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
Fiction

MAKING CONNECTIONS AND DRAWING LINES: AN INTERVIEW WITH EMMALEA RUSSO by Rebecca Gransden

Since its release in fall 2024 Emmalea Russo's Vivienne (Arcade Publishing) has had time to percolate with the culture it so sharply interrogates. A slanted satire, the book poetically autopsies online mores and offers a giddy sojourn to the realm of the artist, both the world they invent for themselves, and that imposed from outside. Three generations of a family are positioned as focus for the novel, and Russo bestows this trio with an enchanted ordinariness. What constitutes a violent act? By the end, flesh and blood puts words to shame. I spoke to Emmalea about the book. Rebecca Gransden: WHO IS VIVIENNE VOLKERCentral to Vivienne is the triumvirate of Vivienne herself, Velour, and Vesta. Do you recall how the characters came to you? How did you decide upon their names?Emmalea Russo: They are certainly a triumvirate, a holy or unholy trinity of Vs. Vivienne Volker sort of tumbled out of a poem I wrote which featured Hans Bellmer. I wondered what his family legacy would be like if he had another lover—one with whom he had a child. Velour Bellmer is Vivienne and Hans’s daughter and that name came to me in a sudden rush—like, duh—of course Vivienne would name her daughter after a fabric! I’d never heard the name Velour (Vel, for short) and I sort of love it. Vesta, Velour’s daughter, had to be another V—and I was thinking of the vestal virgins, the goddesses of home and hearth who kept the fire of Rome going.RG: I’m drawn to the attention you give to the idea of harm. In the media landscape described in the book, harm can be something seemingly arbitrarily ascribed, and amorphous in its definition. There are incidences for your characters that involve their harm, whether that be at the reputation level, or of the actual bodily harm variety. How did you set about incorporating the idea of harm into the book?ER: Harm was such a buzzword when I was writing the book. I grew up around a lot of lawyers, specifically criminal defense attorneys—so I became interested in this idea of harm, which is undeniable but also unprovable, as it relates to the presumption of innocence, reasonable doubt, due process. In Vivienne, detractors claim her work is “harmful” or has “harmed” them in some way. What does this really mean? Is it an artist’s job to make sure their work doesn’t harm anyone? Is that even possible, or a worthwhile goal? What are we to do with our harm? Are we supposed to avoid or boycott works that are risky, problematic, or triggering? In the book, harm and victimhood get weaponized. Accusations of harm become like babyish tyrannical refrains. There are piles of interesting things hiding underneath the word “harm.”RG: You utilize various mediums throughout the text, from comment threads to letters. I found this creates a sensation similar to that of social media scrolling, a pull into a vortex of information. Eyewitness reports on Volker turn up amid these comment threads, presenting tantalising glimpses of her. There is a hunger to construct the person from these fragments, an impulse that becomes a game. Where do you stand on the public and the private when it comes to an artist’s life, and to what extent does this influence your own approach to publicity in relation to your work?ER: Great question. Yes, there are these quick glimpses of Viv—glimpses which make her appear even more iconic and unreachable, in a sense. The Bellmer-Volker-Furio clan is quite private. On the one hand, it’s fair game to reach into a public figure’s life—to try and grab bits and pieces and make stories. On the other hand, there’s a kind of cruelty and madness about it. These days, we do the machinery’s work for it—exploiting ourselves and our images. I often wonder about the backlash—the children of influencers, for instance. I think these publicity technologies can give way to delusion and dehumanization. For instance: we begin to believe that a person is what a person posts. Or, that we know what a person cares about because we follow them online. There’s a level of unknowability, opacity, that has to be preserved. The danger comes when we forget the difference between info and truth. When it comes to my own work, I tend to be very private about my personal life. And yet—how to foreground the work and hope people read it while keeping oneself private? It's not a clean, clear line. Things get fuzzy and messy, inevitably. I don’t know!RG: Velour pictures Wilma’s broken body on the ground seven or eight stories down, Max’s needled, drug-torn form stacked atop it. And her father, too—thin and filled with cancers. Her own dead body, her mother’s, her daughter’s, the dog’s . . . their clothes blowing in the wind and smelling of piss, French perfume, and shit. A saint or an angel arrives—one of these entities her mother apparently believes in—and blesses them, makes the sign of the cross, then continues on. Their bodies, piled high, block traffic. Lou picks the whole mess up in his garbage truck, compacts them until all organs get crushed. A theme that haunts the book is that of accusation, and what it means to stand in judgement. So much of Volker’s story is surrounded with rumor and insinuation, questions of guilt and innocence. For me, a great strength of the book is its careful and nuanced exploration of human messiness. Do you view Vivienne as a moral work?ER: This is such a brilliant question. I’m glad you thought of it as carefully exploring human messiness—which is essentially what I aimed to do. I guess Vivienne is a deeply moral work, though not in an obvious way. I certainly hope it’s not moralizing or preachy. I think there’s a big difference. I get irritated when I can feel the author of a work of fiction winking at me or letting me know she’s on the right side of history. It’s belittling and shoots me out of the world. In Vivienne, the characters are not outright judges for their transgressions, but they do transgress a lot, and they are met with consequences. Vivienne wrestles with her own conscience and guilt, as we see in the church scene, and she seems to be guilty, but likely not for what the internet crowd believes she’s guilty of. The sins of Vivienne and Velour get visited on Vesta, but in ways the characters don’t totally see. There’s a lot of fate in the book. The three Fates, like the three Vs of Vivienne, are women. Maybe