ones to label it, to define what it meant. We’re not in control of that.” And he’s right. The only thing we can do is show up, have fun, make things, share them. Do it or don’t. No one but you gives one single fuck if you do it, and that’s freeing. The process of writing BTB was just me coaching myself through writing a novel. It was the gradual realization that you have to get up, every day, and engage in creating for its own sake. For survival, for joy. You can’t control anything about the outcome — if you get paid for it, if you get accolades, if anyone sees or hears or reads the end result. If nobody else gives a fuck about this but me, is it still worth doing? The answer has to be yes. The act itself has to matter. Some people have told me they see the end as sad; some see it as hopeful. I think their perspective speaks volumes to their outlook on creativity, and on life. I cried when I wrote that last line. I know exactly how I feel about it — where I land on sad or hopeful — but it’s not for me to decide for you. The book doesn’t belong to me anymore, and that’s a beautiful thing.
November 20, 2025
Fiction
YOU THANK THE MARQUIS DE SADE: AUDREY SZASZ’S ‘TELEPLASM’ by Jesse Hilson
My dictionary of British slang tells me that “Sloane” was the first name of an insufferable female archetype of the upper class in the 1980s. When I saw that the protagonist of Audrey Szasz’s novel Teleplasm (Amphetamine Sulphate, 2025) was named Sloane Epstein it suggested great wealth and privilege crossed with echoes of the human trafficking, pedophilia, and white collar underworld of Jeffrey Epstein. Indeed, the novel exists in a narrative Petri dish of high-class travel, Internet media celebrity, psychological deterioration and pervasive sexual violence. Sloan Epstein is a young woman attached to a roving paranormal researcher Dr. Novák, her “boyfriend,” for whom she serves as a fraudulent medium on his globe-trotting YouTube investigations into hauntings and apparitions. “Teleplasm,” on the book’s first page, is given as the title of a substance that hypothetically emanates from “the body of a medium that serves as the means for telekinesis.” Since nobody, especially Sloane, credibly believes in the fiction of the afterlife they are perpetrating, we as readers of the novel are left to witness her body’s other more tangible excretions in the form of aroused sexual response to Novák’s frequent physical and psychological abuse. Sadomasochistic sexual encounters come along with the punishing regularity of a city bus schedule, and are described with microscopic detail. More narration, though, is given to Sloane’s interior emotional landscape which is as weirdly terrifying as the darkest and most deranged true crime documentary offered on the planet’s most off-the-chain YouTube channel on the eve of its being taken down for obscenity. In fact, this monologued material—morbid, funny, shocking, unrepentantly antisocial—makes up the bulk of Szasz’s novel:
My wish for affection is part of a larger neurotic trend, put in motion by an artificial hand or a silent motor—eternity is an unwound thread from an invisible spool—…and what am I doing right now? I am imitating a masochistic patient who longs to be trussed up in my cell like a worm in ever-tightening restraints, disobeying verbal and written commands, slacking off, twisting and turning, prophylaxis as state oppression, I need to please a white man, a clearly ironic overtone of hypergenocidal mania, sexual relations with my oppressors, analysts, teachers, furtive incest wishes, involuntary recall of trauma injuries, furious self-flagellation that never seems to satisfy…Imagine a jet-setting version of A Clockwork Orange, without the Russian slang and with no Ludovico Technique, no rehabilitation or reprogramming narratives or moral vision, no orientation to conformity, and you may come close to imagining Teleplasm. The narrator’s voice (this is a common feature of all Szasz’s fiction that I’ve read) is overpowering: sophisticated and urbane while at the same time uniquely dissolute and down for whatever, including felonious criminal behavior and flouting all forms of authority. This makes for a fascinating window onto her characters. The boundaries broken are both external and internal. Szasz’s narrators dare you to develop something as frail and weak as a moral objection, or a set of stupid moral reactions, to their litanies of outrage and danger.I had opened myself up to Teleplasm maximally, so the book stood for something significant, to me. I could play along with the morbid curiosity. When I read it, though, I felt like “There, I’ve read enough of the evil.” A good book in many ways, an evil book in a big way, in the biggest way. Teleplasm should not be banned as a matter of policy, but if you’re looking for books that from an enlightened and amused perspective “might as well be banned,” banned by a smirking individual, not a humorless, illiterate group, banned for one’s self, this is something like that book. It is a turn-off for all further books of its type about that kind of moral degeneracy. And there are a lot of books of the type out there, but none as well-written as Teleplasm, I’d wager. In it, I have found the book that has done the turning off for me. Szasz’s cool, black book has pride of place in my library.When I first read it, I gave it a five-star Goodreads review, deservedly, but on a personal evaluative basis, as a reader, it’s something I didn’t know if I ever wanted to read again. But I did read the book, again, later, months later, to taste and savor the moral viewpoints upon reflection. Part of this faculty of judgment was arrived at by reading several of Szasz’s novels and novellas, and feeling like I had seen enough of the progression of subject matter to get the picture and not needing to go further. I’m not 100% sure there’s much more depth to the cistern than what I saw from Counterillumination, Invisibility: A Manifesto, “A-Z of Robomasochism,” and finally Teleplasm. Szasz has written numerous other books that if one had extra cash and a desire to read further (itself a species of masochism, arguably), one could buy those books and explore it all. It feels like a case of clever craftsmanship and enfant terrible wit utilized on subject matter with diminishing returns.This repulsion is “satisfying” in a way, a sad satisfaction for a reader. Sad that it was necessary. But happy too, in that I can move on to investigating other moral territories in literature. It drove me, in a sense, out of Dennis Cooper’s best-of lists at year’s end and into the arms of …some more positive sensibility. I don’t know the Marquis de Sade enough to place him, but you thank Sade, you thank him for drawing the boundary. I no longer believe for me “there is no boundary.” Szasz, and in one sense, Sade as one of her influences as a writer of S&M erotica and venom spat into the collective face of the squares, illustrated that, not for themselves or for their thirsty, depraved readers, but for me. And I’m just one reader and nobody to heed. I might as well, however, find a philosophy or a utility in Teleplasm. It provides a service, an aesthetic object lesson: an example of morality and aesthetics meeting perfectly in a novel. If it’s a Sadean thing, I wouldn’t say it draws me closer to reading the French aristocrat. Notoriety is only so compelling — beyond a certain point it has no power over “good people,” people with some orientation, as Joris-Karl Huysmans found after writing his own horrid books, towards the Cross. I hate to sound like a Midwestern mom at a school board invoking Satanic Panic. I don’t think that’s me. I don’t know if I need to read more Audrey Szasz in a quest to gain the forbidden knowledge. And I don’t think this was ever her goal as a writer. The thing about quitting reading her for the kicks is that there is always the world’s horror reportage of its own evil you can turn to. Artists can give you so much of the picture and are in the end, interchangeable with each other. Szasz’s writing was a unique piece of the puzzle; her books, if they were living things, would have zero remorse, zero pangs of conscience about their capabilities. If there was a satirical vein in Teleplasm meant to invite a more complex moral reading, it was too Baroque for me to detect. Maybe I was too much of an obtuse normie to read, in the comedy of Sloane Epstein’s monologues, some cry for help, something about the need for love? It is a damaging, upsetting watershed of a book. I don’t think I’m interested in that kind of damage anymore. I could have gone on reading other transgressive and nihilistic authors forever, presumably. Again, I’m grateful to Teleplasm’s author for helping me to shut off the nozzle.The Marquis de Sade, it seems to me, served as a “necessary outlier” to position other philosophical, moral, and literary coordinates around, against which normalized values can and must be established. And yet the world seems by some lights (whether subjective or objective, whether localized perceptions or mediated global consciousness) to be well on the way to becoming more Sadean every day, not so much of an outlier anymore. Maybe here’s another value of Teleplasm. It’s a dishonest, ill-equipped critic who hasn’t read Sade yet invokes him, but I don’t really need to read him to get this: I have Audrey Szasz’s updated writing.
November 13, 2025
Micros
AGES by Sarah Chin
Thirteen was the year I discovered spite. Fourteen, eyeliner. Fifteen, seduction in a slow blink. At sixteen, I mailed seventeen birthday cards to myself, all unsigned. My mother asked who loved me that much. I said: someone who knows the value of quantity over quality. She looked proud, as if I’d finally become a woman. I looked away, counting the candles, calculating how many more years until I could vanish without anyone noticing.
November 12, 2025
by Mike Topp
$25 | Perfect bound | 72 pages
Paperback | Die-cut matte cover | 7×7″
Mike Topp’s poems defy categorization. That’s why they are beloved by seamstresses, pathologists, blackmailers and art collectors.
–Sparrow