the book could be read as cautioning against forgiving oneself too quickly—the potential dangers in seeing oneself as a victim and not (also) a perpetrator. The ethics of guilt and wrestling with fate are at play.RG: Canines play an important part in the book, and a character’s recurring dream features the powerful image of a dog. What drew you to include this aspect? Have any real life animals inspired the dogs featured in Vivienne? ER: I’m happy you asked this! Dogs are everywhere in the book, including on the cover. I grew up with dogs, and I have two of them now. The dogs in Vivienne are amalgamations of many dogs I know or have known IRL. The family dog’s name is Franz Kline. Kline was an abstract artist from Pennsylvania, so I thought it fit. But also, a friend of mine told me that she met a dog in New York once named Franz Kline, and I thought it was perfect for the Vivienne dog. I was at a dog park a few months after the book came out, and I met a dog that matched the description I gave of Franz Kline perfectly. It was uncanny. There is such an innocence, honesty, and immanence about dogs, and it’s excruciating to see an animal hurt. Animals witness our sorrows, wrongdoings, all of it—and we project onto them. In the book, they become sacrifices, keepers of dreams, companions, protectors, gods, barometers. Maybe dogs serve as a kind of counterpoint to human messiness in the book because, as Freud said, dogs bite their enemies and love their friends, “quite unlike people, who are incapable of pure love and always have to mix love and hate in their object relations.”RG: Vivienne presents the idea of growing a simple soul. What does this mean?ER: Lars Arden, the opportunistic and savvy gallerist who scoops up Vivienne’s work after it’s been ditched by the big museum, is also somewhat of a mystic, a seeker. And throughout, Lars is quoting and thinking of the French mystic Marguerite Porete’s 14th century text The Mirror of Simple Souls. It’s essentially a kind of guidebook for union with the divine, and also a profound and profoundly weird meditation on the nature of love and how to make one’s soul “simple” in preparation for meeting G*d. Porete was burned at the stake for her book, and for refusing to refute its contents. She was called a heretic and a pseudo-mulier (fake woman). These accusations are also levelled against Vivienne. I wanted Lars to be reading this obscure medieval spiritual text and really taking it to heart. There is a lot of dark humor and satire in Vivienne, and Lars is slippery and scheming, but he’s also wanting to better himself—to grow a simple soul. Simplifying one’s soul involves sloughing off earthly stuff. Some people think Lars is like the “villain” of the book, but I don’t see him that way. He’s caught between accruing and simplifying, between growing his reputation and growing his soul. Can you do both at the same time? RG: Lars Arden met Clorinda Salazar, a socialite moonlighting as a stylist and internet writer, at a coffee shop a few years ago when they struck up a conversation about an article she was writing entitled “Sexualities You Didn’t Know Existed.” Clorinda’s reputation preceded her, and Lars felt she lived up to the hype: a gorgeous, big chested redhead with an encyclopedic knowledge of who and what was in. The daughter of the late abstract expressionist known simply as Salazar, a painter who won notoriety amongst the downtown set and beyond when he allegedly pushed his wife, the artist Paulina Paz, from her studio window onto the sidewalk. After she woke from a brief coma following the six-story fall, she didn’t press charges and their careers flourished.I’d like to talk about falling. An incident of a person falling to their death hangs over the novel’s characters. It’s a concept that lingers, not only as a result of the tragedy inherent in the incident itself, but also on a deeper, symbolic level. It put me in mind of the depression era financier jumpers (although I believe that is now regarded to be mostly a myth), the supposed use of this method by government agencies to eliminate people deemed no longer of use, and, most obviously, the unbearable images of 9/11 jumpers. How did this aspect of the book come to you?ER: We see Vivienne’s rise in the book, which is simultaneously her fall. Windows (physical and digital) and highs and lows, obscurity and fame. Climbing/rising is always also falling. I was thinking of the falls and pushes in the book (and lingering questions about who was pushed, who jumped, who fell…) as ways of thinking about fault, guilt, escape, blame. It’s a sort of running joke in the book, but also deathly serious. There’s the tragedy of Icarus, of course—who flew too close to the sun and fell into the sea after his wings melted. Unica Zurn jumped from a window to her death. Deleuze did, too. And there is Ana Mendieta, who apparently fell from a window in the 1980s. RG: This is perhaps an example of the universe lining up in itself, but I increasingly find myself asking writers about their relationship with synchronicity and its importance with regard to their work. How do you view synchronicity, and are there any examples of it in your own creative life you’d like to share?ER: Synchronicity! It’s incredibly important to me. Synchronicity means “same time,” and this is the principle on which divination and astrology operate. Planetary positions aren’t “causing” certain events to happen in our lives. But, there may be a correlation between what’s going on in the sky and that same moment here on Earth. Synchronicity has to do with paying attention, reading the room, making connections and drawing lines. Vivienne unfolds over the course of one supercharged week, but we see overlaps and weird connections between characters. Synchronicities between online commenters and Vivienne’s rural life. Jung thought of synchronicity as a creative act. I think of my astrology practice as the weird study of synchronicities. RG: What does the future hold?ER: I just asked the tarot. I got The Fool.And also, there’s a sequel. It’s called The Moon Papers and it will be out in the summertime. 
November 11, 2025

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American Air

by Mike Topp

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Mike Topp’s poems defy categorization. That’s why they are beloved by seamstresses, pathologists, blackmailers and art collectors.

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